It doesn't need a very large power source. It's still a landmine, and it needs to be very near to its target to have maximum effect. So, use weight or inductance or whatever to trigger the thing, not to explode, but to look for RFID tags. The rest of the time the added parts can be powered completely off.
The antenna isn't really much of a problem. RFID is generally UHF, which penetrates stuff pretty well, while still high enough in frequency that a surprisingly high amount of antenna gain can be contained within a very small package.
And the point is this: You can plant it on a roadway, and avoid killing the locals, but still have a fair chance at killing civilians of whatever RFID-toting nationality you choose. It's like a smart bomb for terrorists. And so, much like a cruise missile, it doesn't matter if it is expensive.
I'd guess that it's better than my company, where we're rather expected to install the same pirated[1] copy of Office 98 on every computer it is requested on. I, of course, refuse; others in the company aren't so clued.
I've tried, over and over, to persuade them to either buy a bunch of copies of Office, or just stick with openoffice.org. It's not like they're using any advanced features of Excel or Word, or any parts (at all) of Access. Alas.
[1]: I have mixed feelings about software piracy -- especially Microsoft software. Personallly: A lot of things I buy, a lot of things I don't. But if I'm using a thing in a business environment to make money, then, yes, the software should, absolutely, be paid for. I definitely bought every bit of software that I use in my sideline computer repair business -- I even register my shareware -- but unfortunately my employer doesn't want to operate that way.
Growing up as a kid in the 80s, I remember Reagan being on TV talking about "layoffs."
It was a new term, at least to me. It seemed to mean that the folks who were let go weren't really fired from their job, that there was some hope that they'd return if business improved.
Now, it seems that "laying someone off" is exactly the same thing as "firing that lazy bastard." If we remove the political incorrectness of the latter, then, can ANYONE bloody tell me the difference between how these less-useful people were oh-so-gently laid off, and just fucking firing them?
In other words: If I underperform at work, I expect to be fired[1]. If my job is shifted to someone else new to the company (no matter what country that they're in), I'd consider it that I was fired. Only in a business downturn, without a replacement, would I think that I was laid off. Am I wrong? (Why?)
[1]: Alas, I've got a quasi-IT job in small business that isn't going anywhere. I'm a bit of a generalist, with skills ranging from technical support to systems administration to tower climbing to cable-pulling monkey to systems integrator and troubleshooter supreme, working in public safety wireless communications and internal support. For the past year or so, I've done everything from just show up when I feel like to being totally AWOL, due to a number of personal, psychological, and financial issues that my employer isn't exactly aware of. I yell at my coworkers when they do stupid things. I'm a bad employee. I've cost the company a lot of money in the past 12 months, but they keep telling me that I'm an asset that the company needs. OTOH, we're having our best year ever. My Christmas bonus hasn't gone down a bit. I guess I'm lucky -- somehow, I think that if I were anyone else at any other company, I'd have been let go years ago.
Cat3 would be skinny, scrawny, and more tolerant of being pulled around corners by its tail. It would be a dingy grey color, and would always have seemed to act as if it were very, very old, even when it were a kitten. You'd probably shy away from Cat3 if someone tried to give it to you.
Cat5 would be a little thicker around the middle, and a lot less durable than Cat3, but far more pleasant to have around. When shopping for a new cat, you'd be sure to get one at least as good as Cat5 -- even though cats of this quality always seem to be a putrid shade of blue.
Cat5e would be almost like Cat5, except for its bizarrely efficient gait: When walking its legs would all work at different intervals to avoid interfering with eachother.
Cat6 would be big and obviously muscular. It would run circles around Cat3, Cat5, and Cat5e, due in part to its pigeon-toed paws, but would be so fragile that its skin would fall off fatally if you so much as rubbed it the wrong way. It would be green or red or pink, or really any other color than blue. Everyone wants a cat as good as Cat6 for a pet, but few can justify the expense of such a breed, and fewer still have any real need for such an tightly-strung animal.
[I'm sure this would get moderated better if I could throw a car analogy or two in here somewhere. Oh, well.]
I'd like to submit that your comments about Vista's UAC also apply equally to anything else using a similar model; Ubuntu comes to mind.
Folks are very used to having a sudo/UAC popup asking for a password, which then gives a program root/admin. So all I, Johnny Hackstuff, have to do is write my malicious script to execute gksudo first and ask permission before conducting it's badness, and it's off to the races.
I, Johnny Hackstuff, might even sit and look at the process list instead. When I see something else run sudo to get root access (Synaptic, for instance), I'll just fire up my own sudo right over top of it. And then David Slowman will gladly enter his password. Oh, sure, he might soon realize that he's been pwn3d, but it's too late by then.
Yay.
Of, course, this stuff shouldn't happen in Ubuntu if you're only using signed programs from trusted sources. (Figuring out why this is bad is left as an exercise for the reader, but the term Trusted Computing comes to my mind very quickly.)
And it won't happen at all in Vista, where the screen is locked during a UAC prompt, making it impossible to draw another one on top of it.
You like ogg? You want legal downloads? You'd be happy to spend money on music but can't physically stomach the way things work right now?
I know of at least one band that offers their music in a range of MP3 bitrates, as well as FLAC and (if you're really desperate) 44.1/16/2 uncompressed linear PCM WAV (it's not as if webhost bandwidth is expensive, or anything). With persuasion, they'd probably offer also Vorbis, but at least you're given rather pristine sources which you're free to convert to whatever you want.
Whatever you think of the industry as a whole, you should take a look around. When you find something worthwhile which is offered in a sane package, reward the artists with money. Even if you only ever find it once.
One UPS outlet per room is an interesting prospect, which I hadn't yet considered. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it before -- I've already got a UPS which is big enough to properly feed a house full of computers . . .
In non-bedroom spaces, the lighting will all be separate. In fact, downstairs, I'll be using the existing cloth-asphalt insulated 12 AWG Romex-ish stuff, which is in excellent condition, for the lighting circuits, which avoids tearing apart plaster ceilings. I'll feed them with 15A GFCI breakers. Upstairs gets all new, both because it is easy, and because the existing wiring up there is pretty bad (it was done at a different time).
In bedroom spaces, it might not work that way, though. There's new (well, new to me) rules requiring AFCI breakers on all circuits in a bedroom, including those dedicated to lighting. And they're bloody expensive -- adding two or three of them for bedroom lighting is getting pricey for me. But I figure a dark bedroom after Little Johnny plugs a pair of needlenose pliers into an outlet is a pretty minor inconvenience, compared to the same thing happening in, say, the kitchen.
And, of course, there's plenty of Cat5 and coax. My standard drop (and I'm aiming for at least two for most rooms) consists of two Cat5 and one RG-6, all run neatly to a patch panel in the basement. It's a work of art.:)
Conduit isn't required here. Using it adds huge amounts of expense and time to the project. I used PEX piping when I redid the plumbing, so that I could pull it around as if it were wire. I'm not about to run wire as if it were plumbing.
It's no fun.
Besides, I can't think of any home lighting application which cannot be satisfied with some 12-2 WG Romex. Now, or ever.
The thing is, though: I do want LED lights in a few spots. I'm sensitive to flicker, and (to a lesser extent) color rendition, but they'd work just great in my pantry (where I don't care about color and it's hard to use a ladder to change light bulbs) and in my attic (where I need things to work in 10 or 20 years -- even if the last time I was up there was 5 years ago and they've been accidentally switched on ever since -- and do so in very cold or hot temperatures).
My house is something like 150 years old. I am in the middle of an ongoing effort to rewire it. The house is getting a wide array of romex, cat5, and coax, and I'd be happy to wire it for low-voltage LED lighting in places where it'd be useful.
I just, simply, can't. I'm a big fan of good standards, but it doesn't seem that there's even any bad standards specifically for LED lighting at this point.
So, I guess I'll continue wiring as if for incandescents and hope for the best.
Or that the poster claiming that the Clapper wouldn't work was, simply, wrong. A Clapper, being a device which has access to hot, neutral, and whatever load is plugged into it, doesn't suffer the same way that an in-series dimmer switch does. This is the reason why a series-wired wall-mounted X10 dimmer won't work with CFLs (the dimmer doesn't have a neutral available to it), and this reason simply does not apply to a Clapper (or, for that matter, a plug-in X10 lamp module).
In fact, I can only imagine that the Clapper's output is switched by a simple relay. There's no real way for a device which is plugged into it to affect the unit's operation.
Even the Clapper's original 1980s TV ad shows the device turning color televisions off.
Just because someone said something and used a few big words doesn't make it true. Stop being so gullible, and start thinking.
Now, I just wait until they're not looking, and set the refresh rate up to 85Hz. Generally the timings are close enough to what the monitor expects that there aren't any big geometry problems. But if there are minor problems with screen size, I'll quickly adjust the monitor to compensate. Major problems (say, big-time keystone errors, or a bulbous shape) typically result in me changing down to some lower refresh rate (75Hz, 72Hz, etc) until the shape is by chance no longer horrible.
It's the only way I can stand to work at a modern CRT, and I'm sick of explaining it to people who will never understand anyway.
At least it is a decreasing problem with LCD screens having now become the rule instead of the exception. 60Hz on an LCD has no more or less flicker than any other frequency.
It seems to me that many of the problems you present are directly related to the fact that people (in the US, at least) are expecting LED lamps to exist in conventional 120V Edison lamp sockets. Would some or all of these problems be eliminated if there were potential for an LED-specific socket standard?
The thought that occurs to me is thus: By changing the socket configuration, you force people to rewire or replace the fixture. This, in turn, forces them to at least think, and at best hire an electrician. In doing so, one can essentially force the elimination of any triac-based incandescent dimmers and replace them with small PWM power supplies, while maintaining overall safety by preventing the ability to plug an incandescent dimmer into the circuit.
I've seen the flickering tail lights on Cadillacs and other makes. It'd have been trivial to up the frequency to a point where the flicker would be imperceptible, but instead it must have been an intentional decision to make them flicker. I, also, find it annoying and distracting, but somewhere in Detroit there's a designer who thinks it's the coolest thing ever. (Yuck.)
And I hate replying to myself, but I forgot to say this: I don't care about how linearly it dims. I just want to be able to vary between "enough light to avoid stepping on a cat," "enough light to eat with," and "enough light to paint a room with," without rewiring my house.
But let's not forget the context. Folks (like me) have rooms lit with incandescent lighting because it can be dimmed. Inefficiently dimming an LED with a common triac-based dimmer switch is still sure to be more efficient than dimming an incandescent, if such a combination actually works.
I want more efficient lighting, but I can't have it with current products ("dimmable" CFLs being both sucky and expensive, and LEDs still being more expensive yet).
We first heard about this here on these very pages, about a decade ago: Read about a slug-hunting, self-sufficient, automatically-fermenting robot here.
How many versions of awdflash.exe do you suppose there really are?
And:
It's not hard to decompress BIOS (if it is in fact compressed in ROM to begin with, which doesn't seem likely): All you have to do is execute it.
Then you just look for the bytes that inform the CPU to instruct the ATA drive to avoid being sabotaged. It doesn't matter where they are in the BIOS. Make this JMP somewhere else where code has been inserted which can set up drive encryption, or replace the string with something which does nothing. IIRC, there's empty areas in a modern BIOS reserved for things like this, for add-in etherboot ROMs and such.
Recompress (again: is this really necessary?), flash, done. That Asus's flash utility might not work on an Acer doesn't mean that they're not performing exactly the same instructions to accomplish the actual flashing process.
Remember, it does not have to operate perfectly. If this simple procedure bricks 25% of machines, has no effect on 50% of machines, and successfully locks down the remaining 25% of machines with an unknown AES key and a ransom note, then it's working quite well enough.
It is my understanding that modern OSes which are follow the ATA standards will issue the security freeze during hardware probe. At least, my *BSD systems do, and I've seen indications that even Windows does.
This doesn't matter. I've seen my share of odd virii living inside of the boot sector.
A particularly clever virus or trojan could even go forth and re-write the BIOS to disable the "security freeze" function you speak of. It sounds far-fetched, until you realize that BIOS code is generally written in assembly, is generally unprotected, generally doesn't change much over time as systems evolve, and generally has some free space available for extra code. Such a hack would be easy for a weekend video game cracker to create.
If you boldly searched someone else's personal property, right in front of them, in an effort to steal and destroy class notes from all of your teachers, what do you think their first retaliatory action would be?
Please stop assuming that I have some sort of warped contractual agreement requiring me to work precisely 40 hours per week. It's just not that way.
When there's not much going on at work, I can work when I feel like it -- if I feel like it. I've taken plenty of unpaid days off to work on the house, or the car, or a client's computer in my sideline repair business. For me, taking some time off to work with MythTV can indeed be a very practical, profitable, and rewarding exercise.
Just because your employer exists just to fuck your ass raw, doesn't mean that mine acts that way too.
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You're missing the point.
It doesn't need a very large power source. It's still a landmine, and it needs to be very near to its target to have maximum effect. So, use weight or inductance or whatever to trigger the thing, not to explode, but to look for RFID tags. The rest of the time the added parts can be powered completely off.
The antenna isn't really much of a problem. RFID is generally UHF, which penetrates stuff pretty well, while still high enough in frequency that a surprisingly high amount of antenna gain can be contained within a very small package.
And the point is this: You can plant it on a roadway, and avoid killing the locals, but still have a fair chance at killing civilians of whatever RFID-toting nationality you choose. It's like a smart bomb for terrorists. And so, much like a cruise missile, it doesn't matter if it is expensive.
I'd guess that it's better than my company, where we're rather expected to install the same pirated[1] copy of Office 98 on every computer it is requested on. I, of course, refuse; others in the company aren't so clued.
I've tried, over and over, to persuade them to either buy a bunch of copies of Office, or just stick with openoffice.org. It's not like they're using any advanced features of Excel or Word, or any parts (at all) of Access. Alas.
[1]: I have mixed feelings about software piracy -- especially Microsoft software. Personallly: A lot of things I buy, a lot of things I don't. But if I'm using a thing in a business environment to make money, then, yes, the software should, absolutely, be paid for. I definitely bought every bit of software that I use in my sideline computer repair business -- I even register my shareware -- but unfortunately my employer doesn't want to operate that way.
Growing up as a kid in the 80s, I remember Reagan being on TV talking about "layoffs."
It was a new term, at least to me. It seemed to mean that the folks who were let go weren't really fired from their job, that there was some hope that they'd return if business improved.
Now, it seems that "laying someone off" is exactly the same thing as "firing that lazy bastard." If we remove the political incorrectness of the latter, then, can ANYONE bloody tell me the difference between how these less-useful people were oh-so-gently laid off, and just fucking firing them?
In other words: If I underperform at work, I expect to be fired[1]. If my job is shifted to someone else new to the company (no matter what country that they're in), I'd consider it that I was fired. Only in a business downturn, without a replacement, would I think that I was laid off. Am I wrong? (Why?)
[1]: Alas, I've got a quasi-IT job in small business that isn't going anywhere. I'm a bit of a generalist, with skills ranging from technical support to systems administration to tower climbing to cable-pulling monkey to systems integrator and troubleshooter supreme, working in public safety wireless communications and internal support. For the past year or so, I've done everything from just show up when I feel like to being totally AWOL, due to a number of personal, psychological, and financial issues that my employer isn't exactly aware of. I yell at my coworkers when they do stupid things. I'm a bad employee. I've cost the company a lot of money in the past 12 months, but they keep telling me that I'm an asset that the company needs. OTOH, we're having our best year ever. My Christmas bonus hasn't gone down a bit. I guess I'm lucky -- somehow, I think that if I were anyone else at any other company, I'd have been let go years ago.
Dams don't prevent flooding. They just move it somewhere else.
+5?
Geez. For that matter, as long as we're speculating, it could have made the quake much less intense.
Remember, kids: Just because you've changed something, doesn't mean that you've always made something else worse.
Kind of.
Cat3 would be skinny, scrawny, and more tolerant of being pulled around corners by its tail. It would be a dingy grey color, and would always have seemed to act as if it were very, very old, even when it were a kitten. You'd probably shy away from Cat3 if someone tried to give it to you.
Cat5 would be a little thicker around the middle, and a lot less durable than Cat3, but far more pleasant to have around. When shopping for a new cat, you'd be sure to get one at least as good as Cat5 -- even though cats of this quality always seem to be a putrid shade of blue.
Cat5e would be almost like Cat5, except for its bizarrely efficient gait: When walking its legs would all work at different intervals to avoid interfering with eachother.
Cat6 would be big and obviously muscular. It would run circles around Cat3, Cat5, and Cat5e, due in part to its pigeon-toed paws, but would be so fragile that its skin would fall off fatally if you so much as rubbed it the wrong way. It would be green or red or pink, or really any other color than blue. Everyone wants a cat as good as Cat6 for a pet, but few can justify the expense of such a breed, and fewer still have any real need for such an tightly-strung animal.
[I'm sure this would get moderated better if I could throw a car analogy or two in here somewhere. Oh, well.]
Right. Of course.
I'd like to submit that your comments about Vista's UAC also apply equally to anything else using a similar model; Ubuntu comes to mind.
Folks are very used to having a sudo/UAC popup asking for a password, which then gives a program root/admin. So all I, Johnny Hackstuff, have to do is write my malicious script to execute gksudo first and ask permission before conducting it's badness, and it's off to the races.
I, Johnny Hackstuff, might even sit and look at the process list instead. When I see something else run sudo to get root access (Synaptic, for instance), I'll just fire up my own sudo right over top of it. And then David Slowman will gladly enter his password. Oh, sure, he might soon realize that he's been pwn3d, but it's too late by then.
Yay.
Of, course, this stuff shouldn't happen in Ubuntu if you're only using signed programs from trusted sources. (Figuring out why this is bad is left as an exercise for the reader, but the term Trusted Computing comes to my mind very quickly.)
And it won't happen at all in Vista, where the screen is locked during a UAC prompt, making it impossible to draw another one on top of it.
But I'm sure Microsoft has it all wrong.
What, exactly, do you suppose UAC is supposed to do in that case?
Cry.
You like ogg? You want legal downloads? You'd be happy to spend money on music but can't physically stomach the way things work right now?
I know of at least one band that offers their music in a range of MP3 bitrates, as well as FLAC and (if you're really desperate) 44.1/16/2 uncompressed linear PCM WAV (it's not as if webhost bandwidth is expensive, or anything). With persuasion, they'd probably offer also Vorbis, but at least you're given rather pristine sources which you're free to convert to whatever you want.
Whatever you think of the industry as a whole, you should take a look around. When you find something worthwhile which is offered in a sane package, reward the artists with money. Even if you only ever find it once.
It's important.
One UPS outlet per room is an interesting prospect, which I hadn't yet considered. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it before -- I've already got a UPS which is big enough to properly feed a house full of computers . . .
In non-bedroom spaces, the lighting will all be separate. In fact, downstairs, I'll be using the existing cloth-asphalt insulated 12 AWG Romex-ish stuff, which is in excellent condition, for the lighting circuits, which avoids tearing apart plaster ceilings. I'll feed them with 15A GFCI breakers. Upstairs gets all new, both because it is easy, and because the existing wiring up there is pretty bad (it was done at a different time).
In bedroom spaces, it might not work that way, though. There's new (well, new to me) rules requiring AFCI breakers on all circuits in a bedroom, including those dedicated to lighting. And they're bloody expensive -- adding two or three of them for bedroom lighting is getting pricey for me. But I figure a dark bedroom after Little Johnny plugs a pair of needlenose pliers into an outlet is a pretty minor inconvenience, compared to the same thing happening in, say, the kitchen.
And, of course, there's plenty of Cat5 and coax. My standard drop (and I'm aiming for at least two for most rooms) consists of two Cat5 and one RG-6, all run neatly to a patch panel in the basement. It's a work of art. :)
Nice, but:
Conduit isn't required here. Using it adds huge amounts of expense and time to the project. I used PEX piping when I redid the plumbing, so that I could pull it around as if it were wire. I'm not about to run wire as if it were plumbing.
It's no fun.
Besides, I can't think of any home lighting application which cannot be satisfied with some 12-2 WG Romex. Now, or ever.
Right. I see your points.
The thing is, though: I do want LED lights in a few spots. I'm sensitive to flicker, and (to a lesser extent) color rendition, but they'd work just great in my pantry (where I don't care about color and it's hard to use a ladder to change light bulbs) and in my attic (where I need things to work in 10 or 20 years -- even if the last time I was up there was 5 years ago and they've been accidentally switched on ever since -- and do so in very cold or hot temperatures).
My house is something like 150 years old. I am in the middle of an ongoing effort to rewire it. The house is getting a wide array of romex, cat5, and coax, and I'd be happy to wire it for low-voltage LED lighting in places where it'd be useful.
I just, simply, can't. I'm a big fan of good standards, but it doesn't seem that there's even any bad standards specifically for LED lighting at this point.
So, I guess I'll continue wiring as if for incandescents and hope for the best.
*sigh*
Or that the poster claiming that the Clapper wouldn't work was, simply, wrong. A Clapper, being a device which has access to hot, neutral, and whatever load is plugged into it, doesn't suffer the same way that an in-series dimmer switch does. This is the reason why a series-wired wall-mounted X10 dimmer won't work with CFLs (the dimmer doesn't have a neutral available to it), and this reason simply does not apply to a Clapper (or, for that matter, a plug-in X10 lamp module).
In fact, I can only imagine that the Clapper's output is switched by a simple relay. There's no real way for a device which is plugged into it to affect the unit's operation.
Even the Clapper's original 1980s TV ad shows the device turning color televisions off.
Just because someone said something and used a few big words doesn't make it true. Stop being so gullible, and start thinking.
I used to ask them that.
Now, I just wait until they're not looking, and set the refresh rate up to 85Hz. Generally the timings are close enough to what the monitor expects that there aren't any big geometry problems. But if there are minor problems with screen size, I'll quickly adjust the monitor to compensate. Major problems (say, big-time keystone errors, or a bulbous shape) typically result in me changing down to some lower refresh rate (75Hz, 72Hz, etc) until the shape is by chance no longer horrible.
It's the only way I can stand to work at a modern CRT, and I'm sick of explaining it to people who will never understand anyway.
At least it is a decreasing problem with LCD screens having now become the rule instead of the exception. 60Hz on an LCD has no more or less flicker than any other frequency.
Very informative. Thank you.
It seems to me that many of the problems you present are directly related to the fact that people (in the US, at least) are expecting LED lamps to exist in conventional 120V Edison lamp sockets. Would some or all of these problems be eliminated if there were potential for an LED-specific socket standard?
The thought that occurs to me is thus: By changing the socket configuration, you force people to rewire or replace the fixture. This, in turn, forces them to at least think, and at best hire an electrician. In doing so, one can essentially force the elimination of any triac-based incandescent dimmers and replace them with small PWM power supplies, while maintaining overall safety by preventing the ability to plug an incandescent dimmer into the circuit.
What are your thoughts?
I've seen the flickering tail lights on Cadillacs and other makes. It'd have been trivial to up the frequency to a point where the flicker would be imperceptible, but instead it must have been an intentional decision to make them flicker. I, also, find it annoying and distracting, but somewhere in Detroit there's a designer who thinks it's the coolest thing ever. (Yuck.)
And I hate replying to myself, but I forgot to say this: I don't care about how linearly it dims. I just want to be able to vary between "enough light to avoid stepping on a cat," "enough light to eat with," and "enough light to paint a room with," without rewiring my house.
Fine.
But let's not forget the context. Folks (like me) have rooms lit with incandescent lighting because it can be dimmed. Inefficiently dimming an LED with a common triac-based dimmer switch is still sure to be more efficient than dimming an incandescent, if such a combination actually works.
I want more efficient lighting, but I can't have it with current products ("dimmable" CFLs being both sucky and expensive, and LEDs still being more expensive yet).
I see it a different way.
If gallium becomes scarce and expensive, then aluminum prices will drop. This will bring us cheaper, stronger, lighter, and less bio-degradable cars.
I, for one, welcome our gallium-based LED lighting overlords.
We first heard about this here on these very pages, about a decade ago: Read about a slug-hunting, self-sufficient, automatically-fermenting robot here.
Maybe I'm trivializing this, but:
How many versions of awdflash.exe do you suppose there really are?
And:
It's not hard to decompress BIOS (if it is in fact compressed in ROM to begin with, which doesn't seem likely): All you have to do is execute it.
Then you just look for the bytes that inform the CPU to instruct the ATA drive to avoid being sabotaged. It doesn't matter where they are in the BIOS. Make this JMP somewhere else where code has been inserted which can set up drive encryption, or replace the string with something which does nothing. IIRC, there's empty areas in a modern BIOS reserved for things like this, for add-in etherboot ROMs and such.
Recompress (again: is this really necessary?), flash, done. That Asus's flash utility might not work on an Acer doesn't mean that they're not performing exactly the same instructions to accomplish the actual flashing process.
Remember, it does not have to operate perfectly. If this simple procedure bricks 25% of machines, has no effect on 50% of machines, and successfully locks down the remaining 25% of machines with an unknown AES key and a ransom note, then it's working quite well enough.
It is my understanding that modern OSes which are follow the ATA standards will issue the security freeze during hardware probe. At least, my *BSD systems do, and I've seen indications that even Windows does.
This doesn't matter. I've seen my share of odd virii living inside of the boot sector.
A particularly clever virus or trojan could even go forth and re-write the BIOS to disable the "security freeze" function you speak of. It sounds far-fetched, until you realize that BIOS code is generally written in assembly, is generally unprotected, generally doesn't change much over time as systems evolve, and generally has some free space available for extra code. Such a hack would be easy for a weekend video game cracker to create.
I, for one, don't like this spec one bit.
Jerry,
How quickly you forget that we live in a young full of immigrant families who really, in the grand scheme of things, haven't been here for very long.
They got here by crossing boarders.
Kind regards.
If you boldly searched someone else's personal property, right in front of them, in an effort to steal and destroy class notes from all of your teachers, what do you think their first retaliatory action would be?
Please stop assuming that I have some sort of warped contractual agreement requiring me to work precisely 40 hours per week. It's just not that way.
When there's not much going on at work, I can work when I feel like it -- if I feel like it. I've taken plenty of unpaid days off to work on the house, or the car, or a client's computer in my sideline repair business. For me, taking some time off to work with MythTV can indeed be a very practical, profitable, and rewarding exercise.
Just because your employer exists just to fuck your ass raw, doesn't mean that mine acts that way too.
Find a better job.