There isn't anything in my mail which I would mind being shared in a demographic or advertisement-targeting sense, and there is no language in Google's TOS which says that they'll use it otherwise. (There's plenty of stuff which I'd rather never see in a courtroom, but then again nothing withstands a subpoena.)
So what if they can find a way to make money by selling demographics based on the content of my mail? I use IMAP with Thunderbird, so I never see their targeted ads, yet they've got to make money somehow. Demographics harm me none.
Now of course they include a clause saying they can can change those terms at their whim. But what provider, these days, does not include such verbiage? (Please be specific.)
As long as the terms are subject to change, any provider (of anything) can decide at some point that they'll suddenly start doing something awful with your data.
This being the case, I think I'll stick with the path of least resistance. I feel rather confident in saying that Gmail is no more evil than anything else in this context.
I just point my domain's MX records at Google's inbound SMTP servers. They handle mail for the entire domain. (www.google.com/a)
If Gmail starts to suck, I'll just log into my domain registrar, point the MX records somewhere else, and move my mail over to the new host using IMAP. Just like I would with any other host.
I think there's a fear that, even if a film was copied to a new drive every year, it would be stored in a weirdo file format that's impossible to decode in the future.
Perhaps. But must it really be impossible?
First step is, of course, using a simple format instead of something weird and complicated. Something which acts more like FLAC seems more appropriate than something which acts like MPEG4.
Second: Add interleaved redundancy information, ala PAR files on Usenet, so that even if some (possibly huge) random portions are unreadable, the whole thing will still be able to be recovered without error.
Third: Store a description of those video and parity data formats on each iteration of media. Write it in Z-80 assembler. Or C. Or Pascal. Or Perl. Or English. Or all of the above. It's a simple format (see step 1), and it shouldn't be that hard to document it adequately enough so that someone in the Mysterious Future who is armed with a computer and half a brain can write a fresh, accurate decoder. (Math isn't going anywhere.)
Fourth: Store that same documentation in analog form (acid-free paper, microfilm, whatever) along with the media. Include byte offsets for the locations of the video and redundancy data, so that in the event that the media is largely trashed the recovery effort can begin right away. (Bytes aren't going anywhere, and neither are lenses.)
I pay less than $10/year for a domain. Everything else is done by a server I have running in my house.
Is your time worth nothing?
Yeah, I know. It's already set up and working. (I used to run Postfix at home, too.)
So what happens when your house burns down, or your hard drive crashes? Sure, you've got (off-site) backups (right?), but even in the best scenario you'll still have half a day in fucking with finding/buying/assembling hardware, configuring a kernel for the new motherboard, restoring backups, and bootstrapping the system after the fire.
Standards? Even without the webmail interface, Gmail is a win as an IMAP server.
The spam filter alone is worth the price of admission; it catches more shit than anything else I've been able to cook up, after years of fucking with spamassassin/amavis/postfix. It also integrates nicely with IMAP; dropping things in the spam folder in Thunderbird automatically tags and learns the message as being spam.
They also host my personal domain's mail for free.
Folders, labels, whatever. They're so close to the same thing that it's almost not worth mentioning. The only functional difference that I can discern between the two is that a message may have more than one label, whereas folder-based systems typically only allow a message to exist in one place at one time.
So. Don't like labels? Simply never assign more than label of them to a given message, and you'll be just as limited as you would be if it were using folders instead.
Here in NW Ohio, the roads have all been slowly progressing toward LED stop lights over the past several years. We get a good bit of snow from time to time, though nowhere near as much as some other places.
I've never seen a stop light clogged with snow. The lights here have these lovely hoods over them (nearly exactly like the second light pictured here which, in cooperation with gravity, seems to keep snow away from the important parts. They've also started painting the lights black instead of yellow, permitting the light from the sun to impart a good deal of heat during the day.
But just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean that it is not a real problem.
So, then: If more heat is required, why not just add an automatic defroster to the lamp? It doesn't have to be complicated. A resistor of suitable value in series with a common thermal switch is all that is needed to make it work. This could be added directly to the LED replacement fixture during manufacturing, or retrofitted into the housing.
This way you'd get all of the efficiency of colored LEDs during the warmer months (which is a huge improvement over filtered incandescent), and at least some of it during the colder months, while retaining the reduced maintenance cycle which is the real driving force behind the adoption of LEDs.
Bonus points for wiring the resistors together, with all of them energized at the same time. That way, yellow (or other seldom-used segments) will also be defrosted, while it might not be if it were just an incandescent light.
This sort of arrangement is extremely common in the CCTV world. Outdoor camera housings typically have exactly this sort of setup in order to keep ice, condensate, and snow out of the field of view. It works fine.
The only reason a mechanic gives you the option of retaining your failed car parts is because they are your property. You own them. You can do whatever you want with them. Make them into paperweights, industrial art projects, second opinions, sell them for scrap - whatever you want. They're still yours. Core charges or not, "Remove and Replace" != "Remove, Replace, Recycle."
When I have my car serviced, I fully expect that all of my old parts are sitting in a pile somewhere, waiting for me to claim/disclaim them. Of course, my mechanic doesn't have me sign anything with annoying fine print on it before he begins work, like it seems that Apple does.
But signed agreement or no, it seems like bad business. When a customer gives me a computer, or a TiVo, or whatever and asks me to fix it, every part (screws, dead fans, hard drives, bulging capacitors, whatever) I remove goes into a box. After the repair is complete, I offer whatever remains in that box back to the customer.
Usually they decide that they don't want it, but until that decision is made then those extra/failed parts remain theirs.
There's a couple of exceptions to this:
Warranty work. Like exchanging a screwdriver at Sears, there's no expectation that one will retain ownership of the old item if it is being replaced under warranty.
Contracts and agreements. In the audio business, years ago, we sometimes sold substantial upgrades to commercial PA systems which weren't at all broken, but which the customer just wanted to have work better or be more flexible. It wasn't uncommon to have verbiage in the quotation which would permit us to remove and dispose of all upgraded/displaced equipment in a manner we saw fit. The potential to re-sell (or re-use) some of this old gear was definitely a factor in the price of an upgrade, and it would generally save the customer some money if they'd let us keep the old gear. But without being upfront and telling them that it would be part of the deal, taking these old components would have been theft
Why would I expect techs to look through files when they are doing something that would be considered "fixing" the computer?
I fix computers all the time, but I don't go rooting about in my clients' stuff any more than necessary in order to ensure that the fix is correct.
In many cases, the reason is very simple: The privacy of various third-party others. I have worked on computers for doctors and lawyers, and in those cases, I feel particularly obligated to do everything I can to avoid seeing any of that third-party information.
I handle the customer's data not only with kid skin gloves, but as if it were some sharp and pointy (but extremely fragile) artifact which would be destroyed if it were even observed, let alone touched.
If I need data with which to test hardware or software, I use my own.
Some times, I can't help but notice things. Names of files on the desktop, or in the My Documents folder on a flailing hard drive that I'm rescuing data from.
It's not my job to go rooting through that stuff and see if it really is of questionable nature, however, so while it'd certainly be easy to go digging, I simply do not. They're paying me to fix a technical problem, not play gestapo.
My abilities as an investigator are thus tempered by my sense of morality. So, while I'll certainly be reporting any thing I find which is plainly threatening toward other people, I have zero inclination to go looking for that thing, and strongly suspect that I'll never find any even if it were hidden in plain sight.
You'll thank me for this the next time I'm working on your lawyer's PC.
Yep. But I wasn't talking about kernels; I was talking about operating systems.
The kernel is not the OS, but just one part of it.
If you'd like to talk about kernels instead of operating systems, please allow me to point out that all Unix kernels employ some form of software RNG, in the forms of/dev/random and/dev/urandom.
Furthermore, after very careful consideration, I feel that in the context of this particular discussion (Microsoft's inclusion of a particular RNG in the SP1 release of their Vista operating system) your point is rather void.
Who even says that a GUI has to be at the OS level? If the NSA or its customers want to use graphics, there is nothing stopping them from doing so on Linux or any other OS.
Or:
Who even says that a filesystem has to be at the OS level? If the NSA or its customers want to use files, there is nothing stopping them from doing so on *BSD or any other OS.
Or even:
Who even says that a TCP/IP stack has to be at the OS level? If the NSA or its customers want to use Teh Intarwebs, there is nothing stopping them from doing so on Vista or any other OS.
So, thus shown that there is no reason to ever include anything in an OS, might you care to show some reason why an OS shouldn't include one or more RNGs? Nobody's forcing anyone to use it. It's just another tool.
It seems to me that MS is simply doing what the Unix people have been asking MS for all along: Unlike DOS, modern incarnations of Windows can actually provide useful and consistent APIs to application developers to program against.
And speaking of application developers, I'd guess that it's approximately one fuckload easier to get an Dual_EC_DRBG-compliant product to market if it uses the (already-certified) Dual_EC_DRBG code in the OS, than if each developer were required to seek such certification independently, which is clearly a competitive advantage for Windows over other operating systems if Dual_EC_DRBG support is a factor (for the NSA, or for anyone else that needs it for whatever reason).
There's no good reason why a performance car, like a Corvette, cannot get 35MPG, except for the huge, soft tires that are required. All that rubber generates a lot of heat as it bends and flexes while you're just rolling down the highway, and it's a loss which isn't easily eliminated on that type of car. Skinny, hard-compound tires with stuff sidewalls (ala Honda Insight) would be a big improvement in mileage, but would certainly prove unacceptable on a Corvette.
However, the Vette is already light weight and aerodynamic, which are (IMHO) the two hardest things to accomplish in a modern car stuffed full of creature comforts.
GM in particular is at the forefront of making V8 motors which are able to run almost as efficiently at I4s when performance is not demanded (isn't this already used on the C7?), by neatly disabling half of the motor. Adding variable valve timing (ala Honda's VTEC, BMW's VANOS, or similar) will further enhance both efficiency and performance, which can enable the use of a smaller motor for a given output level.
Super- and turbo-charged motors add another layer of potential efficiency. Turbo is used to great effect on VW's TDI diesels, but there is no compelling reason why the same improvements cannot be made to a big(ish) V8, again with potential to decrease displacement while maintaining power output.
The downside to all of this is, of course, money. All of this stuff comes with added expense to the consumer at the time the car is purchased.
But then, at the rate that oil continues to rise, it seems likely that it will pay for itself eventually.
So. Don't worry about it. Just because cars are going to have to improve their mileage, doesn't mean you won't be able to get a wicked performance vehicle. It'll just be more expensive.
Found it. It sounds fantastic. There is very little, if any, dynamics or other processing going on.
It is refreshing to listen to a broadcast which tries hard to let the music sound as good as it was recorded, instead of homogenizing everything so that it all sounds equally bad.
All I see is MP3 at 32 and 128kbps, and Windows Media and Real at unknown bitrates. This is, of course, at least three more options than most other radio stations offer, but:
It seems to be a lot more common on European vehicles, than on American and Japanese.
For instance, my 1995 BMW 325i has lug bolts which screw into threaded holes in the hub assembly. The underside of the bolt head is tapered. There is no possible way to assemble it incorrectly, other than over/under-torquing the bolts.
But this is very different from every single other car I've ever taken a wrench to. At least here in the States, we use lug nuts and wheel studs. This is probably because it definately makes a it a -lot- easier to align the wheel to its fasteners, but as a previous poster mentioned, it also makes it possible to reassemble things incorrectly.
TFA reads like a press release for Kroll. The whole thing is (almost) written like a short superhero story, with several paragraphs about Kroll saving the day in a small variety of mishaps which are neither very original nor particularly amusing.
These aren't disasters; all of these folks got their data back.
If this is the going rate for disaster articles these days, I might as well tell you all about the hard drive I recently rescued out of a Dell laptop after the Geek Squad had given up on it (big surprise, that). The Toshiba drive had either very bad spindle bearings or a failed head stack (or both), as when I powered it up it vibrated like crazy and made a very rapid thumping noise, but none of this was a big surprise given that it was a little over four years old.
In experimenting with it, I found a few interesting features:
Plugging it into a Windows box to try running Acronis against it immediately bluescreened the host machine.
When powered up, if the drive was slowly rotated, the nature of the thump would change, and something inside would emanate a horrible metal-on-metal grinding sound for as long as I kept rotating it (apparently due to the gyroscopic effect of the spinning platters along with the failed bearings).
The drive was totally unusable in its normal (label-side up) orientation; Linux wouldn't even read the partition table in that state.
But if I carefully propped the drive up, in a very particular, almost-vertical position resting on its connector, it worked. Not only that, but dd was able to recover every single sector of the disk, without error. I then dd'd that back to a new disk, reinstalled Windows (the theory is that Best Buy's fine Geek Squad managed to fuck up XP somehow) on it, did some shuffling of partitions in Acronis, and gave the customer back a working computer complete with their family photos and music library.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
Or, there was the 200GB Seagate desktop drive that was under six feet of water for about 48 hours. It worked just bloody fine after letting it dry for a week, and then removing the cover to dry out the innards a bit more. Despite the visible traces of river silt still laying on the platters, Windows Explorer was more than capable of retrieving all of the requested data.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
On the other hand, another (different model) Seagate drive which was also in the same flood failed miserably. Swapping controller boards did not help. Kroll's pricing for recovery was deemed too expensive, and it was therefore a total loss.
It was the hard drive from one of my boss's machines. Years worth of quotations and customer data that were stored in Outlook which he had been accustomed to referring to, all gone. This, of course, ==disaster. (But it was a minor disaster compared to the rest of the flood, which destroyed his office building, trashed the basement at his house, and ate enough of my own house that it is now condemned.)
He is still insistent on maintaining his own PCs, and has subsequently been given the standard-issue lecture about backups, which he'd already heard in the past. We'll see if it soaked in, this time.
But I seem to be digressing a lot, here. The point is, in a world stuffedfull of stupid and funny computer stories, TFA doesn't seem to include any. The absence of both well-written humor and real disasters factored with the total lack of technical details equates to this article being positively inane and simply as useless as common whitewash. (Another example of this same PR tactic, not surprisingly from Kroll'
Move the client over to 2.5" disks and enclosures. Please. The heads are better protected, the whole thing is designed able to withstand mechanical shock better than 3.5" disks, and since laptop drives are typically very happy to run from USB or Firewire bus power, there's one fewer cable to connect.
There's no compelling reason, unless the need is for more than 250GB per drive (which it might be) to routinely ship about 3.5" drives.
All other things aside, there is one extremely important reason why one should select the most physically durable drives available for such applications:
Have you ever seen how UPS unloads a truck? It's not exactly what I might consider pretty.
And if I buy an iPhone without a contract, what then? I guess it'd be mine, wouldn't it?
But even if I buy it WITH a contract, it's just a contract for AT&T service. I still get to use the phone however they want, on whatever networks I want -- I'm just obligated to continue to pay AT&T for the duration of the contract term.
You are an idiot, AC. And while I doubt that you'll ever read this, I believe that there are many other mistaken individuals out there who will.
If I sell you something, you're free to do with it as you wish. Whether or not it is discounted (or even sold at a loss) is not a factor in your future use of that item. You own it. It is yours.
For example, there is a grocery store around the corner from my house which has been there since long before I was born. They discount their milk to such an extent that it is sold at a loss, in the hope that they'll recover some of that loss through additional (or future) purchases.
Your mentality suggests that it would be OK for the grocer to dictate how one might use that gallon of milk, just because they sold it at a loss, or to punish someone for not buying more profitable items along with it. Both of which would be totally and obviously absurd.
But it is no less absurd when it is electronics instead of dairy goods. They're still just goods being transacted with money.
Your mentality is unhealthy. It defies logic, and goes against thousands of years of property ownership.
It is Insightful because it is neither Interesting (because everyone already knows that Bush is a lie) nor Funny (as, even with a punchline, those facts would be pretty solemn).
It is not -1 Off-Topic because it is important. The wrong-doings of our President should be at the front of everyone's minds, in the US as well as in those nations that we continually fuck with, and moderating truthful anti-Bush prose as Off-Topic is a sure way to get your points meta-moderated into oblivion.
Thus, the moderators have moderated it Insightful, despite the mod system being heavily weighted against it, because there exists no better category with which to otherwise provide positive moderation with feedback.[1]
I hope addresses this addresses your puzzlement.
[1]: Under- and Over-rated moderations do not get meta-moderated.
If I had mod points, I'd use 'em. But I don't, so I'll just voice my agreement instead:
If it's my stuff (ie, not leased, or rented, or otherwise owned by another party), then I'll be doing whatever the fuck I please with it, as long as it is legal, and nobody can stop me.
The free market works in a lot of different ways. The same ideology that states "if you don't like the Terms of Service, don't buy it" also states "if Apple doesn't want people fucking with the hardware they sell, then they should stop selling it to people."
Interesting picture of traffic backed up waiting for access to the single-lane portions of the road, but I have to ask:
Isn't this something that the removal of a hedgerow or two would just quickly and positively cure?
Looking at the town, it looks like there's more than ample opportunity to make the single-lane portion of the road much, much wider, but nobody ever bothered.
I'm not a civil engineer, and I've never been to Barrow Gurney, or England, hell I'm not even of British descent. But the only structure I see which would impede the widening of that narrow road is a small shed-like building (shelter house?) next to a playground, which is probably already owned by the village.
This leads me to wonder what, exactly, is the problem acquiring the lands as a compulsory purchase (== eminent domain for us USians) and just, you know, fixing it?
If something like this happened in Ohio, the land owners would grumble about the prospect for awhile, the state would step in and purchase the lands for an absurd value, the road would get wider, the previous owners would cash their checks and buy themselves a big-fucking-TV (or a new car, depending on the value of the land), and that would be that.
In my own town, we have such signs at many junctions where the main route diverts (or ends) and a residential road continues.
These, along with other signs near the edge of town stating that "Trucks most follow state routes" seems to do a pretty good job of ensuring that deliveries still get delivered while quiet neighborhoods stay quiet.
Slashdot Mirror
(I'll reply in advance.)
Oh, yeah - that other concern. Privacy.
There isn't anything in my mail which I would mind being shared in a demographic or advertisement-targeting sense, and there is no language in Google's TOS which says that they'll use it otherwise. (There's plenty of stuff which I'd rather never see in a courtroom, but then again nothing withstands a subpoena.)
So what if they can find a way to make money by selling demographics based on the content of my mail? I use IMAP with Thunderbird, so I never see their targeted ads, yet they've got to make money somehow. Demographics harm me none.
Now of course they include a clause saying they can can change those terms at their whim. But what provider, these days, does not include such verbiage? (Please be specific.)
As long as the terms are subject to change, any provider (of anything) can decide at some point that they'll suddenly start doing something awful with your data.
This being the case, I think I'll stick with the path of least resistance. I feel rather confident in saying that Gmail is no more evil than anything else in this context.
Easy.
I don't use a @gmail.com address.
I just point my domain's MX records at Google's inbound SMTP servers. They handle mail for the entire domain. (www.google.com/a)
If Gmail starts to suck, I'll just log into my domain registrar, point the MX records somewhere else, and move my mail over to the new host using IMAP. Just like I would with any other host.
Any other concerns?
I think there's a fear that, even if a film was copied to a new drive every year, it would be stored in a weirdo file format that's impossible to decode in the future.
Perhaps. But must it really be impossible?
First step is, of course, using a simple format instead of something weird and complicated. Something which acts more like FLAC seems more appropriate than something which acts like MPEG4.
Second: Add interleaved redundancy information, ala PAR files on Usenet, so that even if some (possibly huge) random portions are unreadable, the whole thing will still be able to be recovered without error.
Third: Store a description of those video and parity data formats on each iteration of media. Write it in Z-80 assembler. Or C. Or Pascal. Or Perl. Or English. Or all of the above. It's a simple format (see step 1), and it shouldn't be that hard to document it adequately enough so that someone in the Mysterious Future who is armed with a computer and half a brain can write a fresh, accurate decoder. (Math isn't going anywhere.)
Fourth: Store that same documentation in analog form (acid-free paper, microfilm, whatever) along with the media. Include byte offsets for the locations of the video and redundancy data, so that in the event that the media is largely trashed the recovery effort can begin right away. (Bytes aren't going anywhere, and neither are lenses.)
What was the problem, again?
Should you be able to sue for a statutory $250,000.00 per fornicative act?
Is your time worth nothing?
Yeah, I know. It's already set up and working. (I used to run Postfix at home, too.)
So what happens when your house burns down, or your hard drive crashes? Sure, you've got (off-site) backups (right?), but even in the best scenario you'll still have half a day in fucking with finding/buying/assembling hardware, configuring a kernel for the new motherboard, restoring backups, and bootstrapping the system after the fire.
Why make extra work for yourself?
Standards? Even without the webmail interface, Gmail is a win as an IMAP server.
The spam filter alone is worth the price of admission; it catches more shit than anything else I've been able to cook up, after years of fucking with spamassassin/amavis/postfix. It also integrates nicely with IMAP; dropping things in the spam folder in Thunderbird automatically tags and learns the message as being spam.
They also host my personal domain's mail for free.
No complaints from me.
Folders, labels, whatever. They're so close to the same thing that it's almost not worth mentioning. The only functional difference that I can discern between the two is that a message may have more than one label, whereas folder-based systems typically only allow a message to exist in one place at one time.
So. Don't like labels? Simply never assign more than label of them to a given message, and you'll be just as limited as you would be if it were using folders instead.
Here in NW Ohio, the roads have all been slowly progressing toward LED stop lights over the past several years. We get a good bit of snow from time to time, though nowhere near as much as some other places.
I've never seen a stop light clogged with snow. The lights here have these lovely hoods over them (nearly exactly like the second light pictured here which, in cooperation with gravity, seems to keep snow away from the important parts. They've also started painting the lights black instead of yellow, permitting the light from the sun to impart a good deal of heat during the day.
But just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean that it is not a real problem.
So, then: If more heat is required, why not just add an automatic defroster to the lamp? It doesn't have to be complicated. A resistor of suitable value in series with a common thermal switch is all that is needed to make it work. This could be added directly to the LED replacement fixture during manufacturing, or retrofitted into the housing.
This way you'd get all of the efficiency of colored LEDs during the warmer months (which is a huge improvement over filtered incandescent), and at least some of it during the colder months, while retaining the reduced maintenance cycle which is the real driving force behind the adoption of LEDs.
Bonus points for wiring the resistors together, with all of them energized at the same time. That way, yellow (or other seldom-used segments) will also be defrosted, while it might not be if it were just an incandescent light.
This sort of arrangement is extremely common in the CCTV world. Outdoor camera housings typically have exactly this sort of setup in order to keep ice, condensate, and snow out of the field of view. It works fine.
The only reason a mechanic gives you the option of retaining your failed car parts is because they are your property. You own them. You can do whatever you want with them. Make them into paperweights, industrial art projects, second opinions, sell them for scrap - whatever you want. They're still yours. Core charges or not, "Remove and Replace" != "Remove, Replace, Recycle."
When I have my car serviced, I fully expect that all of my old parts are sitting in a pile somewhere, waiting for me to claim/disclaim them. Of course, my mechanic doesn't have me sign anything with annoying fine print on it before he begins work, like it seems that Apple does.
But signed agreement or no, it seems like bad business. When a customer gives me a computer, or a TiVo, or whatever and asks me to fix it, every part (screws, dead fans, hard drives, bulging capacitors, whatever) I remove goes into a box. After the repair is complete, I offer whatever remains in that box back to the customer.
Usually they decide that they don't want it, but until that decision is made then those extra/failed parts remain theirs.
There's a couple of exceptions to this:
Warranty work. Like exchanging a screwdriver at Sears, there's no expectation that one will retain ownership of the old item if it is being replaced under warranty.
Contracts and agreements. In the audio business, years ago, we sometimes sold substantial upgrades to commercial PA systems which weren't at all broken, but which the customer just wanted to have work better or be more flexible. It wasn't uncommon to have verbiage in the quotation which would permit us to remove and dispose of all upgraded/displaced equipment in a manner we saw fit. The potential to re-sell (or re-use) some of this old gear was definitely a factor in the price of an upgrade, and it would generally save the customer some money if they'd let us keep the old gear. But without being upfront and telling them that it would be part of the deal, taking these old components would have been theft
Why would I expect techs to look through files when they are doing something that would be considered "fixing" the computer?
I fix computers all the time, but I don't go rooting about in my clients' stuff any more than necessary in order to ensure that the fix is correct.
In many cases, the reason is very simple: The privacy of various third-party others. I have worked on computers for doctors and lawyers, and in those cases, I feel particularly obligated to do everything I can to avoid seeing any of that third-party information.
I handle the customer's data not only with kid skin gloves, but as if it were some sharp and pointy (but extremely fragile) artifact which would be destroyed if it were even observed, let alone touched.
If I need data with which to test hardware or software, I use my own.
Some times, I can't help but notice things. Names of files on the desktop, or in the My Documents folder on a flailing hard drive that I'm rescuing data from.
It's not my job to go rooting through that stuff and see if it really is of questionable nature, however, so while it'd certainly be easy to go digging, I simply do not. They're paying me to fix a technical problem, not play gestapo.
My abilities as an investigator are thus tempered by my sense of morality. So, while I'll certainly be reporting any thing I find which is plainly threatening toward other people, I have zero inclination to go looking for that thing, and strongly suspect that I'll never find any even if it were hidden in plain sight.
You'll thank me for this the next time I'm working on your lawyer's PC.
Yep. But I wasn't talking about kernels; I was talking about operating systems.
/dev/random and /dev/urandom.
The kernel is not the OS, but just one part of it.
If you'd like to talk about kernels instead of operating systems, please allow me to point out that all Unix kernels employ some form of software RNG, in the forms of
Furthermore, after very careful consideration, I feel that in the context of this particular discussion (Microsoft's inclusion of a particular RNG in the SP1 release of their Vista operating system) your point is rather void.
Thank you for your time.
I could make the same argument about anything:
Who even says that a GUI has to be at the OS level? If the NSA or its customers want to use graphics, there is nothing stopping them from doing so on Linux or any other OS.
Or:
Who even says that a filesystem has to be at the OS level? If the NSA or its customers want to use files, there is nothing stopping them from doing so on *BSD or any other OS.
Or even:
Who even says that a TCP/IP stack has to be at the OS level? If the NSA or its customers want to use Teh Intarwebs, there is nothing stopping them from doing so on Vista or any other OS.
So, thus shown that there is no reason to ever include anything in an OS, might you care to show some reason why an OS shouldn't include one or more RNGs? Nobody's forcing anyone to use it. It's just another tool.
It seems to me that MS is simply doing what the Unix people have been asking MS for all along: Unlike DOS, modern incarnations of Windows can actually provide useful and consistent APIs to application developers to program against.
And speaking of application developers, I'd guess that it's approximately one fuckload easier to get an Dual_EC_DRBG-compliant product to market if it uses the (already-certified) Dual_EC_DRBG code in the OS, than if each developer were required to seek such certification independently, which is clearly a competitive advantage for Windows over other operating systems if Dual_EC_DRBG support is a factor (for the NSA, or for anyone else that needs it for whatever reason).
There's no good reason why a performance car, like a Corvette, cannot get 35MPG, except for the huge, soft tires that are required. All that rubber generates a lot of heat as it bends and flexes while you're just rolling down the highway, and it's a loss which isn't easily eliminated on that type of car. Skinny, hard-compound tires with stuff sidewalls (ala Honda Insight) would be a big improvement in mileage, but would certainly prove unacceptable on a Corvette.
However, the Vette is already light weight and aerodynamic, which are (IMHO) the two hardest things to accomplish in a modern car stuffed full of creature comforts.
GM in particular is at the forefront of making V8 motors which are able to run almost as efficiently at I4s when performance is not demanded (isn't this already used on the C7?), by neatly disabling half of the motor. Adding variable valve timing (ala Honda's VTEC, BMW's VANOS, or similar) will further enhance both efficiency and performance, which can enable the use of a smaller motor for a given output level.
Super- and turbo-charged motors add another layer of potential efficiency. Turbo is used to great effect on VW's TDI diesels, but there is no compelling reason why the same improvements cannot be made to a big(ish) V8, again with potential to decrease displacement while maintaining power output.
The downside to all of this is, of course, money. All of this stuff comes with added expense to the consumer at the time the car is purchased.
But then, at the rate that oil continues to rise, it seems likely that it will pay for itself eventually.
So. Don't worry about it. Just because cars are going to have to improve their mileage, doesn't mean you won't be able to get a wicked performance vehicle. It'll just be more expensive.
Aha!
Found it. It sounds fantastic. There is very little, if any, dynamics or other processing going on.
It is refreshing to listen to a broadcast which tries hard to let the music sound as good as it was recorded, instead of homogenizing everything so that it all sounds equally bad.
Thanks for that.
All I see is MP3 at 32 and 128kbps, and Windows Media and Real at unknown bitrates. This is, of course, at least three more options than most other radio stations offer, but:
Where is the uncompressed stream?
You mean something like this?
It seems to be a lot more common on European vehicles, than on American and Japanese.
For instance, my 1995 BMW 325i has lug bolts which screw into threaded holes in the hub assembly. The underside of the bolt head is tapered. There is no possible way to assemble it incorrectly, other than over/under-torquing the bolts.
But this is very different from every single other car I've ever taken a wrench to. At least here in the States, we use lug nuts and wheel studs. This is probably because it definately makes a it a -lot- easier to align the wheel to its fasteners, but as a previous poster mentioned, it also makes it possible to reassemble things incorrectly.
TFA reads like a press release for Kroll. The whole thing is (almost) written like a short superhero story, with several paragraphs about Kroll saving the day in a small variety of mishaps which are neither very original nor particularly amusing.
These aren't disasters; all of these folks got their data back.
If this is the going rate for disaster articles these days, I might as well tell you all about the hard drive I recently rescued out of a Dell laptop after the Geek Squad had given up on it (big surprise, that). The Toshiba drive had either very bad spindle bearings or a failed head stack (or both), as when I powered it up it vibrated like crazy and made a very rapid thumping noise, but none of this was a big surprise given that it was a little over four years old.
In experimenting with it, I found a few interesting features:
Plugging it into a Windows box to try running Acronis against it immediately bluescreened the host machine.
When powered up, if the drive was slowly rotated, the nature of the thump would change, and something inside would emanate a horrible metal-on-metal grinding sound for as long as I kept rotating it (apparently due to the gyroscopic effect of the spinning platters along with the failed bearings).
The drive was totally unusable in its normal (label-side up) orientation; Linux wouldn't even read the partition table in that state.
But if I carefully propped the drive up, in a very particular, almost-vertical position resting on its connector, it worked. Not only that, but dd was able to recover every single sector of the disk, without error. I then dd'd that back to a new disk, reinstalled Windows (the theory is that Best Buy's fine Geek Squad managed to fuck up XP somehow) on it, did some shuffling of partitions in Acronis, and gave the customer back a working computer complete with their family photos and music library.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
Or, there was the 200GB Seagate desktop drive that was under six feet of water for about 48 hours. It worked just bloody fine after letting it dry for a week, and then removing the cover to dry out the innards a bit more. Despite the visible traces of river silt still laying on the platters, Windows Explorer was more than capable of retrieving all of the requested data.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
On the other hand, another (different model) Seagate drive which was also in the same flood failed miserably. Swapping controller boards did not help. Kroll's pricing for recovery was deemed too expensive, and it was therefore a total loss.
It was the hard drive from one of my boss's machines. Years worth of quotations and customer data that were stored in Outlook which he had been accustomed to referring to, all gone. This, of course, ==disaster. (But it was a minor disaster compared to the rest of the flood, which destroyed his office building, trashed the basement at his house, and ate enough of my own house that it is now condemned.)
He is still insistent on maintaining his own PCs, and has subsequently been given the standard-issue lecture about backups, which he'd already heard in the past. We'll see if it soaked in, this time.
But I seem to be digressing a lot, here. The point is, in a world stuffed full of stupid and funny computer stories, TFA doesn't seem to include any. The absence of both well-written humor and real disasters factored with the total lack of technical details equates to this article being positively inane and simply as useless as common whitewash. (Another example of this same PR tactic, not surprisingly from Kroll'
Move the client over to 2.5" disks and enclosures. Please. The heads are better protected, the whole thing is designed able to withstand mechanical shock better than 3.5" disks, and since laptop drives are typically very happy to run from USB or Firewire bus power, there's one fewer cable to connect.
There's no compelling reason, unless the need is for more than 250GB per drive (which it might be) to routinely ship about 3.5" drives.
All other things aside, there is one extremely important reason why one should select the most physically durable drives available for such applications:
Have you ever seen how UPS unloads a truck? It's not exactly what I might consider pretty.
And if I buy an iPhone without a contract, what then? I guess it'd be mine, wouldn't it?
But even if I buy it WITH a contract, it's just a contract for AT&T service. I still get to use the phone however they want, on whatever networks I want -- I'm just obligated to continue to pay AT&T for the duration of the contract term.
You are an idiot, AC. And while I doubt that you'll ever read this, I believe that there are many other mistaken individuals out there who will.
If I sell you something, you're free to do with it as you wish. Whether or not it is discounted (or even sold at a loss) is not a factor in your future use of that item. You own it. It is yours.
For example, there is a grocery store around the corner from my house which has been there since long before I was born. They discount their milk to such an extent that it is sold at a loss, in the hope that they'll recover some of that loss through additional (or future) purchases.
This is really a fairly common practice in retail, at all levels.
Your mentality suggests that it would be OK for the grocer to dictate how one might use that gallon of milk, just because they sold it at a loss, or to punish someone for not buying more profitable items along with it. Both of which would be totally and obviously absurd.
But it is no less absurd when it is electronics instead of dairy goods. They're still just goods being transacted with money.
Your mentality is unhealthy. It defies logic, and goes against thousands of years of property ownership.
It is Insightful because it is neither Interesting (because everyone already knows that Bush is a lie) nor Funny (as, even with a punchline, those facts would be pretty solemn).
It is not -1 Off-Topic because it is important. The wrong-doings of our President should be at the front of everyone's minds, in the US as well as in those nations that we continually fuck with, and moderating truthful anti-Bush prose as Off-Topic is a sure way to get your points meta-moderated into oblivion.
Thus, the moderators have moderated it Insightful, despite the mod system being heavily weighted against it, because there exists no better category with which to otherwise provide positive moderation with feedback.[1]
I hope addresses this addresses your puzzlement.
[1]: Under- and Over-rated moderations do not get meta-moderated.
If I had mod points, I'd use 'em. But I don't, so I'll just voice my agreement instead:
If it's my stuff (ie, not leased, or rented, or otherwise owned by another party), then I'll be doing whatever the fuck I please with it, as long as it is legal, and nobody can stop me.
The free market works in a lot of different ways. The same ideology that states "if you don't like the Terms of Service, don't buy it" also states "if Apple doesn't want people fucking with the hardware they sell, then they should stop selling it to people."
Interesting picture of traffic backed up waiting for access to the single-lane portions of the road, but I have to ask:
Isn't this something that the removal of a hedgerow or two would just quickly and positively cure?
Looking at the town, it looks like there's more than ample opportunity to make the single-lane portion of the road much, much wider, but nobody ever bothered.
I'm not a civil engineer, and I've never been to Barrow Gurney, or England, hell I'm not even of British descent. But the only structure I see which would impede the widening of that narrow road is a small shed-like building (shelter house?) next to a playground, which is probably already owned by the village.
This leads me to wonder what, exactly, is the problem acquiring the lands as a compulsory purchase (== eminent domain for us USians) and just, you know, fixing it?
If something like this happened in Ohio, the land owners would grumble about the prospect for awhile, the state would step in and purchase the lands for an absurd value, the road would get wider, the previous owners would cash their checks and buy themselves a big-fucking-TV (or a new car, depending on the value of the land), and that would be that.
Put "except local delivery" toward the bottom.
In my own town, we have such signs at many junctions where the main route diverts (or ends) and a residential road continues.
These, along with other signs near the edge of town stating that "Trucks most follow state routes" seems to do a pretty good job of ensuring that deliveries still get delivered while quiet neighborhoods stay quiet.