They are probably (rightly) paranoid that reporting security defects like this will make them liable for criminal prosecution, and would prefer to remain anonymous. It's not like it hasn't happened before.
Using this device would mean you would fail PCI-DSS and probably a few other widely used standards (ISO-27001 for example). One of the first requirements in these standards is that default vendor passwords be changed. You can't change it or even disable it.
A mini van in Europe is an Austin Mini in the form of a van (no longer manufactured). The Mini van had engines between 850cc and 1.2 litre. Room for 2 people and a bunch of tools.
Sinclair didn't use Microsoft BASIC (theirs was written by a company called Nine Tiles, which still is in business) Acorn didn't use Microsoft BASIC, they implemented their own and it was probably the best 8 bit BASIC (variables even had scoping rules, unlike most BASICs at the time where every variable was global) The Jupiter ACE had FORTH (!!!) Amstrad used Locomotive BASIC for their CPC range.
One attribute of all the BASIC interpreters here were they were much better than Microsoft's, but in fairness to Microsoft, they were developed later. I remember the BASIC on the C64 being particularly awful.
There's been some other projects on the Spectrum colour pallette, for instance the ULA Plus enhancement, which replaces the flash and bright attributes and uses a colour lookup table. It's very easy to modify existing software to make use of the ULA Plus, and the ULA Plus would have been something achievable at a low cost back when the 128K Spectrum was being developed so is within the spirit of the original machine. The ULA+ has been implemented in hardware, too.
A few of us make hardware for the humble Speccy still, you can now go on the Internet with the Spectranet http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc - at the VCF in 2010, much fun was had sending tweets from a Sinclair Spectrum, you can connect hard drives/CF cards with the DivIDE http://baze.au.com/divide/, there's a USB interface (although the developer seems to have disappeared, hmm...) and various other fun bits of hardware to play with. Retro enthusasts are still writing some really nice games for the Spectrum and there's a strong demoscene, too.
The ULA (the custom logic IC) has also been reverse engineered by actually de-encapsulating the chip and photographing it with a microscope http://www.zxdesign.info/ - you can buy the book there, by the way... There were some interesting anecdotes from that. Today we have FPGAs and CPLDs and you can essentially make custom logic at home, but back in the early 1980s, companies like Ferranti made generic dies, and stored them, and you made your actual custom logic by specifying the interconnection layer. Richard Altwasser had only 6 weeks to design the circuit for the Spectrum's ULA (which handles video and all other I/O for the basic machine). When Ferranti completed the first wafer of Spectrum ULAs, they ran tests and found that they didn't work. It turns out that a Ferranti engineer had made a mistake when making the phototools to make the metallization layer, and basically half the chip lacked its clock signal. However, one single die on the whole wafer DID work. It turns out that despite all this being done in a clean room, a spec of dust had landed in precisely the right place on the phototools to connect the clock circuit, so they had one working ULA die on the wafer, and Sinclair could test and validate their ULA.
Incidentally if you're in London on the 5th/6th May, there's a 30th anniversary of the Spectrum celebration at the British Film Institute. It's free to enter. Details are here: http://www.imperica.com/horizons
I've got a bike you can ride it if you like it has a basket a bell that rings and things that make it look good. I'd give it to you if I could but I borrowed it.
I would have called their bluff. Ending visa free travel for Europeans would be a bit of a Phyrric victory, it would immediately pretty much end all tourism from Europe (causing economic damage) and most business travel to the US. The visa application is such a ballache that few people would want to bother, and would take their holidays elsewhere. Business travellers would teleconference or simply not consider doing business in the US.
The TFA is unclear, and the article here on Slashdot makes it seem like all flights will be shared with the US, not just flights going to the US. Is this true? If someone flies from Manchester UK, to Paris, France, is this now to be shared with the US?
I used to work for IBM, on a very large project to supply POS equipment (and develop software) for a very large customer in the United States. This customer had very specific requirements, so much so that the customizations on the software ended up being more lines of code than the base retail point of sale software product (the base product was designed to be customizable).
To keep the costs in line with something the customer would pay, we actually - as IBM - ended up using a lot of commodity, non-IBM hardware rather than the full POS kit we made. The money was to be made on the software and the support, you got to sell the hardware once, but you got to keep selling software as the customer kept adding on new requirements. IBM at the time (1996) was making touch LCD screens for retail, but we ended up using some no-name Taiwanese LCD touch screen, and badge engineering it. We used Epson printers, not IBM POS printers. We used a scale made by Eaton rather than by IBM. Scanners from Symbol. I don't even remember whose cash draw we used, and we continued using the customer's already installed label printer. The only IBM kit we used was the base unit, which by then was already a standard PC but with an SDLC interface for the peripherals.
It's a very useful feature. Mac OSX has had it for a long time now. When I'm typing in Spanish, the spell checker works as Spanish. If I switch to English within the same document, the spell checker automatically switches to English. It's incredibly useful.
Many people (especially in Europe) use more than one language daily. I'd imagine it's reasonably common even in the United States where you have a significant minority of the population being native speakers of languages which are not English, and who likely use their own language as well as English routinely, every day. Windows is very backwards in language support, years behind Linux let alone Mac OSX (on Windows, you can't even switch languages after installation, forget thinking about having it switch languages within the same document!)
Apple weren't in debt in 1996, they still had a considerable amount of cash on hand. However, what they were doing was not exactly growing as a business, to say the least.
You don't need a thermometer, aircraft pressure altimeters don't have thermometers built in. If you take the pressure difference from the bottom of the building to the top of the building, you have what you need given a sufficiently good barometer, although you'll only be within about +- 10 feet or so accuracy wise. It's about 30 feet per millibar of pressure change.
Even better, replace the 8 engines with just 2 RR Trents. The basic Trent design is good for 115,000 lbs thrust. Or the GE engine of similar power, given that the US Forces will probably not want to use engines made abroad.
Low volume, certification and paperwork. Anything that goes in an airliner tends to be very low volume, and needs reams and reams of paperwork and certification to show it complies with aviation standards and won't do something dangerous. I should imagine the circuit breaker for the military is - instead of just what using Boeing use for a 747 - to some other spec for some reason and produced in perhaps only 2 digit volumes. Why it's a different spec to a functionally identical airliner part, I don't know without the facts.
We used to make those all the time at school, except we called them "darts" rather than "planes". The word plane was reserved for something with a bit more reasonable of a wingspan.
You may have noted that there are no (or certainly not many) oil companies now, they are all called energy companies. This is because they already see the day when oil is too expensive for most people to use for energy, so they are diversifying into other ways of making energy. BP is a huge manufacturer of solar cells, for example. It is entirely probable that today's energy companies would be involved in the future's commercialization of fusion.
$80 billion isn't much. It's only very slightly over 0.1 Iraq Wars (DOD estimate of the direct costs of the Iraq war is $757bn.) At only 0.1 Iraq Wars, you can hardly describe it as a money pit.
Why is it bad that the dollar loses value if everyone's income keeps up? (People are richer in real terms than 6 decades ago).
If the dollar doesn't lose value, then it gets hoarded. This is why too little inflation is not a good thing. Hoarded money is utterly, utterly useless.
The vast, vast majority of cyclists who go their whole lives without sustaining serious bicycle-related injury don't have to suffer through the health problems that a sedentary, car driving lifestyle results in.
Slashdot Mirror
35.1 million iPhones sold...
Let's review what Steve Ballmer thought about the iPhone... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
How's Windows Phone 7 working out...
They are probably (rightly) paranoid that reporting security defects like this will make them liable for criminal prosecution, and would prefer to remain anonymous. It's not like it hasn't happened before.
Using this device would mean you would fail PCI-DSS and probably a few other widely used standards (ISO-27001 for example). One of the first requirements in these standards is that default vendor passwords be changed. You can't change it or even disable it.
A mini van in Europe is an Austin Mini in the form of a van (no longer manufactured). The Mini van had engines between 850cc and 1.2 litre. Room for 2 people and a bunch of tools.
See http://classiccars.about.com/od/classiccarphotogallery/ig/uniquecarshow/austinminivan.htm
What the US calls a mini van, in Europe is called an MPV or a people carrier.
It wasn't just Atari...
Sinclair didn't use Microsoft BASIC (theirs was written by a company called Nine Tiles, which still is in business)
Acorn didn't use Microsoft BASIC, they implemented their own and it was probably the best 8 bit BASIC (variables even had scoping rules, unlike most BASICs at the time where every variable was global)
The Jupiter ACE had FORTH (!!!)
Amstrad used Locomotive BASIC for their CPC range.
One attribute of all the BASIC interpreters here were they were much better than Microsoft's, but in fairness to Microsoft, they were developed later. I remember the BASIC on the C64 being particularly awful.
Here's the Google doodle loading on a real Sinclair Spectrum...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF2bi_R2v9A
There's been some development on full colour graphics with the Spectrum recently:
- ZXodus engine - a tile engine for full colour graphics http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0026639
- Buzzsaw - A really fun game http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027057
There's been some other projects on the Spectrum colour pallette, for instance the ULA Plus enhancement, which replaces the flash and bright attributes and uses a colour lookup table. It's very easy to modify existing software to make use of the ULA Plus, and the ULA Plus would have been something achievable at a low cost back when the 128K Spectrum was being developed so is within the spirit of the original machine. The ULA+ has been implemented in hardware, too.
- ULA Plus is here: https://sites.google.com/site/ulaplus/
Nice article on The Register:
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/23/retro_week_sinclair_zx_spectrum_at_30/
A few of us make hardware for the humble Speccy still, you can now go on the Internet with the Spectranet http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc - at the VCF in 2010, much fun was had sending tweets from a Sinclair Spectrum, you can connect hard drives/CF cards with the DivIDE http://baze.au.com/divide/, there's a USB interface (although the developer seems to have disappeared, hmm...) and various other fun bits of hardware to play with. Retro enthusasts are still writing some really nice games for the Spectrum and there's a strong demoscene, too.
The ULA (the custom logic IC) has also been reverse engineered by actually de-encapsulating the chip and photographing it with a microscope http://www.zxdesign.info/ - you can buy the book there, by the way... There were some interesting anecdotes from that. Today we have FPGAs and CPLDs and you can essentially make custom logic at home, but back in the early 1980s, companies like Ferranti made generic dies, and stored them, and you made your actual custom logic by specifying the interconnection layer. Richard Altwasser had only 6 weeks to design the circuit for the Spectrum's ULA (which handles video and all other I/O for the basic machine). When Ferranti completed the first wafer of Spectrum ULAs, they ran tests and found that they didn't work. It turns out that a Ferranti engineer had made a mistake when making the phototools to make the metallization layer, and basically half the chip lacked its clock signal. However, one single die on the whole wafer DID work. It turns out that despite all this being done in a clean room, a spec of dust had landed in precisely the right place on the phototools to connect the clock circuit, so they had one working ULA die on the wafer, and Sinclair could test and validate their ULA.
Incidentally if you're in London on the 5th/6th May, there's a 30th anniversary of the Spectrum celebration at the British Film Institute. It's free to enter. Details are here:
http://www.imperica.com/horizons
I've got a bike you can ride it if you like it has a basket a bell that rings and things that make it look good.
I'd give it to you if I could but I borrowed it.
Sid Barrett, you are missed . . .
I would have called their bluff. Ending visa free travel for Europeans would be a bit of a Phyrric victory, it would immediately pretty much end all tourism from Europe (causing economic damage) and most business travel to the US. The visa application is such a ballache that few people would want to bother, and would take their holidays elsewhere. Business travellers would teleconference or simply not consider doing business in the US.
The TFA is unclear, and the article here on Slashdot makes it seem like all flights will be shared with the US, not just flights going to the US. Is this true? If someone flies from Manchester UK, to Paris, France, is this now to be shared with the US?
It's also likely that your car may testify FOR you and against the other guy in a court of law.
The writing was on the wall years ago.
I used to work for IBM, on a very large project to supply POS equipment (and develop software) for a very large customer in the United States. This customer had very specific requirements, so much so that the customizations on the software ended up being more lines of code than the base retail point of sale software product (the base product was designed to be customizable).
To keep the costs in line with something the customer would pay, we actually - as IBM - ended up using a lot of commodity, non-IBM hardware rather than the full POS kit we made. The money was to be made on the software and the support, you got to sell the hardware once, but you got to keep selling software as the customer kept adding on new requirements. IBM at the time (1996) was making touch LCD screens for retail, but we ended up using some no-name Taiwanese LCD touch screen, and badge engineering it. We used Epson printers, not IBM POS printers. We used a scale made by Eaton rather than by IBM. Scanners from Symbol. I don't even remember whose cash draw we used, and we continued using the customer's already installed label printer. The only IBM kit we used was the base unit, which by then was already a standard PC but with an SDLC interface for the peripherals.
It's a very useful feature. Mac OSX has had it for a long time now. When I'm typing in Spanish, the spell checker works as Spanish. If I switch to English within the same document, the spell checker automatically switches to English. It's incredibly useful.
Many people (especially in Europe) use more than one language daily. I'd imagine it's reasonably common even in the United States where you have a significant minority of the population being native speakers of languages which are not English, and who likely use their own language as well as English routinely, every day. Windows is very backwards in language support, years behind Linux let alone Mac OSX (on Windows, you can't even switch languages after installation, forget thinking about having it switch languages within the same document!)
They could just do what Apple did (Rosetta, so you could run PowerPC apps on x86 Macs without needing another instance of the OS)
Apple weren't in debt in 1996, they still had a considerable amount of cash on hand. However, what they were doing was not exactly growing as a business, to say the least.
You don't need a thermometer, aircraft pressure altimeters don't have thermometers built in. If you take the pressure difference from the bottom of the building to the top of the building, you have what you need given a sufficiently good barometer, although you'll only be within about +- 10 feet or so accuracy wise. It's about 30 feet per millibar of pressure change.
Even better, replace the 8 engines with just 2 RR Trents. The basic Trent design is good for 115,000 lbs thrust. Or the GE engine of similar power, given that the US Forces will probably not want to use engines made abroad.
Low volume, certification and paperwork. Anything that goes in an airliner tends to be very low volume, and needs reams and reams of paperwork and certification to show it complies with aviation standards and won't do something dangerous. I should imagine the circuit breaker for the military is - instead of just what using Boeing use for a 747 - to some other spec for some reason and produced in perhaps only 2 digit volumes. Why it's a different spec to a functionally identical airliner part, I don't know without the facts.
We used to make those all the time at school, except we called them "darts" rather than "planes". The word plane was reserved for something with a bit more reasonable of a wingspan.
You may have noted that there are no (or certainly not many) oil companies now, they are all called energy companies. This is because they already see the day when oil is too expensive for most people to use for energy, so they are diversifying into other ways of making energy. BP is a huge manufacturer of solar cells, for example. It is entirely probable that today's energy companies would be involved in the future's commercialization of fusion.
$80 billion isn't much. It's only very slightly over 0.1 Iraq Wars (DOD estimate of the direct costs of the Iraq war is $757bn.) At only 0.1 Iraq Wars, you can hardly describe it as a money pit.
Why is it bad that the dollar loses value if everyone's income keeps up? (People are richer in real terms than 6 decades ago).
If the dollar doesn't lose value, then it gets hoarded. This is why too little inflation is not a good thing. Hoarded money is utterly, utterly useless.
In civilized countries, the medical care is free.
The vast, vast majority of cyclists who go their whole lives without sustaining serious bicycle-related injury don't have to suffer through the health problems that a sedentary, car driving lifestyle results in.