Possibly not in this case, but they do insist on a lot of seriously braindamaged stuff. I don't know how many times I've heard variations of "all the banks hate this and the customers hate this but Visa is forcing us to do it" from banking IT people.
And these tiny research communities don't have online focus points?
Firstly it's not tiny, just not with hundreds of thousands of participants like some journals. The main point though is that sure, there are online focus points... that carry close to zero publication credit/citation weight. You can't just slap it on a web page somewhere, you have to get it into a recognised archival journal, and they're controlled by a very small number of organisations, one of which is Elsevier.
Write to the authors and tell them why? They might think a boycott is a good idea too and publish elsewhere.
Submissions are anonymised. Beyond that, it's also regarded as a breach of etiquette to bypass the reviewing process and contact the authors directly. Unfortunately some of the mechanisms that exist to protect authors and reviewers and ensure fairness also make it difficult to deal with this particular situation.
Well... they can always submit somewhere else. There are so very many journals that aren't under the Elsevier umbrella.
This is in a rather restricted field (but a valid one, not something for "Fractals and Solitons" or whatever that Elsevier journal's called), I'd actually be hard put to suggest an alternative publication. Unfortunately there are some Elsevier journals that are hard to replace/do without.
Researchers do like that, which is why the boycott of Elsevier by researchers is happening.
I just got asked to review a paper for Elsevier, and since I'd signed up for the boycott turned it down. Unfortunately this means that a rather interesting paper, in a reasonably decent journal, may not get published. As with trade embargoes on Saddam's Iraq and more recently Iran, it's the little guys who get hurt, not the leaders who created the mess.
If fast updating still scares you there is always IE. IE 9 is a good browser and is not crap like IE 6 was (even that was a big improvement over Netscape). IE 10 is competitive with the other browsers and even beats FF 10 at HTML5test.com when I ran Consumer Preview of Windows 8.
I must say I was pleasantly surprised with IE's diagnostics and debugging (via F12) recently, I had to use a machine with only default software installed and managed to diagnose a website problem with just the standard out-of-the-box browser. It's come a long way. The only downside is that (a) all the malware targets it and (b) you can't get NoScript for it. Pretty much the sole reason I'm still on ChromeFox is because of the plugins (I know you can get some equivalents for the real Chrome, but not enough to jump ship yet).
The sad thing is that we're now in the position we were ~10 years ago with Netscape Navigator, except that this time Mozilla is playing the part of Netscape, and there's no Phoenix on the horizon...
... probably because I live nowhere near the United States of Paranoia. The last flight I took I had to show my authorisation to travel (a printout of the electronic boarding pass) and shared a joke with the checkin guy. That was all. Time from (public) terminal area to departure gate was under 5 minutes.
In other words, if the Gingrich Campaign is paid up with ASCAP, they can play Eye of the Tiger all they want, even if the writers of that song disagree vehemently with Mr. Gingrinch's politics.
This only works in the US, which doesn't recognise moral rights (the right to control how your work is used). In Europe and other locations (it's a Berne Convention thing, the US signed it but doesn't recognise them) this wouldn't fly.
It's hyperbole because the attacker has to be incredibly close to you. They actually have to bump the device up against your wallet. While it's technically "wireless" that's not what most people have in mind when they hear the word.
I was at Kristin's talk. The range with a standard cheap-ass reader is a few cm. With your own higher-power add-on (13.56MHz is right next to the 14MHz amateur band for which you can get off-the-shelf gear), it's tens of feet.
Also the CVV number it gives you works for one use only.
So you perform multiple reads and get one CVV per read.
Also: the onboard HDR function kind of sucks. You can auto-bracket to RAW, and process in photoshop or however you do your HDR, you get better fine control over contrasts and ranges that way anyway.
I'd never use any onboard HDR for anything more than a preview of what your actual HDR is going to look like. If you look at the amount of memory- and FP-math-intensive processing required for something like tonemapping then there's no way an embedded core in a camera can do that properly (and most of the HDR process isn't amenable to hardware assist, unlike basic stuff like demosaicing). In addition for all but the most generic, mild HDR you're going to need to fiddle with parameters to get rid of halos, artefacts, clown-vomit results, and so on, which you really can't do in-camera.
So using only in-camera HDR is a bit like buying a $2000 DSLR and then keeping it in program mode all the time. OTOH a large percentage of the user population does that, so I guess the in-camera HDR at least has a marketing benefit.
I really dislike Sony, and I never thought I would buy, much less recommend one of their products, but I am very happy with my NEX-5N
If it helps, when you buy a "Sony" DSLR or DSLR-derived camera you're actually buying a Konica-Minolta Maxxum, Sony bought their camera division lock, stock and barrel. So while your money's going to Sony, you're getting a Konica-Minolta-built camera.
(Having said that, I don't know how much that group's products have now been poisoned by Sony's braindamaged business ideas).
1% of 200,000,000 = 2,000,000. Still a lot of copies of IE6.
Microsoft's estimate of Windows deployment about five years ago was about a billion installs, and that was without counting pirated copies, which in some countries (e.g. Asia) are huge (look at China with it's ~25% IE6 usage, that's pirated Windows copies). So let's say 2B installs. 1% of 2B is 20M. OTOH 25% of several hundred million or whatever China contributes is still 100M or so. So worldwide there's still an awful lot of IE6 around.
(I'm not sure if your 200M is meant to be US-only to fit the headline, where would a figure of 200M Windows installs for the US come from?).
Why? IE9 is a completely good browser. It's on par with Chrome, but in fact it offers even more features and security than Firefox does currently, like sandboxing. It's also standards compliant and supports HTML5. There's nothing to hate about IE9.
I recently had to blow away and reinstall Win7 on one of the test boxes, so I thought I'd see what happens if you go online with IE9 instead of my usual default of Firefox 3.6.x + NoScript. Went to a few web sites and got bombarded with animated ads and flashing doodads like it was Idiocracy. Switched to the first few pr0n sites that popped up in Google (since I was reformatting from scratch and it was in a DMZ reserved for experimentation I wanted to see how bad it could get) and it was like the generic web experience above but now with tons of popups with sound (note to self, disable speakers before trying this) and no doubt all manner of malware crawling all over the system before I shut the machine down and wiped the drive.
So yes, IE9 has better security technology than Firefox, but it still makes the web an absolute cesspit to browse.
Almost all of the post 1970s technology in the AP1000 came directly from the nuclear division of Toshiba in Japan after merging with Westinghouse. It's technology bought off Japan instead of China but still looks like what you are worried about.
Beat me to the punch. The AP1000 is not a "new" design, it's a slightly warmed-over 1970s design that got NRC approval because it was close enough to the antiques currently in operation that no bureaucrat had to risk his pension by sticking his neck out and approving something that would be a genuine improvement (I'm lumping the Gen IIIs in with the Gen IIs here because they're mostly incremental improvements obtained from experience in running Gen IIs) . When the NRC approves anything Gen IV like a PBR or, heaven forbid, something genuinely modern like a TWR, then it's time to celebrate.
The OP claimed that Siemens lied about the security of their SIMATIC controllers, but don't you have to know you're lying in order to lie? Having dealt with Siemens over these things in the past (at one point we debated flying someone to Munich to club them repeatedly over the head until they realised there was a serious, showstopper flaw in their control system), it's quite probable that they genuinely believe that they're secure. We ended up using Allen-Bradley gear in the end, which also sucked, but not as much as the Siemens stuff.
Bang. I think you hit it, right there. Solid-state drives solve all the performance and reliability challenges at once.
Ugh, no. The first generations of SSDs (and we're still in that region to some extent even now) had serious reliability issues, and unlike HDDs which tend to fail slowly over time, giving you at least some warning via SMART indicators, SSDs tend to fail in a very quantised manner, one day they work, the next day they're bricked. See for example Jeff Atwood's very readable writeup on this
2. Reliability? Because servicing a warranty request isn't inexpensive(phone drones, fedex, etc.) [...]
Oddly enough, an over-long warranty can actually cost a company less than a shorter warranty. Consider Seagate's former 5-year warranty, and assume that drives fail on a bathtub curve (which admittedly does require assuming that a drive with a five-year warranty is built to slightly better standards than one with a three-year warranty if they're both going to fail towards the end of their warranty lifetime). For anything that fails at the infant-mortality end of the curve, you've got a warranty replacement no matter how long or short you make it. OTOH for something that fails at the other end of the curve, who's going to go for a warranty replacement on a five-year-old totally obsolete drive that, in any case, will probably have to be replaced with a refurb because new stock hasn't been made for years? We've got drives with the old five-year warranties, and when one fails (as it did two weeks ago) we don't bother getting them replaced because the overhead of doing so is many times more than the benefit of getting a 60GB (yes, sixty, not six hundred or something), probably refurb, drive back (and in any case it's at the replacement point of the machine's lifecycle anyway so may as well just get a new drive and a new machine to go with it). So for drives failing at the end of their (then) five-year warranty, Seagate is doing better than drives at the end of a one-year warranty, because it's worth replacing a year-old drive, but not worth the bother for a five-year-old drive.
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I have a cave at my place as well. It's got a beer fridge, wide-screen TV, and power tools. Belching and farting is not only permitted but encouraged.
Visa insisted that did they?
Possibly not in this case, but they do insist on a lot of seriously braindamaged stuff. I don't know how many times I've heard variations of "all the banks hate this and the customers hate this but Visa is forcing us to do it" from banking IT people.
And these tiny research communities don't have online focus points?
Firstly it's not tiny, just not with hundreds of thousands of participants like some journals. The main point though is that sure, there are online focus points... that carry close to zero publication credit/citation weight. You can't just slap it on a web page somewhere, you have to get it into a recognised archival journal, and they're controlled by a very small number of organisations, one of which is Elsevier.
Write to the authors and tell them why? They might think a boycott is a good idea too and publish elsewhere.
Submissions are anonymised. Beyond that, it's also regarded as a breach of etiquette to bypass the reviewing process and contact the authors directly. Unfortunately some of the mechanisms that exist to protect authors and reviewers and ensure fairness also make it difficult to deal with this particular situation.
Well... they can always submit somewhere else. There are so very many journals that aren't under the Elsevier umbrella.
This is in a rather restricted field (but a valid one, not something for "Fractals and Solitons" or whatever that Elsevier journal's called), I'd actually be hard put to suggest an alternative publication. Unfortunately there are some Elsevier journals that are hard to replace/do without.
Researchers do like that, which is why the boycott of Elsevier by researchers is happening.
I just got asked to review a paper for Elsevier, and since I'd signed up for the boycott turned it down. Unfortunately this means that a rather interesting paper, in a reasonably decent journal, may not get published. As with trade embargoes on Saddam's Iraq and more recently Iran, it's the little guys who get hurt, not the leaders who created the mess.
I'm actually betting on the New Deutschmark :-).
If fast updating still scares you there is always IE. IE 9 is a good browser and is not crap like IE 6 was (even that was a big improvement over Netscape). IE 10 is competitive with the other browsers and even beats FF 10 at HTML5test.com when I ran Consumer Preview of Windows 8.
I must say I was pleasantly surprised with IE's diagnostics and debugging (via F12) recently, I had to use a machine with only default software installed and managed to diagnose a website problem with just the standard out-of-the-box browser. It's come a long way. The only downside is that (a) all the malware targets it and (b) you can't get NoScript for it. Pretty much the sole reason I'm still on ChromeFox is because of the plugins (I know you can get some equivalents for the real Chrome, but not enough to jump ship yet).
I'd buy that for a pound sterling!
I'll buy that for 10 Euros in a couple of years.
Actually in a couple of years a pound sterling will be about fifty Euro cents. Or perhaps 10 pfennig in New Deutschmarks.
The sad thing is that we're now in the position we were ~10 years ago with Netscape Navigator, except that this time Mozilla is playing the part of Netscape, and there's no Phoenix on the horizon...
To have a passport is privilege, it's not entitled to you by citizenship,
That sounded better in the original Russian. And I think you're supposed to call them "comrades", not "citizens".
... probably because I live nowhere near the United States of Paranoia. The last flight I took I had to show my authorisation to travel (a printout of the electronic boarding pass) and shared a joke with the checkin guy. That was all. Time from (public) terminal area to departure gate was under 5 minutes.
late employees 'sometimes must sing a song like "I'm a Little Teapot," do a lap around the office building or pay a small fine.
Well as long as it's not lap dances I'm OK with it (our IT guy is not what you'd call a small chap).
In other words, if the Gingrich Campaign is paid up with ASCAP, they can play Eye of the Tiger all they want, even if the writers of that song disagree vehemently with Mr. Gingrinch's politics.
This only works in the US, which doesn't recognise moral rights (the right to control how your work is used). In Europe and other locations (it's a Berne Convention thing, the US signed it but doesn't recognise them) this wouldn't fly.
if it was called Firefox X I would totally be on board! or maybe FirefoX.
If it was called FireAsaDotzler I'd be 100% behind it.
It's hyperbole because the attacker has to be incredibly close to you. They actually have to bump the device up against your wallet. While it's technically "wireless" that's not what most people have in mind when they hear the word.
I was at Kristin's talk. The range with a standard cheap-ass reader is a few cm. With your own higher-power add-on (13.56MHz is right next to the 14MHz amateur band for which you can get off-the-shelf gear), it's tens of feet.
Also the CVV number it gives you works for one use only.
So you perform multiple reads and get one CVV per read.
Also: the onboard HDR function kind of sucks. You can auto-bracket to RAW, and process in photoshop or however you do your HDR, you get better fine control over contrasts and ranges that way anyway.
I'd never use any onboard HDR for anything more than a preview of what your actual HDR is going to look like. If you look at the amount of memory- and FP-math-intensive processing required for something like tonemapping then there's no way an embedded core in a camera can do that properly (and most of the HDR process isn't amenable to hardware assist, unlike basic stuff like demosaicing). In addition for all but the most generic, mild HDR you're going to need to fiddle with parameters to get rid of halos, artefacts, clown-vomit results, and so on, which you really can't do in-camera.
So using only in-camera HDR is a bit like buying a $2000 DSLR and then keeping it in program mode all the time. OTOH a large percentage of the user population does that, so I guess the in-camera HDR at least has a marketing benefit.
I really dislike Sony, and I never thought I would buy, much less recommend one of their products, but I am very happy with my NEX-5N
If it helps, when you buy a "Sony" DSLR or DSLR-derived camera you're actually buying a Konica-Minolta Maxxum, Sony bought their camera division lock, stock and barrel. So while your money's going to Sony, you're getting a Konica-Minolta-built camera.
(Having said that, I don't know how much that group's products have now been poisoned by Sony's braindamaged business ideas).
1% of 200,000,000 = 2,000,000. Still a lot of copies of IE6.
Microsoft's estimate of Windows deployment about five years ago was about a billion installs, and that was without counting pirated copies, which in some countries (e.g. Asia) are huge (look at China with it's ~25% IE6 usage, that's pirated Windows copies). So let's say 2B installs. 1% of 2B is 20M. OTOH 25% of several hundred million or whatever China contributes is still 100M or so. So worldwide there's still an awful lot of IE6 around.
(I'm not sure if your 200M is meant to be US-only to fit the headline, where would a figure of 200M Windows installs for the US come from?).
Why? IE9 is a completely good browser. It's on par with Chrome, but in fact it offers even more features and security than Firefox does currently, like sandboxing. It's also standards compliant and supports HTML5. There's nothing to hate about IE9.
I recently had to blow away and reinstall Win7 on one of the test boxes, so I thought I'd see what happens if you go online with IE9 instead of my usual default of Firefox 3.6.x + NoScript. Went to a few web sites and got bombarded with animated ads and flashing doodads like it was Idiocracy. Switched to the first few pr0n sites that popped up in Google (since I was reformatting from scratch and it was in a DMZ reserved for experimentation I wanted to see how bad it could get) and it was like the generic web experience above but now with tons of popups with sound (note to self, disable speakers before trying this) and no doubt all manner of malware crawling all over the system before I shut the machine down and wiped the drive.
So yes, IE9 has better security technology than Firefox, but it still makes the web an absolute cesspit to browse.
The NRC should approve some more thorium reactors if it doesn't want to be buying technology off China 10-20 years down the line.
And what's so bad about buying them from China?
There's the risk that when the US needs them China will refuse to sell, citing security concerns over selling to a country like the US :-).
Almost all of the post 1970s technology in the AP1000 came directly from the nuclear division of Toshiba in Japan after merging with Westinghouse. It's technology bought off Japan instead of China but still looks like what you are worried about.
Beat me to the punch. The AP1000 is not a "new" design, it's a slightly warmed-over 1970s design that got NRC approval because it was close enough to the antiques currently in operation that no bureaucrat had to risk his pension by sticking his neck out and approving something that would be a genuine improvement (I'm lumping the Gen IIIs in with the Gen IIs here because they're mostly incremental improvements obtained from experience in running Gen IIs) . When the NRC approves anything Gen IV like a PBR or, heaven forbid, something genuinely modern like a TWR, then it's time to celebrate.
The OP claimed that Siemens lied about the security of their SIMATIC controllers, but don't you have to know you're lying in order to lie? Having dealt with Siemens over these things in the past (at one point we debated flying someone to Munich to club them repeatedly over the head until they realised there was a serious, showstopper flaw in their control system), it's quite probable that they genuinely believe that they're secure. We ended up using Allen-Bradley gear in the end, which also sucked, but not as much as the Siemens stuff.
Bang. I think you hit it, right there. Solid-state drives solve all the performance and reliability challenges at once.
Ugh, no. The first generations of SSDs (and we're still in that region to some extent even now) had serious reliability issues, and unlike HDDs which tend to fail slowly over time, giving you at least some warning via SMART indicators, SSDs tend to fail in a very quantised manner, one day they work, the next day they're bricked. See for example Jeff Atwood's very readable writeup on this
.
2. Reliability? Because servicing a warranty request isn't inexpensive(phone drones, fedex, etc.) [...]
Oddly enough, an over-long warranty can actually cost a company less than a shorter warranty. Consider Seagate's former 5-year warranty, and assume that drives fail on a bathtub curve (which admittedly does require assuming that a drive with a five-year warranty is built to slightly better standards than one with a three-year warranty if they're both going to fail towards the end of their warranty lifetime). For anything that fails at the infant-mortality end of the curve, you've got a warranty replacement no matter how long or short you make it. OTOH for something that fails at the other end of the curve, who's going to go for a warranty replacement on a five-year-old totally obsolete drive that, in any case, will probably have to be replaced with a refurb because new stock hasn't been made for years? We've got drives with the old five-year warranties, and when one fails (as it did two weeks ago) we don't bother getting them replaced because the overhead of doing so is many times more than the benefit of getting a 60GB (yes, sixty, not six hundred or something), probably refurb, drive back (and in any case it's at the replacement point of the machine's lifecycle anyway so may as well just get a new drive and a new machine to go with it). So for drives failing at the end of their (then) five-year warranty, Seagate is doing better than drives at the end of a one-year warranty, because it's worth replacing a year-old drive, but not worth the bother for a five-year-old drive.