Don't forget that that plasma cutter will come packaged as well. Duh.
I've taken to letting staff remove such packaging before I leave the shop. Not does it create a nice bit of awareness just how bloody irritating such packaging it is, is also ensures I don't have all the rubbish to clean up, and they can have a pop at hurting themselves whilst trying to open the package.
God alone knows how many injuries are caused by this mania for indestructible packaging.
This laptop isn't just a computer, is also acts as a book. Unless you change 'One Laptop Per Child' to 'One laptop per child and a projector and a serious source of power' this is not going to work.
It's very likely it'll be one laptop per 2 or 3 children in reality, because those nations *are* that poor, but that's still cheaper and more flexible than books. I prefer books to read, but they're a precious and costly resource. With the laptops there is much more flexibility in delivering content.
BTW, there IS a problem with OLPC but it's less obvious. Approx 60% of kids have eye deficiencies and require glasses to read. Someone in the Netherlands has sorted that problem but I'm going to see how I can help them get that to the market (to set up production costs more than the glasses - it's a fantastically clever idea).
Staw poll: would you agree to buy a set of glasses if it means 4 kids in those countries could get one for free? If so, what would you be prepared to pay for them (they look cool, by the way, but I can't tell you more than that yet).
Now, if you really want to kick the industry in the chins it's very easy, but I don't have the time for it.
(1) Register a site "BuynoCDsDay" and put SENSIBLE arguments on there why what the RIAA and the record industry in general is doing is wrong. Talk about the RIAA acting as a second police force, talk about the total absence of rational proof (i.e. lack of evidence) and talk also about alternatives (saying something is bad is easy, offering alternatives is evidence you've been thinking about it)
(2) Plan a day somewhere around Xmas where normally their sales volume is quite high and ask people not to buy a single record that day. Nil, none whatsoever, and to tell their friends as well. Give good arguments (for instance, list the consequences of what happens when the RIAA is allowed to continue abusing the law) and maybe also identify that the RIAA is a primary reason of records being so expensive (here's a question for you - it costs millions to make a movie, yet I can buy a movie DVD for the same money as an album CD, why?). Try to go as wide as possible - get people to translate the site as well because the bigger you make this, the more it will hit.
(3) Market the crap out of this site. Talk to The Register, Slashdot it (which means you'll need to keep to text and small image sizes), get it in Boing Boing, Ars Technica etc, the works. Make promos and stick them on YouTube. In other words, keep hitting it. Email the BBC about what you're doing. Get on the news, annoy your parents with it, come up with a good slogan and yell it everywhere - democracy is being able to say what you think (but without insulting people - ther'e such a thing as good manners).
However, there is ONE thing you should not do. Do not promote illegal activity. Breaking copyright is wrong, whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law. Just send a signal to the RIAA that the game is up - and this "win" of theirs (which will surely be challenged) will make all those others accused even fight harder (except the dead ones, of course).
So there, instant revolution recipe. I'll go and take my tablets and lie down now:-)
The principal problem is that Novell has been tainted by the Microsoft reverse philosopher's stone: turning gold into lead (witness the ISO process). As said entity hasn't exactly endowed the world with graceful, law abiding and ethical behavior (and is known to not exactly be a friend of Linux) it is natural that anything in close proximity ends up sharing the stench. Maybe that was THEIR whole idea of partnering with the house that holds IMHO the best distro (I *said* iMho:-).
It would thus be a very good idea if someone could point at a list of reasons why their deal with Novell will not introduce risks in OpenSuSE - and I mean well argued, logical reasons, no emotional claptrap, we see enough of that from both sides already.
I'm asking this as a longtime fan of SuSE. I was disappointed to see that OpenSuSE is the only 64bit distro that doesn't see both disks on the SATA controlled HP DL320 G3 I have to play with, so off it went and on came Fedora 7 but I'm willing to try 10.3 (as a matter of fact, the DVD is being downloaded on another machine right now). But for a production box I'm reluctant to go near it because I don't have the time to identify if there IS a risk, which means I have to follow the "smoke means fire" algorithm, IMHO not good enough but I (like many others) don't have the time to go through the whole involvement.
The only thing I *do* know for sure is that this deal is with a multiple times convicted monopolist who has yet to change its behavior in any noticeable way, which doesn't really incline me to assume no risk.
If I were to evaluate said product it's something I'd like to know, in advance and fully documented, not hidden somewhere. The whole purpose of documentation is, well, to document things not to leave them for someone surfing extra docs on their website.
If they'd been open about it wouldn't even have made Slashdot, so it's a bit of an own goal - now they have to go and explain it all against a tide of misunderstanding. On stuff like this full disclosure is the better path to take IMHO.
If you read his blog you'll find an entry that identifies the State is working with him to come to a sensible conclusion so it appears that sanity has prevailed in this situation (probably generously assisted by the bad press the situation had created, but that's only an assumption).
So it's not as grim as it appears.
I also think his stance on the CNN vote is admirable - he has a very good point.
These guys went for thick, but that's because they had to stuff all the mechanics in the edges to leave the centre totally transparent. When I saw this watch for the first time in Zurich it took my brain a couple of secs to order a double take and work out how on earth the hands moved.
It's IMHO totally pointless, but quite a fun idea..
We have to be honest here - this IS innovation! Have you ever heard such quality BS from *any*, and I mean *any* other company? I mean, it's been tough since Enron's "I feel you pain" Shilling went the way of the Dodo, but Thank God we still have Microsoft churning out new way of selling complete and utter BS.
I think we will all feel the loss when the EU finally hangs all of them (at least, that's what they make their conviction sound like:-).
I hope there's some barriers to false submissions or creating a situation to report, otherwise you'd get the situation as with FAST and BSA where situations are manufactured to claim the bounty (and FAST & BSA don't mind because it adds to the scare factor).
You did mention you wanted it to be sturdy, I think those are designed for it.
Strangely enough, I've had good mileage out of a VAIO and the only upsetting thing there was that my spare HAD to come with Vista (which I promply zapped for Kubuntu and a VMWared XP session where needed). It seems I'm no longer the only one with a savage dislike for Vista:-).
Anyway, how are you going to check that your laptop doesn't contain Chinese parts? I think you're a bit late for that, but that's my personal opinion - I actually do the same, just for a different country:-)
On one side I'm happy to hear of this effort, OTOH I'm concerned that this is one of the vendors with an alliance to a multiple convictions monopolist.
As drivers are pretty much kernel level activities I would like to see assurances that such development is clean and cannot be used to manufacture truth behind the nebulous IP infringement claims which have stopped in countries where you can't make such statements without having to prove it (which says IMHO a lot in itself).
So, IMHO the news deserves a welcome with caution..
What is wild is that anyone with half a working braincell would use a photocopier in an office where a copy of every document is sent to an uncontrolled 3rd party for translation.
Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..
(not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).
So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.
This Yet Another FUD attempt is starting to irritate me, so let's turn this one 180 degrees and see just what an ugly truth is hiding below the surface. And when I say 'ugly' I mean "oh mother of God" ugly, and most certainly not something you want to tell your shareholders. And you know what? Too late! They know!
Deep intake of breath..
You, Mr-I-have-based-it-all-on-Microsoft, tell me what you are going to do if Europe indeed proves too tough for Microsoft. Hell, they may not bother and pick up their toys and walk out in a huff. Even if they stay it's very uncertain what format future products are going to be in to comply with the EU demands. WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO GO?
Yes, that's right - you're a single source user. No diverse supply chain there - it's all from that one club in Redmond. That club that accidentally disclosed just how well they can screw up global computing by losing their WGA server for a few days. That club that demonstrated that you don't have quite as much control over your operating platform as you thought you had when an upgrade got through the backdoor without you having any say in it. That club that forces you to repeatedly shell out serious amount of extra money because making it as safe as it should be would mean you would stop buying the upgrades (unless they screw up so badly you wake up - look at Vista sales).
Now, your little problem is that when these boys (and gals) go home, you are stuck. You may already have DRM-ed content, you have problems replacing as much as a single component because of that lovely integration (read: as little out-of-platform interoperability as they could get away with). You can't access corporate data without reverse engineering which may be illegal. You are up the creek without a paddle. You're on your way to become a footnote in the annual accounts.
Now, here's a bit of context for you. If you know Unix, you can in principle walk to Solaris, *BSD, Linux, HPUX (if it's still around), hell, even Mac OSX is based on Unix under the hood (da hood?:-). Yes, that's right. The small, silly toys that run Linux are the ones that keep Amazon selling. It powers Paypal together with Solaris. It feeds Google distributed computing power and storage. Rock solid, but yes, I'm the first to admit that you'll have to develop some skills. Like you did when you started with Windows, no different other than that you have to learn to deal with multiple solutions to any problem (otherwise known as "there is always a way to do what YOU want"). And it interoperates and is multi-user because it was written like that from the ground up. Need something that runs eBay in idle time? No problem, stick an E10k with Oracle in. Need a whole bunch of virtual machines? Hell, you may want to think about recycling that IBM mainframe. Need to calculate a lot? Some people build a Beowulf cluster out of old computers just for the hell of it. All of it in principle based on the same platform.
So, for the next disaster I wouldn't just have cross supplier arrangements. When that plane lands off runway and uses your shiny windows as an air brake, that stupid, free Linux CD may just be the only thing you can legally touch to recover your business.
If you're into Crisis Management, if you have recovered businesses, if you know how much a company gets screwed and abused if it is stupid enough to go down the single supplier route - as an investor or shareholder I would know whose nuts to take if the business went bust after a disaster. Yours.
Think interoperability, think open standards, think vendor swap.
This has been a public service announcement. Normal FUD shall now resume. Contents copyrighted under the Creative Commons license - spread but attribute. And get me some pizza while you're at it.
Someone has sat down and thought about E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N. This idea is the most innovative thing I've seen come out of IT for a long time. No wonder the likes of Microsoft want to ruin it - it shows them up rather badly.
The MS way would be to develop the million dollar pen that writes in zero gravity - the OLPC is using a pencil.
.. if that's a given it puts any school who actively collaborates with the RIAA in violation of privacy laws. Now that's going to be fun, and that's without the fact that most of the RIAA's methodology and so-called "evidence" has suffered some serious dents.
They almost make me deliberately start copying just for the hell of it. Nveer felt like that before..
When it asks you to enter the number you just enter 1, 2, 3 or 4 digits. If it accepts it you'll have to test if it works, though, some pad with '0' which I personally find a very dangerous idea (i.e. you enter 12 and it pads it to 0012).
No - it's a standard 0..9 digit setup, but I accidentally discovered something that may well be true for other digital locks as well.
With that briefcase you don't actually need to use ALL the positions, so you can add all 3 digit and 2 digit and 1 digit combinations to the total possible 4 digit combinations (10000 + 1000 + 100 + 10 + 1) - you can't leave a gap in the numbers so it's not like adding an extra character to the combinations (that would have given 11^4 = 14641 combinations). In case I didn't make it clear, it didn't have to be 1234, it could also be 123, 12 or even a single digit.
The rest was a bit of social engineering - it always looked like I was pressing 4 digits when I opened it but I didn't fully press the buttons:-). The actual code was a simple 9, and it drove these guys totally up the wall that I opened it and they couldn't. Funny as heck.
As said, however, I later discovered that that briefcase had another, more dramatic vulnerability which meant I could open it in 10 secs or less. The problem was that the battery supply was not buffered by any kind of capacitor - if you knew how to knock it, the battery would disconnect for a split second and it would reset to '0000'. Duh..
They no longer make these briefcases, partially because you're no longer allowed through security with such a case. And you could spell 'bomb' on the 4 position display which would not help either:-).
Anyway, it was a long time ago when hacking was about fun, intelligence and skill, not about huge egos and causing harm to people - it was OK to exchange good natured wind ups. And I never told them..
Best go to the MIT site then and pick up Matt Blaize's document about picking locks.
Just one word of warning: a Samsonite briefcase with 4 digit digital lock has actually MORE than 10000 different combinations, the true number of possible combinations of that lock is 11111, which is why a bunch of hackers on a hacker weekend spend the whole weekend trying to open it and didn't succeed (very evil grin) - I hadn't corrected their assumption that it had 10000 combinations:-).
Not that you need that long - it has a far more basic vulnerability in the electronics by which you can open it in under 10 seconds:-).
You can already see how the so-called non-harmful taser is already being abused for punishment rather than enforcement. Expect full scale sales efforts to start to places with excellent track records on human rights like China (I never intended it to be used on 'that' square) and, umm, ah, yes: the US?
You can't see it, so it doesn't exist. Guantanamo Bay anyone? New toy for "we never torture anyone"?
You cam bet money that the excuse is going to be that this thing "prevents the use of lethal force". Well, at least you have to think about using lethal force, it costs money every time and it leaves serious evidence. Unless these things and tasers come equipped with immutable recording equipment you'll never be able to prove the abuse - at that point it becomes as safe in unclean hands as a Diebold voting machine.
There is a version of OpenOffice.org ("OO") that uses the beautiful graphic elements of the Mac interface called Neo Office. I don't have a Mac, but I use OO on both Windows and Linux (with less and less taking place on Windows).
I've been using OpenOffice.org since version 1, and I'm quite happy with it. More importantly, very few people seem to notice that I'm using it so the compatibility isn't as big a deal as they want you to believe.
Just give it a try, it's not like it costs anything:-).
Slashdot Mirror
It has gone through many hands, and you don't know where those hands have been :-)
Don't forget that that plasma cutter will come packaged as well. Duh.
I've taken to letting staff remove such packaging before I leave the shop. Not does it create a nice bit of awareness just how bloody irritating such packaging it is, is also ensures I don't have all the rubbish to clean up, and they can have a pop at hurting themselves whilst trying to open the package.
God alone knows how many injuries are caused by this mania for indestructible packaging.
This laptop isn't just a computer, is also acts as a book. Unless you change 'One Laptop Per Child' to 'One laptop per child and a projector and a serious source of power' this is not going to work.
It's very likely it'll be one laptop per 2 or 3 children in reality, because those nations *are* that poor, but that's still cheaper and more flexible than books. I prefer books to read, but they're a precious and costly resource. With the laptops there is much more flexibility in delivering content.
BTW, there IS a problem with OLPC but it's less obvious. Approx 60% of kids have eye deficiencies and require glasses to read. Someone in the Netherlands has sorted that problem but I'm going to see how I can help them get that to the market (to set up production costs more than the glasses - it's a fantastically clever idea).
Staw poll: would you agree to buy a set of glasses if it means 4 kids in those countries could get one for free? If so, what would you be prepared to pay for them (they look cool, by the way, but I can't tell you more than that yet).
God, that was funny :-).
:-)
Class.
Now, if you really want to kick the industry in the chins it's very easy, but I don't have the time for it.
(1) Register a site "BuynoCDsDay" and put SENSIBLE arguments on there why what the RIAA and the record industry in general is doing is wrong. Talk about the RIAA acting as a second police force, talk about the total absence of rational proof (i.e. lack of evidence) and talk also about alternatives (saying something is bad is easy, offering alternatives is evidence you've been thinking about it)
(2) Plan a day somewhere around Xmas where normally their sales volume is quite high and ask people not to buy a single record that day. Nil, none whatsoever, and to tell their friends as well. Give good arguments (for instance, list the consequences of what happens when the RIAA is allowed to continue abusing the law) and maybe also identify that the RIAA is a primary reason of records being so expensive (here's a question for you - it costs millions to make a movie, yet I can buy a movie DVD for the same money as an album CD, why?). Try to go as wide as possible - get people to translate the site as well because the bigger you make this, the more it will hit.
(3) Market the crap out of this site. Talk to The Register, Slashdot it (which means you'll need to keep to text and small image sizes), get it in Boing Boing, Ars Technica etc, the works. Make promos and stick them on YouTube. In other words, keep hitting it. Email the BBC about what you're doing. Get on the news, annoy your parents with it, come up with a good slogan and yell it everywhere - democracy is being able to say what you think (but without insulting people - ther'e such a thing as good manners).
However, there is ONE thing you should not do. Do not promote illegal activity. Breaking copyright is wrong, whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law. Just send a signal to the RIAA that the game is up - and this "win" of theirs (which will surely be challenged) will make all those others accused even fight harder (except the dead ones, of course).
So there, instant revolution recipe. I'll go and take my tablets and lie down now
The principal problem is that Novell has been tainted by the Microsoft reverse philosopher's stone: turning gold into lead (witness the ISO process). As said entity hasn't exactly endowed the world with graceful, law abiding and ethical behavior (and is known to not exactly be a friend of Linux) it is natural that anything in close proximity ends up sharing the stench. Maybe that was THEIR whole idea of partnering with the house that holds IMHO the best distro (I *said* iMho :-).
It would thus be a very good idea if someone could point at a list of reasons why their deal with Novell will not introduce risks in OpenSuSE - and I mean well argued, logical reasons, no emotional claptrap, we see enough of that from both sides already.
I'm asking this as a longtime fan of SuSE. I was disappointed to see that OpenSuSE is the only 64bit distro that doesn't see both disks on the SATA controlled HP DL320 G3 I have to play with, so off it went and on came Fedora 7 but I'm willing to try 10.3 (as a matter of fact, the DVD is being downloaded on another machine right now). But for a production box I'm reluctant to go near it because I don't have the time to identify if there IS a risk, which means I have to follow the "smoke means fire" algorithm, IMHO not good enough but I (like many others) don't have the time to go through the whole involvement.
The only thing I *do* know for sure is that this deal is with a multiple times convicted monopolist who has yet to change its behavior in any noticeable way, which doesn't really incline me to assume no risk.
If I were to evaluate said product it's something I'd like to know, in advance and fully documented, not hidden somewhere. The whole purpose of documentation is, well, to document things not to leave them for someone surfing extra docs on their website.
If they'd been open about it wouldn't even have made Slashdot, so it's a bit of an own goal - now they have to go and explain it all against a tide of misunderstanding. On stuff like this full disclosure is the better path to take IMHO.
If you read his blog you'll find an entry that identifies the State is working with him to come to a sensible conclusion so it appears that sanity has prevailed in this situation (probably generously assisted by the bad press the situation had created, but that's only an assumption).
So it's not as grim as it appears.
I also think his stance on the CNN vote is admirable - he has a very good point.
These guys went for thick, but that's because they had to stuff all the mechanics in the edges to leave the centre totally transparent. When I saw this watch for the first time in Zurich it took my brain a couple of secs to order a double take and work out how on earth the hands moved.
It's IMHO totally pointless, but quite a fun idea..
Absolute class - thanks. It made me laugh.
:-).
We have to be honest here - this IS innovation! Have you ever heard such quality BS from *any*, and I mean *any* other company? I mean, it's been tough since Enron's "I feel you pain" Shilling went the way of the Dodo, but Thank God we still have Microsoft churning out new way of selling complete and utter BS.
I think we will all feel the loss when the EU finally hangs all of them (at least, that's what they make their conviction sound like
I hope there's some barriers to false submissions or creating a situation to report, otherwise you'd get the situation as with FAST and BSA where situations are manufactured to claim the bounty (and FAST & BSA don't mind because it adds to the scare factor).
You did mention you wanted it to be sturdy, I think those are designed for it.
:-).
:-)
Strangely enough, I've had good mileage out of a VAIO and the only upsetting thing there was that my spare HAD to come with Vista (which I promply zapped for Kubuntu and a VMWared XP session where needed). It seems I'm no longer the only one with a savage dislike for Vista
Anyway, how are you going to check that your laptop doesn't contain Chinese parts? I think you're a bit late for that, but that's my personal opinion - I actually do the same, just for a different country
On one side I'm happy to hear of this effort, OTOH I'm concerned that this is one of the vendors with an alliance to a multiple convictions monopolist.
As drivers are pretty much kernel level activities I would like to see assurances that such development is clean and cannot be used to manufacture truth behind the nebulous IP infringement claims which have stopped in countries where you can't make such statements without having to prove it (which says IMHO a lot in itself).
So, IMHO the news deserves a welcome with caution..
It seems that some are highly efficient and combine the two. :-)
What is wild is that anyone with half a working braincell would use a photocopier in an office where a copy of every document is sent to an uncontrolled 3rd party for translation.
Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..
(not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).
So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.
This Yet Another FUD attempt is starting to irritate me, so let's turn this one 180 degrees and see just what an ugly truth is hiding below the surface. And when I say 'ugly' I mean "oh mother of God" ugly, and most certainly not something you want to tell your shareholders. And you know what? Too late! They know!
:-). Yes, that's right. The small, silly toys that run Linux are the ones that keep Amazon selling. It powers Paypal together with Solaris. It feeds Google distributed computing power and storage. Rock solid, but yes, I'm the first to admit that you'll have to develop some skills. Like you did when you started with Windows, no different other than that you have to learn to deal with multiple solutions to any problem (otherwise known as "there is always a way to do what YOU want"). And it interoperates and is multi-user because it was written like that from the ground up. Need something that runs eBay in idle time? No problem, stick an E10k with Oracle in. Need a whole bunch of virtual machines? Hell, you may want to think about recycling that IBM mainframe. Need to calculate a lot? Some people build a Beowulf cluster out of old computers just for the hell of it. All of it in principle based on the same platform.
Deep intake of breath..
You, Mr-I-have-based-it-all-on-Microsoft, tell me what you are going to do if Europe indeed proves too tough for Microsoft. Hell, they may not bother and pick up their toys and walk out in a huff. Even if they stay it's very uncertain what format future products are going to be in to comply with the EU demands. WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO GO?
Yes, that's right - you're a single source user. No diverse supply chain there - it's all from that one club in Redmond. That club that accidentally disclosed just how well they can screw up global computing by losing their WGA server for a few days. That club that demonstrated that you don't have quite as much control over your operating platform as you thought you had when an upgrade got through the backdoor without you having any say in it. That club that forces you to repeatedly shell out serious amount of extra money because making it as safe as it should be would mean you would stop buying the upgrades (unless they screw up so badly you wake up - look at Vista sales).
Now, your little problem is that when these boys (and gals) go home, you are stuck. You may already have DRM-ed content, you have problems replacing as much as a single component because of that lovely integration (read: as little out-of-platform interoperability as they could get away with). You can't access corporate data without reverse engineering which may be illegal. You are up the creek without a paddle. You're on your way to become a footnote in the annual accounts.
Now, here's a bit of context for you. If you know Unix, you can in principle walk to Solaris, *BSD, Linux, HPUX (if it's still around), hell, even Mac OSX is based on Unix under the hood (da hood?
So, for the next disaster I wouldn't just have cross supplier arrangements. When that plane lands off runway and uses your shiny windows as an air brake, that stupid, free Linux CD may just be the only thing you can legally touch to recover your business.
If you're into Crisis Management, if you have recovered businesses, if you know how much a company gets screwed and abused if it is stupid enough to go down the single supplier route - as an investor or shareholder I would know whose nuts to take if the business went bust after a disaster. Yours.
Think interoperability, think open standards, think vendor swap.
There are almost 200 different ways to do better, and I don't think you have that much time left.
This has been a public service announcement. Normal FUD shall now resume.
Contents copyrighted under the Creative Commons license - spread but attribute. And get me some pizza while you're at it.
According to this video at YouTube you'll need to find a couple of kids to fix it for you.
:-)
However, under NO circumstances let any UK PC World staff touch it
Someone has sat down and thought about E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N. This idea is the most innovative thing I've seen come out of IT for a long time. No wonder the likes of Microsoft want to ruin it - it shows them up rather badly.
The MS way would be to develop the million dollar pen that writes in zero gravity - the OLPC is using a pencil.
If you think that's impressive, think about what has to happen to an aerial to support all those different frequencies.
The aerials for these things are mostly ignored but are nothing short of impressive.
.. I mean, if this is anything to go by.
Stupid idiots.
.. if that's a given it puts any school who actively collaborates with the RIAA in violation of privacy laws. Now that's going to be fun, and that's without the fact that most of the RIAA's methodology and so-called "evidence" has suffered some serious dents.
They almost make me deliberately start copying just for the hell of it. Nveer felt like that before..
When it asks you to enter the number you just enter 1, 2, 3 or 4 digits. If it accepts it you'll have to test if it works, though, some pad with '0' which I personally find a very dangerous idea (i.e. you enter 12 and it pads it to 0012).
No - it's a standard 0..9 digit setup, but I accidentally discovered something that may well be true for other digital locks as well.
:-).
:-).
With that briefcase you don't actually need to use ALL the positions, so you can add all 3 digit and 2 digit and 1 digit combinations to the total possible 4 digit combinations (10000 + 1000 + 100 + 10 + 1) - you can't leave a gap in the numbers so it's not like adding an extra character to the combinations (that would have given 11^4 = 14641 combinations). In case I didn't make it clear, it didn't have to be 1234, it could also be 123, 12 or even a single digit.
The rest was a bit of social engineering - it always looked like I was pressing 4 digits when I opened it but I didn't fully press the buttons
The actual code was a simple 9, and it drove these guys totally up the wall that I opened it and they couldn't. Funny as heck.
As said, however, I later discovered that that briefcase had another, more dramatic vulnerability which meant I could open it in 10 secs or less. The problem was that the battery supply was not buffered by any kind of capacitor - if you knew how to knock it, the battery would disconnect for a split second and it would reset to '0000'. Duh..
They no longer make these briefcases, partially because you're no longer allowed through security with such a case. And you could spell 'bomb' on the 4 position display which would not help either
Anyway, it was a long time ago when hacking was about fun, intelligence and skill, not about huge egos and causing harm to people - it was OK to exchange good natured wind ups. And I never told them..
Best go to the MIT site then and pick up Matt Blaize's document about picking locks.
:-).
:-).
Just one word of warning: a Samsonite briefcase with 4 digit digital lock has actually MORE than 10000 different combinations, the true number of possible combinations of that lock is 11111, which is why a bunch of hackers on a hacker weekend spend the whole weekend trying to open it and didn't succeed (very evil grin) - I hadn't corrected their assumption that it had 10000 combinations
Not that you need that long - it has a far more basic vulnerability in the electronics by which you can open it in under 10 seconds
You can already see how the so-called non-harmful taser is already being abused for punishment rather than enforcement. Expect full scale sales efforts to start to places with excellent track records on human rights like China (I never intended it to be used on 'that' square) and, umm, ah, yes: the US?
You can't see it, so it doesn't exist. Guantanamo Bay anyone? New toy for "we never torture anyone"?
You cam bet money that the excuse is going to be that this thing "prevents the use of lethal force". Well, at least you have to think about using lethal force, it costs money every time and it leaves serious evidence. Unless these things and tasers come equipped with immutable recording equipment you'll never be able to prove the abuse - at that point it becomes as safe in unclean hands as a Diebold voting machine.
Ah, wait a moment. Now THERE's a coincidence..
1984, the manual. On sale now.
There is a version of OpenOffice.org ("OO") that uses the beautiful graphic elements of the Mac interface called Neo Office. I don't have a Mac, but I use OO on both Windows and Linux (with less and less taking place on Windows).
:-).
I've been using OpenOffice.org since version 1, and I'm quite happy with it. More importantly, very few people seem to notice that I'm using it so the compatibility isn't as big a deal as they want you to believe.
Just give it a try, it's not like it costs anything