The article doesn't say, but if it's a flint then the stone is incredibly brittle and takes a considerable amount of skill to work without shattering the stone. Working flint (or any stone) to a point or an edge leaves a distinctive pattern of markings on the stone which would be all but impossible to have occurred naturally as you basically need to flake off the unwanted bits of flint until you get the desired edge or point. Natural weathering of stone tends to fall into a limited number of types, predominantly rounding through contact erosion, and shearing which is usually caused by freezing water breaking a stone in two. Neither of the natural patterns are likely to lead to the organised pattern of chips that a worked stone would exhibit.
Conficker basically does some social engineering. Unless Autorun is disabled (it still isn't by default) when you insert a USB stick on a Windows box you get a dialog box asking what you want to do. One of the options on the box appears as "Open folder to view files" which might sound innocuous, but is actually an "autorun.inf" option created by Conficker that in reality runs the virus. The only real clue that you have that something is amiss is that the real "Open folder" option is visible as below the Conficker generated fake.
Maybe at the moment the DeLorean actually travels through time, it simply moves relative to whatever it's resting on, namely the Earth (or a patch of air) just like Wells' Time Machine is shown as doing in the 1960 film of the same name. Of course, you'd need a little extra handwavium to explain how it also temporarily becomes invisible to an external observer, something to do with causality perhaps...
Meh! Physicists! It *always* has to be ohhh sooo complex!
... given the volume of clearly throw away domains in ".cn" consisting of five or six random letters for domain and subdomain being used to spam replica jewelry, pills and porn I've been seeing for the last few months. It might well be the world's second most popular.TLD, but it's also quite probably the world's biggest virtual sewer as well.
I wonder where it would rank if countries saw their ccTLDs in a similar vein to the more tangible aspects of their country like cities, natural features and the like. I'm pretty sure we'd see a little more care being taken to prevent such obvious abuses of ccTLD registration processes for a start...
The greater the difference between your data centre's output air temperature and whatever passive external cooling system you are pumping it though, the more heat you can dump at zero cost. That's monetary cost as well as the cost to the environment through the energy "wasted" in HVAC systems and the like. Google has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness; the ratio of power input to power acutally used for powering production systems) approaching 1.2 vs typical values of around 2.5-3.0 - Microsoft is around 2.75 as I recall - so they are clearly doing something right.
Um - no. That wasn't a list of kernel versions, which is completely different list since the Windows 1.x-ME versions all sat on top of DOS to some extent, even if it was just a stub near the end. I was describing the main visible changes in the UI design and where they debuted rather than the changes to the OS kernels. Since Windows 2000 is an improved version of NT4 with the Windows 9x interface it technically sits at #4, but since it didn't gain much use on the desktop outside of a relatively small number of corporates I didn't include it.
I know they sucked and hardly anyone used them, but that kind of overlooks Windows v1 & v2. I think it makes more sense if you go with the major steps of the UI:
Windows 1 - Initial release.
Windows 2 - Now with over-lapping Windows!
Windows 3 - And pseudo 3D effects!
Windows 9x (& ME) - Look Ma, we can multitask without... Oh, never mind.
Windows XP - So easy a toddler could use it... Which might explain why it looks a lot like Duplo.
Windows Vista - UAC: Making your PC more secure by training you to click "Yes" to everything!
Windows 7 - What do you want us to fsck up today?
Re:Taking pictures of the sun?
on
The Quietest Sun
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The welder's glass will do at a pinch although it's not really sufficient for prolonged viewing of the sun. You'll also need to figure out some means of fixing it to the camera and you might find that it causes some unusual colour shifts in the image as well. Alternatively, you can get hold of a neutral density filter specifically designed for solar-photography; typically these will equate to about 10-15 stops of light loss - Cokin's NDX is one of the "cheapest" options, but that's relative; these are niche products that can be quite hard to find and are priced accordingly.
As to composing and focusing without damaging the sensor or your eyes... Well, it's a good idea to be quick.:) Assuming you gave a "proper" DSLR with a through the lens viewfinder, then you can use the old trick of holding a piece of card a few inches from the eyepiece for basic composition, and on newer models you can also use the live preview screen function. Be aware though that when using the latter method your sensor will be exposed to the sun, so don't take too long or your sensor may get damaged. Focussing isn't too critical; set the camera to manual focus and focus on infinity before you start, and you should get a perfectly usable result, although for pin sharp shots of sunspots a little more precise focussing may be required. Typically, my approach is as follows:
Set up the camera & lens (manual focus, filter attached, pointed in the right direction, etc.)
Visually look for any sunspots by composing with the piece of card technique then focussing manually to make the image sharp; if there are any then I want to know where they are so I can make sure that they are sharp
Compose the shot
Reset the focus to infinity (it will be slightly off from step #2)
Switch to live view
If there are any sunspots, zoom the live view screen in where they are and focus until sharp
Take the shot
Profit! (hopefully)
Be aware that with longer focal lengths the sun will move fairly rapidly across the viewfinder, but unless you are using an insanely long telephoto lens or a telescope with an adapter then this shouldn't be a major problem if you leave room for the sun to move across the frame when you compose.
Good luck, and don't take any chances with your eyes!
Does anyone else think that maybe we are approaching this problem the wrong way?
No, although I think that quite a few people may have the wrong end of the stick. I got the distinct impression that while it's still a good idea, using random source ports wasn't intended to be THE fix for the problem. Rather that it was just a generic, vendor neutral workaround to enable people to have a chance to secure themselves against the immediate threat without revealing enough information to Black Hats to exploit the issue. A more permanent solution, that might otherwise have entailed revealing critical information about the vulnerability to those wishing to exploit it through a diff and code analysis, can now be worked on and applied in subsequent patches.
To use the horse and barn analogy:
Unpatched server: The horse is looking curiously out of the barn, or has already bolted.
Patched server (port randomization): The door is closed, but the horse could still potentially kick it open and bolt.
Patched server (final fix): The door is closed, and bolted. Until the next time.
The tractor possesses mass, and therefore has a constant gravitational effect upon the asteroid (and visa versa) and the only fuel it needs to expend are the minuscule amounts necessary to keep it tracking the asteroid. The simulation shows that, given enough time, the cumulative effect of the gravitational tug can exceed that of expending all of the energy carried by the probe, whether kinetic (impact) or potential (engine burn). It's kind of like an ion engine; it's slower at first but over time it's going to leave a traditional chemical based rocket eating its space dust.
Yeah, but Truecrypt has a defence against that. It is called "hidden volumes".
Unless it has a password that will *securely* wipe the hidden volume when entered, then it only has an illusion of a defence against that which is in reality no more than another example of security by obscurity. Other than the less IT savvy members of law enforcement, the TSA etc., that's not really going to help you at all if you find yourself in a situation where you are being forced to give up your TrueCrypt passwords.
It doesn't exactly take an IT guru to check the free disk space reported by the OS against the expected capacity for a given drive model and wonder why there's a discrepancy, especially if you've been trained to look for that kind of thing. I'd also expect that would be the kind of person that's going to take a low-level copy of a seized HDD before going anywhere near the power switch too, which essentially negates the automatic data erasure too. "Nope, that password erased the secure partition as well; strap him back down onto the board and get some more water and towels while I restore the image again, will you?"
Front and back under the body works best I think, so it looks like it could have just make the first tentative steps up onto a primordial beach and is trying to figure out whether taking in air through its mouth instead of its gills is a smart move.:)
Whenever I see the Jesus fish on the back of a car, I do want to run it off the road on general principle
If you can catch one parked up I find it much more satisfying to draw little legs under it with a dry marker and give it a "Darwin is right!" caption. Sometimes you'll see the same car going around for *weeks* before they notice and clean it off.:)
Assuming that you have a device capable of doing so, which I doubt many SoHo router/firewalls are, then there are not too many issues with dropping RST packets, and none of the them are show stoppers. It'll take a little longer before your web browser or whatever can determine that the remote site is genuinely down or otherwise refusing connections but that's about it from the "end-user" point of view. If you have a Linux proxy box however, then IPTables is perfectly capable of doing this for you, and can even do so in a sensible way - ie. just for BitTorrent traffic, just to pick a protocol at random.
So, the US military is looking to fund a project to re-grow body parts, including meat, and PETA is offering money to someone who can create artificial meat. That sounds like a match made in Soylent Heaven to me; "It's your *own* meat; how could it not be ethical to eat it? You didn't suffer did you?"
I didn't know about the 50,000ft across the Med. thing, but I used to conserve a huge amount of fuel in the initial "F-19 Stealth Fighter" take by climbing to the ceiling, then just switching everything off and gliding in low EM mode. Of course, the real plane with its notoriously quirky aerodynamics would drop like a rock if you tried that, but how were Microprose to know that when they'd got the basic design of the plane completely wrong - I think they must have used some artist's concept from "Flight" or something.
There was one particularly sweet mission profile that let you really rack up the points too; I think it was in the "warm war" state where you could pretty much take out any target you wanted but not get swarmed by hostiles or reprimanded upon return. Basically, you took a "touch and go mission" where you had to land at some secret airstrip, loaded up on A2S weapons and popped a couple of high profile missile sites on the way in or out. Hit the secondary target and kill a few hostile AWACS with your cannon and it was pretty much one of the top medals (I think I had five CMoH's on one pilot) and a promotion every time.
Happy days in EGA for me and, pack rat that I am, I probably still have the original floppies around somewhere!
Actually, I was just pointing out that Anonymous has no motive for an attack on epileptics while Scientology has every reason to want to discredit Anonymous and this smacks of Scientology's usual modus operandi. I don't believe I made any statement about my views on either side, other than that I'm not particularly pro-Scientology, but what the hell... For the record I think that the upper echelons of Scientology are a bunch of deceitful scumbags whose sole purpose in the organisation is to manipulate the more gullible members of the organisation into giving them large sums of cash and will do pretty much anything to keep that gravy train flowing. Typical cult in other words.
Anonymous, on the otherhand, I think has a worthwhile agenda in showing the public at large just what they can expect should they ever be tempted to join, or coerced into joining, Scientology. I do however have a problem with *their* operational methods though - not the peaceful protests, which are harmless to everyone and everything except Scientology's recruitment drive and gravy train, but their more militant activities like launching a series of DDoS attacks against Scientology. That does indeed smack of them consisting, at least in part, of a bunch of 13-year old script kiddies with no life that are perfectly capable of smearing themselves.
And I am supposed to believe that this is Anonymous branching out from their protest against Scientology, and not some asshat member of Scientology trying to give Anonymous a bad name because...?
Anonymous has a beef with Scientology, and that is the sole extent of their agenda to date, so there is absolutely no reason for them to suddenly decide to launch an attack against epileptics. On the other hand there is every reason for Scientology to try and smear Anonymous in order to gain a more sympathetic ear in any future court actions against Anonymous. Given the track record Scientology has with the use of smear campaigns against people and organisations that try to stand up to them, I'd say it's pretty obvious what's really going on here.
Oh, and expect incoming pro-Scientology astroturfers in 3... 2... 1...
Hopefully some patent troll will spend mega bucks on it, then spend even more bucks on expensive lawsuits against the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc., and finally end up going the way of SCO when they get buried under the weight of prior art. The sooner one of these "IP Portfolio" companies gets well and truly burnt, the better.
Plus, as a a bonus, Slashdot gets to root for Microsoft in court for a change. Watching some of the anti-Microsoft zealots around here trying to post on *that* should be entertaining, to say the least!
I'm pretty sure that can't be right. I could perhaps understand the control freaks at Sony trying to pull a stunt like that, but requiring AACS is going to have a big impact on another emerging market Sony has a huge stake in; HD camcorders. Currently, the only way of efficiently distributing sizeable hi-res content from such a camcorder to friends and family (assuming they have HDTV capability in the first place) is via a physical HD disc, which essentially now means Blu-Ray. Hitachi even has a HD camcorder available that records straight to an 8cm Blu-Ray disc, which is then supposed to be immediately playable in any Blu-Ray player. Unless both the Hitachi camcorder and end-user AV software is also doing AACS encoding before writing content to disc, then that's going to leave a lot of HD camcorder owners just a little peeved when they try and show of their latest home videos in glorious HD.
Then again, it could actually be a good thing if they don't play on standalone players. It was bad enough having to sit through $random_family_member's holiday snaps, things took a turn for the worse with the first analogue camcorders, but the thought of seeing all that in HD? Won't somebody please think of the children!
Was to use a software driver to export the spare part of the disk as an iSCSI (or iATA, if you prefer) target. For performance and integrity, you'd probably be better having a dedicated partition the OS couldn't easily fiddle with, but it shouldn't be too hard to create an array of ~50GB iSCSI targets that you could then collate into larger volumes. Performance wouldn't be stellar, unless you could use a dedicated NIC/VLAN on the hosts, but should be reasonable enough for use a nearline storage of non-critical data that was already archived to tape. But so much for the pros, what about the cons?
The big problems with this idea though are going to be MTBF, storage redundancy and power consumption. You're going to be building your storage array using desktop PC rated HDDs, so lets say an MTBF of 50,000 hours, *but* you have about 100 of them so you should be anticipating a fairly frequent drive failure rate. That means both striping and repeatedly mirroring the data across workstations to ensure that it's always available should a drive or two die - or just be powered off overnight, unless you want all your workstations powered up 24/7 ($$$). You'd also need to be able to dynamically rebuild the data set in the event of a drive failure; but how do you detect a drive failure vs someone simply tripping over the power/network cable - that software's not looking so simple now, is it?
I think it's an interesting idea, but the overheads of maintaining enough copies of each element of data online to survive drives becoming unavailable, intelligently managing the replication of data when a drive is deemed to have failed and not just gone temporarily offline, plus network congestion issues make it non-viable. It'd almost certainly be cheaper and faster to write off the spare HDD capacity in your workstations and buy cheap 1U servers with a couple of GB NICs onboard and cram them full of high capacity SATA drives for storage.
I guess they wanted to top the warning label "Do not look into laser with remaining eye".
If Wicked Lasers puts a sticker on there that reads "Do not look into torch with remains of skull!", this thing will probably sell like the wildfires it's going to end up starting...
Slashdot Mirror
The article doesn't say, but if it's a flint then the stone is incredibly brittle and takes a considerable amount of skill to work without shattering the stone. Working flint (or any stone) to a point or an edge leaves a distinctive pattern of markings on the stone which would be all but impossible to have occurred naturally as you basically need to flake off the unwanted bits of flint until you get the desired edge or point. Natural weathering of stone tends to fall into a limited number of types, predominantly rounding through contact erosion, and shearing which is usually caused by freezing water breaking a stone in two. Neither of the natural patterns are likely to lead to the organised pattern of chips that a worked stone would exhibit.
Conficker basically does some social engineering. Unless Autorun is disabled (it still isn't by default) when you insert a USB stick on a Windows box you get a dialog box asking what you want to do. One of the options on the box appears as "Open folder to view files" which might sound innocuous, but is actually an "autorun.inf" option created by Conficker that in reality runs the virus. The only real clue that you have that something is amiss is that the real "Open folder" option is visible as below the Conficker generated fake.
Maybe at the moment the DeLorean actually travels through time, it simply moves relative to whatever it's resting on, namely the Earth (or a patch of air) just like Wells' Time Machine is shown as doing in the 1960 film of the same name. Of course, you'd need a little extra handwavium to explain how it also temporarily becomes invisible to an external observer, something to do with causality perhaps...
Meh! Physicists! It *always* has to be ohhh sooo complex!
It's hardly a big secret. There have been the USS Parche and the USS Jimmy Carter to name just two.
... given the volume of clearly throw away domains in ".cn" consisting of five or six random letters for domain and subdomain being used to spam replica jewelry, pills and porn I've been seeing for the last few months. It might well be the world's second most popular .TLD, but it's also quite probably the world's biggest virtual sewer as well.
I wonder where it would rank if countries saw their ccTLDs in a similar vein to the more tangible aspects of their country like cities, natural features and the like. I'm pretty sure we'd see a little more care being taken to prevent such obvious abuses of ccTLD registration processes for a start...
Two words: "Free Cooling"
The greater the difference between your data centre's output air temperature and whatever passive external cooling system you are pumping it though, the more heat you can dump at zero cost. That's monetary cost as well as the cost to the environment through the energy "wasted" in HVAC systems and the like. Google has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness; the ratio of power input to power acutally used for powering production systems) approaching 1.2 vs typical values of around 2.5-3.0 - Microsoft is around 2.75 as I recall - so they are clearly doing something right.
Um - no. That wasn't a list of kernel versions, which is completely different list since the Windows 1.x-ME versions all sat on top of DOS to some extent, even if it was just a stub near the end. I was describing the main visible changes in the UI design and where they debuted rather than the changes to the OS kernels. Since Windows 2000 is an improved version of NT4 with the Windows 9x interface it technically sits at #4, but since it didn't gain much use on the desktop outside of a relatively small number of corporates I didn't include it.
I know they sucked and hardly anyone used them, but that kind of overlooks Windows v1 & v2. I think it makes more sense if you go with the major steps of the UI:
The welder's glass will do at a pinch although it's not really sufficient for prolonged viewing of the sun. You'll also need to figure out some means of fixing it to the camera and you might find that it causes some unusual colour shifts in the image as well. Alternatively, you can get hold of a neutral density filter specifically designed for solar-photography; typically these will equate to about 10-15 stops of light loss - Cokin's NDX is one of the "cheapest" options, but that's relative; these are niche products that can be quite hard to find and are priced accordingly.
As to composing and focusing without damaging the sensor or your eyes... Well, it's a good idea to be quick. :) Assuming you gave a "proper" DSLR with a through the lens viewfinder, then you can use the old trick of holding a piece of card a few inches from the eyepiece for basic composition, and on newer models you can also use the live preview screen function. Be aware though that when using the latter method your sensor will be exposed to the sun, so don't take too long or your sensor may get damaged. Focussing isn't too critical; set the camera to manual focus and focus on infinity before you start, and you should get a perfectly usable result, although for pin sharp shots of sunspots a little more precise focussing may be required. Typically, my approach is as follows:
Be aware that with longer focal lengths the sun will move fairly rapidly across the viewfinder, but unless you are using an insanely long telephoto lens or a telescope with an adapter then this shouldn't be a major problem if you leave room for the sun to move across the frame when you compose.
Good luck, and don't take any chances with your eyes!
Does anyone else think that maybe we are approaching this problem the wrong way?
No, although I think that quite a few people may have the wrong end of the stick. I got the distinct impression that while it's still a good idea, using random source ports wasn't intended to be THE fix for the problem. Rather that it was just a generic, vendor neutral workaround to enable people to have a chance to secure themselves against the immediate threat without revealing enough information to Black Hats to exploit the issue. A more permanent solution, that might otherwise have entailed revealing critical information about the vulnerability to those wishing to exploit it through a diff and code analysis, can now be worked on and applied in subsequent patches.
To use the horse and barn analogy:
The tractor possesses mass, and therefore has a constant gravitational effect upon the asteroid (and visa versa) and the only fuel it needs to expend are the minuscule amounts necessary to keep it tracking the asteroid. The simulation shows that, given enough time, the cumulative effect of the gravitational tug can exceed that of expending all of the energy carried by the probe, whether kinetic (impact) or potential (engine burn). It's kind of like an ion engine; it's slower at first but over time it's going to leave a traditional chemical based rocket eating its space dust.
Maybe the device needs to do something in between the switches, like actually sending some data?
Unless it has a password that will *securely* wipe the hidden volume when entered, then it only has an illusion of a defence against that which is in reality no more than another example of security by obscurity. Other than the less IT savvy members of law enforcement, the TSA etc., that's not really going to help you at all if you find yourself in a situation where you are being forced to give up your TrueCrypt passwords.
It doesn't exactly take an IT guru to check the free disk space reported by the OS against the expected capacity for a given drive model and wonder why there's a discrepancy, especially if you've been trained to look for that kind of thing. I'd also expect that would be the kind of person that's going to take a low-level copy of a seized HDD before going anywhere near the power switch too, which essentially negates the automatic data erasure too. "Nope, that password erased the secure partition as well; strap him back down onto the board and get some more water and towels while I restore the image again, will you?"
Front and back under the body works best I think, so it looks like it could have just make the first tentative steps up onto a primordial beach and is trying to figure out whether taking in air through its mouth instead of its gills is a smart move. :)
Whenever I see the Jesus fish on the back of a car, I do want to run it off the road on general principle
If you can catch one parked up I find it much more satisfying to draw little legs under it with a dry marker and give it a "Darwin is right!" caption. Sometimes you'll see the same car going around for *weeks* before they notice and clean it off.Assuming that you have a device capable of doing so, which I doubt many SoHo router/firewalls are, then there are not too many issues with dropping RST packets, and none of the them are show stoppers. It'll take a little longer before your web browser or whatever can determine that the remote site is genuinely down or otherwise refusing connections but that's about it from the "end-user" point of view. If you have a Linux proxy box however, then IPTables is perfectly capable of doing this for you, and can even do so in a sensible way - ie. just for BitTorrent traffic, just to pick a protocol at random.
- * "I'm sorry, you appear to have died. The license for this phone is non-transferable. Thank you for buying Microsoft!"
- * STOP: 0xDEADBEEF
- * The battery rapidly discharges into you; hopefully the sudden shock will restart things.
- *
...
Hmm. HTML lists appear not to print bullets in the new Slashdot stylesheet...Beginning dump of physical memory...
Out of memory. Dump aborted...
So, the US military is looking to fund a project to re-grow body parts, including meat, and PETA is offering money to someone who can create artificial meat. That sounds like a match made in Soylent Heaven to me; "It's your *own* meat; how could it not be ethical to eat it? You didn't suffer did you?"
I didn't know about the 50,000ft across the Med. thing, but I used to conserve a huge amount of fuel in the initial "F-19 Stealth Fighter" take by climbing to the ceiling, then just switching everything off and gliding in low EM mode. Of course, the real plane with its notoriously quirky aerodynamics would drop like a rock if you tried that, but how were Microprose to know that when they'd got the basic design of the plane completely wrong - I think they must have used some artist's concept from "Flight" or something.
There was one particularly sweet mission profile that let you really rack up the points too; I think it was in the "warm war" state where you could pretty much take out any target you wanted but not get swarmed by hostiles or reprimanded upon return. Basically, you took a "touch and go mission" where you had to land at some secret airstrip, loaded up on A2S weapons and popped a couple of high profile missile sites on the way in or out. Hit the secondary target and kill a few hostile AWACS with your cannon and it was pretty much one of the top medals (I think I had five CMoH's on one pilot) and a promotion every time.
Happy days in EGA for me and, pack rat that I am, I probably still have the original floppies around somewhere!
Actually, I was just pointing out that Anonymous has no motive for an attack on epileptics while Scientology has every reason to want to discredit Anonymous and this smacks of Scientology's usual modus operandi. I don't believe I made any statement about my views on either side, other than that I'm not particularly pro-Scientology, but what the hell... For the record I think that the upper echelons of Scientology are a bunch of deceitful scumbags whose sole purpose in the organisation is to manipulate the more gullible members of the organisation into giving them large sums of cash and will do pretty much anything to keep that gravy train flowing. Typical cult in other words.
Anonymous, on the otherhand, I think has a worthwhile agenda in showing the public at large just what they can expect should they ever be tempted to join, or coerced into joining, Scientology. I do however have a problem with *their* operational methods though - not the peaceful protests, which are harmless to everyone and everything except Scientology's recruitment drive and gravy train, but their more militant activities like launching a series of DDoS attacks against Scientology. That does indeed smack of them consisting, at least in part, of a bunch of 13-year old script kiddies with no life that are perfectly capable of smearing themselves.
And I am supposed to believe that this is Anonymous branching out from their protest against Scientology, and not some asshat member of Scientology trying to give Anonymous a bad name because...?
Anonymous has a beef with Scientology, and that is the sole extent of their agenda to date, so there is absolutely no reason for them to suddenly decide to launch an attack against epileptics. On the other hand there is every reason for Scientology to try and smear Anonymous in order to gain a more sympathetic ear in any future court actions against Anonymous. Given the track record Scientology has with the use of smear campaigns against people and organisations that try to stand up to them, I'd say it's pretty obvious what's really going on here.
Oh, and expect incoming pro-Scientology astroturfers in 3... 2... 1...
Hopefully some patent troll will spend mega bucks on it, then spend even more bucks on expensive lawsuits against the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc., and finally end up going the way of SCO when they get buried under the weight of prior art. The sooner one of these "IP Portfolio" companies gets well and truly burnt, the better.
Plus, as a a bonus, Slashdot gets to root for Microsoft in court for a change. Watching some of the anti-Microsoft zealots around here trying to post on *that* should be entertaining, to say the least!
I'm pretty sure that can't be right. I could perhaps understand the control freaks at Sony trying to pull a stunt like that, but requiring AACS is going to have a big impact on another emerging market Sony has a huge stake in; HD camcorders. Currently, the only way of efficiently distributing sizeable hi-res content from such a camcorder to friends and family (assuming they have HDTV capability in the first place) is via a physical HD disc, which essentially now means Blu-Ray. Hitachi even has a HD camcorder available that records straight to an 8cm Blu-Ray disc, which is then supposed to be immediately playable in any Blu-Ray player. Unless both the Hitachi camcorder and end-user AV software is also doing AACS encoding before writing content to disc, then that's going to leave a lot of HD camcorder owners just a little peeved when they try and show of their latest home videos in glorious HD.
Then again, it could actually be a good thing if they don't play on standalone players. It was bad enough having to sit through $random_family_member's holiday snaps, things took a turn for the worse with the first analogue camcorders, but the thought of seeing all that in HD? Won't somebody please think of the children!
Was to use a software driver to export the spare part of the disk as an iSCSI (or iATA, if you prefer) target. For performance and integrity, you'd probably be better having a dedicated partition the OS couldn't easily fiddle with, but it shouldn't be too hard to create an array of ~50GB iSCSI targets that you could then collate into larger volumes. Performance wouldn't be stellar, unless you could use a dedicated NIC/VLAN on the hosts, but should be reasonable enough for use a nearline storage of non-critical data that was already archived to tape. But so much for the pros, what about the cons?
The big problems with this idea though are going to be MTBF, storage redundancy and power consumption. You're going to be building your storage array using desktop PC rated HDDs, so lets say an MTBF of 50,000 hours, *but* you have about 100 of them so you should be anticipating a fairly frequent drive failure rate. That means both striping and repeatedly mirroring the data across workstations to ensure that it's always available should a drive or two die - or just be powered off overnight, unless you want all your workstations powered up 24/7 ($$$). You'd also need to be able to dynamically rebuild the data set in the event of a drive failure; but how do you detect a drive failure vs someone simply tripping over the power/network cable - that software's not looking so simple now, is it?
I think it's an interesting idea, but the overheads of maintaining enough copies of each element of data online to survive drives becoming unavailable, intelligently managing the replication of data when a drive is deemed to have failed and not just gone temporarily offline, plus network congestion issues make it non-viable. It'd almost certainly be cheaper and faster to write off the spare HDD capacity in your workstations and buy cheap 1U servers with a couple of GB NICs onboard and cram them full of high capacity SATA drives for storage.
I guess they wanted to top the warning label "Do not look into laser with remaining eye".
If Wicked Lasers puts a sticker on there that reads "Do not look into torch with remains of skull!", this thing will probably sell like the wildfires it's going to end up starting...