Does anyone know anything about resurrecting
data from a dead Maxtor? Seriously!
Very much depends on how it died...
Did the controller roast? Try swapping it for
another from the same exact model (and batch,
if possible)... Only viable when the data has
a value greater than the cost of a throw-away
drive, but it works (Or at least it used to...
Not sure how newer drives would work, since
they keep track of bad spots on the disk and
automatically avoid them).
Does it not spin up? Drive bearings seem like
a pretty common point of failure - Try sticking
it in the freezer overnight (no joke!), and see
if you can get it to spin up one last time,
just long enough to copy everything important
off it (And make damned sure you know what you
want, and in what order you value it,, because
you'll only get 15 minutes tops out of the
drive this way).
Did you have a head crash? In that case, you
don't really have any data left to recover. A
professional recovery house could probably get
90% of it back, for a few grand, but the average
Joe should consider it a total loss.
I've always used my newest harddrive as my
backup drive, thinking that it would be the
most reliable. guess I was wrong.
If you already have a well-organized system of
backups, you might want to consider an offline
backup-backup... With HDD space so cheap, you can
set yourself up with a cheap Linux box with a TB
of space for under $500. Turn it on, mirror your
live backup system, then shut it back down...
Repeat whenever you have enough new stuff that it
would hurt too much to lose it.
As an aside, to keep this OT, I've never had
a problem with the DiamondMax line from Maxtor.
They supposedly had a crap run back in the late
90's, the ones Dell used in all their boxes
(wouldn't know personally, I don't buy name
brand PCs), but I have half a dozen (exactly)
DiamondMaxes running, including two 10s, a 9+,
and three from before that (don't have them
visible and not about to shutdown a machine just
to check, but definitely pre-9). Not a single
failure yet.
Don't mistake MS's "see, we tried" pretend
attempts at security, and their "this hurts
our bottom line" real security.
The original XBox still has no generally
applicable software-only crack for it, after
several years in the field. Real
security.
This new "please don't pirate Windows" joke
lasted 24 hours. Why? Microsoft WANTS
people to pirate Windows. Very, very few
private individuals would pay $300 for an
OS plus $300 for an office app suite. However,
if "everyone" uses it already, then the sort of
customers who do buy, such as businesses
and governments, will far more likely go with
Microsoft.
Call me paranoid if you want, but NO modern
attempt at secure authentication has any excuse for
not using server-side verified, AES-encrypted
communication. A pathetic little unverified
Javascript toy? Gimme a break.
Except that this moves the time window to include
more daylight hours, so you don't need to have your
lights on. At least that is the theory.
Except that in practice, I have never, ever
seen a place of business actually turn off the lights
and depend on what comes through the window.
Quite the opposite, in fact - In rooms with a lot of
windows ("Front" offices, for example), in the morning
when too much sun comes in at a low angle, people draw
the shades and turn on desk lamps in addition
to the overhead lighting.
Personally, I think the clocks should stay constant
Agreed. If businesses can save a penny by changing when the
workdway begins and ends, they most certainly will,
without the need for our Nanny-in-DC to shove the idea down
our throats.
Please, intentionally misunderstanding people
in order to mock them is not a substitute for an
argument.
I apologize for my vitriol if I took your
statement the wrong way. I did not, however,
"intentionally" misunderstand you, I took
your words at face value (nor did I deliberatly
ignore any apparent subtext) - Your choice of
wording appeared to contrast this new chart
with the standard one in a manner that gave
the impression that you, not your
students, found the old one had elements
"arbitrarily shoved into place".
Perhaps my error arises from not seeing what
you mean about this new chart having a more
obvious visual organization... As I described,
to me, it looks like the standard one merely
folded in half. YMMV, though.
I did still go a tad overboard on the
sarcasm, though, so another apology from me
on that point.
the elements within a group line up *not*
because they've been arbitrarily shoved into
place, but because they spiral out to the
appropriate location
You mean, "arbitrary" as in, grouped into rows
corresponding to ground state config (you know,
those those silly S, P, and D orbitals - and F,
but I don't think I've ever seen a periodic table
with the Ls and As inline), and columns that
instantly indicate the number of valence electrons?
Golly, that Mendelev must have just used a
frickin' dart-board to place the elements, eh?
As for my opinion of this new chart - Purely
in terms of placement, it doesn't gain or lose
anything compared to the standard PT... It just
takes all the elements up to full-D configuration
and folds them in half, middle-inward, then
takes the Actinides and Lanthanides and bends
them downward so they fit - So in one sense,
satisfying my comment above about never seeing
them inline, but at the same time, violating
the pattern established by the entire top
half of the chart.
Now, for metadata... At least as presented, this
new chart falls abysmally short of the simple,
blocky standard periodic table form. Putting
only the symbol on the chart and having the rest
along the edge? Weak.
She will actually plan to watch a
particular program (amazing I know).
Gotta agree, I suspect these results come
from something along the very lines you
propose.
VCR not intuitive? A VCR has basically the
same sort of interface as a PVR, with the PVR
quite a lot more complex. Biggest
difference? You set a VCR to record by time,
not by program.
Though, I have to admit that my viewing habits
more closely resemble females ones, at least in
that I watch specific programs, not just pick a
channel and watch it. But fear not, my
testosterone-laden brethren, I still loathe
all commercials (It drives me batty
when my SO stops to show me "that cute
commercial [she] tried to tell [me] about"),
and I still can't stand "chick" programming.
To me the logic is to prevent/deter theft on the
individual passes
Theft? This doesn't prevent theft, it prevents two
similar-sized families on vacation together, who plan
to visit at least two different theme parks, from
swapping multi-day passes between two sites to save
a few bucks. The pass itself gets fully and properly
paid for. This just helps Disney give a great big
"FU" to people capable of planning ahead so as to
minimize their costs. "Non transferable?" WTF does
that really mean?
You dont associate your name with the individual
pass, so they are only pinpointing "pass 106 has
this finger structure with it"
Yeah, sure - LOTS of people will pay
over a grand in cash for a week's pass
for four people, plus one or two of the ticket
"options" (I hope you like Disney's most famous
ride, "search for a parking spot two miles away
from the gate", if you don't add the "parkhopper"
extra).
And we all know that no one has ever
managed to use credit card data to identify
the user, right?
Add to this the fact that, despite the manufacturer's
claim, you can regenerate an image of the
fingerprint from biometric scanners like this...
It may not actually "store" the image, but it stores
enough information to come up with a damn close
fake (good enough to fool a human, and a computer would
use the exact same features as stored to do a comparison
in the first place!).
I ditched my last bank when they started requiring
a thumbprint to cash checks ("Oh, I do? Well, do you
need a thumbprint to withdraw cash? Great, I'd like to
withdraw my entire account balance, please. Feel free
to close out my account!" - Yeah, figure that out... To
put money in, they wanted biometric ID against
which they didn't even have any basis of comparison on
file... But to take it out, a license and a smile will do).
Where the hell does Disney get off requiring two
fingers?
but I've returned two CDs because they had
DRM on them, even though I wanted the CDs.
Wait - You actually found a CD with copy protection
that works???
Wow... Consider me impressed! I've deliberately
bought supposedly-uncopyable CDs (used, of course) in
which I had no interest whatsoever, just to see if
they would even slow down my attempts to rip
them to FLAC (as with yourself, I rip for personal
use only, I just have no need to carry around the
over a thousand CDs in my collection when they'll
all fit on the HDD of my laptop). And I have yet
to find one that requires me to use some explicit
circumvention technique to break a CD's DRM.
You can be for DRM, but against shitty
implementations thereof? No wait, that would
involve too much thought and judgement.
So, using your amazing powers of "thought and
judgement", describe for us an unobtrusive
form of DRM.
Well?
Any thoughts?
Didn't think so.
Most of us would have no problem with
the idea of DRM, if any possible
implementation didn't inherently either
totally deprive us of anonymity (just
because I bought a CD doesn't mean the
**AA should suddenly know my complete
medical history), or makes the DRM'd
media inconvenient to an absurd degree.
Or both.
Currently we only suffer the second half
of that. I fully expect we'll see schemes
pushing both those buttons in the
near future, to which "only" suffering the
first (ie, absolutely no anonymity, something
like the content biometrically locked to a
fully identified user) will "graciously" come
as a relief from the loving folks at the
**AA.
Keep in mind also that I currently have the
"right" to loan things like books and CDs to
friends. Include that capability in your
grand idea of a tenable DRM scheme.
Do you think the movie industry is going to
give you something playable on your un-DRMed
box? You might pirate it.
Of course, that results in the inherent irony
that MORE people will "pirate" it, ie,
make a non-DRM'd copy, just so they can
watch it on whatever the hell they want.
Many people (myself not excluded) already do
this with movies - First thing they do with a
new (or even rented) movie? Toss it in the PC
and burn a copy, minus the PUOps. Does it take
three times longer than watching even the worst
of pre-movie commercials? Yup. Does it "feel"
a million times better to waste that time
(personally, I usually preparing dinner while
waiting) than to sit through forced ads?
Yup also.
I'll head the line to insult the ignorant masses
of consuming sheeple, but even sheep will
only take so much abuse before they saunter to
the other side of the field. Consumer backlash
to this crap has already started. I really
don't think the **AA can push much further
before they start to feel the public's
squirrely wrath.
So you've just shifted the electrolysis
problem further upstream and instead of using
nice friendly water, you're passing current
through nasty, mean molten salt.
But distribution becomes a simple matter
of shipping a powder, rather than long-distance
lossy electric transmission lines.
Imagine a few hundred square miles of Death
Valley coated in solar cells, producing this
powder. Or monster-scale wind turbines dotting
the more inhospitable ridges of the Rockies.
Or hell, why not even plain ol' nuclear power,
far enough from a population center that even
the most hard-core anti-nuclear weenies couldn't
complain (how about on the Moon?).
Yes, solutions like this only move the problem
of actual production upstream - But they let us
move the production almost arbitrarily far away
from the site of consumption, something we can't
do so well using conventional electric
distribution systems. This also provides a
reasonably efficient form of long-term off-line
storage, something else we can't currently do
very efficiently (giant battery banks?), for
example to use excess winter generation capacity
to help offset increased summer demand.
I already have the hardware. Now, I am being
forced to purchase MORE hardware, against my
will.
No, you already have the hardware for something
that you simple assumed would continue
to exist, for free, forever. Well, that particular
free ride has ended. You don't need to get a car,
but you do need to switch busses, if you
want to keep riding for free.
As for "forcing" you to upgrade - I've heard
that one over and over, and it hasn't gotten
any more true through repetition. No one
needs to switch. It simply amazes
me that so many people seem to have this
sense of entitlement to watch free analogue
television. Guess what? You don't.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say
that the goverment will provide, or force private
industry to provide, bread and circuses. Can't
get a local DTV signal strong enough, or can't
afford to upgrade to cable? Read a book. If
an emergency happens, you'll still have a radio.
And, if digital TV is so important to freeing up
those RF ranges, why can I walk into a Best Buy
today and still buy a pure Analog television?
Because as long as people will still buy them, stores
will still sell them. Thus, the need for the FCC to
step in and say "enough".
If you'd like a good historical precedent for
this change, before modern radio, we had
something called "sparkgap", a fairly self-descriptive
technology - You make a spark across a gap, key it
like a telegraph, and voila, you can receive it a
good distance away with mindlessly simple equipment.
The problem? It drowns out anything nearby across
the entire useful RF spectrum.
With DTV, we have a similar problem - Digital
takes a tenth of the bandwidth of analog TV, for
incredibly higher quality. It takes much more
sophisticated decoding equipment, but in the
long run, we'll all benefit as a result.
I'll give you a hint: union regulations
that prohibit firing someone just for being
completely fucking incompetent at their job.
I feel fairly strongly anti-union as well, but
really, this has nothing to do with
unions or competence.
Scenario - You work at a department store.
Your boss tells you a shipment of books just
came in, put 'em out on display. You comply.
Oh, look at this, that new Harry Potter book
finally came out? Cool, you might pick that
up, "for your niece", when you get off
tonight.
As much as publishers and upper management
cares about things like release dates, your
average drone does not. Even if the box says
in BIG BOLD LETTERS, "Do not open until
foo", well, how many boxes have you seen that
say "this side up", up-side-down? Or
"fragile", so badly beaten that you don't even
need a box-cutter to get the product out of the
box?
The last time I looked, Itanium was more
efficient than *PENTIUM M*
Ahahahahahaa... Good one. You guys crack me up,
sometimes.
Intel's own numbers shows the low voltage (aka
"piss-poor performance") version as still drawing 62W.
The last "real" version, the Madison core, draws an
impressive 130W. Ah, but you meant to refer to the
dual core one, correct? Well now, that changes
everything! To realize the draw you
gave (not quite half of 99W, but I'll let that slide
for now), should I cut one in half with a hacksaw,
or just smash a bit of it up with a really small
hammer?
more efficient than *PENTIUM M*, let alone
mobile athlon(64)s.
The 1MB cache LV mobile Athlon 64 has a TDP of 19W.
The ULV Pentium M-753 (Dothan core) draws... 5W.
Five. Stomp stomp stomp... stomp...... stomp.
5W<42.5W. 19W<42.5W. 42.5W<(99/2)W.
99W<130W. Please play again.
You can't fucking compare the energy
efficiency of chips made with different
size transistors, fuckwit.
Yes, actually, you can. I chose to measure it
in terms of "Slashdot trolls I have to put up with
per watt".
You could also use a more meaningful number,
such as megaflops per watt, or even FPS in Doom 3
per watt. But only considering the per-gate
waste doesn't tell you anything particularly
meaningful - Doing so strikes me as similar to
trying to compare the brightness of a 100W
incandescent light-bulb to an LCD monitor
based on the worst-case draw of a single pixel.
How many gates does it have total, how well does
it make use of them, and does it keep idle
sections of the chip active also matters rather a
lot. Using half as much power per state change
doesn't matter if it takes 10x as many transistors
to get the same job done.
Many people here only know what has been
said on Slashdot about the Itanium.
You only need to know three things
about the Itanium to pretty much automatically
rule it out:
1) Heat (and the related, power consumption).
Not a joke, not a rumor. The Itanium makes
the Prescott core look cool and
energy-efficient by comparison.
2) Not designed to run the software in use
by 99.5% of the PC market. Great for a
custom supercomputer, okay for some servers,
complete shit for normal desktop use.
3) Price. They hope to make it competitive
by 2007? How long has it existed now,
at 3-10x the price of the highest end x86 CPU?
And someone actually needs to ask why it
hasn't hit mainstream use yet?
That about does it for me, anyway.
Did I miss something obvious here? I don't see
this as a case of the rumor mill damning it,
just its own HUGE shortcomings to offset its
single good point (namely, good performance
for a very limited set of uses).
Scholastic has totally failed to
take time zones into consideration! Just
think about the billions they will lose
from people living on the borders of time zones,
buying in one and selling at a huge markup in
the other - At only 11:04pm!!!
Oh, wait... Scholastic still gets its cover
price. Rowling still gets her cut. Everyone
(legitimately) involved still gets paid, including
some otherwise-uninvolved middle-man who gets a few
bucks from parents with more money than sense.
I think I've lost my faith - Someone explain to
me again why this matters?
Hey buddy, I have one and you can buy it
before anyone else for only $150
Why not?
Hell, they should do that themselves!
Anyone stupid enough to pay 10x as much to read
the exact same content 12-40hrs earlier...
Well, I think an old adage about a fool and their
money applies here.
Now, someone else's point about merchandising
opportunities seems quite a lot more likely.
This has nothing to do with making
it fair to all the happy little Harry P
fans, and everything to do with not
undercutting the massive cross-media
promotional opportunities. Though, admittedly,
I can't quite see how having some people
read the book a half day early would even
affect that so much, unless it
really sucked hard...
And on a seperate note, what the hell did
they spend $24 million on?
Politicians. Even the SUV-loving twits at
the EPA balked a tad at the thought of filling
our landfills with these plastic monstrosities
"constructed like a tank" (straight from TFA)
for what amounts to a medium coffee.
Otherwise... Well, we've all seen "Quik-Heet"
hand and foot warmers. Same thing, different
(but equally common) set of chemicals. Not
a whole lot of R&D needed to figure out
"keep the dry part dry and the wet part wet
until needed, using an easily punctured
membrane".
The point of the article is that nothing the
workstations do can (supposedly) compromise the
SERVERS which are on their own internal network.
I would respectfully disagree... The "point" of the
article appeared to suggest that server admins do
the same things they've always done (functional
isolation? Differing security levels for less/more
critical/sensitive servers? Sandboxing? Whoah,
radical stuff there!), and then turned into an
advertisement for Xen.
However, the submitter unwisely chose the title
"Tear Down the Firewall". Regardless of server
administration, real-world networks have servers
and workstations (with human, non-IT
users of those workstations). Thus, I took
exception to that idea. As for the specific
points I responded to - Well, #1 says it all...
"The roof is leaky". If you can show me a system,
that has NO bugs or vulnerabilities, I'll
show you the next system from which we'll hear
about a major customer information leak occurring.
I'd saying locking down the user so
they can't install ANYTHING
1) More difficult to do that it sounds - Someone
will always find a way around any level
of restriction, and once one person finds it,
they all know it. Not to mention, this leads
to an interesting HR paradox - You want employees
to have computer skills, but not enough to potentialy
circumvent security "casually" (as in, not maliciously,
but breaking the rules to get the job done more
efficiently).
2) My "users" include people above me in the
corporate food chain. I can't tell
them not to lick the outlets, but I can quietly
put little plastic widgets in the socket to
keep curious tongues out.
3) Simply put, happy workers get more done.
Telling people that you consider them idiots
unworthy of trusting with access to their own
desktop machines, whether true or not, does
not make them happy - Quite the opposite.
OTOH, as a well-studied example, giving them
dummy thermostats that let them think they
have some control over the climate makes people
far, far happier, even though the central HVAC
stays set at 72F year-round.
I've worked in environments with the sort of
policy you suggest, and they simply don't work.
They crush morale, breed resentment against
IT, and perhaps most important, don't accomplish
the desired goal (namely, having a 100% controlled
environment to work in - Even cooperative
users make such a goal impossible, nevermind those
who will deliberately try to get around restrictions).
Compare that to my current situation, in which
people appreciate my presence. They call
to ask for my help, not to complain that
blind-policy-X has once again blocked them from
doing their job. When I send out an email telling
people about a new threat, I get concerned reponses
asking for clarification so no one accidentally
exposes themselves at home, either; not people
second-guessing me about whether the threat really
exists or just threatens my fascist control of their
access.
You're going to update your firewall rules
for every oddball Internet site?
No. AV and anti-spyware software takes care of
99.9% of the problems automatically. I only need
to worry about the "legitimate" software deciding
to phone home to mom to tell it all about what it
did today. The "cute" software that poses only a
marginal threat (perhaps just checking for updates
with a frequency that would saturate a T1) yet may
readily lure users into installing it. Microsoft's
update site (my users update when I decide
to SUS one out, damnit!).
As for actual websites, I don't particularly care
what web sites people visit... They run FireFox in a
reduced privelage context, thereby limiting any damage
to depriving themselves of surfing the web until
I get around to fixing it for them (a low priority,
as they all know).
Sometimes (ie, with Windows), you already
know the roof leaks, and can't do a hell
of a lot about it. Sometimes (ssh vulnerability,
for example), the roof leaks in places you don't
know, and you'll only find out when you go to
look at those irreplaceable and now
water-destroyed family photos you kept
in a corner of the attic.
you want to make your yard free of rain
Yes, I occasionally throw summer parties
(a (legit) visiting laptop connecting to my
WAP). Though I have a wonderful umbrella for
my own use, I would prefer the rain not affect
the comfort of my possibly umbrella-impaired
visitors.
you own a number of houses, and want to
ensure they will be free of rain even if
the houses' caretakers are idiots
You don't have a (non-geek) SO, do you?
For that matter, you also apparently don't have
any coworkers who just lurve having those
cute little mouse pointers, enhanced IM smileys,
and "need" to know the weather on a
second-by-second basis. Yeah, I could lock
down every one of their machines - Or I can just
block the relevant sites at the firewall. Which
takes less work if a similar new annoyance
appears?
And if you want to use the firewall to block
off unneeded services, why in the hell are you
running them in the first place?
Watch your gateway traffic from a normal,
healthy, secure XP network (pretend all of
the above don't count as an oxymoron). It
might surprise you (and scare the hell out
of you) to see how many totally legitimate
programs phone home for no good reason (XP
itself not the least of the offenders).
Are you saying that AMD has something
that beats the Pentium M? Can you back that
up?
No. The M certainly beats even the Venice core
for power consumption (though not by much, when
a fan alone can draw more than either of them at
idle) - No arguing that, Intel wins that battle
for now.
But when the dual Athlon 64s trounce Intel's
best offerings, and with a power consumption
at least in the same ballpark as the Pentium
M... Well, that makes for a pretty impressive
product, to the point that it amazes me anyone
would even consider a dual core P4 as
an alternative.
Actually, as an aside, we'll have to wait
for some performance numbers, but I do
believe the Geode will draw far less power than
the Pentium M. Unfortunately I expect it will
perform more like the Via C3 line, but if AMD
can get it at least into the realm of "tolerable"
(ie, at the last-gen 1 to 1.5 Ghz level), it
could still give the M a run for the laptop
market.
Low power g5 in a ws ibook, that would be
so nice.
Also-ran, anyone?
Seriously, not an anti-Apple troll, but this
strikes me as just a wee bit sad...
With both Intel and AMD having decent dual-core
offerings now (with AMD's absolutely dominating
anything else on the market for both performance
and low power), not to mention the
impending dual core Pentium-Ms... Combined with
Apple choosing to go with x86 (most likely,
the same aforementioned dual-Ms)...
Does IBM even have a market for these
anymore? This strikes me as nothing but wasted
effort on their part. Even their embedded market
won't care about this, when a few watts means far
more than a second core...
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor? Seriously!
Very much depends on how it died...
Did the controller roast? Try swapping it for another from the same exact model (and batch, if possible)... Only viable when the data has a value greater than the cost of a throw-away drive, but it works (Or at least it used to... Not sure how newer drives would work, since they keep track of bad spots on the disk and automatically avoid them).
Does it not spin up? Drive bearings seem like a pretty common point of failure - Try sticking it in the freezer overnight (no joke!), and see if you can get it to spin up one last time, just long enough to copy everything important off it (And make damned sure you know what you want, and in what order you value it,, because you'll only get 15 minutes tops out of the drive this way).
Did you have a head crash? In that case, you don't really have any data left to recover. A professional recovery house could probably get 90% of it back, for a few grand, but the average Joe should consider it a total loss.
I've always used my newest harddrive as my backup drive, thinking that it would be the most reliable. guess I was wrong.
If you already have a well-organized system of backups, you might want to consider an offline backup-backup... With HDD space so cheap, you can set yourself up with a cheap Linux box with a TB of space for under $500. Turn it on, mirror your live backup system, then shut it back down... Repeat whenever you have enough new stuff that it would hurt too much to lose it.
As an aside, to keep this OT, I've never had a problem with the DiamondMax line from Maxtor. They supposedly had a crap run back in the late 90's, the ones Dell used in all their boxes (wouldn't know personally, I don't buy name brand PCs), but I have half a dozen (exactly) DiamondMaxes running, including two 10s, a 9+, and three from before that (don't have them visible and not about to shutdown a machine just to check, but definitely pre-9). Not a single failure yet.
I cant wait to see how secure the XBox360 will be
Fairly.
Don't mistake MS's "see, we tried" pretend attempts at security, and their "this hurts our bottom line" real security.
The original XBox still has no generally applicable software-only crack for it, after several years in the field. Real security.
This new "please don't pirate Windows" joke lasted 24 hours. Why? Microsoft WANTS people to pirate Windows. Very, very few private individuals would pay $300 for an OS plus $300 for an office app suite. However, if "everyone" uses it already, then the sort of customers who do buy, such as businesses and governments, will far more likely go with Microsoft.
Call me paranoid if you want, but NO modern attempt at secure authentication has any excuse for not using server-side verified, AES-encrypted communication. A pathetic little unverified Javascript toy? Gimme a break.
So delete its plugin.
Then you can open it as an external program, rather than inside FF.
Someone else posted the "right" way to do it, but I find just making the plugin vanish works more reliably and takes less time to "configure".
jklmnopqrstuVWxyz
abcdefghijklMNopq
ghijklmnopqrSTuvw
David Cutler? Never heard of 'im.
Except that this moves the time window to include more daylight hours, so you don't need to have your lights on. At least that is the theory.
Except that in practice, I have never, ever seen a place of business actually turn off the lights and depend on what comes through the window.
Quite the opposite, in fact - In rooms with a lot of windows ("Front" offices, for example), in the morning when too much sun comes in at a low angle, people draw the shades and turn on desk lamps in addition to the overhead lighting.
Personally, I think the clocks should stay constant
Agreed. If businesses can save a penny by changing when the workdway begins and ends, they most certainly will, without the need for our Nanny-in-DC to shove the idea down our throats.
Please, intentionally misunderstanding people in order to mock them is not a substitute for an argument.
I apologize for my vitriol if I took your statement the wrong way. I did not, however, "intentionally" misunderstand you, I took your words at face value (nor did I deliberatly ignore any apparent subtext) - Your choice of wording appeared to contrast this new chart with the standard one in a manner that gave the impression that you, not your students, found the old one had elements "arbitrarily shoved into place".
Perhaps my error arises from not seeing what you mean about this new chart having a more obvious visual organization... As I described, to me, it looks like the standard one merely folded in half. YMMV, though.
I did still go a tad overboard on the sarcasm, though, so another apology from me on that point.
Bad day. No excuse.
I teach chemistry
That scares me, considering that you then opine:
the elements within a group line up *not* because they've been arbitrarily shoved into place, but because they spiral out to the appropriate location
You mean, "arbitrary" as in, grouped into rows corresponding to ground state config (you know, those those silly S, P, and D orbitals - and F, but I don't think I've ever seen a periodic table with the Ls and As inline), and columns that instantly indicate the number of valence electrons?
Golly, that Mendelev must have just used a frickin' dart-board to place the elements, eh?
As for my opinion of this new chart - Purely in terms of placement, it doesn't gain or lose anything compared to the standard PT... It just takes all the elements up to full-D configuration and folds them in half, middle-inward, then takes the Actinides and Lanthanides and bends them downward so they fit - So in one sense, satisfying my comment above about never seeing them inline, but at the same time, violating the pattern established by the entire top half of the chart.
Now, for metadata... At least as presented, this new chart falls abysmally short of the simple, blocky standard periodic table form. Putting only the symbol on the chart and having the rest along the edge? Weak.
She will actually plan to watch a particular program (amazing I know).
Gotta agree, I suspect these results come from something along the very lines you propose.
VCR not intuitive? A VCR has basically the same sort of interface as a PVR, with the PVR quite a lot more complex. Biggest difference? You set a VCR to record by time, not by program.
Though, I have to admit that my viewing habits more closely resemble females ones, at least in that I watch specific programs, not just pick a channel and watch it. But fear not, my testosterone-laden brethren, I still loathe all commercials (It drives me batty when my SO stops to show me "that cute commercial [she] tried to tell [me] about"), and I still can't stand "chick" programming.
No longer true.
To me the logic is to prevent/deter theft on the individual passes
Theft? This doesn't prevent theft, it prevents two similar-sized families on vacation together, who plan to visit at least two different theme parks, from swapping multi-day passes between two sites to save a few bucks. The pass itself gets fully and properly paid for. This just helps Disney give a great big "FU" to people capable of planning ahead so as to minimize their costs. "Non transferable?" WTF does that really mean?
You dont associate your name with the individual pass, so they are only pinpointing "pass 106 has this finger structure with it"
Yeah, sure - LOTS of people will pay over a grand in cash for a week's pass for four people, plus one or two of the ticket "options" (I hope you like Disney's most famous ride, "search for a parking spot two miles away from the gate", if you don't add the "parkhopper" extra).
And we all know that no one has ever managed to use credit card data to identify the user, right?
Add to this the fact that, despite the manufacturer's claim, you can regenerate an image of the fingerprint from biometric scanners like this... It may not actually "store" the image, but it stores enough information to come up with a damn close fake (good enough to fool a human, and a computer would use the exact same features as stored to do a comparison in the first place!).
I ditched my last bank when they started requiring a thumbprint to cash checks ("Oh, I do? Well, do you need a thumbprint to withdraw cash? Great, I'd like to withdraw my entire account balance, please. Feel free to close out my account!" - Yeah, figure that out... To put money in, they wanted biometric ID against which they didn't even have any basis of comparison on file... But to take it out, a license and a smile will do). Where the hell does Disney get off requiring two fingers?
but I've returned two CDs because they had DRM on them, even though I wanted the CDs.
Wait - You actually found a CD with copy protection that works???
Wow... Consider me impressed! I've deliberately bought supposedly-uncopyable CDs (used, of course) in which I had no interest whatsoever, just to see if they would even slow down my attempts to rip them to FLAC (as with yourself, I rip for personal use only, I just have no need to carry around the over a thousand CDs in my collection when they'll all fit on the HDD of my laptop). And I have yet to find one that requires me to use some explicit circumvention technique to break a CD's DRM.
You can be for DRM, but against shitty implementations thereof? No wait, that would involve too much thought and judgement.
So, using your amazing powers of "thought and judgement", describe for us an unobtrusive form of DRM.
Well?
Any thoughts?
Didn't think so.
Most of us would have no problem with the idea of DRM, if any possible implementation didn't inherently either totally deprive us of anonymity (just because I bought a CD doesn't mean the **AA should suddenly know my complete medical history), or makes the DRM'd media inconvenient to an absurd degree. Or both.
Currently we only suffer the second half of that. I fully expect we'll see schemes pushing both those buttons in the near future, to which "only" suffering the first (ie, absolutely no anonymity, something like the content biometrically locked to a fully identified user) will "graciously" come as a relief from the loving folks at the **AA.
Keep in mind also that I currently have the "right" to loan things like books and CDs to friends. Include that capability in your grand idea of a tenable DRM scheme.
Do you think the movie industry is going to give you something playable on your un-DRMed box? You might pirate it.
Of course, that results in the inherent irony that MORE people will "pirate" it, ie, make a non-DRM'd copy, just so they can watch it on whatever the hell they want.
Many people (myself not excluded) already do this with movies - First thing they do with a new (or even rented) movie? Toss it in the PC and burn a copy, minus the PUOps. Does it take three times longer than watching even the worst of pre-movie commercials? Yup. Does it "feel" a million times better to waste that time (personally, I usually preparing dinner while waiting) than to sit through forced ads? Yup also.
I'll head the line to insult the ignorant masses of consuming sheeple, but even sheep will only take so much abuse before they saunter to the other side of the field. Consumer backlash to this crap has already started. I really don't think the **AA can push much further before they start to feel the public's squirrely wrath.
If I get any results at all, they're all old.
Just use the "advanced" search page, and limit the date to the past three months.
You'll still get some crap, but quite a lot less.
So you've just shifted the electrolysis problem further upstream and instead of using nice friendly water, you're passing current through nasty, mean molten salt.
But distribution becomes a simple matter of shipping a powder, rather than long-distance lossy electric transmission lines.
Imagine a few hundred square miles of Death Valley coated in solar cells, producing this powder. Or monster-scale wind turbines dotting the more inhospitable ridges of the Rockies. Or hell, why not even plain ol' nuclear power, far enough from a population center that even the most hard-core anti-nuclear weenies couldn't complain (how about on the Moon?).
Yes, solutions like this only move the problem of actual production upstream - But they let us move the production almost arbitrarily far away from the site of consumption, something we can't do so well using conventional electric distribution systems. This also provides a reasonably efficient form of long-term off-line storage, something else we can't currently do very efficiently (giant battery banks?), for example to use excess winter generation capacity to help offset increased summer demand.
I already have the hardware. Now, I am being forced to purchase MORE hardware, against my will.
No, you already have the hardware for something that you simple assumed would continue to exist, for free, forever. Well, that particular free ride has ended. You don't need to get a car, but you do need to switch busses, if you want to keep riding for free.
As for "forcing" you to upgrade - I've heard that one over and over, and it hasn't gotten any more true through repetition. No one needs to switch. It simply amazes me that so many people seem to have this sense of entitlement to watch free analogue television. Guess what? You don't. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that the goverment will provide, or force private industry to provide, bread and circuses. Can't get a local DTV signal strong enough, or can't afford to upgrade to cable? Read a book. If an emergency happens, you'll still have a radio.
And, if digital TV is so important to freeing up those RF ranges, why can I walk into a Best Buy today and still buy a pure Analog television?
Because as long as people will still buy them, stores will still sell them. Thus, the need for the FCC to step in and say "enough".
If you'd like a good historical precedent for this change, before modern radio, we had something called "sparkgap", a fairly self-descriptive technology - You make a spark across a gap, key it like a telegraph, and voila, you can receive it a good distance away with mindlessly simple equipment. The problem? It drowns out anything nearby across the entire useful RF spectrum.
With DTV, we have a similar problem - Digital takes a tenth of the bandwidth of analog TV, for incredibly higher quality. It takes much more sophisticated decoding equipment, but in the long run, we'll all benefit as a result.
I'll give you a hint: union regulations that prohibit firing someone just for being completely fucking incompetent at their job.
I feel fairly strongly anti-union as well, but really, this has nothing to do with unions or competence.
Scenario - You work at a department store. Your boss tells you a shipment of books just came in, put 'em out on display. You comply. Oh, look at this, that new Harry Potter book finally came out? Cool, you might pick that up, "for your niece", when you get off tonight.
As much as publishers and upper management cares about things like release dates, your average drone does not. Even if the box says in BIG BOLD LETTERS, "Do not open until foo", well, how many boxes have you seen that say "this side up", up-side-down? Or "fragile", so badly beaten that you don't even need a box-cutter to get the product out of the box?
The last time I looked, Itanium was more efficient than *PENTIUM M*
... stomp.
Ahahahahahaa... Good one. You guys crack me up, sometimes. Intel's own numbers shows the low voltage (aka "piss-poor performance") version as still drawing 62W. The last "real" version, the Madison core, draws an impressive 130W. Ah, but you meant to refer to the dual core one, correct? Well now, that changes everything! To realize the draw you gave (not quite half of 99W, but I'll let that slide for now), should I cut one in half with a hacksaw, or just smash a bit of it up with a really small hammer?
more efficient than *PENTIUM M*, let alone mobile athlon(64)s.
The 1MB cache LV mobile Athlon 64 has a TDP of 19W.
The ULV Pentium M-753 (Dothan core) draws... 5W. Five. Stomp stomp stomp... stomp...
5W<42.5W. 19W<42.5W. 42.5W<(99/2)W. 99W<130W. Please play again.
You can't fucking compare the energy efficiency of chips made with different size transistors, fuckwit.
Yes, actually, you can. I chose to measure it in terms of "Slashdot trolls I have to put up with per watt".
You could also use a more meaningful number, such as megaflops per watt, or even FPS in Doom 3 per watt. But only considering the per-gate waste doesn't tell you anything particularly meaningful - Doing so strikes me as similar to trying to compare the brightness of a 100W incandescent light-bulb to an LCD monitor based on the worst-case draw of a single pixel.
How many gates does it have total, how well does it make use of them, and does it keep idle sections of the chip active also matters rather a lot. Using half as much power per state change doesn't matter if it takes 10x as many transistors to get the same job done.
Many people here only know what has been said on Slashdot about the Itanium.
You only need to know three things about the Itanium to pretty much automatically rule it out:
1) Heat (and the related, power consumption). Not a joke, not a rumor. The Itanium makes the Prescott core look cool and energy-efficient by comparison.
2) Not designed to run the software in use by 99.5% of the PC market. Great for a custom supercomputer, okay for some servers, complete shit for normal desktop use.
3) Price. They hope to make it competitive by 2007? How long has it existed now, at 3-10x the price of the highest end x86 CPU? And someone actually needs to ask why it hasn't hit mainstream use yet?
That about does it for me, anyway. Did I miss something obvious here? I don't see this as a case of the rumor mill damning it, just its own HUGE shortcomings to offset its single good point (namely, good performance for a very limited set of uses).
Like, Oh... My... Gawd!
Scholastic has totally failed to take time zones into consideration! Just think about the billions they will lose from people living on the borders of time zones, buying in one and selling at a huge markup in the other - At only 11:04pm!!!
Oh, wait... Scholastic still gets its cover price. Rowling still gets her cut. Everyone (legitimately) involved still gets paid, including some otherwise-uninvolved middle-man who gets a few bucks from parents with more money than sense.
I think I've lost my faith - Someone explain to me again why this matters?
Hey buddy, I have one and you can buy it before anyone else for only $150
Why not?
Hell, they should do that themselves!
Anyone stupid enough to pay 10x as much to read the exact same content 12-40hrs earlier... Well, I think an old adage about a fool and their money applies here.
Now, someone else's point about merchandising opportunities seems quite a lot more likely. This has nothing to do with making it fair to all the happy little Harry P fans, and everything to do with not undercutting the massive cross-media promotional opportunities. Though, admittedly, I can't quite see how having some people read the book a half day early would even affect that so much, unless it really sucked hard...
And on a seperate note, what the hell did they spend $24 million on?
Politicians. Even the SUV-loving twits at the EPA balked a tad at the thought of filling our landfills with these plastic monstrosities "constructed like a tank" (straight from TFA) for what amounts to a medium coffee.
Otherwise... Well, we've all seen "Quik-Heet" hand and foot warmers. Same thing, different (but equally common) set of chemicals. Not a whole lot of R&D needed to figure out "keep the dry part dry and the wet part wet until needed, using an easily punctured membrane".
The point of the article is that nothing the workstations do can (supposedly) compromise the SERVERS which are on their own internal network.
I would respectfully disagree... The "point" of the article appeared to suggest that server admins do the same things they've always done (functional isolation? Differing security levels for less/more critical/sensitive servers? Sandboxing? Whoah, radical stuff there!), and then turned into an advertisement for Xen.
However, the submitter unwisely chose the title "Tear Down the Firewall". Regardless of server administration, real-world networks have servers and workstations (with human, non-IT users of those workstations). Thus, I took exception to that idea. As for the specific points I responded to - Well, #1 says it all... "The roof is leaky". If you can show me a system, that has NO bugs or vulnerabilities, I'll show you the next system from which we'll hear about a major customer information leak occurring.
I'd saying locking down the user so they can't install ANYTHING
1) More difficult to do that it sounds - Someone will always find a way around any level of restriction, and once one person finds it, they all know it. Not to mention, this leads to an interesting HR paradox - You want employees to have computer skills, but not enough to potentialy circumvent security "casually" (as in, not maliciously, but breaking the rules to get the job done more efficiently).
2) My "users" include people above me in the corporate food chain. I can't tell them not to lick the outlets, but I can quietly put little plastic widgets in the socket to keep curious tongues out.
3) Simply put, happy workers get more done. Telling people that you consider them idiots unworthy of trusting with access to their own desktop machines, whether true or not, does not make them happy - Quite the opposite. OTOH, as a well-studied example, giving them dummy thermostats that let them think they have some control over the climate makes people far, far happier, even though the central HVAC stays set at 72F year-round.
I've worked in environments with the sort of policy you suggest, and they simply don't work. They crush morale, breed resentment against IT, and perhaps most important, don't accomplish the desired goal (namely, having a 100% controlled environment to work in - Even cooperative users make such a goal impossible, nevermind those who will deliberately try to get around restrictions).
Compare that to my current situation, in which people appreciate my presence. They call to ask for my help, not to complain that blind-policy-X has once again blocked them from doing their job. When I send out an email telling people about a new threat, I get concerned reponses asking for clarification so no one accidentally exposes themselves at home, either; not people second-guessing me about whether the threat really exists or just threatens my fascist control of their access.
You're going to update your firewall rules for every oddball Internet site?
No. AV and anti-spyware software takes care of 99.9% of the problems automatically. I only need to worry about the "legitimate" software deciding to phone home to mom to tell it all about what it did today. The "cute" software that poses only a marginal threat (perhaps just checking for updates with a frequency that would saturate a T1) yet may readily lure users into installing it. Microsoft's update site (my users update when I decide to SUS one out, damnit!).
As for actual websites, I don't particularly care what web sites people visit... They run FireFox in a reduced privelage context, thereby limiting any damage to depriving themselves of surfing the web until I get around to fixing it for them (a low priority, as they all know).
You ARE a sys admin, right?
Depends what you mean by that
the roof is leaky
Sometimes (ie, with Windows), you already know the roof leaks, and can't do a hell of a lot about it. Sometimes (ssh vulnerability, for example), the roof leaks in places you don't know, and you'll only find out when you go to look at those irreplaceable and now water-destroyed family photos you kept in a corner of the attic.
you want to make your yard free of rain
Yes, I occasionally throw summer parties (a (legit) visiting laptop connecting to my WAP). Though I have a wonderful umbrella for my own use, I would prefer the rain not affect the comfort of my possibly umbrella-impaired visitors.
you own a number of houses, and want to ensure they will be free of rain even if the houses' caretakers are idiots
You don't have a (non-geek) SO, do you?
For that matter, you also apparently don't have any coworkers who just lurve having those cute little mouse pointers, enhanced IM smileys, and "need" to know the weather on a second-by-second basis. Yeah, I could lock down every one of their machines - Or I can just block the relevant sites at the firewall. Which takes less work if a similar new annoyance appears?
And if you want to use the firewall to block off unneeded services, why in the hell are you running them in the first place?
Watch your gateway traffic from a normal, healthy, secure XP network (pretend all of the above don't count as an oxymoron). It might surprise you (and scare the hell out of you) to see how many totally legitimate programs phone home for no good reason (XP itself not the least of the offenders).
Are you saying that AMD has something that beats the Pentium M? Can you back that up?
No. The M certainly beats even the Venice core for power consumption (though not by much, when a fan alone can draw more than either of them at idle) - No arguing that, Intel wins that battle for now.
But when the dual Athlon 64s trounce Intel's best offerings, and with a power consumption at least in the same ballpark as the Pentium M... Well, that makes for a pretty impressive product, to the point that it amazes me anyone would even consider a dual core P4 as an alternative.
Actually, as an aside, we'll have to wait for some performance numbers, but I do believe the Geode will draw far less power than the Pentium M. Unfortunately I expect it will perform more like the Via C3 line, but if AMD can get it at least into the realm of "tolerable" (ie, at the last-gen 1 to 1.5 Ghz level), it could still give the M a run for the laptop market.
Low power g5 in a ws ibook, that would be so nice.
Also-ran, anyone?
Seriously, not an anti-Apple troll, but this strikes me as just a wee bit sad...
With both Intel and AMD having decent dual-core offerings now (with AMD's absolutely dominating anything else on the market for both performance and low power), not to mention the impending dual core Pentium-Ms... Combined with Apple choosing to go with x86 (most likely, the same aforementioned dual-Ms)...
Does IBM even have a market for these anymore? This strikes me as nothing but wasted effort on their part. Even their embedded market won't care about this, when a few watts means far more than a second core...