High profile devices, placed at an altitude that would have rendered shrapnel pretty much ineffective. (I watched the videos of them PLACING the damn things all over Boston...) Here's a clue: High profile, low cost, low risk- without drawing attention to the devices or people until the act actually goes down. Light-brights made out of LEDs and D-cells do not make for this- they draw attention to themselves.
They EODed an unknown device. If they were being serious about a potential terrorist act, you HAVE to assume the possibility of Sarin, Tabun, VX or similar- or a weaponized biological agent. EODing the stuff is the worst possible thing you could have done as it'd very likely distribute the damn stuff instead of dispose of it.
I'm sorry, but this was an overreaction by this City. From start to finish. Worse, they did everything wrong if it wasn't one.
...but it's PAINFULLY true. I'd have modded this "Insightful" instead of "Funny"- because it's dead to rights accurate.
We've handed the terrorists another high-payoff, extreme low cost, attack with a very definite soft-target- and they now know we'll do almost all of their work FOR THEM.
Heh... The hackers are already DOING this stuff- on similar devices, even.
You're going to find that the black/grey hats will be buying a Nokia 770 or it's next generation, buying one of the alterable PocketPC's, or a cheap laptop and running Metasploit or SPIKE/MOSDEF on them- all of which are legit tools and available as LGPL or similar licensed code. And, in the case of SPIKE/MOSDEF, you're using the underlying engine for CANVAS anyhow...
All this does is provide commercial support and exploit updates for a year. $3600 is a bit high for that sort of thing, but hey...
Considering that 8 primary stock market exchanges happen to generate 30 Gb of data by themselves over the Internet by and of themselves- EVERY DAY THEY'RE OPEN. It's enough to swallow an OC3 by itself during trading at it's peaks. And that would have to be tracked just like everything else if you adhered to the stupid bill.
Boston. I'm not QUITE sure what to make of this observation, myself, but having been here for a handful of months now, I can't precisely say I'm at all surprised, really.
Everything, drivers-wise, is pretty much a userspace driver unless it's supplied by MS directly in Vista.
It's slower than XP. It's more resource intensive than XP.
You're going to find that you're going to have to throw more muscle at it to get performance out of it.
After having seen it in use and "used" it for the last four months, I can say that I've little use for it- much less than XP, and I've little use for XP to begin with. You can wait for it to be a better performer than XP, but you're likely to wait until there's no more support for XP in the hardware. Then you'll be forced to make a choice, do without, use Linux, or use Vista.
You're playing the terror game yourself. Please stop.
An IED would be a bit bigger than this- and if not, where it was PLACED wouldn't have done anything to anyone.
As a bomb, these things would have been worthless- at most you would have put about 1 pound of HE in it. One pound of C4 MIGHT hurt someone at point blank range or at a slightly larger range if made up to be a fragmentation device. Neither were evident and at the distances they were placed they wouldn't have been effective at all as IEDs (I saw the video footage of their Boston sign placement run- sorry, don't buy the IED angle at all with this whole thing.
If the signs had been a biochem weapon, the Police did precisely the wrong thing as the EOD they did on one of the signs would have spread the damn weaponized substance all over the damn place. You don't just EOD something unless you know precisely what it is. Too much risk of bad things happening with it.
Here's a hint... A terrorist is NOT going to go about doing something like this, and if so, they'd have already accomplished it because the signs had been up for about a week before ANYONE noticed. And doing these little signs that draw attention to themselves wouldn't be how they would have went about this- they'd have hidden it in the common trash that seems to lie about in this town in varying places and it would have went off. Worse, they're not going to go do a low payoff thing like what Boston keeps trying to paint this looking like. They're going to go for another 9-11 type payoff and there's still quite a few things that the bad guys can do to us that we're NOT worrying about.
Boston, and to a lesser extent, the Feds, way overreacted to the situation.
Heh, I've been handling and doing what he's not succeeded at for the better part of 8 years now in various, largely MS-only, shops. If I weren't needing to work on both Windows and Linux drivers (mostly Windows support right at the moment- heh, my boss missed that little detail when I signed on for this contract...) I'd be doing it right now. It's not hard to do, really. In most cases, they don't even KNOW you're not using a 2000/XP machine- it's that seamless. A properly set up Exchange server can be talked with by Evolution- without ANY issues. OpenOffice handles everything but "fancy" stuff from MS Office, and it's very debatable that someone actually NEEDS to use that stuff. For the rest, the vertical apps, etc. there's WINE and CrossOver- and they work rather nicely.
And it's a tough call- there's so many to choose from.
Phonograph (Edison) Light Bulb (Edison) AC Power System (Tesla) Remote Control System (Tesla) Bladeless Turbine (Tesla) Steam Engine (Watt) Hot Air Engine (Stirling)
And so forth...
Each of the above has had an impact or will have an impact on all of our lives in a very major way. It's a shame, really, that they're limiting the competition to UK citizens.
The government peoples are all going "This proves the system works! See, we did good!"... I say "No, it proves that in an actual terrorist bombing situation, we'd all be dead for a couple of weeks before 'the system' caught up."
Bingo! Everyone that has no clue about this stuff is going around like Chicken Little- "Oh, MY! The Terrorists are going to do us all in!"
This is not to say that there's not a problem. This is not to say there's not a risk.
This is to say that we've got a LOT bigger problems that quite honestly they're going to exploit a lot further along than placing itty-bitty bombs or bio-chemical weapons in very obvious, very definitely out in the open places. This whole thing is endemic of the silliness that goes for responding to the real problem terrorism brings to the table.
It was wholey designed to garner this kind of attention and I don't really find it funny that a large chunk of taxpayer's money is being spent investigating what is effectively a burning paper bag full of doo doo.
No, it was solely designed to just draw attention and do it cheaply. Unfortunately, a bunch of people overreacted (Funny that...) and don't quite know when to let it all go- and keep overreacting.
How many pounds of C4 (Which would be the most potent explosive you could lay hands on...) do you think you could put in there?
1? 2?
You MIGHT be able to hurt someone with it like you would with an anti-personnel mine, but damage the bridge or anything else that would rate this sort of reaction? Nope.
In order to do something serious with the stuff- say take out armored vehicles, you'd need MUCH more than what could have ever been deployed in something that size:
US M21 AT Mine: 11 lbs of explosive. US M15 AT Mine: 21 lbs of explosive. Type 72 non-metallic AT mine: 11 lbs of explosive.
AP mines have varying weights of explosive but usually it's something like 1.5-3 lbs.
To be sure, it might have been a risk if it WERE a bomb, but it didn't merit the reactions that we've seen. It's not like a car-bomb where you might find hundreds of pounds of explosive in it...
Some of it's Microsoft's doing, yes. But it's a lot more complicated than that.
"Show me the money" "We have to protect our IP"
Those two statements I get told QUITE often in relation to my driver consulting work I currently do.
Both are varying degrees of wrong- and where the trick lies is in convincing the company in question that it's wrong to hold that position in the first place. Both are very difficult to shift because they're usually NOT fact based positions to begin with.
I've done it before. It's doable in proportion to the complexity of the device. Most industrial I/O devices will be doable this way- a 3D accelerator or an iWARP channel adapter would be pretty much impossible without at least one if not multiple instances of the device in hand.
You'll need a big cluebat to get a lot of these companies to wise up. The real reason that they don't give out programming interface information is because they're listening to a lot of IP Lawyers that tell them they have to keep everything secret or it might affect future patentability of future devices (YES, I've seen that A LOT lately, doing Linux driver consulting for some of the crowd willing to do proprietary driver work...), etc.
It's a mixture of worries about revealing possible Patent infringements, trying to slavishly follow the lawyer's advice, and a confusion as to what business they are precisely in (Software versus hardware- a lot of companies, because of the advice of their IP lawyers are confused as to what they should be doing...).
The costs of making a driver are minimal, even to the point of most devices actually showing a profit because they sell more than enough devices to offset the extra costs. The only really obvious exception to this would be a 3D accelerator driver- and even then, it's more of a chicken and egg situation. The profit could be there if they'd sink the money.
And here I thought that Vista would be a technical security risk. Heh, little did I know that MS would do something idiotic like this to go with the lot. I'd be strongly dissuading ANYONE who was my client to go do this "upgrade" because of this alone (never mind the potential and REAL security risks that the OS seems to have...).
...the cost of penetrating the defenses of the savvy user is much higher than just spooging "Buy! V|AGr4 N0W!@" emails all over the place, hoping some of them 'stick'...
So the odds of them bothering are lower, though not completely out of the picture. They just keep upping the ante once the clever ones pass down effective answers to block/bounce the damn stuff to the less clever people because it's not gotten too expensive for these monkeys to stop flinging the electronic poo around.
The Ultracaps, IF they've pulled it off, will have to be able handle a dead short in the stacked cells for a pack or you'll have >350W/kg dumped in about a millisecond or so. That's a LOT of energy- if you thought exploding Dell's because of a Li-Ion pack were impressive... If they can't ensure no instant discharge in the case of cell damage, you're going to want to spread them all throughout the car with a distribution bus instead of a single pullable pack that gets a new one replaced to "fuel up" your car, not to mention it's going to be a big bulky thing that's not easily pulled. You're going to want an inductive charging system for safety reasons.
While it's not backed by gold or silver, it IS backed by a commodity's valuation...
Stop and think about what one thing that everyone in the "first world" countries want that is a natural resource... That one thing can only be bought with ONE currency. You can't buy it in Euros, Francs, etc.- only in US Dollars.
Once you realize this, many of the things that the US does and have done over the years snap into clarity.
No, because the value of a company's stock is based on real assets, liabilities, and income: all of which are easily translatable to real money, and which commonly pay cash dividends.
Heh. That's RICH.
Stock valuation might be based on that if you're talking IBM or GE, but unless it's one of the stocks on QQQ or one of the NYSE blue chips, you're not investing against that- and the valuation is based on a lot of things utterly unrelated to the things you mention. Working the stock market (or any securities market, for that matter...) you're purely gambling on the valuation going up (Going long...) or going down (Shorting a stock...). And Second Life is a LOT like the Stock Market- a lot more than you think. In fact, most of the money in the stock market is made precisely the way you describe making money out of Second Life or in playing games like Arbitrage right at the moment.
It's performance is on a par with the IGP's about 3 iterations back from ATI- mostly due to immature drivers. It's closer in performance to the previous generation of integrated graphics (Which happens to be a chip from the previous era of GPUs with a vastly lower power consumption due to process shrink and logic improvements...)- some things it bests ATI's chips, other things ATI's chip with it's current drivers pastes it all over the place. The chip's capable of quite a bit more, but it's hampered by an immature driver (gee, this sounds familiar...) so it's a mixed bag right at the moment. The Larabee Group, depending on what they do, might actually give the other players a run for their money.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, please.
High profile devices, placed at an altitude that would have rendered shrapnel pretty much ineffective. (I watched the videos of them PLACING the damn things all over Boston...) Here's a clue: High profile, low cost, low risk- without drawing attention to the devices or people until the act
actually goes down. Light-brights made out of LEDs and D-cells do not make for this- they draw attention to themselves.
They EODed an unknown device. If they were being serious about a potential terrorist act, you HAVE to assume the possibility of
Sarin, Tabun, VX or similar- or a weaponized biological agent. EODing the stuff is the worst possible thing you could have done
as it'd very likely distribute the damn stuff instead of dispose of it.
I'm sorry, but this was an overreaction by this City. From start to finish. Worse, they did everything wrong if it wasn't one.
...but it's PAINFULLY true. I'd have modded this "Insightful" instead of "Funny"- because it's dead to rights accurate.
We've handed the terrorists another high-payoff, extreme low cost, attack with a very definite soft-target- and they
now know we'll do almost all of their work FOR THEM.
Heh... The hackers are already DOING this stuff- on similar devices, even.
You're going to find that the black/grey hats will be buying a Nokia 770 or it's next generation,
buying one of the alterable PocketPC's, or a cheap laptop and running Metasploit or SPIKE/MOSDEF
on them- all of which are legit tools and available as LGPL or similar licensed code. And, in the
case of SPIKE/MOSDEF, you're using the underlying engine for CANVAS anyhow...
All this does is provide commercial support and exploit updates for a year. $3600 is a bit high for
that sort of thing, but hey...
It's a $3600 Nokia WebPad with custom software on it.
Considering the new WebPads and all being available and supported (unlike the Zaurus...), I think I'll go with that instead...
Considering that 8 primary stock market exchanges happen to generate 30 Gb of data by themselves over the Internet by and of themselves- EVERY DAY THEY'RE OPEN. It's enough to swallow an OC3 by itself during trading at it's peaks. And that would have to be tracked just like everything else if you adhered to the stupid bill.
Boston. I'm not QUITE sure what to make of this observation, myself, but having been here for a handful of months now,
I can't precisely say I'm at all surprised, really.
Everything, drivers-wise, is pretty much a userspace driver unless it's supplied by MS directly in Vista.
It's slower than XP.
It's more resource intensive than XP.
You're going to find that you're going to have to throw more muscle at it to get performance out of it.
After having seen it in use and "used" it for the last four months, I can say that I've little use
for it- much less than XP, and I've little use for XP to begin with. You can wait for it to be
a better performer than XP, but you're likely to wait until there's no more support for XP in the
hardware. Then you'll be forced to make a choice, do without, use Linux, or use Vista.
You're playing the terror game yourself. Please stop.
An IED would be a bit bigger than this- and if not, where it was PLACED wouldn't have done anything to anyone.
As a bomb, these things would have been worthless- at most you would have put about 1 pound of HE in it.
One pound of C4 MIGHT hurt someone at point blank range or at a slightly larger range if made up to be
a fragmentation device. Neither were evident and at the distances they were placed they wouldn't have
been effective at all as IEDs (I saw the video footage of their Boston sign placement run- sorry, don't
buy the IED angle at all with this whole thing.
If the signs had been a biochem weapon, the Police did precisely the wrong thing as the EOD they did on
one of the signs would have spread the damn weaponized substance all over the damn place. You don't
just EOD something unless you know precisely what it is. Too much risk of bad things happening with it.
Here's a hint... A terrorist is NOT going to go about doing something like this, and if so, they'd have
already accomplished it because the signs had been up for about a week before ANYONE noticed. And doing
these little signs that draw attention to themselves wouldn't be how they would have went about this- they'd
have hidden it in the common trash that seems to lie about in this town in varying places and it would have
went off. Worse, they're not going to go do a low payoff thing like what Boston keeps trying to paint this
looking like. They're going to go for another 9-11 type payoff and there's still quite a few things that
the bad guys can do to us that we're NOT worrying about.
Boston, and to a lesser extent, the Feds, way overreacted to the situation.
Heh, I've been handling and doing what he's not succeeded at for the better part of 8 years now in various, largely MS-only, shops. If I weren't needing to work on both Windows and Linux drivers (mostly Windows support right at the moment- heh, my boss missed that little detail when I signed on for this contract...) I'd be doing it right now. It's not hard to do, really. In most cases, they don't even KNOW you're not using a 2000/XP machine- it's that seamless. A properly set up Exchange server can be talked with by Evolution- without ANY issues. OpenOffice handles everything but "fancy" stuff from MS Office, and it's very debatable that someone actually NEEDS to use that stuff. For the rest, the vertical apps, etc. there's WINE and CrossOver- and they work rather nicely.
And it's a tough call- there's so many to choose from.
Phonograph (Edison)
Light Bulb (Edison)
AC Power System (Tesla)
Remote Control System (Tesla)
Bladeless Turbine (Tesla)
Steam Engine (Watt)
Hot Air Engine (Stirling)
And so forth...
Each of the above has had an impact or will have an impact on all of our lives in a very major way. It's a shame, really, that they're limiting the competition to UK citizens.
This is not to say that there's not a problem. This is not to say there's not a risk.
This is to say that we've got a LOT bigger problems that quite honestly they're going to exploit a lot further along than placing itty-bitty bombs or bio-chemical weapons in very obvious, very definitely out in the open places. This whole thing is endemic of the silliness that goes for responding to the real problem terrorism brings to the table.
Sigh... A bomb...
I looked at the pics.
How many pounds of C4 (Which would be the most potent explosive you could lay hands on...) do you think you could put in there?
1?
2?
You MIGHT be able to hurt someone with it like you would with an anti-personnel mine, but damage the bridge or anything else
that would rate this sort of reaction? Nope.
In order to do something serious with the stuff- say take out armored vehicles, you'd need MUCH more than what could have
ever been deployed in something that size:
US M21 AT Mine: 11 lbs of explosive.
US M15 AT Mine: 21 lbs of explosive.
Type 72 non-metallic AT mine: 11 lbs of explosive.
AP mines have varying weights of explosive but usually it's something like 1.5-3 lbs.
To be sure, it might have been a risk if it WERE a bomb, but it didn't merit the reactions that we've seen. It's not like
a car-bomb where you might find hundreds of pounds of explosive in it...
Some of it's Microsoft's doing, yes. But it's a lot more complicated than that.
"Show me the money"
"We have to protect our IP"
Those two statements I get told QUITE often in relation to my driver consulting work I currently do.
Both are varying degrees of wrong- and where the trick lies is in convincing the company in question that it's wrong to hold that position in the first place. Both are very difficult to shift because they're usually NOT fact based positions to begin with.
I've done it before. It's doable in proportion to the complexity of the device. Most industrial I/O devices will be doable this way- a 3D accelerator or an iWARP channel adapter would be pretty much impossible without at least one if not multiple instances of the device in hand.
You'll need a big cluebat to get a lot of these companies to wise up. The real reason that they don't give out programming interface information is because they're listening to a lot of IP Lawyers that tell them they have to keep everything secret or it might affect future patentability of future devices (YES, I've seen that A LOT lately, doing Linux driver consulting for some of the crowd willing to do proprietary driver work...), etc.
It's a mixture of worries about revealing possible Patent infringements, trying to slavishly follow the lawyer's advice, and a confusion as to what business they are precisely in (Software versus hardware- a lot of companies, because of the advice of their IP lawyers are confused as to what they should be doing...).
The costs of making a driver are minimal, even to the point of most devices actually showing a profit because they sell more than enough devices to offset the extra costs. The only really obvious exception to this would be a 3D accelerator driver- and even then, it's more of a chicken and egg situation. The profit could be there if they'd sink the money.
And here I thought that Vista would be a technical security risk. Heh, little did I know that MS would do something idiotic like this to go with the lot. I'd be strongly dissuading ANYONE who was my client to go do this "upgrade" because of this alone (never mind the potential and REAL security risks that the OS seems to have...).
...the cost of penetrating the defenses of the savvy user is much higher than just spooging "Buy! V|AGr4 N0W!@" emails all over the place, hoping some of them 'stick'...
So the odds of them bothering are lower, though not completely out of the picture. They just keep upping the ante once the clever ones pass down effective answers to block/bounce the damn stuff to the less clever people because it's not gotten too expensive for these monkeys to stop flinging the electronic poo around.
He'd have owed money on the donations as well. The whole US Tax code is insanely screwed up to begin with.
The Ultracaps, IF they've pulled it off, will have to be able handle a dead short in the stacked cells for a pack or you'll have >350W/kg dumped in about a millisecond or so. That's a LOT of energy- if you thought exploding Dell's because of a Li-Ion pack were impressive... If they can't ensure no instant discharge in the case of cell damage, you're going to want to spread them all throughout the car with a distribution bus instead of a single pullable pack that gets a new one replaced to "fuel up" your car, not to mention it's going to be a big bulky thing that's not easily pulled. You're going to want an inductive charging system for safety reasons.
While it's not backed by gold or silver, it IS backed by a commodity's valuation...
Stop and think about what one thing that everyone in the "first world" countries want that is a natural resource...
That one thing can only be bought with ONE currency. You can't buy it in Euros, Francs, etc.- only in US Dollars.
Once you realize this, many of the things that the US does and have done over the years snap into clarity.
Heh. That's RICH.
Stock valuation might be based on that if you're talking IBM or GE, but unless it's one of the stocks on QQQ or one of the NYSE blue chips, you're not investing against that- and the valuation is based on a lot of things utterly unrelated to the things you mention. Working the stock market (or any securities market, for that matter...) you're purely gambling on the valuation going up (Going long...) or going down (Shorting a stock...). And Second Life is a LOT like the Stock Market- a lot more than you think. In fact, most of the money in the stock market is made precisely the way you describe making money out of Second Life or in playing games like Arbitrage right at the moment.
It's performance is on a par with the IGP's about 3 iterations back from ATI- mostly due to immature drivers. It's closer in performance to the previous generation of integrated graphics (Which happens to be a chip from the previous era of GPUs with a vastly lower power consumption due to process shrink and logic improvements...)- some things it bests ATI's chips, other things ATI's chip with it's current drivers pastes it all over the place. The chip's capable of quite a bit more, but it's hampered by an immature driver (gee, this sounds familiar...) so it's a mixed bag right at the moment. The Larabee Group, depending on what they do, might actually give the other players a run for their money.
Not anywhere near enough caffene for the morning...