My brother-in-law is a plastic surgeon specializing in hands. He told me last year that fully a *third* of his surgeries are to repair damage caused by these plastic packages. Most commonly, people get frustrated and apply extra force with a knife, which then slips and cuts across the palm of the hand, slicing through some of the tendons and nerves that control the fingers. It is a real mess to repair apparently. Or people cut themselves up on the sharp plastic edges by trying to rip open the package with their hands and brute force.
The sad part - is virtually none of those injuries would happen, no - not by changing the packaging, but if people wouldn't be such damm idiots. Use a *good* knife, a little common sense, and a little patience and you'll have the contents of the package out in no time with no injury and no damage to the product. (Most folks knives and scissors are about as sharp as the average 2x4 - edges must be maintained folks!.)
Let's have a show of hands from all the kind folks who have attempted to open a plastic bag of spaghetti at the seams, only to have it rip down the sides sending noodles flying all over the kitchen floor. I've never understood the logic of using a glue that is stronger than the material it is intended to seal.
There is this cool tool, been around for centuries, designed for just such occasions - scissors. Don't blame the manufacturer for your own idiocy.
Most importantly, how do the manufacturers imagine people are supposed to open those things? I would really like to know the answer to this.
Probably the same way I do - by simply grabbing my pocket knife and cutting them open. (Except when flying and on Christmas morning, it lives in my pants pocket. Christmas Eve, I'll leave it on the bookcase next to the tree before going to bed.)
I find it difficult to believe that they would've evolved this kind of technology (concrete) and used it exclusively for the task of pyramid-building.
That's because you don't live in a primitive era where the local boss was considered an actual deity (the reincarnation of Horus, if I recall my amateur Egyptology correctly).
That's not the problem - the problem is why concrete technology would have been abandoned with the end of the pyramid era, rather than being adapted to other usages. Equally, during the pyramid era - why wasn't it used for the funerary temples associated with the pyramids?
I have several customers that now want more than my word about the security of the systems that have worked for them flawlessly for over 5-6 years now with minimal expense outside of upgrades and patching for security.
It's a damm good thing I'm not one of your customers - because if I saw this, I'd drop you like a hot rock and go find an honest vendor. You've been pushing the religion of OSS - without any facts to back you up. When asked for facts... You have to go the lame route of asking Slashdot rather than having them at your fingertips!
Folks, you want to know why OSS is having such a hard time gaining market and mindshare? The OP is a prime exhibit of the reason - too many zealots who confuse philosophy with business.
EA lost their direction a long time ago. I used to play Ultima Online until EA bought it out.
Which of course has the order of events exactly reversed... Because EA bought Origin Systems in 1992, while Ultima Online was launched nearly five years later - in 1997.
My dad always used to tell me that when Alexandria was burned, all the publications holding the Roman recipe for concrete went with it. That, he claimed, was why all concrete poured was inferior to the Roman Aqueducts.
That's a nice theory - but the aqueducts were built of stone, not concrete.
The fact that the some of the aqueducts still hold their accuracy within inches of their architectural specifications after 2000 years is nothing to overlook.
Given that we don't have the architectural specifications - that's a claim utterly without support. (And given how few miles out of the original number still stand and are capable of carrying water....)
In all honesty, if you were to ask me to construct a pyramid today--knowing what I know, I would build the core of the pyramid out of laid brick. And then I would, starting from the bottom, form up the angled sides and fill in those areas. If you're wondering why I would take this route, try it with paper. Cut out blocks of paper from a notebook without making marks and try to make a perfect angled edge between them. Pretty difficult. Now try it in three dimensions with 2000 year old tools.
That says more about your [lack of] knowledge of ancient tools and building methods than it does about pyramid building techniques.
They had tools for both measuring and marking stone - and tools to measure angles. The had wood and tools from which to build jigs, and metals from which to build measuring rods. Using those tools - it's far, far easier to build the interior from large blocks of stone (as they did) than by forming and casting an order of magnitude more bricks.
This is an absolutely amazing project. Forget the space program; forget SETI--if this thing works as designed, pure science will gain more in 2008 than it did in the previous decade. But, they need your help! The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion. Even smaller errors can add up, damaging the accelerator over time. The LHC@home project lets you donate your spare CPU cycles to help calibrate the machine in order to minimize the risk of accidental wall collisions. Come on, I know there must be some physics geeks out there... show your support! Given the sorry state of pure science research in the USA, this may be your only chance...
Before you go rushing off, a word of warning... LHC@Home is just barely this side of an being an ex-parrot. With the near completion of the magnet system, work come in spurts with considerable time between them. (If you already run BOINC, it's quite suitable as a side project. If you don't already run BOINC, please consider also running one of the other available projects.)
No, in the main the responses don't actually cover this. The subject I discuss is your inane assumption that 'if you know you are going to fail, you have no need to test'.
If you have an obviously insecure network (social and/or technical) a penetration test is going to find the holes you already know about. Think about a penetration test as checking a bicycle inner tube for leaks. You inflate it, then submerge it and look for bubbles to spot a tiny leak. Obviously, if you have a 1" gash, you'd want to fix that first, or the gaping hole will mask any more subtle holes. Penetration testers look for a way in, not all the ways in.
Right. That covers the situations where you have a gash. Now, on to the other situations...
It's just common sense. Before you inspect something do your best to fix it. Otherwise you're just paying someone a lot of money to point out the obvious.
Oh, fuck it. You are stuck on your asinine assumption and oblivious to it's irrelevance to the real world.
Is penetration testing even worth the money for a system as obviously insecure as this one? If, as the article claims, these attempts succeed 9 times out of 10, then you don't need to pay for the penetration test to know your company will fail. Does a bank manager really need to pay someone to tell them the obvious?
Knowing you will fail isn't enough - to fix the problems, you need to know how you fail.
So you, the technology expert, bought $20,000 worth of equipment on a one sentence verbal spec... and it's HIS fault?
You're suprised at that?
Reading Slashdot one finds an endless parade of excuses from IT workers why every failure, big and small, is not their fault. It's always the boss, the methodology, the particular shade of green on the walls of the office bathroom...
Management should ask themselves "is it more important to know exactly how wrong we are or is it more important not to be wrong."
Any rational manager would answer that the former is more important - because you will go wrong, and you cannot fix the problem unless you know where and how you went wrong.
It's actually easier to crash/hijack a plane that's flown through radio controls than one flown by a pilot. If it's radio controlled, you just have to build a bigger transmitter and aim it at the plane (from a safe distance).
No, building a bigger transmitter won't do it. (I.E. as usual, the people who do things for a living have, unsurprisingly, actually thought about these issues - they actually do know more than the average Slashdot poster.)
It's easy to put an encoding scheme in place that has to be broken as well. It's easy to put 'bounds checking' code in place to prevent the A/C from doing something stupid. (I.E. commanding it dive uncontrolled or do something to render it unstable like turning too sharply.) It's eay to program the plane to enter a 'safe mode' when jammed or confused... etc... etc...
On top of this - all of these methods, and more, are well known and proven in actual use. (On both UAV's and satellites.)
I've seen reliable calculations (I.E. from actual nuclear experts), that it would take 200 antistatic brushes to provide the amount of polonium that Litvenko likely ingested. That of course assumes 100% extraction (the Polonium in antistatic brushes is alloyed and plated onto foil), and that an insignificant quantity of the Polonium has decayed (since it has a fairly short half-life).
"The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. Weight for weight, polonium is approximately 2.5 × 1011 (250 billion) times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. The maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m3 (2 × 10-11 Ci/cm3). The biological halflife of polonium in humans is 30 to 50 days.[18]"
There was no business case for TV at all. RCA pushed it because they could. that's what RCA did in those days, late 30s and post-war and the early 50s.
I'll just file this claim next to "we never went to the moon" and various other tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense. Why? Because the business case was "we are just like radio, but with pictures". The movie industry has long proved that folks like pictures, and the radio industry had long proved that people liked entertainment on demand... TV was just an intersection technology.
Which is great for protecting things like the CPU, chipset, video cards, and ram.
If those components were the only ones at risk - you'd have a point.
The components I'm most worried about are the harddrives, and harddrives are primarily mechanical devices. Very simply - the more they are used, the quicker they wear out. For that reason, I'm willing to sacrafice a bit of the life of the other components to prolong the life of the harddrives*.
The funny part about this is - the most vulnerable part to startup/shutdown transients, next to the power supply... Is the hard drive, from both mechanical stresses to the mechanical systems and thermal stresses to the circuit card.
I think the most damning part of the video is when the device responds identically to different stimuli. Particularly the "knocking on the table" portion of the video.
OTOH that's exactly the behavior I'd expect to see in a 'learning' system when it first wakes up - because it doesn't know what response is suitable, so it runs down it's basic menu. (A more advanced algorithm would have some weighting to various options over others, but a simplified one would not.) It's exactly the same behavior I've seen repeatedly when playing with basic neural networks, simplified genetic algortithms, etc... That's what convinced me that this is real - because it's behavior matches what I've seen before.
Believe me, as a rabid geek and original furby owner, I'd like nothing more than for this video to be wrong, it just doesn't look good at the moment, and these guys have been advertising this thing as "coming real soon now" for a few years.
As I said, your reaction says more about you than it does about the Pleo. You default to accusation rather than questioning.
the second is more insidious because while it causes little damage with each occurence, that damage accumulates. Micro cracks in the wires, insulation, board traces, solder joint, even components
The effects of such temperature changes on components is negligible.
Certainly it's negligible, per event. But it is there and it does accumulate. Especially in the power supply and the connections to hot devices (I.E. your CPU).
The negative effects of leaving the computer on are actually greater. Ignoring the moving parts, you still have electrical signals (for example, the clock) traversing the entire motherboard that are constantly changing voltage. Magnetic fields are constantly being created / destroyed. These magnetic fields apply forces to their neighboring components. As long as a computer is powered up, damage is being done.
One can simulate an extreme case of that damage, without powering up the equipment, by dropping a marshmallow onto your case from a height of 1 cm once a month.
I believe the myth of a computer lasting longer if left on comes from the light bulb. Light bulbs have their tungsten filaments go from room temperature to some outrageously hight temperature in a matter of milliseconds. This results in physical strains that cause the filament to shake violently. Minimizing this shaking extends the life of the filament. But solid state devices aren't effected in the same way so the generalized rule for light bulbs doesn't transfer to modern hardware.
Here's a free clue for you: There are things in your computer other than solid state devices. Even solid state devices rely on physical connections- connections vulnerable to this kind of damage.
As a linguist, I always found the term cellphone quite curious.
From the start, it seemed unlikely to catch on, as the cell bit was meaningless to anyone but a techy or geek. The UK term seems far more meaningful to the average user: mobile phone.
So why did cellphone catch on? I'm forced to assume that it's because it sounds like something out of a sci-fi flick.
Here (in the US), before there were cell phones, there were mobile phones - big ass clunky things that were typically mounted in cars. Then there were mobile handsets - big ass clunky things that you carried around your house. The term cell phone arose to differentiate between these clunky beasts, and the rapidly shrinking phones you could actually reasonably carry on your person. (The term 'portable' also had a brief run - but it was, I suspect, poisoned by association with the 'portable' computers of the mid to late 80's.) The switch occurred about the time these (cell phones) became ubiquitous, not only on the Coasts but in flyover land.
Fankly I'm surprised that a linquist would a) find a difference between US and UK usage unusual and, b) wouldn't bother to do the slightest research on something he finds 'curious'.
Turning a machine on and off many times can be harmful, so it is said. Others say it's a myth. I don't know who to believe, but it seems feasible that this could be so.
It's not a myth - the first few dozen milliseconds after power up and the first handful of seconds after power are the greatest times of thermal stress on the varied and sundry bits of your box. Oh, wait - I can hear the peanut gallery shouting, "my motherboard doesn't reach full temperature until [2 minutes after startup|I run $CPU_Intensive_game|some other scenario]" - well young grasshopper, that means you are only half as smart as you think you are because there are two very different kinds of thermal stress in your computer.
The first, and the one everyone worries about, is peak temperature - that's what you are seeing with your fancy little temperature monitoring software. The second kind is much harder to see even for the professionals, that is stresses caused by rapid changes in temperature. (And guess when those periods are in your average PC?) The first kind kills computers (actually any electrical equipment) pretty quickly - the second is more insidious because while it causes little damage with each occurence, that damage accumulates. Micro cracks in the wires, insulation, board traces, solder joint, even components - it all accumulates day-by-day until one day, your PC simple doesn't work any more. The damage can express itself in many ways, a wire can open, or damaged insulation can cause a short, or crosstalk, or capacitive effects, or a hot spot... You might not be able to see it, or even find it without fancy equipment, but sure as death and taxes its there.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad part - is virtually none of those injuries would happen, no - not by changing the packaging, but if people wouldn't be such damm idiots. Use a *good* knife, a little common sense, and a little patience and you'll have the contents of the package out in no time with no injury and no damage to the product. (Most folks knives and scissors are about as sharp as the average 2x4 - edges must be maintained folks!.)
There is this cool tool, been around for centuries, designed for just such occasions - scissors. Don't blame the manufacturer for your own idiocy.
Probably the same way I do - by simply grabbing my pocket knife and cutting them open. (Except when flying and on Christmas morning, it lives in my pants pocket. Christmas Eve, I'll leave it on the bookcase next to the tree before going to bed.)
Really - this isn't rocket science.
That's not the problem - the problem is why concrete technology would have been abandoned with the end of the pyramid era, rather than being adapted to other usages. Equally, during the pyramid era - why wasn't it used for the funerary temples associated with the pyramids?
He's talking partly out of his ass, I'm not doing so at all.
It's a damm good thing I'm not one of your customers - because if I saw this, I'd drop you like a hot rock and go find an honest vendor. You've been pushing the religion of OSS - without any facts to back you up. When asked for facts... You have to go the lame route of asking Slashdot rather than having them at your fingertips!
Folks, you want to know why OSS is having such a hard time gaining market and mindshare? The OP is a prime exhibit of the reason - too many zealots who confuse philosophy with business.
Which of course has the order of events exactly reversed... Because EA bought Origin Systems in 1992, while Ultima Online was launched nearly five years later - in 1997.
That's a nice theory - but the aqueducts were built of stone, not concrete.
Given that we don't have the architectural specifications - that's a claim utterly without support. (And given how few miles out of the original number still stand and are capable of carrying water....)
That says more about your [lack of] knowledge of ancient tools and building methods than it does about pyramid building techniques.
They had tools for both measuring and marking stone - and tools to measure angles. The had wood and tools from which to build jigs, and metals from which to build measuring rods. Using those tools - it's far, far easier to build the interior from large blocks of stone (as they did) than by forming and casting an order of magnitude more bricks.
Before you go rushing off, a word of warning... LHC@Home is just barely this side of an being an ex-parrot. With the near completion of the magnet system, work come in spurts with considerable time between them. (If you already run BOINC, it's quite suitable as a side project. If you don't already run BOINC, please consider also running one of the other available projects.)
No, in the main the responses don't actually cover this. The subject I discuss is your inane assumption that 'if you know you are going to fail, you have no need to test'.
Right. That covers the situations where you have a gash. Now, on to the other situations...
Oh, fuck it. You are stuck on your asinine assumption and oblivious to it's irrelevance to the real world.
I don't think you are travelling with too many chargers - but that you are traveling with too many things that require chargers.
Knowing you will fail isn't enough - to fix the problems, you need to know how you fail.
You're suprised at that?
Reading Slashdot one finds an endless parade of excuses from IT workers why every failure, big and small, is not their fault. It's always the boss, the methodology, the particular shade of green on the walls of the office bathroom...
Carey's calculations can be found in this thread.
Any rational manager would answer that the former is more important - because you will go wrong, and you cannot fix the problem unless you know where and how you went wrong.
No, building a bigger transmitter won't do it. (I.E. as usual, the people who do things for a living have, unsurprisingly, actually thought about these issues - they actually do know more than the average Slashdot poster.)
It's easy to put an encoding scheme in place that has to be broken as well. It's easy to put 'bounds checking' code in place to prevent the A/C from doing something stupid. (I.E. commanding it dive uncontrolled or do something to render it unstable like turning too sharply.) It's eay to program the plane to enter a 'safe mode' when jammed or confused... etc... etc...
On top of this - all of these methods, and more, are well known and proven in actual use. (On both UAV's and satellites.)
I've seen reliable calculations (I.E. from actual nuclear experts), that it would take 200 antistatic brushes to provide the amount of polonium that Litvenko likely ingested. That of course assumes 100% extraction (the Polonium in antistatic brushes is alloyed and plated onto foil), and that an insignificant quantity of the Polonium has decayed (since it has a fairly short half-life).
According to Carey Sublette the Wikipedia is wrong.
I'll just file this claim next to "we never went to the moon" and various other tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense. Why? Because the business case was "we are just like radio, but with pictures". The movie industry has long proved that folks like pictures, and the radio industry had long proved that people liked entertainment on demand... TV was just an intersection technology.
If those components were the only ones at risk - you'd have a point.
The funny part about this is - the most vulnerable part to startup/shutdown transients, next to the power supply... Is the hard drive, from both mechanical stresses to the mechanical systems and thermal stresses to the circuit card.
OTOH that's exactly the behavior I'd expect to see in a 'learning' system when it first wakes up - because it doesn't know what response is suitable, so it runs down it's basic menu. (A more advanced algorithm would have some weighting to various options over others, but a simplified one would not.) It's exactly the same behavior I've seen repeatedly when playing with basic neural networks, simplified genetic algortithms, etc... That's what convinced me that this is real - because it's behavior matches what I've seen before.
As I said, your reaction says more about you than it does about the Pleo. You default to accusation rather than questioning.
Certainly it's negligible, per event. But it is there and it does accumulate. Especially in the power supply and the connections to hot devices (I.E. your CPU).
One can simulate an extreme case of that damage, without powering up the equipment, by dropping a marshmallow onto your case from a height of 1 cm once a month.
Here's a free clue for you: There are things in your computer other than solid state devices. Even solid state devices rely on physical connections- connections vulnerable to this kind of damage.
It would have been handy if the damm writer had bothered to put dates in each writeup. Context is everything.
Here (in the US), before there were cell phones, there were mobile phones - big ass clunky things that were typically mounted in cars. Then there were mobile handsets - big ass clunky things that you carried around your house. The term cell phone arose to differentiate between these clunky beasts, and the rapidly shrinking phones you could actually reasonably carry on your person. (The term 'portable' also had a brief run - but it was, I suspect, poisoned by association with the 'portable' computers of the mid to late 80's.) The switch occurred about the time these (cell phones) became ubiquitous, not only on the Coasts but in flyover land.
Fankly I'm surprised that a linquist would a) find a difference between US and UK usage unusual and, b) wouldn't bother to do the slightest research on something he finds 'curious'.
It's not a myth - the first few dozen milliseconds after power up and the first handful of seconds after power are the greatest times of thermal stress on the varied and sundry bits of your box. Oh, wait - I can hear the peanut gallery shouting, "my motherboard doesn't reach full temperature until [2 minutes after startup|I run $CPU_Intensive_game|some other scenario]" - well young grasshopper, that means you are only half as smart as you think you are because there are two very different kinds of thermal stress in your computer.
The first, and the one everyone worries about, is peak temperature - that's what you are seeing with your fancy little temperature monitoring software. The second kind is much harder to see even for the professionals, that is stresses caused by rapid changes in temperature. (And guess when those periods are in your average PC?) The first kind kills computers (actually any electrical equipment) pretty quickly - the second is more insidious because while it causes little damage with each occurence, that damage accumulates. Micro cracks in the wires, insulation, board traces, solder joint, even components - it all accumulates day-by-day until one day, your PC simple doesn't work any more. The damage can express itself in many ways, a wire can open, or damaged insulation can cause a short, or crosstalk, or capacitive effects, or a hot spot... You might not be able to see it, or even find it without fancy equipment, but sure as death and taxes its there.