According to the pseudo-science, the blade of a light saber is a stabilized plasma of some sort.
Plasma is a black body emitter. Meaning that it is opaque and will, therefore, cast a shadow.
Of course in a real world situation, most likely the blade's light is strong enough that it's shadow should be unnoticeable but hey, if they got all the details right there'd be nothing for guys like us to bitch and moan about on slashdot...
Depending on budget and the amount of power you have, you have a few different options.
First off you mentioned encouraging students to install anti-virus software. Take it a step farther; write a small.exe file that e-mails you confirming presence of an anti-virus program. Let it automatically download and install one with their permission if they don't have it. An afternoon of VB programming can return all the information you need, and is well within the capabilities of anyone in the programming department. Especially with WMI, which is a Windows Scripting language that (IIRC) is built to scan for things like registered virus detectors. Before the user verifies his/her computer limit access to outbound port 80 only. This can be fairly easy with control of the DHCP server; assign those computers their own subnet that's aggressively filtered by the firewall.
If you're savvy enough you can even automate the verification process completely with a custom service running on the DHCP server.
This should work relatively quickly to get most of the student base verified as running anti-virus.
If you've got a budget to make it happen an extra box serving as e-mail and web proxy is a good idea. I'm not sure what the options out there are, but surely there are free e-mail and web proxy scanners out there. Most of them simply disallow dangerous attachment types and let all other traffic through.
When a virus hits you've got a couple options. Very first thing to do is put them in their own subnet at the DHCP server. Like all DHCP-based access restriction you'll need to set the lease pretty low for this to have a good effect. Most worms are programmed to target the local network for a time before hitting the external network; its an effective spreading method that allows it to take over an entire subnet quickly and then hit large address blocks in a short time... by putting them in their own subnet you restrict their effect on other machines.
If you've got the budget for it, consumer grade firewalls to segment your network should limit virus damage and keep malicious traffic contained to small sections. The WRT54G comes highly recommended by lots of network guys I know and can be hacked to run Linux if that's your inclination. At their price they'll cost a pretty penny but as an advantage if you set them up right you can provide wireless access on your current network. A laptop user with a virus can be a bad thing in that kind of environment but hopefully you're verifying them automatically before connecting them anyways...
Of course if you wanted to do it right and had an infinite amount of money, I'd say setup active directory and use group policies to force installation of (free) virus scanners and anti-spyware software. Setup properly that can be a low-maintenance solution but it'll cost a bit of money, time and skill to setup in the first place...
I was thinking the exact same thing. Seems like such an obvious tool to have. I was thinking more of a jack than a flipper arm. I imagine the rover would not do well in a non-standard attitude (aka "upside down")
I thought cold fusion was one where the working medium contained less energy than would be required for fusion at the pressure of the medium; some 2.1 billion electronvolts at 1 atm, I believe.
There are several ways to use a neutron source to detect radioactive material.
You can use it to calibrate a neutron detector to sniff out radioactive materials that way. Or you can use it in an x-ray machine type format; not many materials are good neutron shields; any nuclear weapon that passes the neutron leakage test would have to include pretty good neutron shielding, not to mention that nuclear materials themselves tend to absorb neutrons; but they emit more than they absorb (it is this reaction that causes a fissionable sample to go critical... get the surface area to mass ratio high enough and the emitted neutrons will tend to cause more reactions rather than be emitted... in a spherical configuration this is called the "critical mass")... I imagine that this would be pretty measurable.
Re:great result, but not really a "discovery"
on
Nuclear Fusion Discovered
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'd just like to add a few points.
This method of fusion has been known for at least a decade. But the energy efficiency is so low that it's just not a candidate for power generation. Like the article says, this is primarily targetted as a neutron source. It might be able to be scaled above the break even point, but not without some pretty innovative features.
The basic of it is you get a copper plate, attach it to a special crystal, heat it with a tungsten filament, and immerse it in deuterium gas. The heated crystal strips electrons from the deuterium gas, and the ions are accelerated towards an erbium-deuterium target.
I imagine most of your energy is lost as waste heat. And while this is cold fusion, this is not room temperature fusion. Cold fusion is any fusion that is not heat-pressure catalyzed. While heating is involved here, the energy from the heat pressure is not directly used to bring deuterium nuclei together...
Modify the Neti@Home client to do dynamic blacklisting?
The biggest problem in Intrusion Detection Systems (buzzword for firewalls with more intelligence than a typical rule-based firewall) is that metrics gathering is occuring at a specific site, making it difficult to discern malice intent from dropped packets or bad coding.
Any time the central server sees a certain threshold of malicious attempts from a single IP, it adds it to a short term blacklist... Make the term length just slightly longer than the reporting period so if it persists it'll remain on the list but if it stops, the IP is cleared in short order.
Yeah unfortunately there's no untraceable way on the current internet to transfer a file without a central content aggregator. And even then only if you can guarantee that this central aggregator is untouchable legally and physically and has very good data "retention" policies. Retention, of course, being a euphemism for "deletion".
Just wait for Internet2... I'd love to see a multicast P2P software. Just multicast the packets for a particular file on occasion. The scheduling algorithm would be tough to get just right and you would still need a central server (or use kazaa's idea of distributed supernodes) but the only record of who received the packets would be router logs... and most routers don't have the storage space to log that sort of thing for long.
Actually multicast P2P sounds pretty dope now that I think about it...
While we're wishing for some good UI... let's make sure the aforementioned grid includes resizeable, hideable, sortable columns.
Oh and would it kill you guys to include some sort of early-bound scripting language? ECMA is nice and all but I can write VB code about 3 times faster than JavaScript all thanks to AutoComplete...
Actually we were both wrong; it is (2^keylength)^2 number of keys. However this number is equivalent to 2^(keylength*2), not 2^(keylength^2)
Why would this not be "just double work"?
First you find all files matching the first hash, then filter out one matching the second.
And where exactly do you think the work is occuring? Computing the second hash. If you have one hash algorithm, you only have to match once. If you have two hash algorithms and you did it this way, you have to match enough with the first algorithm to find a match for the second algorithm. This isn't twice as much work, this is twice as much keyspace (with each bit increase in keyspace representing twice the work)
All you'd really be doing is creating a hash with more bits. Might as well use the "best" hashing algorithm and increase the width.
Actually, if the hashing algorithms are dissimilar you are exponentiating the keyspace.
Note: I'm using very low hash sizes to make the math easier...
If your hash is 8 bits long, then there will be a hash collision every 2^8 files.
If you use two hashes that are 8 bits long, then there will be a collision for the first algorithm every 2^8 files, and a collision for the second every 2^8 files. If the hash algorithms are orthogonal in their operation, then only one out of every (2^8)^2 or 2^64 files will match both algorithms. So you've done the work of two 8 bit hashes (approximately the work of a 16 bit hash), with the security of a 64 bit hash.
In reality, all hash algorithms are probably similar algorithmically. But the worst case scenario (assuming that the hash algorithms are not identical) is a doubling of the hashspace, no worse than you would get by doubling the hash length.
For instance, hash with two different algorithms. In theory it is possible to find a file that can hash to the same value in two different algorithms, but its a lot harder than finding a file that hashes to a specific value in one algorithm.
There is nothing wrong with being attracted to girls who have gone through puberty no matter what their age, its a biological thing.
This reminds me... a friend of mine (with a degree in biology) is fond of pointing out that there are excellent evolutionary reasons to be attracted to the youngest post-puberty potential mates...
In Windows, paging is done concurrently with memory writes; this way when you swap the memory out, it doesn't require you to actually write the memory contents to the drive, as they're already there.
It also helps in case of kernel panic (it allows Windows to report its entire state when it comes back from a blue screen)
IIRC, there is no way to disable this behaviour, unfortunately.
But how long will that last ? Once their workforces see the wealth that they are generating they are going to want a share of it, that is going to lead to demands for higher wages. This has happened before (see Eastern Europe).
I disagree with your statement of how it will end. These workers generally have about the same standard of living as we in america do, and when you're talking about wage and compensation, it's the standard of living, not the monetary value, that people treasure.
This situation will last until their economies start to equal ours. If it cost half as much to maintain the same standard of living in India as it does in the US, it'd be too expensive to outsource. How will their economies come equal to ours?
Globalisation. Free Trade. Like outsourcing a ton of services to their countries, for instance. The trick is to do it in a small enough chunk that we don't totally ruin our economy in the process.
There *is* a levelling factor; import tariffs. Unfortunately, currently import tariffs are only enforceable on physical goods. This tariff would have to be an IRS-reported item, or something along those lines (similar to the "Internet Sales Tax" that I'm SURE all you slashdotters report fairly, right?)
Even then, however, the tariffs would have to be might steep to make outsourcing look unattractive. For two reasons; first off the exchange rate seems to be about six to one. You can hire me at my companies' standard wage, or you can hire six hindu guys. So the import tariff would have to knock that down quite a bit. The second reason is that outsourcing looks a lot better on paper than it is in reality. On paper it looks like even if you can hire two guys for the price of one you've come out on top, where the reality is that communication issues, time zones, overheard and administrative costs, and engineer productivity mean that two to three Indians have to bust their ass to keep up with one American engineer, if that engineer is part of a workteam that does documentation in English, during the US working day.
the difference between reflected and emitted light is in intensity. And, most importantly, relative intensity. There aren't many situations in our pre-technology era environment where objects are commonly brighter than their surroundings. We live in a world where things glow, and our vision system was evolved in a world where most of the time, the visual environment has roughly equal brightness for all objects.
First off, the human vision system was made to look at diffuse light sources; that is we're meant to look at things that are reflecting light, not emitting it. There are some strains from that. And especially from vivid colors side by side. I once saw someone with the apple color scheme - green on red. Instant migraine.
More worrisome, the x-rays being emitted out the front are carefully regulated for health reasons. However this doesn't apply to the back, which typically has 3-7 times as much radiation coming out of it. Lots of offices are setup in such a way that you are staring directly at the back of a co-workers monitor. So, your three CRT setup?
So, if you could tag all the cancer cells with something that emits a beacon
There's a company that's working on an enzyme dye using jellyfish flourescence to do just that. This would work in theory even after it has metastized.
then does that mean you could home in on them with a gamma knife and elimite them in any delicate part of the body with perfect accuracy?
Forget gamma knife. Proton treatment is where it's at. Get radiation treatment for your prostate cancer in the morning, play tennis in the afternoon. Basically they create a 3D model of the tumor and modulate the proton beam's energy and shape (using a series of masks) so that the protons deposit most of their energy inside the tumor. There's a small amount that gets deposited ahead of it and none behind. Much cleaner/better than other radiation treatments. I've heard that with early diagnosis they're getting phenomenal success rates. And its outpatient.
They have some of the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the industry (92 dB vs. 85-89 dB), their hardware is pretty affordable, and (most importantly to the discussion of their branding abilities) it has an extremely distinctive, attractive look.
Oh and since there's a pretty high chance that someone at Sony might read the above:
Dear Sony,
I am an audio technician. I use minidisc products exclusively. I use the Yamaha MD4 mixer and a net MD walkman (MNZ-somethingsomething)... change your software to let me transfer audio discs I record on the mixer to my computer digitally please. I run an internet radio show and use the mixer to record to MD-Audio discs. It's a pain to have to patch it in via audio and re-record every time.
If it doesn't show up soon I'm going to hack it. I've even considered writing a mass storage driver for the netMD. Whatever I do, I plan to open source it. I know you don't want that. I don't want that. All I want is the ability to do with my digital media what I want, and an opportunity to use some of the best audio equipment in the market. Minidisc is a great solution to me for a variety of reasons, including the media cost, re-writability, and recording quality. But until I can transfer losslessly from digital media I'm still shopping for a better solution.
And what really burned me was their non-existent customer service.
A close family member used to work at their american tech support center. Turnover was high. Expectations were high. Typical "get the customer off the phone" policies. He was there for about 9 months IIRC, and at that point was the senior member of his team.
IMHO, (and this is an informed second-hand opinion) Sony really needs to stop treating customer service as a cost center, and give it the same branding treatment they give all their other products BEFORE sale.
Or to rephrase: branding doesn't stop just because the consumer has bought your device.
It continually amazes me that a company that is SO great at branding (see: playstation, XPlode, SonyStyle, Walkman, VAIO) drops the ball at such a crucial part of the branding experience.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the pseudo-science, the blade of a light saber is a stabilized plasma of some sort.
Plasma is a black body emitter. Meaning that it is opaque and will, therefore, cast a shadow.
Of course in a real world situation, most likely the blade's light is strong enough that it's shadow should be unnoticeable but hey, if they got all the details right there'd be nothing for guys like us to bitch and moan about on slashdot...
Depending on budget and the amount of power you have, you have a few different options.
.exe file that e-mails you confirming presence of an anti-virus program. Let it automatically download and install one with their permission if they don't have it. An afternoon of VB programming can return all the information you need, and is well within the capabilities of anyone in the programming department. Especially with WMI, which is a Windows Scripting language that (IIRC) is built to scan for things like registered virus detectors. Before the user verifies his/her computer limit access to outbound port 80 only. This can be fairly easy with control of the DHCP server; assign those computers their own subnet that's aggressively filtered by the firewall.
First off you mentioned encouraging students to install anti-virus software. Take it a step farther; write a small
If you're savvy enough you can even automate the verification process completely with a custom service running on the DHCP server.
This should work relatively quickly to get most of the student base verified as running anti-virus.
If you've got a budget to make it happen an extra box serving as e-mail and web proxy is a good idea. I'm not sure what the options out there are, but surely there are free e-mail and web proxy scanners out there. Most of them simply disallow dangerous attachment types and let all other traffic through.
When a virus hits you've got a couple options. Very first thing to do is put them in their own subnet at the DHCP server. Like all DHCP-based access restriction you'll need to set the lease pretty low for this to have a good effect. Most worms are programmed to target the local network for a time before hitting the external network; its an effective spreading method that allows it to take over an entire subnet quickly and then hit large address blocks in a short time... by putting them in their own subnet you restrict their effect on other machines.
If you've got the budget for it, consumer grade firewalls to segment your network should limit virus damage and keep malicious traffic contained to small sections. The WRT54G comes highly recommended by lots of network guys I know and can be hacked to run Linux if that's your inclination. At their price they'll cost a pretty penny but as an advantage if you set them up right you can provide wireless access on your current network. A laptop user with a virus can be a bad thing in that kind of environment but hopefully you're verifying them automatically before connecting them anyways...
Of course if you wanted to do it right and had an infinite amount of money, I'd say setup active directory and use group policies to force installation of (free) virus scanners and anti-spyware software. Setup properly that can be a low-maintenance solution but it'll cost a bit of money, time and skill to setup in the first place...
I was thinking the exact same thing. Seems like such an obvious tool to have. I was thinking more of a jack than a flipper arm. I imagine the rover would not do well in a non-standard attitude (aka "upside down")
I thought cold fusion was one where the working medium contained less energy than would be required for fusion at the pressure of the medium; some 2.1 billion electronvolts at 1 atm, I believe.
There are several ways to use a neutron source to detect radioactive material.
You can use it to calibrate a neutron detector to sniff out radioactive materials that way. Or you can use it in an x-ray machine type format; not many materials are good neutron shields; any nuclear weapon that passes the neutron leakage test would have to include pretty good neutron shielding, not to mention that nuclear materials themselves tend to absorb neutrons; but they emit more than they absorb (it is this reaction that causes a fissionable sample to go critical... get the surface area to mass ratio high enough and the emitted neutrons will tend to cause more reactions rather than be emitted... in a spherical configuration this is called the "critical mass")... I imagine that this would be pretty measurable.
I'd just like to add a few points.
This method of fusion has been known for at least a decade. But the energy efficiency is so low that it's just not a candidate for power generation. Like the article says, this is primarily targetted as a neutron source. It might be able to be scaled above the break even point, but not without some pretty innovative features.
The basic of it is you get a copper plate, attach it to a special crystal, heat it with a tungsten filament, and immerse it in deuterium gas. The heated crystal strips electrons from the deuterium gas, and the ions are accelerated towards an erbium-deuterium target.
I imagine most of your energy is lost as waste heat. And while this is cold fusion, this is not room temperature fusion. Cold fusion is any fusion that is not heat-pressure catalyzed. While heating is involved here, the energy from the heat pressure is not directly used to bring deuterium nuclei together...
IBM is the last remaining manufacturer of quality PC laptops. I'm glad to see that the sale of the PC division to Lenovo hasn't affected that.
Except for, you know, the fact that IBM is no longer doing the manufacturing...
Modify the Neti@Home client to do dynamic blacklisting?
The biggest problem in Intrusion Detection Systems (buzzword for firewalls with more intelligence than a typical rule-based firewall) is that metrics gathering is occuring at a specific site, making it difficult to discern malice intent from dropped packets or bad coding.
Any time the central server sees a certain threshold of malicious attempts from a single IP, it adds it to a short term blacklist... Make the term length just slightly longer than the reporting period so if it persists it'll remain on the list but if it stops, the IP is cleared in short order.
Yeah unfortunately there's no untraceable way on the current internet to transfer a file without a central content aggregator. And even then only if you can guarantee that this central aggregator is untouchable legally and physically and has very good data "retention" policies. Retention, of course, being a euphemism for "deletion".
Just wait for Internet2... I'd love to see a multicast P2P software. Just multicast the packets for a particular file on occasion. The scheduling algorithm would be tough to get just right and you would still need a central server (or use kazaa's idea of distributed supernodes) but the only record of who received the packets would be router logs... and most routers don't have the storage space to log that sort of thing for long.
Actually multicast P2P sounds pretty dope now that I think about it...
While we're wishing for some good UI... let's make sure the aforementioned grid includes resizeable, hideable, sortable columns.
Oh and would it kill you guys to include some sort of early-bound scripting language? ECMA is nice and all but I can write VB code about 3 times faster than JavaScript all thanks to AutoComplete...
Actually we were both wrong; it is (2^keylength)^2 number of keys. However this number is equivalent to 2^(keylength*2), not 2^(keylength^2)
Why would this not be "just double work"?
First you find all files matching the first hash, then filter out one matching the second.
And where exactly do you think the work is occuring? Computing the second hash. If you have one hash algorithm, you only have to match once. If you have two hash algorithms and you did it this way, you have to match enough with the first algorithm to find a match for the second algorithm. This isn't twice as much work, this is twice as much keyspace (with each bit increase in keyspace representing twice the work)
Lol as a former calculus teacher I am humbled.
That, my friends, is why eighty hour work weeks are NEVER a good idea.
Thanks for the correction.
All you'd really be doing is creating a hash with more bits. Might as well use the "best" hashing algorithm and increase the width.
Actually, if the hashing algorithms are dissimilar you are exponentiating the keyspace.
Note: I'm using very low hash sizes to make the math easier...
If your hash is 8 bits long, then there will be a hash collision every 2^8 files.
If you use two hashes that are 8 bits long, then there will be a collision for the first algorithm every 2^8 files, and a collision for the second every 2^8 files. If the hash algorithms are orthogonal in their operation, then only one out of every (2^8)^2 or 2^64 files will match both algorithms. So you've done the work of two 8 bit hashes (approximately the work of a 16 bit hash), with the security of a 64 bit hash.
In reality, all hash algorithms are probably similar algorithmically. But the worst case scenario (assuming that the hash algorithms are not identical) is a doubling of the hashspace, no worse than you would get by doubling the hash length.
For instance, hash with two different algorithms. In theory it is possible to find a file that can hash to the same value in two different algorithms, but its a lot harder than finding a file that hashes to a specific value in one algorithm.
There is nothing wrong with being attracted to girls who have gone through puberty no matter what their age, its a biological thing.
This reminds me... a friend of mine (with a degree in biology) is fond of pointing out that there are excellent evolutionary reasons to be attracted to the youngest post-puberty potential mates...
That's not swapping, that's paging.
In Windows, paging is done concurrently with memory writes; this way when you swap the memory out, it doesn't require you to actually write the memory contents to the drive, as they're already there.
It also helps in case of kernel panic (it allows Windows to report its entire state when it comes back from a blue screen)
IIRC, there is no way to disable this behaviour, unfortunately.
The default behaviour in IE for sites in the internet zone is to block all cross-domain cookies.
IIRC, the W3C even recommends that HTTP clients do not send cookies across domains.
But how long will that last ? Once their workforces see the wealth that they are generating they are going to want a share of it, that is going to lead to demands for higher wages. This has happened before (see Eastern Europe).
I disagree with your statement of how it will end. These workers generally have about the same standard of living as we in america do, and when you're talking about wage and compensation, it's the standard of living, not the monetary value, that people treasure.
This situation will last until their economies start to equal ours. If it cost half as much to maintain the same standard of living in India as it does in the US, it'd be too expensive to outsource. How will their economies come equal to ours?
Globalisation. Free Trade. Like outsourcing a ton of services to their countries, for instance. The trick is to do it in a small enough chunk that we don't totally ruin our economy in the process.
There *is* a levelling factor; import tariffs. Unfortunately, currently import tariffs are only enforceable on physical goods. This tariff would have to be an IRS-reported item, or something along those lines (similar to the "Internet Sales Tax" that I'm SURE all you slashdotters report fairly, right?)
Even then, however, the tariffs would have to be might steep to make outsourcing look unattractive. For two reasons; first off the exchange rate seems to be about six to one. You can hire me at my companies' standard wage, or you can hire six hindu guys. So the import tariff would have to knock that down quite a bit. The second reason is that outsourcing looks a lot better on paper than it is in reality. On paper it looks like even if you can hire two guys for the price of one you've come out on top, where the reality is that communication issues, time zones, overheard and administrative costs, and engineer productivity mean that two to three Indians have to bust their ass to keep up with one American engineer, if that engineer is part of a workteam that does documentation in English, during the US working day.
I think the parent forgot to mention that the membrane should block neutrons. Otherwise that funeral may be a little earlier than mentioned.
And there definitely won't be anything to go into any sort of time capsule...
the difference between reflected and emitted light is in intensity. And, most importantly, relative intensity. There aren't many situations in our pre-technology era environment where objects are commonly brighter than their surroundings. We live in a world where things glow, and our vision system was evolved in a world where most of the time, the visual environment has roughly equal brightness for all objects.
First off, the human vision system was made to look at diffuse light sources; that is we're meant to look at things that are reflecting light, not emitting it. There are some strains from that. And especially from vivid colors side by side. I once saw someone with the apple color scheme - green on red. Instant migraine.
More worrisome, the x-rays being emitted out the front are carefully regulated for health reasons. However this doesn't apply to the back, which typically has 3-7 times as much radiation coming out of it. Lots of offices are setup in such a way that you are staring directly at the back of a co-workers monitor. So, your three CRT setup?
Should be perfectly safe. For you.
So, if you could tag all the cancer cells with something that emits a beacon
There's a company that's working on an enzyme dye using jellyfish flourescence to do just that. This would work in theory even after it has metastized.
then does that mean you could home in on them with a gamma knife and elimite them in any delicate part of the body with perfect accuracy?
Forget gamma knife. Proton treatment is where it's at. Get radiation treatment for your prostate cancer in the morning, play tennis in the afternoon. Basically they create a 3D model of the tumor and modulate the proton beam's energy and shape (using a series of masks) so that the protons deposit most of their energy inside the tumor. There's a small amount that gets deposited ahead of it and none behind. Much cleaner/better than other radiation treatments. I've heard that with early diagnosis they're getting phenomenal success rates. And its outpatient.
The name may not be good but the brand is good.
They have some of the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the industry (92 dB vs. 85-89 dB), their hardware is pretty affordable, and (most importantly to the discussion of their branding abilities) it has an extremely distinctive, attractive look.
Too bad their minidisc car decks are all +$400.
Oh and since there's a pretty high chance that someone at Sony might read the above:
Dear Sony,
I am an audio technician. I use minidisc products exclusively. I use the Yamaha MD4 mixer and a net MD walkman (MNZ-somethingsomething)... change your software to let me transfer audio discs I record on the mixer to my computer digitally please. I run an internet radio show and use the mixer to record to MD-Audio discs. It's a pain to have to patch it in via audio and re-record every time.
If it doesn't show up soon I'm going to hack it. I've even considered writing a mass storage driver for the netMD. Whatever I do, I plan to open source it. I know you don't want that. I don't want that. All I want is the ability to do with my digital media what I want, and an opportunity to use some of the best audio equipment in the market. Minidisc is a great solution to me for a variety of reasons, including the media cost, re-writability, and recording quality. But until I can transfer losslessly from digital media I'm still shopping for a better solution.
And what really burned me was their non-existent customer service.
A close family member used to work at their american tech support center. Turnover was high. Expectations were high. Typical "get the customer off the phone" policies. He was there for about 9 months IIRC, and at that point was the senior member of his team.
IMHO, (and this is an informed second-hand opinion) Sony really needs to stop treating customer service as a cost center, and give it the same branding treatment they give all their other products BEFORE sale.
Or to rephrase: branding doesn't stop just because the consumer has bought your device.
It continually amazes me that a company that is SO great at branding (see: playstation, XPlode, SonyStyle, Walkman, VAIO) drops the ball at such a crucial part of the branding experience.