Oh right, the thing you do when you buy the computer and then after each OS upgrade. I never shut off a laptop from the day I buy it until I dispose of it so boot time is irrelevant. I think if boot time is a problem for some machines then the hardware vendors should address sleep time power consumption instead of creating a new user environment.
Nasty issues to be handled in embedded BIOS applications:
Enter all my wifi access data again.
Configure all my email accounts again.
Can it get to my authentication keychain?
Can it sync my browser bookmarks?
Can it get to my address book?
If my wifi world uses MAC filtering or the BIOS remembers wap/wep keys, does it take authentication to get these apps up or can Bob the cleaning guy activate them?
Can I securely disable it?
The user interface is identical to my existing apps so I don't have to learn one more damn environment, right?
I guess you can cram this in 4M of flash if you are top notch programmer, 128M if you are not. Either way the hardware won't add more than $20 to the cost of the laptop, so I suppose it is a good thing, as long as you can disable it.
It does open an interesting option: If a user only needs email and web access, they don't need to install an OS at all.
The news around the web is all about this being an evil DRM checksum, but given how quickly the generation algorithm was found, isn't it possible that it is an integrity checksum?
A user can unplug a device at any time, even in the middle of a catalog write. It only seems prudent to checksum the data to make sure you don't have a corrupt file.
I'd be interested to hear if this is a tricky crypto algorithm, or the sort of simple MD5 or CRC of data that a programmer would whip out for integrity. This is important because if the intent was integrity we can expect it to not change. The problem is solved. If it was intended to detect reverse engineered and possibly incorrect files then we can look forward to more algorithms in the future.
TFA was silent on the matter. <wtbw> can i hear a fuck yeah? didn't really tell me much.
It is comforting to know that if I ever receive a debilitating head injury, lose most of my faculties and embrace the victim complex wing of the libertarians I will still be slashdot-worthy.
Oh no! Maybe I'm out to get the libertarians! Quick! Pen a screed!
I tried to read the article, but someone has vandalized it with double underlined words all over the place and annoying popups when your mouse slides over them. I closed the window.
On further reflection, this would be a means for wikipedia to communicate to search engines and browsers the trust level of link. A more general solution would be to introduce link signing. Allow people to create a "linker id" and a private linker key. They could then sign links with their id and a signature.
The search engines are then free to decide who they trust and how much. Link spammers should be obvious by making huge numbers of links to the same content. People who make consistently good links can be more trustworthy in the ranks.
The network infrastucture could be fairly simple. Use DNS for mapping the "linker id" to their key. That way any organization can allocate ids without stepping on each others toes.
It would be possible to keep a registry of each linker id's reputation, much like realitime spam block lists are kept now, but that would likely be a spot for gaming the system and other people whining that they were unjustly ranked. It would be better to just leave it up to each search engine to figure out who the good linkers in the world are and adjust them accordingly.
This should be considered a step in an evolving policy. The next step should be that old links, ones that have survived many edits and time as well as links added or edited by known and trusted editors should omit the no-follow tag. Then wikipedia can continue to serve as an interpreter of the WWW.
The camera costs nearly nothing. Disabling it costs even less. I recommend you fill the lens divot with epoxy and set something pretty in the top, perhaps a small earring with the stud removed. There. No camera and a little personalization for your phone.
I can second most of this. I've been using compact fluorescent bulbs for years and this is mostly true. The good news is that it is getting better.
You can now get them in spectrums close enough to incandescent that my wife doesn't notice. (She hated the early ones.) The down side of that is that it takes more energy for the same perceived brightness, but that is just your lying eyes.
The imaginary incandescent equivalent wattage is closer to true. I always upsize one, e.g. replace a 60w incandescent with a 75w cf, but the 60s are now too bright to use where I had 40s.
They are still hideously made. 2 of the last 20 I bought are nearly unusable because of the whining noise they make. That doesn't say good things about build quality.
The plastic is still marginal. Most of my bulbs hang inverted and the plastic is deteriorating quickly.
I got my last batch at Home Depot, but they were no doubt made in the Chinese People's Lightbulb Factory #24 or somesuch. They claim to have a multiyear warranty, with an asterisk that says it is based on projected use of several hours a day. I have no idea how they would apply that rule without an hour meter, but the warranty never says what it covers or to whom you might apply for reimbursement. Maybe they just thought the word looked pretty on the backage.
Do remember to save the dead ones for hazardous waste pickup day. But if you don't... the amount of mercury in the bulb is less than the mercury you didn't emit by burning coal to power an equivalent incandescent.
About longer lasting incandescents... Lightbulb design isn't rocket science (which explains why they rarely achieve orbit), the big design tradeoff is life vs. efficiency. For my incandescents I use 130v bulbs on my 120v house, they last 17k hours or so but are marginally less efficient.
I installed a solar/inverter/battery system in my cabin this year, demoting my pair of propane generators to backup and cloudy day devices. One thing I found during the selection process was that some of the inverter companies are just coasting. They have a product that everyone in the field is familiar with and they just sell them. You might want to check some of the newer players. I went with OutBack Power Systems. They have a solidly engineered modern design that can make a geek drool.
You can have a system where a person can verify their vote, but not prove to a third party that they voted a particular way. Consider... each ballot has a sequential number on it. The voter remembers (or writes down) this number when they vote. Later they can look up their ballot and see that it was tallied correctly.
Since the valid ballot numbers are known you could just sift through for a ballot and claim it is yours if you want to collect your voting selling payment, but then the vote buyers would know that and it would be no proof at all.
The problem is, that if your vote was not tallied correctly then you have no way of proving that either. You can claim ballot 3939 should have voted for candidate XYZ, but then anyone could do that. That limits its usefulness as fraud countermeasure.
A nice side effect, anyone can check the count by just checking all the ballots and adding them up for themselves.
The more I think about this, the better I like it. It allows "the people" to audit the election for accuracy. Anyone can get together a body of voters and check for problems.
On the other hand. People are dicks and I'm sure some of them would pick opposition ballots, claim them as their own and claim they were misread.
It is also so simple that anyone with a scantron type system could do it and there would not be room for massive profits so no one will lobby the local election offices and it would never be deployed.
I appear to have a case of election grumpiness already.
Re:They seem to be forgetting something...
on
Oceans Empty By 2048?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sure the passenger pigeons will be comforted by your unwavering faith in free markets.
I don't think I need to read anymore, well, I did verify that the number really appears in the article. This author does not understand the subject material.
(I suppose you could deliberatly overload a switch enough to get this number, maybe, but that would be silly, and your switch would need 1.25Mbytes of packet cache.)
I wonder if Apple has a preferential deal to get the new, fast parts first. When a new process is being ramped up, there is an initial period where they can make some processors, but not a lot.
Apple being a relatively small consumer of Intel parts could be quite happy with this small volume of fast parts and put out machines that trump the wintel vendor's clock rates.
It is a lesson that Apple learned back in the dark days of Mac clones. Since Apple only refreshes a Mac design a couple times a year people know when it is coming and will hold off for the newer version. When that version comes out there is a big demand spike. To avoid long backorders Apple has to have enough processors in hand to cover the initial orders and enough capacity to keep up with the flow after that. The clone vendors, being a tiny fraction of the Mac market could introduce models with the faster processors as soon as they became available in limited quantities. The double nasty effect was that the clone vendors got the reputation for faster machines since they could bring theirs to market faster and they delayed Apple's ability to get the new xxMhz 68030 to market because instead of stockpiling chips for Apple, Motorola would be selling them to the cloners.
It won't matter for short documents, but for large documents XML will have problems with random access.
PDF is very carefully laid out so that you can perform random access to the document and even download only those parts which you wish to read as you read them.
The offsets are a bit of a nusiance for the code that writes PDF, but aside from that it's a very clean format.
Beyond that, XML encoded documents will be larger. One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size. PDF is a terse encoding to begin with and supports zipping internally so it is invisible to users, plus the random access still works on the zipped content.
I'm more than willing to assess the merits of the two formats when both of them are real, but for now my money is on the format designed for efficient encoding and access to documents rather than the one designed to use the trending encoding format of the decade.
The passport sniffer needn't hide the gear under a bulky coat. Any shoulder strap carry on type bag will do. They will blend in perfectly in the air port. They can then stand next to you in line, or perhaps brush past you walking in the hallways.
In 60 minutes of sniffing they could easily collect a dozen or more candidate "known gone" families, then use that as a short list of houses to check.
Maybe the regular readers will have a range in inches, and 802.11 has a range of 100ft. With the right antenna 802.11 can be extended by a factor of 50. I would not count on tags being unreadable from 24", a nice polite personal space distance.
I'm not saying this will ever happen, but it certainly is a lot easier than your deliberately ridiculous example.
What it really comes down to is... If the passport issuing officials want a system that keeps a secondary reference copy of your information in a difficult to forge format, that is only readable with a special reader and is encrypted to prevent unauthorized use, then there is no reason to use a remotely readable device. A high resolution two dimensional barcode of encrypted data will do a nice job of it without exposing people's data to risk additional risk.
Tankless is nice, I use one at a cabin. They do have the odd feature that if they kick off for some reason (related to flow rate on mine, too low a flow and it turns off) the water goes from toasty warm to well water cold instantly.
As my friend said when it got him ithe first time in the shower...
Two 100 foot towers comes to mind. Though that might need to be two 100 foot towers with a valley between them.
Anyone planning a long haul like this would do well to read up on "fresnel zones". I have a 10mbit link that works well with more than 10 knots of wind. Below that the water between gets too shiny and the signal falls apart from multipath reflection problems.
My initial thought was that hyrdogen being a smaller molecule would leak out more rapidly, though perhaps not at a significantly higher rate. A quick googling reveals this to be false. Helium actually sneaks through mylar faster than hydrogen. At very low temperatures it looks to be about 50% faster. Dupont data, see page 3 I don't know what film they are using, but the others I checked were similar.
Given that the limiting factor for staying on station is gas leakage, hydrogen would seem to be a winner.
> If it gets shot or blown up...
I don't think gas type will be much of an issue. Either way the blimp will be a loss. The spectacular combustion of the hydrogen will happen well away from anything else that can burn.
The safety issues of hydrogen are probably only an issue on the ground. You probably would not want to put an inflated hydrogen blimp in the hangar for maintanence, so if the life cycle of the blimp involves hangar work like leak detection and repair helium looks better.
The final reason may be what Lockheed harps on a couple of times... Lockheed has the expertise in getting FAA certification for blimbs. The FAA is a variable that could effectivly kill the project, so project risk management probably dictates that they deviate as little as possible from the previous designs.
I don't think terrorists or rogue states siezing control and using the system as a death ray is the biggest risk. The greatest risk by far is that the coutry which builds the system will use it as a weapon. How could they not?
Generating power from keyboard keystrokes is patented. No reason that shouldn't work except for dollars.
You can send energy over a radio protocol, its just really inefficient.
But number one... These devices should be solar powered. Sort of like cheap desktop calculators. The keyboard is a no brainer. It sends so few packets per day. The mouse is a bit rougher. Less surface area for light collection and orders of magnitude more data transmitted. But here is the rub: To collect light energy an object can not be white. If Apple's color scheme was bluish-near-black I have no doubt that both of these devices would be powered from ambient light.
Slashdot Mirror
Nasty issues to be handled in embedded BIOS applications:
I guess you can cram this in 4M of flash if you are top notch programmer, 128M if you are not. Either way the hardware won't add more than $20 to the cost of the laptop, so I suppose it is a good thing, as long as you can disable it.
It does open an interesting option: If a user only needs email and web access, they don't need to install an OS at all.
The news around the web is all about this being an evil DRM checksum, but given how quickly the generation algorithm was found, isn't it possible that it is an integrity checksum?
A user can unplug a device at any time, even in the middle of a catalog write. It only seems prudent to checksum the data to make sure you don't have a corrupt file.
I'd be interested to hear if this is a tricky crypto algorithm, or the sort of simple MD5 or CRC of data that a programmer would whip out for integrity. This is important because if the intent was integrity we can expect it to not change. The problem is solved. If it was intended to detect reverse engineered and possibly incorrect files then we can look forward to more algorithms in the future.
TFA was silent on the matter. <wtbw> can i hear a fuck yeah? didn't really tell me much.
It is comforting to know that if I ever receive a debilitating head injury, lose most of my faculties and embrace the victim complex wing of the libertarians I will still be slashdot-worthy.
Oh no! Maybe I'm out to get the libertarians! Quick! Pen a screed!
I tried to read the article, but someone has vandalized it with double underlined words all over the place and annoying popups when your mouse slides over them. I closed the window.
On further reflection, this would be a means for wikipedia to communicate to search engines and browsers the trust level of link. A more general solution would be to introduce link signing. Allow people to create a "linker id" and a private linker key. They could then sign links with their id and a signature.
The search engines are then free to decide who they trust and how much. Link spammers should be obvious by making huge numbers of links to the same content. People who make consistently good links can be more trustworthy in the ranks.
The network infrastucture could be fairly simple. Use DNS for mapping the "linker id" to their key. That way any organization can allocate ids without stepping on each others toes.
It would be possible to keep a registry of each linker id's reputation, much like realitime spam block lists are kept now, but that would likely be a spot for gaming the system and other people whining that they were unjustly ranked. It would be better to just leave it up to each search engine to figure out who the good linkers in the world are and adjust them accordingly.
This should be considered a step in an evolving policy. The next step should be that old links, ones that have survived many edits and time as well as links added or edited by known and trusted editors should omit the no-follow tag. Then wikipedia can continue to serve as an interpreter of the WWW.
The camera costs nearly nothing. Disabling it costs even less. I recommend you fill the lens divot with epoxy and set something pretty in the top, perhaps a small earring with the stud removed. There. No camera and a little personalization for your phone.
About longer lasting incandescents... Lightbulb design isn't rocket science (which explains why they rarely achieve orbit), the big design tradeoff is life vs. efficiency. For my incandescents I use 130v bulbs on my 120v house, they last 17k hours or so but are marginally less efficient.
I installed a solar/inverter/battery system in my cabin this year, demoting my pair of propane generators to backup and cloudy day devices. One thing I found during the selection process was that some of the inverter companies are just coasting. They have a product that everyone in the field is familiar with and they just sell them. You might want to check some of the newer players. I went with OutBack Power Systems. They have a solidly engineered modern design that can make a geek drool.
You can have a system where a person can verify their vote, but not prove to a third party that they voted a particular way. Consider... each ballot has a sequential number on it. The voter remembers (or writes down) this number when they vote. Later they can look up their ballot and see that it was tallied correctly.
Since the valid ballot numbers are known you could just sift through for a ballot and claim it is yours if you want to collect your voting selling payment, but then the vote buyers would know that and it would be no proof at all.
The problem is, that if your vote was not tallied correctly then you have no way of proving that either. You can claim ballot 3939 should have voted for candidate XYZ, but then anyone could do that. That limits its usefulness as fraud countermeasure.
A nice side effect, anyone can check the count by just checking all the ballots and adding them up for themselves.
The more I think about this, the better I like it. It allows "the people" to audit the election for accuracy. Anyone can get together a body of voters and check for problems.
On the other hand. People are dicks and I'm sure some of them would pick opposition ballots, claim them as their own and claim they were misread.
It is also so simple that anyone with a scantron type system could do it and there would not be room for massive profits so no one will lobby the local election offices and it would never be deployed.
I appear to have a case of election grumpiness already.
I'm sure the passenger pigeons will be comforted by your unwavering faith in free markets.
I trusted Mr. Reiser with my mp3 archive once before. I still haven't found all the original CDs to replace the corrupted files. Never again.
I don't think I need to read anymore, well, I did verify that the number really appears in the article.
This author does not understand the subject material.
(I suppose you could deliberatly overload a switch enough to get this number, maybe, but that would be silly, and your switch would need 1.25Mbytes of packet cache.)
Yes, I know it's too late in the thread for anyone to read this, but it needed saying.
I wonder if Apple has a preferential deal to get the new, fast parts first. When a new process is being ramped up, there is an initial period where they can make some processors, but not a lot.
Apple being a relatively small consumer of Intel parts could be quite happy with this small volume of fast parts and put out machines that trump the wintel vendor's clock rates.
It is a lesson that Apple learned back in the dark days of Mac clones. Since Apple only refreshes a Mac design a couple times a year people know when it is coming and will hold off for the newer version. When that version comes out there is a big demand spike. To avoid long backorders Apple has to have enough processors in hand to cover the initial orders and enough capacity to keep up with the flow after that. The clone vendors, being a tiny fraction of the Mac market could introduce models with the faster processors as soon as they became available in limited quantities. The double nasty effect was that the clone vendors got the reputation for faster machines since they could bring theirs to market faster and they delayed Apple's ability to get the new xxMhz 68030 to market because instead of stockpiling chips for Apple, Motorola would be selling them to the cloners.
It won't matter for short documents, but for large documents XML will have problems with random access.
PDF is very carefully laid out so that you can perform random access to the document and even download only those parts which you wish to read as you read them.
The offsets are a bit of a nusiance for the code that writes PDF, but aside from that it's a very clean format.
Beyond that, XML encoded documents will be larger. One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size. PDF is a terse encoding to begin with and supports zipping internally so it is invisible to users, plus the random access still works on the zipped content.
I'm more than willing to assess the merits of the two formats when both of them are real, but for now my money is on the format designed for efficient encoding and access to documents rather than the one designed to use the trending encoding format of the decade.
The passport sniffer needn't hide the gear under a bulky coat. Any shoulder strap carry on type bag will do. They will blend in perfectly in the air port. They can then stand next to you in line, or perhaps brush past you walking in the hallways.
In 60 minutes of sniffing they could easily collect a dozen or more candidate "known gone" families, then use that as a short list of houses to check.
Maybe the regular readers will have a range in inches, and 802.11 has a range of 100ft. With the right antenna 802.11 can be extended by a factor of 50. I would not count on tags being unreadable from 24", a nice polite personal space distance.
I'm not saying this will ever happen, but it certainly is a lot easier than your deliberately ridiculous example.
What it really comes down to is...
If the passport issuing officials want a system that keeps a secondary reference copy of your information in a difficult to forge format, that is only readable with a special reader and is encrypted to prevent unauthorized use, then there is no reason to use a remotely readable device. A high resolution two dimensional barcode of encrypted data will do a nice job of it without exposing people's data to risk additional risk.
As my friend said when it got him ithe first time in the shower...
Two 100 foot towers comes to mind. Though that might need to be two 100 foot towers with a valley between them.
Anyone planning a long haul like this would do well to read up on "fresnel zones". I have a 10mbit link that works well with more than 10 knots of wind. Below that the water between gets too shiny and the signal falls apart from multipath reflection problems.
yes. everyone I know who was argued otherwise was trying to cheat. The levels are just too different.
Just keep your solar cells in a shady grove under some nice trees. This will shield them from harmful effects of the sun.
My initial thought was that hyrdogen being a smaller molecule would leak out more rapidly, though perhaps not at a significantly higher rate. A quick googling reveals this to be false. Helium actually sneaks through mylar faster than hydrogen. At very low temperatures it looks to be about 50% faster. Dupont data, see page 3 I don't know what film they are using, but the others I checked were similar.
Given that the limiting factor for staying on station is gas leakage, hydrogen would seem to be a winner.
> If it gets shot or blown up...
I don't think gas type will be much of an issue. Either way the blimp will be a loss. The spectacular combustion of the hydrogen will happen well away from anything else that can burn.
The safety issues of hydrogen are probably only an issue on the ground. You probably would not want to put an inflated hydrogen blimp in the hangar for maintanence, so if the life cycle of the blimp involves hangar work like leak detection and repair helium looks better.
The final reason may be what Lockheed harps on a couple of times... Lockheed has the expertise in getting FAA certification for blimbs. The FAA is a variable that could effectivly kill the project, so project risk management probably dictates that they deviate as little as possible from the previous designs.
I don't think terrorists or rogue states siezing control and using the system as a death ray is the biggest risk. The greatest risk by far is that the coutry which builds the system will use it as a weapon. How could they not?
Generating power from keyboard keystrokes is patented. No reason that shouldn't work except for dollars.
You can send energy over a radio protocol, its just really inefficient.
But number one... These devices should be solar powered. Sort of like cheap desktop calculators. The keyboard is a no brainer. It sends so few packets per day. The mouse is a bit rougher. Less surface area for light collection and orders of magnitude more data transmitted. But here is the rub: To collect light energy an object can not be white. If Apple's color scheme was bluish-near-black I have no doubt that both of these devices would be powered from ambient light.