I've been wondering for a while what Verizon was thinking. While I can't vouch for the rest of the country (although consumer reports keeps ranking Verizon #1), around my area (Tucson, AZ) Verizon's coverage blows away every other carrier. Plus, having once sold both Verizon and Sprint phones at RadioShack, and having had several other companies in previous years, Verizon's customer service is by far the best I've ever dealt with. I've been hoping they wouldn't delay (again) the portability ruling because I want to switch *to* Verizon when it takes effect.
But now, I (maybe) see what they've been doing.
Wait for FCC to create new regulation (Which we'll call X) that will cost a lot of money to implement.
Fight tooth and nail to delay X. Become the leading anti-X company in the country.
Use the extra time to implement X as cheaply as possible, while your competitors put it off.
When you've finished your implementation of X, suddenly drop your opposition, taking the wind out of the entire anti-X movement.
(Possibly?) Start pushing X as a major reason to switch from your competition to you. Laugh as your competitors scramble to implement it.
Man, just as soon as SCO shoots itself in both feet during the past couple of weeks, it finds a third foot, and shoots that........oh wait... that's not a foot........ouch....
Come on man, that should have been obvious, nobody has feet that small.
joshamania obviously hasn't bothered to read either the page for his town's model or the one in Maine. If he had, he'd presumably have noticed that the one in Maine doesn't, unfortunately, list the actual distance from the sun to pluto in their model except for the 'over 40 miles'. They do however list the distance from the sun to Neptune, on their Neptune page, and that distance is 30 miles, and Neptune has a diameter of 21.3 inches. The Peoria model, on the other hand, lists it's Neptune model at diameter of 15 inches, and a distance of 23 miles. So it would appear that yes, the Maine model is bigger.
Plus while the first post only claimed (correctly) that it was North America's largest model, the second post claimed it's the World's largest, which as many other posters have pointed out, is wrong.
what makes this thing a 'robot' as opposed to say... just a big fscking tool?
There are several answers to that, which largely depend on your definition of robot, so take your pick.
The first answer is that there is no difference between a robot (American Heritage, definition #2) and a complicated tool.
The second, more complete answer is that a robot (WordNet definition from above link) is just an automatic mechanism. If you go to the AquaJet site (They're the hydrodemolitions company in question.) and poke around, or even just read the summary linked in the story, you'll see that the operator tells the robot where to go, how much concrete to remove, and how smooth to leave it, and the robot then decides (and executes) the proper number, speed and angle of sweeps with the proper pressure and oscillation. It doesn't mention what the second operator is for, but I suspect he's either back at the custom trailer mmaking sure the water lines feed out, or driving the reclamation truck behind the robot to suck up the water.
The third answer, for American Heritage definition #1, meaning a robot is a human-like machine, can be seen here, in the picture of the second model, which is equipped with a vaguely humanoid 'robot arm' that can move the entire assembly up and down and back and forth.
The final answer (Well, the final one I'll be giving tonight) is that using the final definition of 'robot' on the dictionary.com page above ("A mechanical device for performing a task which might otherwise be done by a human, e.g. spraying paint on cars."), this is still a robot. Of course, that's because you could, if you really wanted to, have a machine where a person with a joystick and a set of throttles manually moved and controlled the jet. But, would you really want to?
Negative impact from cable TV? Violence, crime, and drugs? That's nuts! We've had cable TV in the USA since it was invented, and we're......Oh, nevermind, I see.
The thing about phone spam is they generally include a phone number, which is a lot harder to setup and dump than a return mail address.
The first spam I got on my phone, I ignored.
The second one from the same company, I looked up who owned that number and decided to never do business with them. (Not that I was in the market for a mortgage, anyways.)
The third time, I went to every porno free-for-all links page I could find (in the first 20 pages of google results) and submitted a link reading something to the effect of "FREE PHONE SEX! CALL NOW! (XXX) XXX-XXXX!"
Oddly, I never received a fourth spam. It's too bad, I had the explosives all mixed up and everything.
I believe this is the first time we slashdotted the server of an IP law firm... Don't worry about that 'whooshing' sound, that's just the "cease and desist"s starting to arrive.
What's going on? Why hasn't this guy been modded into oblivion yet? He's literally begging for it.
1) He bashed on gamers, yet when you go to his (annoying blog) homepage, the second paragraph says this:
For some really dumb reason I've gotten hooked on Civilization 3. Yeah I know, the game is like 2 years old, but it's pretty cool. Last night I played it until about 4 am, at which point I developed an insane migrane and had to drink myself into a stupor just to make the pain go away (and let me fall asleep.) Good times had by all.
2) He claims that people who game too much can't get good jobs (using his 'old high school buddies' as examples), yet if you go read his homepage, you'll also see that not only does he not have a job, he's currently maybe getting one at a fast food place, and even that was unexpected. Hello, hypocrites anonymous calling.
3) In a reply to a reply he bashes on his 'old high school buddies' some more, and implies that LAN gaming centers don't work, then he says of the original story "it sounds like any number of half-baked plans that will never happen". Hello, earth to Ryan Amos, these things happen allthetime, and that's just the ones I know by heart.
4) And finally, and by far the most damning, he said 'This is not a troll.' That's really all the evidence the moderators should need.
I was going to complain that I used that exact same text and the lamesness filter rejected it for 'too much whitespace'. But I just realized my terminal was copying the trailing white space on each line when I copy from Pine. Doh.
There was a relevant message from Dan Veditz, of the Mozilla securitygroup, on the full discolsure list just this morning. I'd post the text but the lamesness filter doesn't like it. You can read it here.
A lot of people are missing the point here. The fac that their saving the random seed (and therefore you can completely repeat their sequences) has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is that the numbers generated do not follow a completely set sequence, instead they change depending on your input to make you lose.
The example they have is that, if you follow the sequence on this page, the machine reaches a point that's supposed to be a gamble, but in fact you cannot win. And it's not because the output is predetermined, or the seed is the same and it happens to be a losing bet. It's a high/low gamble, so you should have a chance to win regardless of what the seed was. But if you pick high the machine picks low, and vice-versa. An 'honest' machine would pick the same number regardless of which button you picked.
Of course, the legal/ethical issue is more complicated than the simple mechanical issue. The basic problem is that machines are never fair, and cannot ever be fair because their purpose is to redistribute money from your pocket to the machine owner. The large number of people who seem to think that gambling is ever fair are deluded or naive. And the problem with the specific machine referenced above is that it has the extremely difficult task of mapping a percentage payout (they mention it's probably 70%) to a more fair operation (high-low with a pair of dice). Therefore, it has to cheat sometimes to ensure it doesn't payout too much. Which is perfectly legal, and really is the only way to do it. If they actually get a law passed saying that machines cannot cheat in any circumstance, it will mean the end of gambling, because no owner in their right mind would take a real gamble, where they could lose all that money they've been raking in.
Once you get an e-mail and read it with PGP, you can do anything you want with it. You can copy-paste it into a Word document, you can forward it to a million-member Yahoo mailing list, anything you want
Actually, PGP (the new-ish versions, anyways) has an option when encrypting to only allow the decrypted message to be displayed in PGP's 'Secure Viewer', which prevents you from copying or saving the information (and, optionally, displays it in a grey on slightly-lighter-grey color scheme to try to prevent Tempest attacks). It also has other properties, such as preventing the message from being written to swap/page files (and windows hibernation files).
Of course, you can still just re-type it yourself, but it is distinctly DRM-like in that it requires extra effort to defeat the security, while not really offering any more protection. Of course, the difference is that when receiving a PGP message, the recipient generally *wants* the data to remain secure, and in DRM's case the recipient generally doesn't.
An artist is not necessarily a businessman, nor does he necessarily have any capital
So, you're saying that "An artist is not necessarily a businessman" yet an artist needs to be an expert in contract law to ensure he's getting a good deal. Of course, he could just hire a lawyer to do it, except, oops, "nor does he necessarily have any capital".
The real problem isn't with the publishing system. It's necessary, as you pointed out. The problem, as I see it, is the fact that the majoriy of record labels seem to use contracts that can be broken down, in plain english, as 'You get x% of the profit, which is the total sales minus our costs, which we will calculate ourselves.' Then they calculate their 'costs' as 'total sales + $1'.
The problem is it's very hard to fix something like that in legislation. Unless you make some specific law dealing with accounting practices for "all contracts involving a percentage of an as-of-yet uncertain number" or something like that.
Or maybe a required basic course on 'everyday laws' in school. There are quite a few things that would be better if teens were exposed to a well-taught (yes that could be difficult in public schools) primer on contracts (read them carefully, require accountability), criminal law (what will happen if you're arrested), and generally what rights you are and are not granted by law, and probably more that I'm not thinking of.
And if it won't fit in the schedule, eliminate a PE course:D
OK, so changing the filtering settings based on executable name is bad, we all agree on that, but has anyone really looked at the screenshots they posted?
I opened the optimized screen and the renamed.exe screen in two tabs and have been scrolling to each corner flipping back and forth between them, and I've got to say I actually think the image quality is higher on the optimized one. If you look at the book in the background, you get a hint of text on it in the optimized version, where it's blank in the renamed one. And the bevels on the edges of the desks are a lot clearer in the optimized one. And there's a really jagged edge on the carpet under the left desk in the renamed one that gets fixed in the optimized one. It's not all good, of course. There are some textures on the left wall that are brighter in the renamed one, but it's hard to tell which one would be better without seeing it in action. (My system gets about 10fps on that test, not really enough.) And finally the optimized one has one thing that looks obviously worse, and that's the cross pieces on the rear window, they're a little strange.
So, anyways, even though it's bad that they change the settings to get higher scores on the benchmark, I'd like to know how to change those settings myself, if it improves performance that much and looks (arguably) no worse, or even better.
So they've got a TCP stack that changes it's window based on round-trip time instead of packet loss, to avoid overcorrection for minor packet loss on high-bandwidth networks. That's a pretty good idea, of the semi-obvious "Doh, why didn't we think of that?" variety.
It will take a little research to find good algorithms, which I presume they've already done, but there's nothing stopping some enterprising soul (who wants his porn faster) from adding this to linux in a couple weeks. So I guess the real question is are they going to try to patent it? And if so, the entire concept (bad) or just their implementation (better)?
In other words, if you don't work for Microsoft or Disney, will you get to see any of the benefit from this or will it be locked up?
all wrapped with a minimal window manager (enlightenment iirc)
I was going to point out that that was probably the first time anybody had ever used 'minimal window manager' and 'enlightenment' in the same sentence. I was wrong, AltaVista (since Google doesn't support the 'near' keyword) says it's the second. Of course, the first time was the sentence "blackbox is a minimal window manager where enlightenment is a full featured window manager"...
You can tell I'm bored. I was curious about this, since the same claim (that she was Miss Vermont twice) appeared in the disputed web page (thanks to earlier poster for google cache.) In the 8th paragraph after the seperator line it states "One of the specific things I remember us talking about was that she was Miss Vermont, twice..."
So, I went and looked it up. Turns out she won Miss Vermont in the Miss America pageant in 1999 (The one you linked to.) But, she also won Miss Vermont in the Miss USA pageant in 2001. (Their very slow site is here but there's no past winners link, you can see their description of her on this google cached page, apparently she was a judge last year.)
I'm going to go do something more interesting like watching paint dry now.
Problem: I don't build new machines with floppy drives anymore.
Of the 4 programs I listed, 2 of them (SeaTools and PowerMax) use a proprietary disk creation program (Ontrack's Diskette Maker), so you're SOL for them.
The third program, Western Digital's DLG, comes (if you just download the diagnostics module) as just a.zip file containing the actual program (a single.exe). You should be able to add that to the CD portion of any standard DOS boot CD. (Disclaimer: I've used that guy's tools to make Win2K boot CDs, but haven't tried his DOS images.)
The fourth program is the easiest, however. IBM/Hitachi's DFT, comes in 2 flavors. The 'Windows' package uses an Install-shield based diskette maker program, so you could theoretically grab all the files from the temp directories it unpacks them too. Even easier, though, is to just download the 'Linux' package, which is an actual 1.44MB boot disk image, suitable for direct use with your favorite burning software (see: mkisofs -b, or Nero's "CD-ROM (Boot)" type.).
I wonder if I'm the only one who read 'RoBoCop Suit' (what's with the capitalization there?) and thought "Oh, no, they beat me to it!"
Luckily they're just misusing the term to refer to a bomb squad blast armor that's also a biological/chemical suit. Nothing really new, just the combination of two old technologies.
Now, when they take that same suit, add in hydraulic strength multipliers and an advanced HUD, I'll be worried. Unless I get there first.
Your best bet is to try the utility from your manufacturer. They generally have to be put on a bootable DOS floppy. The manufacturer will want the results from them if you need warranty repairs anyways:
If you've got an off-brand drive, you can check the manufacturer website to see if they have one, or just try one of the above, I believe all of them can run at least basic dagnostics on any drive.
My first real job in 95 was at a Kwik Kopy. From about 6 months after I started, we (well, a couple of us) were aware that the color copier tagged it's serial number on every copy it made.
When I first discovered it I was working with the head typesetter. We couldn't figure out what this strange very light interference pattern on every printout from the color copier (which had it's own RIP) was. It was the same regardless of whether we were printing or copying, and regardless of the content, and it was an identical pattern on every sheet. That particular copier (as far as we could tell) didn't have any moving parts that synced with the page ends well enough for it to be a physical problem. And if we put the machine into black and white mode it went away.
It took several weeks of me badgering the service guy, and 3 service calls for 'Image Quality', before he finally admitted what it was.
We weren't really surprised, the copier had other more noticeable anti-counterfitting measures as well. While we never had a problems with copying, occasionally if you printed a file from the network with a complex enough swirled pattern on it (which one of our typesetters was unfortunately fond of), any green on the page would get shifted towards blue. We solved the problem by firing the typesetter. (For unrelated reasons, of course.)
The smaller black and white self-serve copiers also apparently had currency detectors (of an informational, not active type), which we found out about when one of the machines had a service call for a broken belt and the tech qustioned us because he said the currency detection register had been set. Since none of us had seen anybody trying to copy money, and it was a black and white machine, he said it was likely a mistake and he didn't even have to report it, but asked us to keep an eye out.
Oh, sure. *I* posted this when the original article came up, and nobody cared. But then some fly-by-night company nobody's ever heard of named 'apple' steals my comment, and suddenly it's news:)
g vs b, symbol rate vs throughput
on
802.11g Slows Down
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Having already deployed draft 802.11g equipment from Linksys in a small office, I can tell you that the actual throughput is already around 20Mbps for a pure-g environment. (Haven't tried it mixed with b).
The problem here is just that the reporter seems to be twisting the numbers to try to make it sound worse than it is. His very first sentence compares "true throughput for Internet-type connections of between 10M and 20Mbit/sec" with "54Mbit/sec. raw data rate", which is misleading. Raw data rate and actual throughput are (unfortunately) only vaguely related. If you want accurate numbers for g and b, compare apples to apples. According to the article, if you pay close enough attention, the real numbers are:
802.11b
Raw Data Rate: 11Mbps
Actual Throughput: 5-6Mbps
802.11g (pure)
Raw Data Rate: 54Mbps
Actual Throughput: 20Mbps
802.11g (mixed with b)
Raw Data Rate: 54Mbps
Actual Throughput: 10Mbps
Now, maybe in earlier drafts the actual throughput numbers for 802.11g were supposed to be higher, but you wouldn't know it from reading the article. Lookingathispastarticles it seems like the reporter might just not know the difference, he uses 'throughput', 'data', 'data rate', 'raw data rate', 'data speeds', 'raw data speeds', and 'bandwidth' all interchangeably. The differences between some of those are subtle (or non-existent), but if he's confused enough then comparing 'raw data rate' to 'actual throughput' could conceivably have been an honest mistake...
Slashdot Mirror
But now, I (maybe) see what they've been doing.
Does that sound about right?
Come on man, that should have been obvious, nobody has feet that small.
Plus while the first post only claimed (correctly) that it was North America's largest model, the second post claimed it's the World's largest, which as many other posters have pointed out, is wrong.
There are several answers to that, which largely depend on your definition of robot, so take your pick.
The first answer is that there is no difference between a robot (American Heritage, definition #2) and a complicated tool.
The second, more complete answer is that a robot (WordNet definition from above link) is just an automatic mechanism. If you go to the AquaJet site (They're the hydrodemolitions company in question.) and poke around, or even just read the summary linked in the story, you'll see that the operator tells the robot where to go, how much concrete to remove, and how smooth to leave it, and the robot then decides (and executes) the proper number, speed and angle of sweeps with the proper pressure and oscillation. It doesn't mention what the second operator is for, but I suspect he's either back at the custom trailer mmaking sure the water lines feed out, or driving the reclamation truck behind the robot to suck up the water.
The third answer, for American Heritage definition #1, meaning a robot is a human-like machine, can be seen here, in the picture of the second model, which is equipped with a vaguely humanoid 'robot arm' that can move the entire assembly up and down and back and forth.
The final answer (Well, the final one I'll be giving tonight) is that using the final definition of 'robot' on the dictionary.com page above ("A mechanical device for performing a task which might otherwise be done by a human, e.g. spraying paint on cars."), this is still a robot. Of course, that's because you could, if you really wanted to, have a machine where a person with a joystick and a set of throttles manually moved and controlled the jet. But, would you really want to?
Negative impact from cable TV? Violence, crime, and drugs? That's nuts! We've had cable TV in the USA since it was invented, and we're... ...Oh, nevermind, I see.
You're 34 and you still read slashdot? What's wrong with you? :)
The first spam I got on my phone, I ignored.
The second one from the same company, I looked up who owned that number and decided to never do business with them. (Not that I was in the market for a mortgage, anyways.)
The third time, I went to every porno free-for-all links page I could find (in the first 20 pages of google results) and submitted a link reading something to the effect of "FREE PHONE SEX! CALL NOW! (XXX) XXX-XXXX!"
Oddly, I never received a fourth spam. It's too bad, I had the explosives all mixed up and everything.
I believe this is the first time we slashdotted the server of an IP law firm... Don't worry about that 'whooshing' sound, that's just the "cease and desist"s starting to arrive.
1) He bashed on gamers, yet when you go to his (annoying blog) homepage, the second paragraph says this:
2) He claims that people who game too much can't get good jobs (using his 'old high school buddies' as examples), yet if you go read his homepage, you'll also see that not only does he not have a job, he's currently maybe getting one at a fast food place, and even that was unexpected. Hello, hypocrites anonymous calling.
3) In a reply to a reply he bashes on his 'old high school buddies' some more, and implies that LAN gaming centers don't work, then he says of the original story "it sounds like any number of half-baked plans that will never happen". Hello, earth to Ryan Amos, these things happen all the time, and that's just the ones I know by heart.
4) And finally, and by far the most damning, he said 'This is not a troll.' That's really all the evidence the moderators should need.
I was going to complain that I used that exact same text and the lamesness filter rejected it for 'too much whitespace'. But I just realized my terminal was copying the trailing white space on each line when I copy from Pine. Doh.
There was a relevant message from Dan Veditz, of the Mozilla securitygroup, on the full discolsure list just this morning. I'd post the text but the lamesness filter doesn't like it. You can read it here.
The example they have is that, if you follow the sequence on this page, the machine reaches a point that's supposed to be a gamble, but in fact you cannot win. And it's not because the output is predetermined, or the seed is the same and it happens to be a losing bet. It's a high/low gamble, so you should have a chance to win regardless of what the seed was. But if you pick high the machine picks low, and vice-versa. An 'honest' machine would pick the same number regardless of which button you picked.
Of course, the legal/ethical issue is more complicated than the simple mechanical issue. The basic problem is that machines are never fair, and cannot ever be fair because their purpose is to redistribute money from your pocket to the machine owner. The large number of people who seem to think that gambling is ever fair are deluded or naive. And the problem with the specific machine referenced above is that it has the extremely difficult task of mapping a percentage payout (they mention it's probably 70%) to a more fair operation (high-low with a pair of dice). Therefore, it has to cheat sometimes to ensure it doesn't payout too much. Which is perfectly legal, and really is the only way to do it. If they actually get a law passed saying that machines cannot cheat in any circumstance, it will mean the end of gambling, because no owner in their right mind would take a real gamble, where they could lose all that money they've been raking in.
Actually, PGP (the new-ish versions, anyways) has an option when encrypting to only allow the decrypted message to be displayed in PGP's 'Secure Viewer', which prevents you from copying or saving the information (and, optionally, displays it in a grey on slightly-lighter-grey color scheme to try to prevent Tempest attacks). It also has other properties, such as preventing the message from being written to swap/page files (and windows hibernation files).
Of course, you can still just re-type it yourself, but it is distinctly DRM-like in that it requires extra effort to defeat the security, while not really offering any more protection. Of course, the difference is that when receiving a PGP message, the recipient generally *wants* the data to remain secure, and in DRM's case the recipient generally doesn't.
So, you're saying that "An artist is not necessarily a businessman" yet an artist needs to be an expert in contract law to ensure he's getting a good deal. Of course, he could just hire a lawyer to do it, except, oops, "nor does he necessarily have any capital".
The real problem isn't with the publishing system. It's necessary, as you pointed out. The problem, as I see it, is the fact that the majoriy of record labels seem to use contracts that can be broken down, in plain english, as 'You get x% of the profit, which is the total sales minus our costs, which we will calculate ourselves.' Then they calculate their 'costs' as 'total sales + $1'.
The problem is it's very hard to fix something like that in legislation. Unless you make some specific law dealing with accounting practices for "all contracts involving a percentage of an as-of-yet uncertain number" or something like that.
Or maybe a required basic course on 'everyday laws' in school. There are quite a few things that would be better if teens were exposed to a well-taught (yes that could be difficult in public schools) primer on contracts (read them carefully, require accountability), criminal law (what will happen if you're arrested), and generally what rights you are and are not granted by law, and probably more that I'm not thinking of.
And if it won't fit in the schedule, eliminate a PE course :D
I opened the optimized screen and the renamed .exe screen in two tabs and have been scrolling to each corner flipping back and forth between them, and I've got to say I actually think the image quality is higher on the optimized one. If you look at the book in the background, you get a hint of text on it in the optimized version, where it's blank in the renamed one. And the bevels on the edges of the desks are a lot clearer in the optimized one. And there's a really jagged edge on the carpet under the left desk in the renamed one that gets fixed in the optimized one. It's not all good, of course. There are some textures on the left wall that are brighter in the renamed one, but it's hard to tell which one would be better without seeing it in action. (My system gets about 10fps on that test, not really enough.) And finally the optimized one has one thing that looks obviously worse, and that's the cross pieces on the rear window, they're a little strange.
So, anyways, even though it's bad that they change the settings to get higher scores on the benchmark, I'd like to know how to change those settings myself, if it improves performance that much and looks (arguably) no worse, or even better.
Come on, when replying to a story posted by 'The Inquirer', at least quote 'Inquiring minds want to know...' correctly.
(Yes, I know they're not that Inquirer, they even use the other spelling, but still...)
It will take a little research to find good algorithms, which I presume they've already done, but there's nothing stopping some enterprising soul (who wants his porn faster) from adding this to linux in a couple weeks. So I guess the real question is are they going to try to patent it? And if so, the entire concept (bad) or just their implementation (better)?
In other words, if you don't work for Microsoft or Disney, will you get to see any of the benefit from this or will it be locked up?
I was going to point out that that was probably the first time anybody had ever used 'minimal window manager' and 'enlightenment' in the same sentence. I was wrong, AltaVista (since Google doesn't support the 'near' keyword) says it's the second. Of course, the first time was the sentence "blackbox is a minimal window manager where enlightenment is a full featured window manager"...
So, I went and looked it up. Turns out she won Miss Vermont in the Miss America pageant in 1999 (The one you linked to.) But, she also won Miss Vermont in the Miss USA pageant in 2001. (Their very slow site is here but there's no past winners link, you can see their description of her on this google cached page, apparently she was a judge last year.)
I'm going to go do something more interesting like watching paint dry now.
Of the 4 programs I listed, 2 of them (SeaTools and PowerMax) use a proprietary disk creation program (Ontrack's Diskette Maker), so you're SOL for them.
The third program, Western Digital's DLG, comes (if you just download the diagnostics module) as just a .zip file containing the actual program (a single .exe). You should be able to add that to the CD portion of any standard DOS boot CD. (Disclaimer: I've used that guy's tools to make Win2K boot CDs, but haven't tried his DOS images.)
The fourth program is the easiest, however. IBM/Hitachi's DFT, comes in 2 flavors. The 'Windows' package uses an Install-shield based diskette maker program, so you could theoretically grab all the files from the temp directories it unpacks them too. Even easier, though, is to just download the 'Linux' package, which is an actual 1.44MB boot disk image, suitable for direct use with your favorite burning software (see: mkisofs -b, or Nero's "CD-ROM (Boot)" type.).
HTH.
Luckily they're just misusing the term to refer to a bomb squad blast armor that's also a biological/chemical suit. Nothing really new, just the combination of two old technologies.
Now, when they take that same suit, add in hydraulic strength multipliers and an advanced HUD, I'll be worried. Unless I get there first.
Maxtor's Powermax
Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools (You only need the Diagnostics module. There's also a Windows version farther down.)
Hitachi GS (Including IBM drives) Drive Fitness Test (Also check out SMART Defender, farther down, for a lightweight windows systray icon to monitor all your drive's SMART status.)
Seagate's SeaTools (Or try a direct link to the file to avoid registration.)
If you've got an off-brand drive, you can check the manufacturer website to see if they have one, or just try one of the above, I believe all of them can run at least basic dagnostics on any drive.
My first real job in 95 was at a Kwik Kopy. From about 6 months after I started, we (well, a couple of us) were aware that the color copier tagged it's serial number on every copy it made.
When I first discovered it I was working with the head typesetter. We couldn't figure out what this strange very light interference pattern on every printout from the color copier (which had it's own RIP) was. It was the same regardless of whether we were printing or copying, and regardless of the content, and it was an identical pattern on every sheet. That particular copier (as far as we could tell) didn't have any moving parts that synced with the page ends well enough for it to be a physical problem. And if we put the machine into black and white mode it went away.
It took several weeks of me badgering the service guy, and 3 service calls for 'Image Quality', before he finally admitted what it was.
We weren't really surprised, the copier had other more noticeable anti-counterfitting measures as well. While we never had a problems with copying, occasionally if you printed a file from the network with a complex enough swirled pattern on it (which one of our typesetters was unfortunately fond of), any green on the page would get shifted towards blue. We solved the problem by firing the typesetter. (For unrelated reasons, of course.)
The smaller black and white self-serve copiers also apparently had currency detectors (of an informational, not active type), which we found out about when one of the machines had a service call for a broken belt and the tech qustioned us because he said the currency detection register had been set. Since none of us had seen anybody trying to copy money, and it was a black and white machine, he said it was likely a mistake and he didn't even have to report it, but asked us to keep an eye out.
Oh, sure. *I* posted this when the original article came up, and nobody cared. But then some fly-by-night company nobody's ever heard of named 'apple' steals my comment, and suddenly it's news :)
The problem here is just that the reporter seems to be twisting the numbers to try to make it sound worse than it is. His very first sentence compares "true throughput for Internet-type connections of between 10M and 20Mbit/sec" with "54Mbit/sec. raw data rate", which is misleading. Raw data rate and actual throughput are (unfortunately) only vaguely related. If you want accurate numbers for g and b, compare apples to apples. According to the article, if you pay close enough attention, the real numbers are:
Now, maybe in earlier drafts the actual throughput numbers for 802.11g were supposed to be higher, but you wouldn't know it from reading the article. Looking at his past articles it seems like the reporter might just not know the difference, he uses 'throughput', 'data', 'data rate', 'raw data rate', 'data speeds', 'raw data speeds', and 'bandwidth' all interchangeably. The differences between some of those are subtle (or non-existent), but if he's confused enough then comparing 'raw data rate' to 'actual throughput' could conceivably have been an honest mistake...