As to "why the government owes" a converter box, that was the way it was decided to distribute the money from the spectrum auction (which, after the switchover, will belong to those successful bidders who 'own' the newly reallocated VHF range).
The converter is just a patch, but MAYBE it will give me another year or three of use from my TiVO.
I have two battery-shirtpocket TVs, three computers with TV tuners, multiple TVs (two in regular use), all about to become junk/gameconsole accessories.
That converter is NOT a solution to my switchover problem.
The rebate did NOT cover the full cost of any converter, either. There's no excess of zeal on the part of a nanny state here.
IRDA was using baseband (didn't play any modulation tricks), so there wasn't any way to use filtering to improve signal/noise ratio.
LEDs don't modulate very fast (above 1 MHz) IF you use the standard drive circuits, because the light straggles out during the carrier lifetime in the minority region. That means you can modulate LEDs fast ONLY if you turn them off extra-hard.
So, if you are clever about device physics, LEDs can do the same bitrate as old 10baseT Ethernet, and one can use modulation tricks to reject room light (as well as narrow-band color filtering, which WAS present in IRDA implementations). Rejecting noise and raising baudrate makes about four orders of magnitude of improvement feasible in throughput. Heck, maybe this guy has some other tricks he can play (like wavelength division multiplexing).
At any rate, IRDA was never developed fully; with modern communication technology one can easily get faster and longer range systems to run well.
His big problem is going to be the clutter issue; the only part of my computer that always basks in the light of day is the keyboard's upper rim.
"I kept six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew; their names were what, and why, and when, and how, and where, and who" - Kipling
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt: three dishonest servants. Sack them.
"The article... short on details." - so, detailed info on the GLOBAL PROBLEM, you expect that in a short article?
".. would hardly call 54 % of 80 experts statistically significant" but, the usual rules of statistics make the error in the second digit of that "54%" number, so it looks OK to me.
"risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand..." OK, I completely agree that there is a large "we" that doesn't understand. That never stopped engineering in the past, though. It isn't a better argument now.
The risk that we DO have knowledge of, is that business-as-usual will cause a crash in a few decades. Swerving to avoid a crash is NOT as scary as the alternatives. That is the message of many experts according to the original article...
Well, I'm familiar with another firmware-OS incompatibility (from Apple in the circa-2000 timeframe), and it unfolded thus:
Apple makes a computer and firmware, and ships it with OS 9.0 Apple updates some software and firmware, and tests the updates on their barnful of original iMacs. When it works, they release it. Apple updates OS to 9.2, testing on the barnful of original iMacs.
It works, so they release it
HOWEVER there were no machines in the barn with original, nonupdated firmware. So, there were no tests with the original, nonupdated firmware. Failures occur in the field, things are unsettled for a while, then... somewhere, someone does the firmware update and finds that the same hardware that 'broke' with the new OS is just fine if, only if, the firmware version is 'most-recent'.
Apple had to:
(1) release new system software installers that checked for (and warned/exited if they found) incompatible early firmware,
(2) update all the firmware on repair-parts motherboards (which would otherwise be used as replacement parts and fail in the field),
(3) alert all service centers of workarounds that could be used to un-brick customer machines.
They did all that, on the 400 MHz generation of iMac computers. Affected machines had video problems and sometimes these problems would shutdown the power supply.
Seems like they flubbed one last requirement:
(4) always generate reversal software to undo firmware upgrades so that the test-machine barn has all the same versions of firmware available for test as the customer base might have.
The ONLY operating system that worked for the (required) firmware update was 9.1, and lots of folk were trying to skip directly from 9.0 to 9.2 (or 10.2). I was one of the dealer service agents, it WAS rather a mess and this latest issue sounds like a repeat.
>>Here, let me fix those numbers for you: >>estimate of iraqi population...: 27,499,638 >>Num. of Iraqi civilian deaths to date (iraqbodycount.og): 88952 - this is the lower estimate. >>Total percentage of iraqi civilians killed by war to date:.0032%
Mathematically, it's 0.32%; logically, it's a lowball estimate of 0.32% Well, we were warned, this was always about 'fixed' numbers.
Alas, USB cannot keep up with wide/fast SCSI (required for DDS3 and DDS4 tape drives), and doesn't have enough power for high voltage differential at all. You need two or more SCSI interfaces, just to cover the signaling range (there are low-voltage-differential interfaces that autoswitch to the older single-ended standard, but not to high-voltage-differential).
But that's not all: the original PC had cassette interface (and your audio card can't completely replace that, there's no motor control wire in an audio card). Is there a cassette/USB dongle available? Anywhere?
There is also question about how long the firewire "standard" will remain. At the recent FCC hearing on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, Intel made it very clear that they were pushing for IP based technologies and thought that the firewire standard had failed.
Two red flags here: first, Firewire allows isochronous transport, so it can deliver glitch-free program material. There are IP workarounds, but the Firewire solution is effective and trouble-free. IP delivery requires lots of slop in the timing, because it doesn't have any way to preallocate bandwidth to the time-critical data.
Intel has 'not invented here' feelings about Firewire, which are not to be taken as expertise. Intel doesn't think Firewire has failed, they just think they don't own it.
Second red flag: why would IP be useful? I've used Firewire as the medium for TCP/IP, it works fine, but what is the supposed advantage to IP? Do they imagine they will be able to fix some kind of solution that works in all consumers' wired and wireless network environments? A solution that will be future-proof?
Glittalogik says: > Sending old faulty or unusable computers (and even functional ones eventually) to third world countries is >tantamount to coopting them as a dumping ground for our hazardous waste.
That's the basic premise of the article, and it's a completely unfair characterization.
What was shipped, was an undiagnosed mix of working and nonworking hardware. A technician can determine functionality in UK for $100/hour, OR the end users can do it themselves in Congo. Going with plan B makes sense both from the UK end (less cost for them) and the Congo end (more computers received if they aren't asking for a 1-year warranty). So, they went with plan B.
After some kind of diagnosis, some of the computer parts are scrapped for materials, and THAT is poorly handled by the Congo end. There's nothing useful about blaming the UK half of the transaction for this consequence. UK can't do better for themselves by smashing good computers with the bad, and can't do any net good for Congo that way either. Congo, remember, DOES need computers.
At the repair center (I've worked there, trust me on this) there are "components" like monitors, that have maybe 50 electronic parts. The "component" is nonfunctional if one of 50 electronic parts is faulty, or misadjusted. Given three dead monitors, the likelihood is that two working monitors can be built from those electronic parts. So, shipping dead computers can benefit Congo, because it gives them access to repair parts. The $100/hour UK technician can't fix enough of those monitors to keep him in business, however. The UK technician cannot economically use the repair parts potential.
The other unfair characterization in the article, is that Congo, no matter HOW they get computers, will someday scrap them (even if they buy new-retail-box) and in the Congo style, that scrap phase will be dirty. UK practices can only alter the scale of the Congo scrap piles, not their ugliness.
'Information that might help an opponent' and 'Information that might help a coworker, ally, employer' are both likely to be present in those e-mails. Only the first of these excites fear, uncertainty, doubt and only the first is being carefully considered by the policymakers in this case. They're deluded. Don't buy stock, and keep your resume updated.
I met a lot of chinese in grad school (hint: when attending a conference, make sure at least one US citizen attends with any group of chinese... because your rental car agency will want to see a credit card). The expertise might be thin on the ground in China, but it isn't absent.
More to the point, if that expertise IS thin on the ground, the likelihood of a chance encounter with a hacker is small. The observed events must therefore have been OTHER than chance, perhaps arranged by some Chinese nationwide agency...
Chinese insistence on information control (declaring all sorts of information 'state secret') implies a mindset that all US acquisition of information is 'stealing state secrets', and it's very likely that cracking open visitors' computers is expected behavior for any Chinese who welcomes an American congressman. Sad, but not unexpected.
In this and other matters of diplomacy, China is uncivilized.
Take a quick scan of the entire disc and do the rest in memory. Yep, now what's the rest? You have to decide if the data is read center-out, clockwise or other. Then you have to know to undo the modulation (it's called 8-14, because each 8 bit byte generates a 14-bit pattern on the disk), and unwrap the complex-interleave-Reed-Solomon coding (CIRC). You need to know the error-encoding mechanism in order to repair bad bits at this point. Even if you don't repair, you need to discard the extra bits of the error-correcting code.
Then you need the format (the inner tracks have lots of album data, and some or all of it is relevant to playback) to rebuild a track index, then recognize the stereo data in each track as audio (it might be an ISO 9660 data disk of MP3s, or AIFF, or something entirely other).
Unless you find a set of the (license-restricted) specifications known as red book, yellow book, etc., it's unlikely that the hypothetical 23rd century researcher is going to complete the decoding process in a single weekend.
It's equally unlikely that normal 'computer literacy' will suffice to do the decoding. At best, your hypothetical investigator will have to find an archive of instructions, VERY DETAILED instructions, to complete the task. Serious archivists are aghast at the digital-rights-management roadblocks that have been proposed in recent years; plays-for-sure is the tip of an iceberg.
There are many real physical systems where the 'butterfly effect' is very evident, and the history of science includes prior art. Lagrange found in his orbital calculations of planets that the sensitivity of the solutions to errors in observation could be extreme, about 200 years ago. A century ago, the excessive sensitivity of matrices with large eigenvalues provided a good model of the problem.
Today, we call it 'chaos theory', but Lorenz is just a recent worker in the field, not really the father...
Phosphors don't 'fade over time'; fade means "lose color saturation", and the time-dependent shifts in a CRT affect the color BALANCE, not the saturation.
The bleaching of color filters in LCDs might conceivably result in a 'fading' time characteristic. More important though, LCDs are affected by the character of the backlights, and THAT makes them a nightmare to fully characterize. I've done it, as a service tech, and it's just amazing what a graphic artist will notice; they were often VERY particular, and they weren't imagining the problems, just noticing things that I could only verify with meters...
The best bargain in color is the old Macintosh "Moby" monitor; the rainbow button on the front panel initiated a full automated self-calibration.
>>The reason the state is issuing these new fancy-schmancy thumb drives is that the new ones (claim to) >>have 256-bit AES encryption and (claim to) self-destruct after 10 consecutive wrong passwords.
>In which case they really should verify that this actually is the case before buying more than a sample.
Very true, but let's go a little deeper... A prudent test would be applicable only to one model of hardware, one revision of the firmware, and the cost of testing would only be supportable if one makes a bulk purchase. Because a retail outlet, or even a wholesaler, cannot identify the firmware from the packaging, you have to contract with a manufacturer directly to do that.
Inescapable conclusion: consumers buying thumb drives cannot expect any comparable security for their data. We can only trust some manufacturer's claims printed on the retail package.
Now, we hear of a government agency that's going to certify one kind of drive, BUT only for their own use. We should, as citizens, ask our elected government to provide some support for our needs in this regard. Maybe Washington state can market an "approved for security" logo and offset this hardware purchase cost?
Government acting for the public good: it's an idea.
The bogus charges were handled through an intermediary. Most of that $30 million went to the scammers, but a fee was paid to the intermediary (which is the same organization that would handle complaints.).
The $1.9M is a fine to the billing middleman, who should have known there was fraud afoot and will, in future, have to be more careful. Since the middleman only profited by a small fee on the fraudulent transactions, the fine is a small fraction of the amount of the fraud.
I should say, the presumed amount of the fraud; it's hard to know what part of a phone bill is real and what is bogus. The court can only deal with the parts that are clearly fraud. For this reason, bill-per-service is a VERY bad way to arrange telecom services. There have been cases of iPhone bills incurring international roaming charges at an alarming rate while doing innocent 'check for e-mail' background tasks.
In the current case, they (1) violated their agreement to register sites for a fee
(i.e. they broke a contract unilaterally) (2) made no good-faith effort to keep their customer from
harm (they didn't release the sitenames for him to arrange
alternate accommodations, nor did they notify him of the action).
A good tort lawyer could make a case of this. Public policy is to enforce contracts, and only a court order normally can override that. A hearing before a real court of law could be in the offing...
For the Macintosh line, all the high-end machines since about 2000 have had Firewire. It trickled down to the iMac/iBook in 2003. So if one believes the 'five years after it's in a Mac' rule, high-end Wintel will be likely to have Firewire from 2005, and low-end Wintel will be picking up that 'feature' this year.
Plan for the future: expect Firewire.
Firewire is a one-stop solution for external hard drives, for digital video, for HD video, for fast TCP/IP. The use as a maintenance back-channel into your files is also extremely important to some of us (makes lots of data transfer/recovery issues easy to solve).
The moving part is cute, of course, and gives a bit of visual tension to the apparatus you see through your peekaboo case.
Still, it's a bit of a clunker compared to the old-tech way of making a no-moving-parts air pump powered by waste heat. I refer, of course, to the 'chimney'.
We, humans, aren't limited to chance at all, we can also apply knowledge and purpose. After all, we've had the roots/nuts/berries fuel thing nailed down for millennia, and the sun never HAS burned those.
We were also first with fission energy, and with less time 'spent' on the problem than old Sol has had...
Best activation energy for fusion is deuterium-tritium, by the way, and solar output is straight proton-proton (which is much harder).
>...that detectors should be required to be certified, makes sense
NO! It is a mistake to seek sanity in this kind of fatuous proposal.
If it were a good idea, it wouldn't need modification. If it's a bad idea, the modification doesn't suffice to save it. This idea is a wedge for censorship that is clearly against US law and custom.
In my world, adults are presumed to have some idea what constitutes danger, and are encouraged, if only for the sake of children, to sound out loudly when they see a danger. That's all that's required. We can trust adults to use simple measurement tools safely. So, why not trust them to use ALL measurement tools?
Get a smoke alarm in your house, and repel the NYC police if they try to 'certify' it. Use the speedometer on your car, and the tire pressure gage, and the temperature warning light. Keep the police force OUT of it.
False alarms, while a nuisance, are less damaging than suppression of valid alarms. The dust danger after 9/11 is a sensitive issue in NYC, and the sensitivity is leading to madness. We mustn't encourage them.
With a little wiring adapter board. They cost $4 or so last time I bought 'em. The laptop connector isn't polarized, though, you HAVE to remember which orientation of the adapter board is right side up!
A 2.5" laptop drive and the adapter fit easily into the 3.5" hotswap bays, too.
>The Seagate 80GB HDD/retails/ at $65. You don't pay $160, >as a RESELLER, for that same device that they're selling at retail >for FORTY PER CENT of that price.
Ah, but the Apple store is selling a drive of three-years-ago manufacture that was put into inventory as a warranty-spares drive, and which was purchased when an 80G drive probably DID cost that much.
For warranty (1 year) and extended warranty (3 years) and for some educational service contracts (5 years) the spares drives are all stocked somewhere, and Apple protects their stock level by pricing it all well above reasonable retail.
An Apple store employee is tied to the single-supplier Apple repair depot for such parts. Buy your replacement drive elsewhere if you want to see fair-market pricing. What Apple is doing is intended for obligations to replace exactly the original, as in a warranty repair.
Yes, that's the key to the whole transaction! The Apple store offered out-of-warranty service on the same terms as warranty service, but at the customer's expense. This means they use Apple repair parts (possibly rebuilt, not new), under Apple repair warranty (not too good, 90 days parts and labor), and send the 'faulty' part to Apple for possible rebuild (or more likely, pass-off to the disk manufacturer for factory rebuild).
Because the part is swapped, this also means that the option to upgrade to a larger disk is ruled out. Apple repair warranty only applies to disk-original-size-shipped-with-unit, after all.
So, getting memory or hard disk replaced on an Apple computer by the Apple store will result in ripoff part price (because the part prices were set when the computer was manufactured and not readjusted later), small capacity (because that's the exact-replacement for what was available when the comptuer was manufactured) and inflexibility about exchange (because warranty repair agents have to show the dead part or they won't get paid/credited for doing the repair).
I worked for an Apple dealer, and we had flexibility to use normal retail-channel parts for repairs. So memory replacements had lifetime warranty, hard drive replacements could be any size you wanted to buy, you can keep the old drive, etc. The Apple store doesn't deserve any particular respect for how they treat this kind of 'repair', because they aren't really trying to do a good job for the customer. They're just grudgingly redoing service-as-usual-under-warranty because it makes money.
There are car companies that offer long (even ten year) mechanical warranties on their cars. To me, that means that my car, at age 11, becomes unserviceable except by the dealer. Who else ever worked on that model in the preceeding decade? Who except the dealer ever had parts stocked for it? It sounds like a sweet warranty, but it's ALSO a major anticompetitive action by the manufacturer.
>but...he also had them wipe the drives of several underling's laptops as well...
When the underlings left, their laptops and the data on them were going to be reissued; a wipe to ensure confidentiality probably seems normal-practice to a lawyer (I know it does to a doctor).
>and if he really had a virus, why not just call his own IT
Consider that a lawyer who doesn't trust his computer might not trust the IT folk who set it up, either; getting outside support and a receipt that has that reassuring "all data wiped" tickmark might just be the no-brainer reassurance this individual is comfortable with. The geek squad doesn't have any reason to educate him on other options (a billable hour is... another $95). If the customer will pay for more work than necessary, they'll prepare a suitable invoice... it's all good.
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As to "why the government owes" a converter box,
that was the way it was decided to distribute the
money from the spectrum auction (which, after
the switchover, will belong to those successful
bidders who 'own' the newly reallocated VHF range).
The converter is just a patch, but MAYBE it will give me
another year or three of use from my TiVO.
I have two battery-shirtpocket TVs, three computers
with TV tuners, multiple TVs (two in regular use), all
about to become junk/gameconsole accessories.
That converter is NOT a solution to my switchover problem.
The rebate did NOT cover the full cost of any converter,
either. There's no excess of zeal on the part of
a nanny state here.
It MIGHT work, if done well.
IRDA was using baseband (didn't play any modulation tricks), so
there wasn't any way to use filtering to improve signal/noise
ratio.
LEDs don't modulate very fast (above 1 MHz) IF you use the
standard drive circuits, because the light straggles out during
the carrier lifetime in the minority region. That means you can
modulate LEDs fast ONLY if you turn them off extra-hard.
So, if you are clever about device physics, LEDs can do the same
bitrate as old 10baseT Ethernet, and one can use modulation
tricks to reject room light (as well as narrow-band color
filtering, which WAS present in IRDA implementations).
Rejecting noise and raising baudrate makes about four
orders of magnitude of improvement feasible in throughput.
Heck, maybe this guy has some other tricks he can play (like
wavelength division multiplexing).
At any rate, IRDA was never developed fully; with modern
communication technology one can easily get faster and
longer range systems to run well.
His big problem is going to be the clutter issue; the only part
of my computer that always basks in the light of day is
the keyboard's upper rim.
"I kept six honest serving men, they taught me all
I knew; their names were what, and why, and when,
and how, and where, and who" - Kipling
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt: three dishonest servants.
Sack them.
"The article ... short on details." - so, detailed info on
the GLOBAL PROBLEM, you expect that in a short
article?
".. would hardly call 54 % of 80 experts statistically significant"
but, the usual rules of statistics make the error in the second
digit of that "54%" number, so it looks OK to me.
"risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand..."
OK, I completely agree that there is a large "we" that doesn't
understand. That never stopped engineering in the past, though.
It isn't a better argument now.
The risk that we DO have knowledge of, is that business-as-usual
will cause a crash in a few decades. Swerving to avoid a crash
is NOT as scary as the alternatives. That is the message of many
experts according to the original article...
Well, I'm familiar with another firmware-OS incompatibility (from Apple
in the circa-2000 timeframe), and it unfolded thus:
Apple makes a computer and firmware, and ships it with OS 9.0
Apple updates some software and firmware, and tests the updates on
their barnful of original iMacs. When it works, they release it.
Apple updates OS to 9.2, testing on the barnful of original iMacs.
It works, so they release it
HOWEVER there were no machines in the barn with original, nonupdated firmware.
So, there were no tests with the original, nonupdated firmware. Failures occur
in the field, things are unsettled for a while, then... somewhere, someone does
the firmware update and finds that the same hardware that 'broke' with the
new OS is just fine if, only if, the firmware version is 'most-recent'.
Apple had to:
(1) release new system software installers that checked for (and
warned/exited if they found) incompatible early firmware,
(2) update all the firmware on repair-parts motherboards
(which would otherwise be used as replacement parts and
fail in the field),
(3) alert all service centers of workarounds that
could be used to un-brick customer machines.
They did all that, on the 400 MHz generation of iMac computers.
Affected machines had video problems and sometimes
these problems would shutdown the power supply.
Seems like they flubbed one last requirement:
(4) always generate reversal software to undo firmware upgrades
so that the test-machine barn has all the same versions of
firmware available for test as the customer base might have.
The ONLY operating system that worked for the (required)
firmware update was 9.1, and lots of folk were trying to skip
directly from 9.0 to 9.2 (or 10.2). I was one
of the dealer service agents, it WAS rather a mess and this latest
issue sounds like a repeat.
So, THAT's how QA misses problems like these.
Anonymous Coward, you're such a troll!
>>Here, let me fix those numbers for you: ...: 27,499,638 .0032%
>>estimate of iraqi population
>>Num. of Iraqi civilian deaths to date (iraqbodycount.og): 88952 - this is the lower estimate.
>>Total percentage of iraqi civilians killed by war to date:
Mathematically, it's 0.32%; logically, it's a lowball estimate of 0.32%
Well, we were warned, this was always about 'fixed' numbers.
Alas, USB cannot keep up with wide/fast SCSI (required for DDS3 and DDS4
tape drives), and doesn't have enough power for high voltage differential
at all. You need two or more SCSI interfaces, just to cover the signaling
range (there are low-voltage-differential interfaces that autoswitch to the
older single-ended standard, but not to high-voltage-differential).
But that's not all: the original PC had cassette interface (and your audio card
can't completely replace that, there's no motor control wire in an audio card).
Is there a cassette/USB dongle available? Anywhere?
There is also question about how long the firewire "standard" will remain. At the recent FCC hearing on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, Intel made it very clear that they were pushing for IP based technologies and thought that the firewire standard had failed.
Two red flags here: first, Firewire allows isochronous transport,
so it can deliver glitch-free program material. There are IP
workarounds, but the Firewire solution is effective and
trouble-free. IP delivery requires lots of slop in the timing,
because it doesn't have any way to preallocate bandwidth to
the time-critical data.
Intel has 'not invented here' feelings about Firewire, which are
not to be taken as expertise. Intel doesn't think Firewire
has failed, they just think they don't own it.
Second red flag: why would IP be useful? I've used Firewire
as the medium for TCP/IP, it works fine, but what is the
supposed advantage to IP? Do they imagine they will be
able to fix some kind of solution that works in all consumers'
wired and wireless network environments? A solution that
will be future-proof?
Glittalogik says:
> Sending old faulty or unusable computers (and even functional ones eventually) to third world countries is >tantamount to coopting them as a dumping ground for our hazardous waste.
That's the basic premise of the article, and it's a completely unfair characterization.
What was shipped, was an undiagnosed mix of working and nonworking hardware.
A technician can determine functionality in UK for $100/hour, OR the end users
can do it themselves in Congo. Going with plan B makes sense both from the UK
end (less cost for them) and the Congo end (more computers received if they aren't
asking for a 1-year warranty). So, they went with plan B.
After some kind of diagnosis, some of the computer parts are scrapped for materials,
and THAT is poorly handled by the Congo end. There's nothing useful about
blaming the UK half of the transaction for this consequence. UK can't do
better for themselves by smashing good computers with the bad, and
can't do any net good for Congo that way either. Congo, remember, DOES need
computers.
At the repair center (I've worked there, trust me on this) there are "components" like
monitors, that have maybe 50 electronic parts. The "component" is nonfunctional
if one of 50 electronic parts is faulty, or misadjusted. Given three dead monitors,
the likelihood is that two working monitors can be built from those electronic parts.
So, shipping dead computers can benefit Congo, because it gives them access to repair
parts. The $100/hour UK technician can't fix enough of those monitors to keep
him in business, however. The UK technician cannot economically use the repair
parts potential.
The other unfair characterization in the article, is that Congo, no matter HOW they get
computers, will someday scrap them (even if they buy new-retail-box) and in the
Congo style, that scrap phase will be dirty. UK practices can only alter the scale of
the Congo scrap piles, not their ugliness.
'Information that might help an opponent'
and
'Information that might help a coworker, ally, employer'
are both likely to be present in those e-mails.
Only the first of these excites fear, uncertainty, doubt and
only the first is being carefully considered by the policymakers
in this case. They're deluded. Don't buy stock, and keep
your resume updated.
China's official denial is ... laughable.
I met a lot of chinese in grad school (hint: when
attending a conference, make sure at least one US
citizen attends with any group of chinese... because
your rental car agency will want to see a credit card).
The expertise might be thin on the ground in China,
but it isn't absent.
More to the point, if that expertise IS thin on the ground,
the likelihood of a chance encounter with a hacker is small.
The observed events must therefore have been OTHER than
chance, perhaps arranged by some Chinese nationwide
agency...
Chinese insistence on information control (declaring all sorts
of information 'state secret') implies a mindset that all US
acquisition of information is 'stealing state secrets', and
it's very likely that cracking open visitors' computers is
expected behavior for any Chinese who welcomes an
American congressman. Sad, but not unexpected.
In this and other matters of diplomacy, China is uncivilized.
is read center-out, clockwise or other. Then you have to
know to undo the modulation (it's called 8-14, because
each 8 bit byte generates a 14-bit pattern on the disk),
and unwrap the complex-interleave-Reed-Solomon
coding (CIRC). You need to know the error-encoding
mechanism in order to repair bad bits at this point.
Even if you don't repair, you need to discard the
extra bits of the error-correcting code.
Then you need the format (the inner tracks have lots of
album data, and some or all of it is relevant to playback)
to rebuild a track index, then recognize the stereo
data in each track as audio (it might be an ISO 9660 data
disk of MP3s, or AIFF, or something entirely other).
Unless you find a set of the (license-restricted) specifications
known as red book, yellow book, etc., it's unlikely that
the hypothetical 23rd century researcher is going to
complete the decoding process in a single weekend.
It's equally unlikely that normal 'computer literacy' will
suffice to do the decoding. At best, your hypothetical
investigator will have to find an archive of instructions,
VERY DETAILED instructions, to complete the task.
Serious archivists are aghast at the digital-rights-management
roadblocks that have been proposed in recent years;
plays-for-sure is the tip of an iceberg.
There are many real physical systems where the
'butterfly effect' is very evident, and the history
of science includes prior art. Lagrange found in
his orbital calculations of planets that the sensitivity of
the solutions to errors in observation could be
extreme, about 200 years ago. A century ago,
the excessive sensitivity of matrices with large
eigenvalues provided a good model of the problem.
Today, we call it 'chaos theory', but Lorenz is just a recent
worker in the field, not really the father...
Phosphors don't 'fade over time'; fade means "lose color saturation", and the
time-dependent shifts in a CRT affect the color BALANCE, not the saturation.
The bleaching of color filters in LCDs might conceivably result in a 'fading'
time characteristic. More important though, LCDs are affected by the
character of the backlights, and THAT makes them a nightmare to fully
characterize. I've done it, as a service tech, and it's just amazing what
a graphic artist will notice; they were often VERY particular, and they
weren't imagining the problems, just noticing things that I could only verify
with meters...
The best bargain in color is the old Macintosh "Moby" monitor; the rainbow
button on the front panel initiated a full automated self-calibration.
>>The reason the state is issuing these new fancy-schmancy thumb drives is that the new ones (claim to) >>have 256-bit AES encryption and (claim to) self-destruct after 10 consecutive wrong passwords.
>In which case they really should verify that this actually is the case before buying more than a sample.
Very true, but let's go a little deeper... A prudent test would be applicable only to
one model of hardware, one revision of the firmware, and the cost of testing would only
be supportable if one makes a bulk purchase. Because a retail outlet, or even
a wholesaler, cannot identify the firmware from the packaging, you have to contract with
a manufacturer directly to do that.
Inescapable conclusion: consumers buying thumb drives cannot expect any
comparable security for their data. We can only trust some manufacturer's
claims printed on the retail package.
Now, we hear of a government agency that's going to certify one kind of drive, BUT only
for their own use. We should, as citizens, ask our elected government to provide
some support for our needs in this regard. Maybe Washington state can market an
"approved for security" logo and offset this hardware purchase cost?
Government acting for the public good: it's an idea.
The bogus charges were handled through an intermediary. Most of that
$30 million went to the scammers, but a fee was paid to the intermediary
(which is the same organization that would handle complaints.).
The $1.9M is a fine to the billing middleman, who should have
known there was fraud afoot and will, in future, have to be
more careful. Since the middleman only profited by a small fee
on the fraudulent transactions, the fine is a small fraction of
the amount of the fraud.
I should say, the presumed amount of the fraud; it's hard to know
what part of a phone bill is real and what is bogus. The court
can only deal with the parts that are clearly fraud. For this reason,
bill-per-service is a VERY bad way to arrange telecom services.
There have been cases of iPhone bills incurring international
roaming charges at an alarming rate while doing innocent
'check for e-mail' background tasks.
In the current case, they
(1) violated their agreement to register sites for a fee
(i.e. they broke a contract unilaterally)
(2) made no good-faith effort to keep their customer from
harm (they didn't release the sitenames for him to arrange
alternate accommodations, nor did they notify him of the action).
A good tort lawyer could make a case of this. Public policy
is to enforce contracts, and only a court order normally can
override that. A hearing before a real court of law could
be in the offing...
For the Macintosh line, all the high-end machines since about 2000 have
had Firewire. It trickled down to the iMac/iBook in 2003. So if one
believes the 'five years after it's in a Mac' rule, high-end Wintel
will be likely to have Firewire from 2005, and low-end Wintel
will be picking up that 'feature' this year.
Plan for the future: expect Firewire.
Firewire is a one-stop solution for external hard drives, for digital video,
for HD video, for fast TCP/IP. The use as a maintenance back-channel
into your files is also extremely important to some of us (makes lots
of data transfer/recovery issues easy to solve).
The moving part is cute, of course, and gives a bit of visual
tension to the apparatus you see through your peekaboo case.
Still, it's a bit of a clunker compared to the old-tech way of
making a no-moving-parts air pump powered by waste
heat. I refer, of course, to the 'chimney'.
How do we 'humans stand a chance?'
We, humans, aren't limited to chance at all, we can also apply
knowledge and purpose. After all, we've had the roots/nuts/berries
fuel thing nailed down for millennia, and the sun never HAS burned
those.
We were also first with fission energy, and with less time 'spent' on
the problem than old Sol has had...
Best activation energy for fusion is deuterium-tritium, by the way, and
solar output is straight proton-proton (which is much harder).
>...that detectors should be required to be certified, makes sense
NO! It is a mistake to seek sanity in this kind of fatuous proposal.
If it were a good idea, it wouldn't need modification. If it's a bad idea,
the modification doesn't suffice to save it. This idea is a
wedge for censorship that is clearly against US law and custom.
In my world, adults are presumed to have some idea what constitutes
danger, and are encouraged, if only for the sake of children, to
sound out loudly when they see a danger. That's all that's required.
We can trust adults to use simple measurement tools safely.
So, why not trust them to use ALL measurement tools?
Get a smoke alarm in your house, and repel the NYC police if
they try to 'certify' it. Use the speedometer on your car,
and the tire pressure gage, and the temperature warning light.
Keep the police force OUT of it.
False alarms, while a nuisance, are less damaging than suppression
of valid alarms. The dust danger after 9/11 is a sensitive issue
in NYC, and the sensitivity is leading to madness.
We mustn't encourage them.
> ...And how do I hook up a 44 pin laptop drive
With a little wiring adapter board. They cost $4 or so last time I bought 'em.
The laptop connector isn't polarized, though, you HAVE to remember
which orientation of the adapter board is right side up!
A 2.5" laptop drive and the adapter fit easily into the 3.5" hotswap bays, too.
How is this 'entirely American'?
The statue is French, depicts the first of the trio 'Liberte, egalite, fraternite'
from the French revolution.
Maybe it's a typo, you meant to say it's 'entirely copper'?
>The Seagate 80GB HDD /retails/ at $65. You don't pay $160,
>as a RESELLER, for that same device that they're selling at retail
>for FORTY PER CENT of that price.
Ah, but the Apple store is selling a drive of three-years-ago manufacture
that was put into inventory as a warranty-spares drive, and which
was purchased when an 80G drive probably DID cost that much.
For warranty (1 year) and extended warranty (3 years) and for
some educational service contracts (5 years) the spares drives are
all stocked somewhere, and Apple protects their stock level by
pricing it all well above reasonable retail.
An Apple store employee is tied to the single-supplier Apple repair
depot for such parts. Buy your replacement drive elsewhere if
you want to see fair-market pricing. What Apple is doing is
intended for obligations to replace exactly the original, as
in a warranty repair.
>So what was the $160 for?
Yes, that's the key to the whole transaction! The Apple store
offered out-of-warranty service on the same terms as warranty
service, but at the customer's expense. This means they use
Apple repair parts (possibly rebuilt, not new), under Apple
repair warranty (not too good, 90 days parts and labor),
and send the 'faulty' part to Apple for possible rebuild (or
more likely, pass-off to the disk manufacturer for factory rebuild).
Because the part is swapped, this also means that the option to
upgrade to a larger disk is ruled out. Apple repair warranty
only applies to disk-original-size-shipped-with-unit, after all.
So, getting memory or hard disk replaced on an Apple computer
by the Apple store will result in ripoff part price (because the
part prices were set when the computer was manufactured and not
readjusted later), small capacity (because that's the exact-replacement
for what was available when the comptuer was manufactured) and
inflexibility about exchange (because warranty repair agents have
to show the dead part or they won't get paid/credited for doing
the repair).
I worked for an Apple dealer, and we had flexibility to use
normal retail-channel parts for repairs. So memory replacements
had lifetime warranty, hard drive replacements could be any
size you wanted to buy, you can keep the old drive, etc.
The Apple store doesn't deserve any particular respect for
how they treat this kind of 'repair', because they aren't really
trying to do a good job for the customer. They're just grudgingly
redoing service-as-usual-under-warranty because it makes money.
There are car companies that offer long (even ten year) mechanical
warranties on their cars. To me, that means that my car, at age 11,
becomes unserviceable except by the dealer. Who else ever
worked on that model in the preceeding decade? Who except the
dealer ever had parts stocked for it? It sounds like a sweet warranty,
but it's ALSO a major anticompetitive action by the manufacturer.
>but...he also had them wipe the drives of several underling's laptops as well...
... another $95). If the customer will pay for more work than necessary, they'll
When the underlings left, their laptops and the data on them were going to be reissued;
a wipe to ensure confidentiality probably seems normal-practice to a lawyer (I know it
does to a doctor).
>and if he really had a virus, why not just call his own IT
Consider that a lawyer who doesn't trust his computer might not trust the IT folk who set it
up, either; getting outside support and a receipt that has that reassuring "all data wiped"
tickmark might just be the no-brainer reassurance this individual is comfortable with.
The geek squad doesn't have any reason to educate him on other options (a billable hour
is
prepare a suitable invoice... it's all good.