This is a bit misleading. If you double encrypt using different keys and passwords it is effectively twice as strong. At WORST it is the same strength exactly.
Proof: Assume it is easier to crack a file that has been encrypted twice with different keys and passwords. Step 1 to crack the file:Encrypt it with a key and password that you make up. Now you have something encrypted using the same method, with weaker encryption than you started. Now encrypt it again. Now you have something encrypted with a still weaker encryption. This is a total ordering, so repeating this a number of times will leave you with encryption which is much weaker than you started, all by merely knowing the type of encryption used. This can be done by any attacker, so doing it yourself does not reduce the strength of the encryption.
Using two different encryption methods can ONLY improve the security.
The question is whether it is better than just using single encryption with a key which is twice as long. It is certainly better to use stronger encryption and only encrypt once than to use weaker encryption and to it twice.
Here is a way I just thought of to create secure passwords. It seems good enough. It has the benefit that you can derive your password easily without making it less secure at all.
Pick some english words. It doesn't matter at all what they are, so long as the number of repeated letters is low. It can even be a phrase. In fact, it can be your name if you like, but it is better to just pick some words that you can remember.
Pass Phrase: MikeyJohnFatDug
Now you apply a group permutation to this. There are n! different permutations for a Pass Phrase with n unique characters. So the above has 15 unique characters, there are 15! = 1307674368000 ~= 13 *10^11 different permutations.
It is possible to order the permutations in a unique way. So now you just pick a number between 1 and 13*10^11. This seems hard right? Well, maybe not. Pick an equation and then use the first however many significant digits. If you don't want to remember how many digits you used, just find an equation that has a value within the range, and chop the decimal part. Of course you need to write a short script to tell you what permutation corresponds to the number you choose.
Example Permutation: Pi^Pi^Sqrt[3] = 18878025475.0620 so the permutation is 18878025475.
Now, you apply permutation 18878025475 to MikeyJohnFatDug, and whatever that gives you is your password. Memorize it. If you forget it derive it again.
With 15 characters made from 4 words as above, there are approx. n! * (25000 choose 4) different passwords possible. This assumes the attacker knows the length of the password AND how many words are in it AND how you made it. Without this knowledge the password is basically as strong as a random string, and with this knowledge they are still in a hopeless situation.
So you have to remember a few short words in order and a simple equation, for a password that is many orders of magnitude stronger than any commonly used encryption key. They'll brute force the key before they can crack this password.
Now they might try guessing equations, but as long as you have at least 3 operations in it it will be no easier for them by doing this, since there are hundreds of constants you can choose from as well as any numbers, plus about 8 operations, so again it is stronger than the key.
Of course I may have missed something serious here, though it seems kosher to me.
Then why are you using a grammar checker? You can't say "You should know this." and magically people do. The university accepted this person.
Think of a University as a black box where people go in, and four (to 7 haha) years later they come out. Now, say they come in with knowledge level x. Is the goal of the University merely to spit them out at knowledge level x + 10, or is it the goal to output graduates at some level y, where y is a high level of competency?
Obviously it is the latter. So if even if they SHOULD know something, that doesn't mean they get to brush over it. Especially as the vast vast vast majority of people have been failed by their previous schools which did not force them to learn grammar (or anything else) in their childhood.
To make this obvious, suppose someone is taking a math class. Does the person get out of having to learn how to do basic algebra just because they can use a tool like Mathematica or a TI-89 to do it for them? No, they take some sort of placement test and they have to start as far down on the math track as their lack of knowledge requires. Then they have to learn everything they should already know, but don't.
The clear difference is that math is more linear in it's progression early on than other subjects like English. You can have great reading comprehension of complex texts without actually being able to spell or knowing grammar, while you can't do calculus without algebra and arithmetic, for example. That shouldn't get you out of learning spelling and grammar though, if it is important to learn those things at all.
So Universities exist to bring students to a high level of competency. If you need to know grammar to attain this then they exist to teach grammar.
Failure of Public School to teach people isn't an excuse for the University to fail to require people to know stuff to get a diploma.
An English prof. who recommends you use a grammar checker should be fired. It is the same as a math prof. who recommends that you just use Mathematica instead of learning the math.
Learn grammar and the checker is irrelevant. If you are in an English class then that is the point of being there!
In business I can understand that you would want to pass yourself off as more competent than you are, or at least not let your bad grammar turn off someone who otherwise have been profitable to do business with.
Grammer checkers dumb. I always think grammer is a way to gauge person by writing. You know if their smart. When they write like this you know. Grammer checkers make dumber people seem like smarters. It is harder to tell that they are wortless human beings who don't deserve more energy being invested into them, since the beginning of time this is the case, which is why the correct grammer is always defined as the one which will make you sound like the rich people, because the point of using that grammer is to show that you aren't mentally defective, and worthy of having resources spent on you because you will show a good return for the investment, since it doesn't cost anything to practice good grammer it is a good way to tell, other ways of determining intelligence and education can be two biased and that means that it is better to use grammer since it is less baised, this is obvious to me.
See what I mean?
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
You mean the stuff I'm trying to sell? Hmm, maybe selling all my hardware would normally mean I have lots of cash, but not buying other hardware is the clue that I might not have loads of cash.
So to go over it again, selling your stuff is usually a sign of a lack of money, not the opposite as you claim.
Oh, and thanks for standing behind your comment by not posting as AC.
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To "just move" a file you hold down apple, or is it shift? It's basically the same deal on windows, except there you do hold shift.
Are you actually posting comments on slashdot? Why would I ever give a flying god damn what someone who can't move a file thinks? Honestly?
Note: Windows does not come with winamp. Plus, macs DO come with itunes, which is fantastic for music. Are you using winamp for video? Guess what, you're using media player in disguise.
I find that quicktime pro is very nice for watching video's, I find it annoying that quicktime regular can't do full screen. But then again pro is just a serialnumber away!
I'll go ahead and give you guys my software position again: If you pay for software you're a sucker. If you find that it is morally wrong to just type in a serial number from the net then you are a sucker too. Maybe someday when I have money to spare I'll feel differently, as buying it might be cheaper than downloading it when your time is worth money. But when alot of software costs more than I make in a month I'll go ahead and get it from bittorrent while I eat my ramen noodles. I do use OSS, but only when it sucks less than the comercial equivelent. So no openoffice.org, since it is pretty awful, and rarely renders Word documents correctly. Abiword is ok and I use it sometimes.
What are you talking about? Honestly, you must be a very confused person.
I say "Can't do digital photo's on an old computer, because there is no USB. "
You say "Get a serial to USB converter."
I say: "Hey dummy, that still won't give you USB, it works to give a serial port to a new computer, not a USB port to an old computer."
You say: "Cars and robots have serial ports. Modern cars have serial ports. Something irelevent about the freeway system."
One last time friend, a USB to Serial converter does NOT NOT NOT turn a serial port into a USB port. IT DOES NOT DO THIS. IT DOES NOT DO THIS. It turns a USB port on a NEWER COMPUTER into a serial port. The thing you describe is not in reality. It has no extension. It is not a thing which exists. Do you follow what I am saying yet? You think something is, while it is not.
USB was not based on the old serial port. USB is called serial because it sends one bit at a time, rather than a parallel archetecture like IDE. USB has a large amount of additional overhead, such as device ID's and transfer modes as part of the specification, while serial as in old serial ports is a raw interface.
Are you on medication? I mean seriously, you're nutty as I've seen on slashdot.
I realize that I'm just feeding the troll here, and that you're probably like 14 or something, but you should really stop talking out your ass just to try to win this little disagreement. I mean jesus, you tried to bring the Interstate system into a discussion of USB!
But honestly, the mouse thing was weird at first. Give it like 2 weeks and you won't notice it any more.
The mouse pointer doesn't matter. Suck it up or download something from versiontracker. It will take 3 minutes dude.
3. There are only like 1 billion file managers available. I used to rely on that view as well, but you might find that if you use the mac for awhile, and create shortcuts to your most heavily used folders, this way is actually a bit faster. It forces you to avoid doing something that is inefficient but good enough.
The GUI is limited in that you can't put docs all over the screen out of the box. I have found that Apple got it right, so I don't have to change it around to get it usable.
Cocoa is a breeze to program in. You can even do it from Python scripts, out of the box. The IDE is included with the OS, as is the compiler and advanced profiling tools. What are you complaining about? It beats the unholy dog shit out of KDE and Gnome. KDE can bairly bounce an icon when you start a program without having painting artifacts and jumpiness. Gnome as of 2.6 was way to buggy to use. OSX Just Rocks.
I've read every Ender book released so far. The rest I've avoided because I don't personally like any sort of 'fantasy' book, I know, my loss whatever.
I've also read his "How to Write Science Fiction" book.
Frankly, I liked Ender's Game alot, then I liked Ender's Shadow and Speaker for the Dead as well. However, the writing isn't good. It is the usual pulp fiction, and I can accept/embrace that. Ender's Game was the best in this respect, the rest are really just shit, especially that latest Bean book. Why does Achilles keep coming back? It's like a bad horror movie, every 10 minutes he is running a superpower nation. It's stupid shit.
The beauty of trading information with a distant alien race is:
1.Information is free to copy, so there is no cost to sending real information. 2.If you cheat and send fake info they might cut you off, even if you send real info later. 3.They are so far away it can almost never hurt you to tell them what you know, since even if they were inclined they couldn't hurt you. 4.They will know the above because however bad their system of government/whatever they have to decide what to transmit, however bad it is, it has to be better than ours. This isn't really that much of a suprise if you happen to know that we have the worst possible of all governments, the kind that is willing to build weapons that can kill virtually everyone on the planet, then only take half hearted measures to prevent insane nations from developing them. It becomes obvious why there are no alien signals when it is possible to build something so destructive with basic rudiments of technology.
So this idea, besides being really stupid and solving nothing, is even more anthropomorphic than sending images (which are 2 dimensional patterns, which any being which can move in at least 2 dimensions can be safely able to abstractly comprehend if worth talking to). It solves nothing because the AI still has to talk to them somehow, so back to square one.
Even the things that happen in Ender's "psyche" are in the book happening in a video game. Card is a terrible writer. There is nothing subtle in this book.
Nah, his books might seem good at first. I've read the entire Ender Series so far, and the Bean saga has been written at a level that should embarass Card. Especially the latest book, Shadow of the Hegemon or whatever the latest one is called. It was just awful, with people running around (for the entire book) to save unborn disgarded fetus's, which were stolen. The entire premise of the Bean character is that he was genetically engineered, and how terrible it is to do this because unforseen effects caused him to be a freakshow. So don't make it out to seem like his politics doesn't effect his writing, it certainly does. And the Achillies plot if fucking stupid as hell.
This is just a bunch of lies. Windows 2000 on 8 megs? In a dream maybe.
But the tell is that he saw windows 95 running on a 286. 286's are 16 bit. So this is just a lie.
About linux never swapping: Linux will write to the disk every second or so regardless of the memory situation.
In the end, I hope this article is cut and pasted from some kind of illiterate overclockers forum or something. I mean, it really could have been. Sorry if I'm feeding the troll. (if this is a serious post, lay off the amphetamine)
However, believe it or not, cars don't get twice as fast every 18 months! So it seems that your analogy falls afucking part there. (besides, this analogy was fucking stupid from the start. Cars do one primary thing, get you somewhere. Once you're there it really doesn't matter what car you have. However, computers are *general* computing machines. They can be programmed to do more than one function. So you can type up a document just like they did 40 years ago, AND you can render your home video like they didn't 4 years ago, and you will be able to do whatever you can program a turing complete machine to do.)
Plus, old crap doesn't do anything worth while to people. Could you use windows 3.11 to orginize your digital photo's? No USB jerk.
Could you use Windows 95 to edit your home movies? BZZZZT, no firewire, memory model leads to lots o lots o lots o crashes. Do you like redoing things? I hope so!
Dos: Privateer and doom are great. Enjoy 320x240 hotshot.
Oh, and the internet is just a passing fad anyway, so don't worry about using anything older than win95. (yea, I know you can use 3.1. But honestly, netscape 3 has lost it's shine)
Windows 2000. Can you set this computer up in your living room and use it as a family computer? Sure, if you don't mind people 1. Shitting all over your account or 2. Logging you out when you are in the middle of something. Why, they didn't have fast user switching! (this last one isn't so big of a deal, but it is very nice for a multi user computer in a common area, at least until you go get that mac you've been lusting after.)
I guess Grandma can still use Print Shop to make you a little card on her dot matrix printer, but the old bat will soon be dead so humor her. For those of us who might be around long enough to care what people think (and aren't going for that 'retro' look) might want to look in to upgrading every now and again.
Windows 95 will not run reasonably well with 4mb. On my 8mb *486* DX it had to page out memory when you right clicked the desktop! Listen, let me explain how bad this is. It had to churn the hard drive to load up the menu that comes up when you right click on the desktop. Not the resolution selection stuff, just the menu that says "Copy Paste Properties...".
When I got my whopping 32mb fast page mode simm it stopped doing that. In fact, it made a world of difference even loading programs like notepad, since with 32mb it wasn't paging out half of the essential parts of the OS to virtual memory.
To make it clear: I've been in the exact situation you describe. You are a liar or an idiot.
That's a good way to get screwed. I have no problem with both sides being winners in any transaction. The difference seems to be that I am willing to ensure that I am a winner in any given transaction.
And sometimes on old tv's you have to make someone sit next to it to get reception.
The other side of this is that if you rotate the phone 180 degrees it will get worse. At best this is shielding your phone from noise from other more distant towers or other phones/other sources of noise, thus making the antenna more directional.
To completely shield your phone from noise wrap it completely in aluminum foil and put it in the microwave. (Microwave optional)
Of course the sticker works, when used as directed. Then again, if you power cycle a lithium ion battery 5 times it will work the same as if you power cycle it 5 times with the sticker.
You see, the instructions quoted in the article tell you to fully charge and discharge the battery like 4 times.
Here is why:
If you discharge a lithium ion battery completely to 0 it could explode when you charge it. So there is a meter in the battery (usually) or on the logic board of the phone (not usually) that prevents total discharge. That is, at a pre-defined level of discharge, it turns the phone off. Now, the meter can get out of callibration. When you fully discharge and recharge the phone it can put the battery meter back into calibration, and doing it repeatedly will fix it better.
So you see, you might get up to about 30% more battery life, because the meter is out of whack and is cutting off your phone when there is still plenty of charge.
Basically they are selling you the instructions to fix your battery, plus a sticker that does nothing.
Computer batteries are the same way.
Disclaimer: Fully discharging Lithium batteries is bad for them. They do not develop memory like other battery types. However, when the meter is out of calibration it pays to do this a few times, just don't over do it, since you only get between 500 and 1000 full use cycles out of the batteries regardless of what you do.
Are they legally obligated? No. Should they do it? Yes.
There is a good reason why, and not just because it is in their best interest to do it. They are selling hardware. They should support any large enough group that wants to use the hardware, regardless of how they want to use it. If people want to use the chip to power easy bake ovens, they should help them turn the chip into a heating element.
Why should they? Because it is a publicly traded company. Shareholders don't care why people are handing them money. They just want them to rake it in hand over fist. Anything that gets in the way of that is rediculous.
So in the end the reason is that it is their damn job to support it, and the people paying their bills don't give a crap about them except for bringing in money.
Look at it this way, suppose a jeweler went to a yard sale and bought what some old lady thought was a piece of broken glass. The glass is really a diamond. The jeweler knew this and picked it up for 25 cents. Who is getting screwed here?
If I offer it on ebay and I only get 25 cents do you suppose the guy who wins the bid is going to email me and say, "That board can be modified, it is worth far more than 25 cents, research it and put it back up for auction so you get a fair price."? Hell no he isn't. The key in this (and every) exchange is that you want the other guy to be the sucker, not you. If you think you can make money without hedging then it is likely the case that you are on the bad end of the bargain. Sucker.
Probably. But only for one revision, then they'll stop it. This has been going on forever. The 486sx was identical to the dx early on, except the FPU was disabled. I have never heard of a hack to get around this. Video chips are the same story, a radeon 9500 IS a 9700, with half the pixel paths disabled usually due to defect. You can get around this in software even.
Here is where you can make out like a bandit. Buy up a bunch of the revision which is hackable. Then, hack the ones you can and sell them as such. Then wait until supplies run out, and sell the ones where the hack failed on ebay. People will be on the lookout for the hackable version, and will pay a premium to get it from you. Oh, don't mention that you already tried it and it didn't work. They get exactly what they paid for, so this isn't dishonest in the least.
Actually, this happened to me. I wanted the Radeon 9500 with the ram in an L configuration, because you can soft-upgrade it to a 9700 most of the time. I bought one on ebay since there were no more on newegg. I specifically asked the guy "L shaped ram" he says yes. I get it and everything seems fine. UNTIL I lift off the heatsink. There, instead of a thermal pad or tape, is silver thermal compound. Clearly he had lifted the heatsink, and then put it back on when the hack failed. At least he was nice enough not to leave the hosed heat-tape on there. I ended up with a good upgrade for about what the newer revision would have cost anyway.
Now, in the next revision they just update the manufacturing to make it impossible to do the hack, because it is a nightmare for them to support all the half busted products that have been 'fixed' (even if they just say no, receiving and testing those products for the hack, and even phone support, costs like a bastard), and it cuts into the sales of the top tier products, where they make the highest margin. For chip companies this is as easy as dinging the faulty side of the chip before they assemble it completely, or putting some sort of "fuse" on the silicon itself, which they then burn out if that side is faulty. There is no way to take apart a chip to work directly on the silicon, and if there is and someone actually does it it will be a "Prove you can" since the equipment will be in the millions. (I can imagine a physics grad student with access to the machinery if they are doing superconductor or quantum computing research)
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bit misleading. If you double encrypt using different keys and passwords it is effectively twice as strong. At WORST it is the same strength exactly.
Proof: Assume it is easier to crack a file that has been encrypted twice with different keys and passwords. Step 1 to crack the file:Encrypt it with a key and password that you make up. Now you have something encrypted using the same method, with weaker encryption than you started. Now encrypt it again. Now you have something encrypted with a still weaker encryption. This is a total ordering, so repeating this a number of times will leave you with encryption which is much weaker than you started, all by merely knowing the type of encryption used. This can be done by any attacker, so doing it yourself does not reduce the strength of the encryption.
Using two different encryption methods can ONLY improve the security.
The question is whether it is better than just using single encryption with a key which is twice as long. It is certainly better to use stronger encryption and only encrypt once than to use weaker encryption and to it twice.
Here is a way I just thought of to create secure passwords. It seems good enough. It has the benefit that you can derive your password easily without making it less secure at all.
Pick some english words. It doesn't matter at all what they are, so long as the number of repeated letters is low. It can even be a phrase. In fact, it can be your name if you like, but it is better to just pick some words that you can remember.
Pass Phrase: MikeyJohnFatDug
Now you apply a group permutation to this. There are n! different permutations for a Pass Phrase with n unique characters. So the above has 15 unique characters, there are 15! = 1307674368000 ~= 13 *10^11 different permutations.
It is possible to order the permutations in a unique way. So now you just pick a number between 1 and 13*10^11. This seems hard right? Well, maybe not. Pick an equation and then use the first however many significant digits. If you don't want to remember how many digits you used, just find an equation that has a value within the range, and chop the decimal part. Of course you need to write a short script to tell you what permutation corresponds to the number you choose.
Example Permutation: Pi^Pi^Sqrt[3] = 18878025475.0620 so the permutation is 18878025475.
Now, you apply permutation 18878025475 to MikeyJohnFatDug, and whatever that gives you is your password. Memorize it. If you forget it derive it again.
With 15 characters made from 4 words as above, there are approx. n! * (25000 choose 4) different passwords possible. This assumes the attacker knows the length of the password AND how many words are in it AND how you made it. Without this knowledge the password is basically as strong as a random string, and with this knowledge they are still in a hopeless situation.
So you have to remember a few short words in order and a simple equation, for a password that is many orders of magnitude stronger than any commonly used encryption key. They'll brute force the key before they can crack this password.
Now they might try guessing equations, but as long as you have at least 3 operations in it it will be no easier for them by doing this, since there are hundreds of constants you can choose from as well as any numbers, plus about 8 operations, so again it is stronger than the key.
Of course I may have missed something serious here, though it seems kosher to me.
Then why are you using a grammar checker? You can't say "You should know this." and magically people do. The university accepted this person.
Think of a University as a black box where people go in, and four (to 7 haha) years later they come out. Now, say they come in with knowledge level x. Is the goal of the University merely to spit them out at knowledge level x + 10, or is it the goal to output graduates at some level y, where y is a high level of competency?
Obviously it is the latter. So if even if they SHOULD know something, that doesn't mean they get to brush over it. Especially as the vast vast vast majority of people have been failed by their previous schools which did not force them to learn grammar (or anything else) in their childhood.
To make this obvious, suppose someone is taking a math class. Does the person get out of having to learn how to do basic algebra just because they can use a tool like Mathematica or a TI-89 to do it for them? No, they take some sort of placement test and they have to start as far down on the math track as their lack of knowledge requires. Then they have to learn everything they should already know, but don't.
The clear difference is that math is more linear in it's progression early on than other subjects like English. You can have great reading comprehension of complex texts without actually being able to spell or knowing grammar, while you can't do calculus without algebra and arithmetic, for example. That shouldn't get you out of learning spelling and grammar though, if it is important to learn those things at all.
So Universities exist to bring students to a high level of competency. If you need to know grammar to attain this then they exist to teach grammar.
Failure of Public School to teach people isn't an excuse for the University to fail to require people to know stuff to get a diploma.
An English prof. who recommends you use a grammar checker should be fired. It is the same as a math prof. who recommends that you just use Mathematica instead of learning the math.
Learn grammar and the checker is irrelevant. If you are in an English class then that is the point of being there!
In business I can understand that you would want to pass yourself off as more competent than you are, or at least not let your bad grammar turn off someone who otherwise have been profitable to do business with.
Grammer checkers dumb. I always think grammer is a way to gauge person by writing. You know if their smart. When they write like this you know. Grammer checkers make dumber people seem like smarters. It is harder to tell that they are wortless human beings who don't deserve more energy being invested into them, since the beginning of time this is the case, which is why the correct grammer is always defined as the one which will make you sound like the rich people, because the point of using that grammer is to show that you aren't mentally defective, and worthy of having resources spent on you because you will show a good return for the investment, since it doesn't cost anything to practice good grammer it is a good way to tell, other ways of determining intelligence and education can be two biased and that means that it is better to use grammer since it is less baised, this is obvious to me.
See what I mean?
You mean the stuff I'm trying to sell? Hmm, maybe selling all my hardware would normally mean I have lots of cash, but not buying other hardware is the clue that I might not have loads of cash.
So to go over it again, selling your stuff is usually a sign of a lack of money, not the opposite as you claim.
Oh, and thanks for standing behind your comment by not posting as AC.
To "just move" a file you hold down apple, or is it shift? It's basically the same deal on windows, except there you do hold shift.
Are you actually posting comments on slashdot? Why would I ever give a flying god damn what someone who can't move a file thinks? Honestly?
Note: Windows does not come with winamp. Plus, macs DO come with itunes, which is fantastic for music. Are you using winamp for video? Guess what, you're using media player in disguise.
I find that quicktime pro is very nice for watching video's, I find it annoying that quicktime regular can't do full screen. But then again pro is just a serialnumber away!
I'll go ahead and give you guys my software position again: If you pay for software you're a sucker. If you find that it is morally wrong to just type in a serial number from the net then you are a sucker too. Maybe someday when I have money to spare I'll feel differently, as buying it might be cheaper than downloading it when your time is worth money. But when alot of software costs more than I make in a month I'll go ahead and get it from bittorrent while I eat my ramen noodles. I do use OSS, but only when it sucks less than the comercial equivelent. So no openoffice.org, since it is pretty awful, and rarely renders Word documents correctly. Abiword is ok and I use it sometimes.
What are you talking about? Honestly, you must be a very confused person.
I say "Can't do digital photo's on an old computer, because there is no USB. "
You say "Get a serial to USB converter."
I say: "Hey dummy, that still won't give you USB, it works to give a serial port to a new computer, not a USB port to an old computer."
You say: "Cars and robots have serial ports. Modern cars have serial ports. Something irelevent about the freeway system."
One last time friend, a USB to Serial converter does NOT NOT NOT turn a serial port into a USB port. IT DOES NOT DO THIS. IT DOES NOT DO THIS. It turns a USB port on a NEWER COMPUTER into a serial port. The thing you describe is not in reality. It has no extension. It is not a thing which exists. Do you follow what I am saying yet? You think something is, while it is not.
USB was not based on the old serial port. USB is called serial because it sends one bit at a time, rather than a parallel archetecture like IDE. USB has a large amount of additional overhead, such as device ID's and transfer modes as part of the specification, while serial as in old serial ports is a raw interface.
Are you on medication? I mean seriously, you're nutty as I've seen on slashdot.
I realize that I'm just feeding the troll here, and that you're probably like 14 or something, but you should really stop talking out your ass just to try to win this little disagreement. I mean jesus, you tried to bring the Interstate system into a discussion of USB!
I won't respond to you from here on.
Are you honestly this stupid? For example: USB to serial converter. Do you actually believe this turns a serial port into a USB port?
Very very very very very very very ignorant.
Windows Weenee!
But honestly, the mouse thing was weird at first. Give it like 2 weeks and you won't notice it any more.
The mouse pointer doesn't matter. Suck it up or download something from versiontracker. It will take 3 minutes dude.
3. There are only like 1 billion file managers available. I used to rely on that view as well, but you might find that if you use the mac for awhile, and create shortcuts to your most heavily used folders, this way is actually a bit faster. It forces you to avoid doing something that is inefficient but good enough.
The GUI is limited in that you can't put docs all over the screen out of the box. I have found that Apple got it right, so I don't have to change it around to get it usable.
Cocoa is a breeze to program in. You can even do it from Python scripts, out of the box. The IDE is included with the OS, as is the compiler and advanced profiling tools. What are you complaining about? It beats the unholy dog shit out of KDE and Gnome. KDE can bairly bounce an icon when you start a program without having painting artifacts and jumpiness. Gnome as of 2.6 was way to buggy to use. OSX Just Rocks.
Time to read about Efficient Market Theory.
I've read every Ender book released so far. The rest I've avoided because I don't personally like any sort of 'fantasy' book, I know, my loss whatever.
I've also read his "How to Write Science Fiction" book.
Frankly, I liked Ender's Game alot, then I liked Ender's Shadow and Speaker for the Dead as well. However, the writing isn't good. It is the usual pulp fiction, and I can accept/embrace that. Ender's Game was the best in this respect, the rest are really just shit, especially that latest Bean book. Why does Achilles keep coming back? It's like a bad horror movie, every 10 minutes he is running a superpower nation. It's stupid shit.
The beauty of trading information with a distant alien race is:
1.Information is free to copy, so there is no cost to sending real information.
2.If you cheat and send fake info they might cut you off, even if you send real info later.
3.They are so far away it can almost never hurt you to tell them what you know, since even if they were inclined they couldn't hurt you.
4.They will know the above because however bad their system of government/whatever they have to decide what to transmit, however bad it is, it has to be better than ours. This isn't really that much of a suprise if you happen to know that we have the worst possible of all governments, the kind that is willing to build weapons that can kill virtually everyone on the planet, then only take half hearted measures to prevent insane nations from developing them. It becomes obvious why there are no alien signals when it is possible to build something so destructive with basic rudiments of technology.
So this idea, besides being really stupid and solving nothing, is even more anthropomorphic than sending images (which are 2 dimensional patterns, which any being which can move in at least 2 dimensions can be safely able to abstractly comprehend if worth talking to). It solves nothing because the AI still has to talk to them somehow, so back to square one.
Oh, wait, yes it is. (an action movie with kids)
Even the things that happen in Ender's "psyche" are in the book happening in a video game. Card is a terrible writer. There is nothing subtle in this book.
Nah, his books might seem good at first. I've read the entire Ender Series so far, and the Bean saga has been written at a level that should embarass Card. Especially the latest book, Shadow of the Hegemon or whatever the latest one is called. It was just awful, with people running around (for the entire book) to save unborn disgarded fetus's, which were stolen. The entire premise of the Bean character is that he was genetically engineered, and how terrible it is to do this because unforseen effects caused him to be a freakshow. So don't make it out to seem like his politics doesn't effect his writing, it certainly does. And the Achillies plot if fucking stupid as hell.
This is just a bunch of lies. Windows 2000 on 8 megs? In a dream maybe.
But the tell is that he saw windows 95 running on a 286. 286's are 16 bit. So this is just a lie.
About linux never swapping: Linux will write to the disk every second or so regardless of the memory situation.
In the end, I hope this article is cut and pasted from some kind of illiterate overclockers forum or something. I mean, it really could have been. Sorry if I'm feeding the troll. (if this is a serious post, lay off the amphetamine)
However, believe it or not, cars don't get twice as fast every 18 months! So it seems that your analogy falls afucking part there. (besides, this analogy was fucking stupid from the start. Cars do one primary thing, get you somewhere. Once you're there it really doesn't matter what car you have. However, computers are *general* computing machines. They can be programmed to do more than one function. So you can type up a document just like they did 40 years ago, AND you can render your home video like they didn't 4 years ago, and you will be able to do whatever you can program a turing complete machine to do.)
Plus, old crap doesn't do anything worth while to people. Could you use windows 3.11 to orginize your digital photo's? No USB jerk.
Could you use Windows 95 to edit your home movies? BZZZZT, no firewire, memory model leads to lots o lots o lots o crashes. Do you like redoing things? I hope so!
Dos: Privateer and doom are great. Enjoy 320x240 hotshot.
Oh, and the internet is just a passing fad anyway, so don't worry about using anything older than win95. (yea, I know you can use 3.1. But honestly, netscape 3 has lost it's shine)
Windows 2000. Can you set this computer up in your living room and use it as a family computer? Sure, if you don't mind people 1. Shitting all over your account or 2. Logging you out when you are in the middle of something. Why, they didn't have fast user switching! (this last one isn't so big of a deal, but it is very nice for a multi user computer in a common area, at least until you go get that mac you've been lusting after.)
I guess Grandma can still use Print Shop to make you a little card on her dot matrix printer, but the old bat will soon be dead so humor her. For those of us who might be around long enough to care what people think (and aren't going for that 'retro' look) might want to look in to upgrading every now and again.
I call bullshit.
Windows 95 will not run reasonably well with 4mb. On my 8mb *486* DX it had to page out memory when you right clicked the desktop! Listen, let me explain how bad this is. It had to churn the hard drive to load up the menu that comes up when you right click on the desktop. Not the resolution selection stuff, just the menu that says "Copy Paste Properties...".
When I got my whopping 32mb fast page mode simm it stopped doing that. In fact, it made a world of difference even loading programs like notepad, since with 32mb it wasn't paging out half of the essential parts of the OS to virtual memory.
To make it clear: I've been in the exact situation you describe. You are a liar or an idiot.
That's a good way to get screwed. I have no problem with both sides being winners in any transaction. The difference seems to be that I am willing to ensure that I am a winner in any given transaction.
And sometimes on old tv's you have to make someone sit next to it to get reception.
The other side of this is that if you rotate the phone 180 degrees it will get worse. At best this is shielding your phone from noise from other more distant towers or other phones/other sources of noise, thus making the antenna more directional.
To completely shield your phone from noise wrap it completely in aluminum foil and put it in the microwave. (Microwave optional)
Of course the sticker works, when used as directed. Then again, if you power cycle a lithium ion battery 5 times it will work the same as if you power cycle it 5 times with the sticker.
You see, the instructions quoted in the article tell you to fully charge and discharge the battery like 4 times.
Here is why:
If you discharge a lithium ion battery completely to 0 it could explode when you charge it. So there is a meter in the battery (usually) or on the logic board of the phone (not usually) that prevents total discharge. That is, at a pre-defined level of discharge, it turns the phone off. Now, the meter can get out of callibration. When you fully discharge and recharge the phone it can put the battery meter back into calibration, and doing it repeatedly will fix it better.
So you see, you might get up to about 30% more battery life, because the meter is out of whack and is cutting off your phone when there is still plenty of charge.
Basically they are selling you the instructions to fix your battery, plus a sticker that does nothing.
Computer batteries are the same way.
Disclaimer: Fully discharging Lithium batteries is bad for them. They do not develop memory like other battery types. However, when the meter is out of calibration it pays to do this a few times, just don't over do it, since you only get between 500 and 1000 full use cycles out of the batteries regardless of what you do.
Are they legally obligated? No. Should they do it? Yes.
There is a good reason why, and not just because it is in their best interest to do it. They are selling hardware. They should support any large enough group that wants to use the hardware, regardless of how they want to use it. If people want to use the chip to power easy bake ovens, they should help them turn the chip into a heating element.
Why should they? Because it is a publicly traded company. Shareholders don't care why people are handing them money. They just want them to rake it in hand over fist. Anything that gets in the way of that is rediculous.
So in the end the reason is that it is their damn job to support it, and the people paying their bills don't give a crap about them except for bringing in money.
Look at it this way, suppose a jeweler went to a yard sale and bought what some old lady thought was a piece of broken glass. The glass is really a diamond. The jeweler knew this and picked it up for 25 cents. Who is getting screwed here?
If I offer it on ebay and I only get 25 cents do you suppose the guy who wins the bid is going to email me and say, "That board can be modified, it is worth far more than 25 cents, research it and put it back up for auction so you get a fair price."? Hell no he isn't. The key in this (and every) exchange is that you want the other guy to be the sucker, not you. If you think you can make money without hedging then it is likely the case that you are on the bad end of the bargain. Sucker.
Probably. But only for one revision, then they'll stop it. This has been going on forever. The 486sx was identical to the dx early on, except the FPU was disabled. I have never heard of a hack to get around this. Video chips are the same story, a radeon 9500 IS a 9700, with half the pixel paths disabled usually due to defect. You can get around this in software even.
Here is where you can make out like a bandit. Buy up a bunch of the revision which is hackable. Then, hack the ones you can and sell them as such. Then wait until supplies run out, and sell the ones where the hack failed on ebay. People will be on the lookout for the hackable version, and will pay a premium to get it from you. Oh, don't mention that you already tried it and it didn't work. They get exactly what they paid for, so this isn't dishonest in the least.
Actually, this happened to me. I wanted the Radeon 9500 with the ram in an L configuration, because you can soft-upgrade it to a 9700 most of the time. I bought one on ebay since there were no more on newegg. I specifically asked the guy "L shaped ram" he says yes. I get it and everything seems fine. UNTIL I lift off the heatsink. There, instead of a thermal pad or tape, is silver thermal compound. Clearly he had lifted the heatsink, and then put it back on when the hack failed. At least he was nice enough not to leave the hosed heat-tape on there. I ended up with a good upgrade for about what the newer revision would have cost anyway.
Now, in the next revision they just update the manufacturing to make it impossible to do the hack, because it is a nightmare for them to support all the half busted products that have been 'fixed' (even if they just say no, receiving and testing those products for the hack, and even phone support, costs like a bastard), and it cuts into the sales of the top tier products, where they make the highest margin. For chip companies this is as easy as dinging the faulty side of the chip before they assemble it completely, or putting some sort of "fuse" on the silicon itself, which they then burn out if that side is faulty. There is no way to take apart a chip to work directly on the silicon, and if there is and someone actually does it it will be a "Prove you can" since the equipment will be in the millions. (I can imagine a physics grad student with access to the machinery if they are doing superconductor or quantum computing research)