How many mediated-access DRM schemes have to come and go, leaving the unwary screaming about how they paid for something and now it's gone, before they wake up?
This is big media's wet dream. Up to now, it's just been, "Uh, I guess I have to buy the White album again," when it's released in a new format, a new mix, a new cover (sic). With these schemes, big media is setting up to collect every time you listen to part of the White album.
Ownership? What's that? You are a mere licensee, subject to a license that is not slanted in your favor. Rights under the license? Whatever highly structured and highly limiting circumstances big media deigns to allow, subject to revision and reversion on their whim.
Even if you have the file sitting on your local server, if you need an internet connection to be able to play it, you don't have anything except somebody looking over your shoulder and putting their big grubby hands into your pockets.
Citi hasn't been doing too well on these things recently; they've replaced our cards twice in the last few months.
Outsourcing saves companies money because the outfit that takes the business can achieve better economies of scale -- yeah, they can compromise tens of millions of accounts at once for multiple firms, rather than the measly million or two that would have been screwed otherwise...
We really need to know more about what you need, is it slow thermals (0.03MeV) or fast (2.5MeV - 14MeV), and what kind of rates. You also don't mention beam width or necessity for collimation.
A wheezer Penning could do 10e8 fast neutrons/s in a relatively simple and compact package. There are a bunch of designs that can produce on the order of 10e11 neutrons/s. If you're in the Silicon Valley, you can even rent time on them.
Have you tried eBay?
Oh, and watch out for side-lobes and activation issues -- incident or diffracted beams can play havoc with premature triggering of your krytrons.
The current generation of (good) tablets, iPad and Android, are coming close to one of the Holy Grails of computing -- Alan Kay's Dynabook.
And MS continues to fumble the future on this one in an even more colossal fashion than another passing fad -- the Internet.
These aren't the desktop paradigm squashed flat! That was one of Kay's big hurdles trying to explain the Dynabook -- it was such a radically different concept from the computers that were in use (and being planned) at the time.
This is such a good article to compliment Dell's statement that the iPad is a fad and is going to flop with the Enterprise. Ah, how many Fortune 100 companies have ongoing projects using iPads? Didn't someone (like Steve) mention 80+? Hospitals? Schools? The iPad is now FAA certified for primary flight records -- what special features did Apple build in so that they could own that market? None? How is that possible, since all these other companies have been making (pseudo) tablets with all sorts of features "specifically for business." What "special business features" got SAS to go with the iPad?
It's not the desktop paradigm squashed flat! It's a different way of doing things! Here's a subtle clue -- "OnMouseOver" doesn't translate very well to tablets.
Give people a non-threatening, easy to use interface. Make it the antithesis of business - make it fun. Provide the creative types with a toolkit. Now get the hell out of the way and let people run with it!
I'd say this is unbelievable, but it's all too believable -- grasping at anything to show that we are better than them.
Just how is this relevant in the real world? Oh, you measured a difference -- but is this measured difference repeatable over repeated runs on the same system let alone repeated runs on a wide cohort of systems, and is this difference really significant to a user? Let's see -- a ten minute difference over a 220 minute period, that's a whopping four percent! Run these tests a few more times and tell me if that difference is statistically significant (let alone clearly outside the expected margin of error) on the same machine, let alone over different machines.
Oh, and that run time graph is right out of "How to Lie with Statistics" -- cutting off the zero to make the difference in the length of the bars look more significant than it actually is.
I've got a much better one -- this whole "green" thing only appeals to people concerned about energy conservation. There's a bigger audience out there to grab for...
Let's take the current versions of all these browsers, and count all the "1" bits and all the "0" bits in the binaries.
Wouldn't it be great, absolutely stupendous, if IE9 had the smallest difference between the numbers of "1"s and "0"s? Then we could claim, correctly, just as correctly as with this energy consumption thing, that IE9 is the LEAST DISCRIMINATORY browser out there! All those other browsers out there DISCRIMINATE against "0"s (or they discriminate against "1"s) -- just look at the numbers! Do you want to use a browser that is blatantly discriminatory?
So now you could claim that IE9 is not only greener but it's also less discriminatory!!!
Well, unless you count discriminating on the basis of intelligence...
Three main uses of GPS -- nav, position, and standards (time and frequency).
I can connect a GPS antenna on the roof to a small box in the lab and have frequency and time references at an accuracy that previously were limited to national laboratories! (search for Trimble Thunderbolt). When the green lights are on, I've got accuracy on the order of ten to the minus eleven or better.
To the over-reliance claim, when the green lights go off on that box and the red lights go on, I'm back to using the references in each of my lab instruments. More important, the red lights let me know I'm not operating at those higher, known, levels of accuracy.
The "over-reliance" argument is more an argument against not having a Plan B to put into action when Plan A goes down the tubes. Am I "over-reliant" on electric motors because I use an electric shaver in the morning rather than a straight razor? Or because I use a motorized coffee grinder rather than some manually operated device? No, it's a trade-off, and hopefully one I have made knowingly.
This might work, if there are actually standards with teeth in them, such as (evolving) PCI standards (PA DSS, PCI DSS) and compliance.
The risk is that they provide a "get out of jail free" card, where complying with a set of minimal standards absolves an organization of liability and/or blame.
Until director-level folks, CEO, CFO, other executives, and board members start demanding to use their iPads for things like e-mail and calendars.
About the only defense IT has is to say, "Fine, to do that we have to do a forklift upgrade of our mail/calendar infrastructure -- $xxx,xxx."
But when the CEO and CFO say, "do it," you do it.
Oh, and don't start on those weirdo creative types in marketing and documentation that bring in their own Macs anyway...
Some businesses, rather than going neurotic about access controls are instead asking, how do we enable employees to use the best tools for their jobs? Yeah, some can get away with XP on a Pentium box. Others want Linux and command lines. Others go for Macs. An iPad can be nearly deal for an exec that lives by e-mail and calendar and doesn't do a lot of content creation.
Figure out how to give people access to the tools that work -- for them
The 6502 as used in the Apple ][ had some interesting quirks -- such as dummy read cycles that appeared on the bus when executing indexed operations. Woz used these dummy memory cycles in designing the original Apple ][ disk controller to whack the disk controller state machine. Undocumented at the least! Some of the Apple ][ disk copy protection schemes (particularly for games on 5 1/4 inch floppies) also relied upon undocumented behaviors in the processor, such as some of the "unused" opcodes.
Think about it -- couldn''t most of the real people you know, the ones you do upgrades and friends/family tech support for, get along just fine with 256GB or so of mass storage?
Yeah, the price differential will be there, but it won't be that big. Another aspect, at Fry's this morning I noticed that disk drives smaller than 250GB are getting harder to find at least at pseudo-retail.
So, most real people/families could get along fine with SSD based systems, particularly if they have a box on their network with a much bigger rotating beast for storing backups and other files.
And us folks that frequent Slashdot will end up there too, as price comes down, because the combo of (hi) speed and (low) power is so good with SSDs -- especially when we already have bigger boxes off in the closet to store those massive collections of pr0n^h^h^h^h files...
Most intelligent people,finding themselves at the bottom of a hole, would stop digging...
HP on the other hand, having dug themselves in pretty deep on this one already, have just hired a crew at many hundreds of dollars per hour to help them dig deeper!
As a Part 15 device, you have to put up with what other devices are doing.
My first guess would be a non-802.11 device such as a video or audio sender. They can take out many 2.4GHz channels at once, where a microwave oven usually only knocks out a couple.
One workaround is to go to 5GHz -- you're still under Part 15 and susceptible to interference, but there's less of it, a lot more channels, and you can find a 40 MHz channel for 802.11n.
Without something that acts like a spectrum analyzer (such as a real spectrum analyzer -- but some modern access points and other 802.11n devices offer spectrum analysis/FFT capabilities), it's going to be difficult to identify your interference source.
Using a simple reflector such as a parabolic reflector or a corner reflector, you might have a better chance at establishing a direction for your interference source.
Pundits have been tolling the death knell of rotating storage for... decades?
But somehow, the rotating storage business manages to innovate its way back to relevance -- Winchester technology, thin film heads, headerless architectures, increased spindle speeds, bigger caches, perpendicular recording, 4k sectors, continuing advances in encoding and ECC, continuing advances in media -- the advances keep coming.
And whatever happened to bubble memory, anyway? Wasn't that supposed to save the day and obsolete rotating storage once and for all? Isn't that what Intel promised us?
Waiting to see what the min sys requirements are -- I'd expect Intel only, no PPC.
The big question is on minimum requirements on the video side -- will early MacBooks and Minis be left in the cold? The wrappers used for Spore really screwed a lot of people by not supporting the early Intel video chipsets like the GMA950 on the old MacBook I'm using.
I'd say give it a try -- either it works, or it doesn't!
The characteristic impedance of cat5/cat6 is 110 ohms. Assuming your house is wired with RG6, that's 75 ohms. You have an impedance mismatch, but it's not a really bad one -- swr around 1.4:1.
Reasonably good RG6 used for cable (or even broadcast) TV signal distribution should perform well up to 500 MHz, so frequency response shouldn't be a killer.
It might not handle gigabit, but mash it up, try it, and let us know!
the planned split is in two: the Moto name goes with cell phones and consumer.
The other part is enterprise radios plus the wireless biz...
With the expectation that wireless will be spun out as soon as they can find someone gullible enough...
Poor Symbol -- when Moto bought them they had dreams of World Domination -- after all, now they had the financial and technical backing of Moto, right? What a surprise to find out that they're on an even shorter financial leash, and expected to pay tribute to their new masters and operate under their financial models...
Maybe they'll be better off on their own again, just having to compete against Cisco, rather than having to compete against the drooling idiots (^H^H skilled MBAs) down the hall, people supposedly on their side...
Step 1 - decap the chip without killing it
on
Hardware TPM Hacked
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While decapping chips is done all the time in failure analysis labs, it isn't easy, and it's even harder if you're trying not to damage the chip (or yourself) in the process.
Decapping usually involves concentrated nitric and/or sulfuric acids. Temperature control is important. You want to carefully dissolve the plastic without destroying the lead frame and/or the bonding wires going from the lead frame to the die. You also want to complete this process without losing any fingers or your eyesight -- highly concentrated acids. Rinse carefully with deionized water and test to make sure the chip is still functional.
Now you can feed the chip to your electron beam probe, FIB mill, or just take pretty pictures.
Not the kind of thing you're going to do in your kitchen!
(1) it's a meta-analysis, looking at other studies, not a study actually looking at links between RF exposure and disease.
(2) it's a meta-analysis of a veritable zoo of studies. About the only things the subject studies have in common is that most of them involve humans and most involve RF! This is not a valid application of these statistical techniques!
(3) the so-called conclusions of the meta-analysis look at opinions on factors in the subject studies which were not controlled let alone investigated and measured according to a set of standards -- opinions on funding.
And somehow I don't think this paper was subject to peer review, although I'm not familiar with their review process...
Before that, it was the 900 MHz band -- until it filled up with cordless crap.
As others have posted, 5 GHz is still pretty clean, so use it while you can. In our residential area, 2.4 GHz is full (even 14 is in use), but there's little activity on 5 GHz, so that's where our macbooks connect.
Same at work -- dual mode phones, bluetooth, microwave ovens, old laptops and more all on 2.4, with the newer equipment connecting on 5 GHz.
I was working with a company doing LED replacements for traffic signals at least five years ago, and people knew about the problem back then. And folks were going through all the gyrations mentioned here, and then some.
Damn, when I looked at it, I thought for sure it said "radiation horniness" -- following the sunspot cycle?
Why not?
People working with long distance radio communications -- whether it's LF for ships, ham radio, or spacecraft, knows the incredible variation the sunspot cycle can have on communications -- there are enormous swings in energy levels involved. Why shouldn't it show up in complex systems such as trees?
And yes, the link may be indirect, it may not be direct causation, merely correlation, but that's often a good reason to look again, more closely, as there may be something interesting going on.
This has been tomorrow's hot technology for decades -- Ovshinsky has been trying to get traction with his phase change technologies since the late 60's! Ovonics?
Maybe this time?
And where are the other technologies that were going to displace the current leaders in the memory market?
Bubble memory?
FeRAM?
It would be nice to have another player in the game!
Slashdot Mirror
How many mediated-access DRM schemes have to come and go, leaving the unwary screaming about how they paid for something and now it's gone, before they wake up?
This is big media's wet dream. Up to now, it's just been, "Uh, I guess I have to buy the White album again," when it's released in a new format, a new mix, a new cover (sic). With these schemes, big media is setting up to collect every time you listen to part of the White album.
Ownership? What's that? You are a mere licensee, subject to a license that is not slanted in your favor. Rights under the license? Whatever highly structured and highly limiting circumstances big media deigns to allow, subject to revision and reversion on their whim.
Even if you have the file sitting on your local server, if you need an internet connection to be able to play it, you don't have anything except somebody looking over your shoulder and putting their big grubby hands into your pockets.
Citi hasn't been doing too well on these things recently; they've replaced our cards twice in the last few months.
Outsourcing saves companies money because the outfit that takes the business can achieve better economies of scale -- yeah, they can compromise tens of millions of accounts at once for multiple firms, rather than the measly million or two that would have been screwed otherwise...
We really need to know more about what you need, is it slow thermals (0.03MeV) or fast (2.5MeV - 14MeV), and what kind of rates. You also don't mention beam width or necessity for collimation.
A wheezer Penning could do 10e8 fast neutrons/s in a relatively simple and compact package. There are a bunch of designs that can produce on the order of 10e11 neutrons/s. If you're in the Silicon Valley, you can even rent time on them.
Have you tried eBay?
Oh, and watch out for side-lobes and activation issues -- incident or diffracted beams can play havoc with premature triggering of your krytrons.
The current generation of (good) tablets, iPad and Android, are coming close to one of the Holy Grails of computing -- Alan Kay's Dynabook.
And MS continues to fumble the future on this one in an even more colossal fashion than another passing fad -- the Internet.
These aren't the desktop paradigm squashed flat! That was one of Kay's big hurdles trying to explain the Dynabook -- it was such a radically different concept from the computers that were in use (and being planned) at the time.
This is such a good article to compliment Dell's statement that the iPad is a fad and is going to flop with the Enterprise. Ah, how many Fortune 100 companies have ongoing projects using iPads? Didn't someone (like Steve) mention 80+? Hospitals? Schools? The iPad is now FAA certified for primary flight records -- what special features did Apple build in so that they could own that market? None? How is that possible, since all these other companies have been making (pseudo) tablets with all sorts of features "specifically for business." What "special business features" got SAS to go with the iPad?
It's not the desktop paradigm squashed flat! It's a different way of doing things! Here's a subtle clue -- "OnMouseOver" doesn't translate very well to tablets.
Give people a non-threatening, easy to use interface. Make it the antithesis of business - make it fun. Provide the creative types with a toolkit. Now get the hell out of the way and let people run with it!
I'd say this is unbelievable, but it's all too believable -- grasping at anything to show that we are better than them.
Just how is this relevant in the real world? Oh, you measured a difference -- but is this measured difference repeatable over repeated runs on the same system let alone repeated runs on a wide cohort of systems, and is this difference really significant to a user? Let's see -- a ten minute difference over a 220 minute period, that's a whopping four percent! Run these tests a few more times and tell me if that difference is statistically significant (let alone clearly outside the expected margin of error) on the same machine, let alone over different machines.
Oh, and that run time graph is right out of "How to Lie with Statistics" -- cutting off the zero to make the difference in the length of the bars look more significant than it actually is.
I've got a much better one -- this whole "green" thing only appeals to people concerned about energy conservation. There's a bigger audience out there to grab for...
Let's take the current versions of all these browsers, and count all the "1" bits and all the "0" bits in the binaries.
Wouldn't it be great, absolutely stupendous, if IE9 had the smallest difference between the numbers of "1"s and "0"s? Then we could claim, correctly, just as correctly as with this energy consumption thing, that IE9 is the LEAST DISCRIMINATORY browser out there! All those other browsers out there DISCRIMINATE against "0"s (or they discriminate against "1"s) -- just look at the numbers! Do you want to use a browser that is blatantly discriminatory?
So now you could claim that IE9 is not only greener but it's also less discriminatory!!!
Well, unless you count discriminating on the basis of intelligence...
Three main uses of GPS -- nav, position, and standards (time and frequency).
I can connect a GPS antenna on the roof to a small box in the lab and have frequency and time references at an accuracy that previously were limited to national laboratories! (search for Trimble Thunderbolt). When the green lights are on, I've got accuracy on the order of ten to the minus eleven or better.
To the over-reliance claim, when the green lights go off on that box and the red lights go on, I'm back to using the references in each of my lab instruments. More important, the red lights let me know I'm not operating at those higher, known, levels of accuracy.
The "over-reliance" argument is more an argument against not having a Plan B to put into action when Plan A goes down the tubes. Am I "over-reliant" on electric motors because I use an electric shaver in the morning rather than a straight razor? Or because I use a motorized coffee grinder rather than some manually operated device? No, it's a trade-off, and hopefully one I have made knowingly.
This might work, if there are actually standards with teeth in them, such as (evolving) PCI standards (PA DSS, PCI DSS) and compliance.
The risk is that they provide a "get out of jail free" card, where complying with a set of minimal standards absolves an organization of liability and/or blame.
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. ... John Perry Barlow
When will these people figure that out?
Sony have gone to great expense to prove that they still don't get it!
Until director-level folks, CEO, CFO, other executives, and board members start demanding to use their iPads for things like e-mail and calendars.
About the only defense IT has is to say, "Fine, to do that we have to do a forklift upgrade of our mail/calendar infrastructure -- $xxx,xxx."
But when the CEO and CFO say, "do it," you do it.
Oh, and don't start on those weirdo creative types in marketing and documentation that bring in their own Macs anyway...
Some businesses, rather than going neurotic about access controls are instead asking, how do we enable employees to use the best tools for their jobs? Yeah, some can get away with XP on a Pentium box. Others want Linux and command lines. Others go for Macs. An iPad can be nearly deal for an exec that lives by e-mail and calendar and doesn't do a lot of content creation.
Figure out how to give people access to the tools that work -- for them
The 6502 as used in the Apple ][ had some interesting quirks -- such as dummy read cycles that appeared on the bus when executing indexed operations. Woz used these dummy memory cycles in designing the original Apple ][ disk controller to whack the disk controller state machine. Undocumented at the least! Some of the Apple ][ disk copy protection schemes (particularly for games on 5 1/4 inch floppies) also relied upon undocumented behaviors in the processor, such as some of the "unused" opcodes.
Think about it -- couldn''t most of the real people you know, the ones you do upgrades and friends/family tech support for, get along just fine with 256GB or so of mass storage?
Yeah, the price differential will be there, but it won't be that big. Another aspect, at Fry's this morning I noticed that disk drives smaller than 250GB are getting harder to find at least at pseudo-retail.
So, most real people/families could get along fine with SSD based systems, particularly if they have a box on their network with a much bigger rotating beast for storing backups and other files.
And us folks that frequent Slashdot will end up there too, as price comes down, because the combo of (hi) speed and (low) power is so good with SSDs -- especially when we already have bigger boxes off in the closet to store those massive collections of pr0n^h^h^h^h files...
Most intelligent people,finding themselves at the bottom of a hole, would stop digging...
HP on the other hand, having dug themselves in pretty deep on this one already, have just hired a crew at many hundreds of dollars per hour to help them dig deeper!
As a Part 15 device, you have to put up with what other devices are doing.
My first guess would be a non-802.11 device such as a video or audio sender. They can take out many 2.4GHz channels at once, where a microwave oven usually only knocks out a couple.
One workaround is to go to 5GHz -- you're still under Part 15 and susceptible to interference, but there's less of it, a lot more channels, and you can find a 40 MHz channel for 802.11n.
Without something that acts like a spectrum analyzer (such as a real spectrum analyzer -- but some modern access points and other 802.11n devices offer spectrum analysis/FFT capabilities), it's going to be difficult to identify your interference source.
Using a simple reflector such as a parabolic reflector or a corner reflector, you might have a better chance at establishing a direction for your interference source.
Some places fill the USB connectors with hot glue.
I prefer 3 inch drywall screws.
They're system agnostic...
Pundits have been tolling the death knell of rotating storage for ... decades?
But somehow, the rotating storage business manages to innovate its way back to relevance -- Winchester technology, thin film heads, headerless architectures, increased spindle speeds, bigger caches, perpendicular recording, 4k sectors, continuing advances in encoding and ECC, continuing advances in media -- the advances keep coming.
And whatever happened to bubble memory, anyway? Wasn't that supposed to save the day and obsolete rotating storage once and for all? Isn't that what Intel promised us?
Waiting to see what the min sys requirements are -- I'd expect Intel only, no PPC.
The big question is on minimum requirements on the video side -- will early MacBooks and Minis be left in the cold? The wrappers used for Spore really screwed a lot of people by not supporting the early Intel video chipsets like the GMA950 on the old MacBook I'm using.
Might be time to upgrade to a newer MacBook Pro!
I'd say give it a try -- either it works, or it doesn't!
The characteristic impedance of cat5/cat6 is 110 ohms. Assuming your house is wired with RG6, that's 75 ohms. You have an impedance mismatch, but it's not a really bad one -- swr around 1.4:1.
Reasonably good RG6 used for cable (or even broadcast) TV signal distribution should perform well up to 500 MHz, so frequency response shouldn't be a killer.
It might not handle gigabit, but mash it up, try it, and let us know!
the planned split is in two: the Moto name goes with cell phones and consumer.
The other part is enterprise radios plus the wireless biz...
With the expectation that wireless will be spun out as soon as they can find someone gullible enough...
Poor Symbol -- when Moto bought them they had dreams of World Domination -- after all, now they had the financial and technical backing of Moto, right? What a surprise to find out that they're on an even shorter financial leash, and expected to pay tribute to their new masters and operate under their financial models...
Maybe they'll be better off on their own again, just having to compete against Cisco, rather than having to compete against the drooling idiots (^H^H skilled MBAs) down the hall, people supposedly on their side...
While decapping chips is done all the time in failure analysis labs, it isn't easy, and it's even harder if you're trying not to damage the chip (or yourself) in the process.
Decapping usually involves concentrated nitric and/or sulfuric acids. Temperature control is important. You want to carefully dissolve the plastic without destroying the lead frame and/or the bonding wires going from the lead frame to the die. You also want to complete this process without losing any fingers or your eyesight -- highly concentrated acids. Rinse carefully with deionized water and test to make sure the chip is still functional.
Now you can feed the chip to your electron beam probe, FIB mill, or just take pretty pictures.
Not the kind of thing you're going to do in your kitchen!
(1) it's a meta-analysis, looking at other studies, not a study actually looking at links between RF exposure and disease.
(2) it's a meta-analysis of a veritable zoo of studies. About the only things the subject studies have in common is that most of them involve humans and most involve RF! This is not a valid application of these statistical techniques!
(3) the so-called conclusions of the meta-analysis look at opinions on factors in the subject studies which were not controlled let alone investigated and measured according to a set of standards -- opinions on funding.
And somehow I don't think this paper was subject to peer review, although I'm not familiar with their review process...
Picky, picky, picky, but new patents issue on Tuesdays.
...And currently, it's 2.4 GHz.
Before that, it was the 900 MHz band -- until it filled up with cordless crap.
As others have posted, 5 GHz is still pretty clean, so use it while you can. In our residential area, 2.4 GHz is full (even 14 is in use), but there's little activity on 5 GHz, so that's where our macbooks connect.
Same at work -- dual mode phones, bluetooth, microwave ovens, old laptops and more all on 2.4, with the newer equipment connecting on 5 GHz.
I was working with a company doing LED replacements for traffic signals at least five years ago, and people knew about the problem back then. And folks were going through all the gyrations mentioned here, and then some.
Rule #1: Mother Nature always wins.
Damn, when I looked at it, I thought for sure it said "radiation horniness" -- following the sunspot cycle?
Why not?
People working with long distance radio communications -- whether it's LF for ships, ham radio, or spacecraft, knows the incredible variation the sunspot cycle can have on communications -- there are enormous swings in energy levels involved. Why shouldn't it show up in complex systems such as trees?
And yes, the link may be indirect, it may not be direct causation, merely correlation, but that's often a good reason to look again, more closely, as there may be something interesting going on.
This has been tomorrow's hot technology for decades -- Ovshinsky has been trying to get traction with his phase change technologies since the late 60's! Ovonics?
Maybe this time?
And where are the other technologies that were going to displace the current leaders in the memory market?
Bubble memory?
FeRAM?
It would be nice to have another player in the game!