Ah, yes, well... I guess you'll just have to wait until next year when the Human Homing Emergency Life-Preserver Munition Emitter (HHELP-ME) is available. Until then, I guess you can sink 'em or save 'em (or both) with the same weapon, er, um, life saving bazooka...
I wonder when someone will build a mod to put one of these in a first person shooter? BFG? Naw, give me the LPB!
We have private companies that produce better results
Not a single one has ever put anyone in orbit. I'm all for letting private enterprise launch our payloads for us, but until they star launching people, NASA will still be needed. Or would have been, had they retained the ability to launch people into space.
Um, what??
McDonnell (now part of Boeing) built the Mercury and Gemini capsules (sent many people to orbit) Convair (parts of which are now General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin) built the Atlas rocket that launched Mercury Martin (now part of Lockheed Martin) build the Titan rockets that launched the Gemini capsules North American (now part of Boeing) build the Apollo command module Grumman built the Apollo Lunar Module Boeing, North American (now part of Boeing), and Douglas (now part of Boeing) contributed to building the Saturn V rocket that was used in the Apollo missions Rockwell (now part of Boeing) build the Space Shuttle Orbiter Martin (now part of Lockheed) built the Shuttle's External Tank Thiokol built the Solid Rocket Boosters for the Shuttle
Private companies have built every vehicle ever used to send Americans (and citizens from many other countries) into space since NASA starting doing that. In fact NASA has NEVER sent anyone into space without a vehicle built by a private company.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin are still very much involved in launching things into space, and do so much more often than NASA does. All they need is a financial reason to send humans up there, and they'll do it -- with or without NASA.
Wow. I'm amazing they finally brought this idea to market. HP has been kicking around this idea since the mid 90's. There used to be this big push inside the company called "grow usage." The idea was to find ways to get customers to print more so they would use more ink and hence have to buy more ink cartridges. Automatically printing the newspaper every morning was one idea to get people to print more. The revenue projections were used to justify massive investments in R&D and production line tooling. (I was working in R&D with cartridge development at the time.) At one point they projected people would be printing so much (including those morning newspapers, complete with ink-heavy full-color photos) that HP was going to have to order over 100 cartridge manufacturing lines and use the entire world's supply of silicon wafers to keep up with demand. When someone finally called bullshit on the numbers, they reduced the order to only 4 lines. I think they only built 2. Actual orders were only 4% of the new, lowered forecast. (This was the 2000 series ink jet printers, by the way -- the first ones HP made with the replaceable ink-tanks. The technology was supposed to go into home printers, but didn't make it for almost a decade, because the business ink jets were so unprofitable.)
Anyway, the last time HP tried this, it was an unmitigated disaster -- the biggest setback in the inkjet business in HP history. If they are trying it again, it must mean VG and Nigro are getting desperate for ways to grow revenue. Hurd must be pushing them really hard. Growth in the inkjet business has been slowing into stagnation for several years now. At least it was like that when I left, which was a couple of years ago. I can't image things have improved. Has anyone here printed MORE in the last year than the year before? I haven't.
15 years ago, printing out a customized newspaper *might* have made sense to a few people. These days? Who wants that? Most people don't even print out their digital photos anymore. The home printer market is in decline. There might be opportunities in the commercial printing market, but the amount of printing taking place at home is falling, and will continue to fall. HP isn't going to increase it by getting people to print ads with their daily printed newspaper.
Why all that hassle? I'm sure any spam message sent to a printer will have the evil bit set (see: RFC3514), so you can just tell the printer to ignore those messages... Simple!
Right, that's just what I thought. It is even legal for Apple to refuse payment in cash? I can understand businesses not taking checks, credit cards, debit cards, etc. however not taking CASH? That smacks of a federal crime or something....
So it seems the missile that is supposed to be loaded into these containers is this one: Klub
This is a modular missile that, according to wikipedia, has 5 different warhead/guidance packages. The anit-ship version uses inertial guidance plus active radar homing. That means you need: #1 -- know where the ship is #2 -- get the missile to the target -- solved by inertial guidance #3 -- get the missile to hit the target accurately -- solved by active radar homing, but with jamming and decoy countermeasures #4 -- avoid getting shot down -- solved by sea-skimming (at least in this case, the Klub looks to be a sub-sonic sea-skimmer), but there are the counter measures of trying to confuse or decoy the missile #3, or trying to shoot it down with defensive missiles/guns, #4
Against a well defended target (e.g. a carrier battle group), the Klub would probably only be effective in very large numbers (to saturate the defenses, effectively a counter to #4.)
However, that's a traditional war scenario. In such a scenario, the likelyhood that a container ship is going to be allowed within range of a CBG is not likely. Therefore, this system would be better used to attack either smaller task groups or other merchant ships (where it would probably be very effective.) Imagine one of these choking off the persian gulf. Merchant ships/tankers are at risk of attack because other merchant ships now have the ability to shoot missiles. If you forbid any ship capable of parking a container on deck from entry into the persian gulf, you get pretty much the same result: closing the persian gulf. The same can happen at any other shipping choke point. It can also be used in more open waters where you don't have enough escorts to protect your merchant fleet. (Germany nearly strangled England in WWII with their U-Boats, and the US seriously degraded Japan's ability to continue the war in WWII by sinking lots of their merchant ships.)
There is another scenario that is also interesting. There is also a land-attack version of the Klub. Wikipedia says it uses strictly inertial guidance, but GPS type satellite guidance seems like a natural follow on. Most navel ships spend most of their time in port.
#1 -- you know where they are, as they are sitting right there in port. They aren't even moving. #2 -- inertial guidance and/or GPS will work great here. #3 -- since the ship isn't even moving and you know exactly where it is, GPS might be enough, no active-radar terminal homing needed. Jamming/decoys are now ineffective. #4 -- the ships probably aren't even manned, and even if they are, they probably aren't expecting to spool up their defensive systems with only seconds of warning to try and defeat an incoming missile.
So, you stroll up in your innocuous looking container ship and blow up 1/2 of the enemy's fleet while sitting in port with no warning. Great first strike weapon (think Pearl Habor), but probably still effective after the outbreak of war, because most large navel bases are fairly near commercial ports, and unless you suspend merchant shipping during your war, or stop every container ship well out of range and search every container, these things are going to pose a serious problem.
Re:Does anyone know if this leads to a soft-hack
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Hardware TPM Hacked
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· Score: 1
My question:
Would a mass produced chip that is on a lot of business PC motherboards, and which is stated to have little to no physical resistance to attack have all this? TPMs are not that expensive, so I'm sure they would not have near the physical anti-tamper technology that a CAC, a smart cartd, an IBM crypto PCI card, much less a 3U HP HSM would have.
CAC? no. IBM crypto PCI card? no. an HSM? certainly not. (no temp/vibration/motion/intrusion/EM field sensors in a TPM)
A smart card? Well... the same technology used in smart cards are also used in chip and pin credit and debit cards. If you are going build millions of chips and put them on little plastic cards that people will loose, bend, stuff in their wallets/purses/back-pockets, etc, they had better be pretty darn cheap. My guess is TPM chips and smart card chips have a lot in common, and smart card chips have a surprising amount of anti-tamper technology baked in. What is a few pennies for another chip on a motherboard that retails for $60-100? Unlike CPU's, TPM chips are really tiny with fewer layers, so they are much cheaper to produce. Many of the anti-tamper features involve detecting voltages being out of spec, detecting out of sequence commands through use of a few simple check flags, adding obfuscation circuit pathways, and the inclusion of volatile memory with an on-chip capacitor to create the functional equivalent of non-volatile memory that becomes fragile when you start messing with the chip. These aren't expensive features to implement.
My understanding is that gen 1 TPM chips were pretty weak in terms of anti-tamper tech. I can only hope they they've gotten better by now. I have no idea what sort of features where in the chip that Tarnovsky hacked.
The purpose of the TPM chip is store a secret key and encrypt/decrypt the data sent to it. In order for your "clip on" chip to work, it would need to know the key inside the TPM. The key inside EACH TPM is different, and the only (known) way to get at that key is the hardware hack that the article describes. If you don't have the key, you can't decrypt data that was already encrypted by the TPM, but you could in theory encrypt new data with a key that you know (because it is in your clip-on chip) and you can then also decrypt this newly encrypted data. However, you can't use it to decrypt data that you stole, because you don't have the key inside the TPM.
This is a different problem than the XBOX hack. There, MS was distributing the same data to everyone, and all XBOX's had to have the ability to decode it. Once the key was found to do this, all XBOX's could be moded. In this case, the key in each and every device is different. Knowing the key from one device and building a chip to bypass the TPM will only help you on that ONE machine, and any data encrypted on it. You can't replicate this to every machine, and the method for getting the key out of the TPM requires some serious hardware hacking, so you can't just drop a chip into the machine and bypass it.
The CPU that does the encryption/decryption is on the same die as the TPM, so the key never leaves the chip. That's why you have to hack the chip itself. If I remember correctly, this wasn't the case with the XBOX. The key was transmitted in the clear across the system bus, so it was a relatively simple matter to connect to the bus and read off the key.
Cracking a TPM is MUCH MUCH harder.
Re:Does anyone know if this leads to a soft-hack
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Hardware TPM Hacked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, most likely the keys stored inside the chip's non-volatile memory are probably encrypted, just to prevent that sort of attack.
I worked with similar technology in a previous job. When Tarnovsky said "This chip is mean, man - it's like a ticking time bomb if you don't do something right,"
My guess is he wasn’t kidding. These sorts of chips have all sorts of counter measures to make this sort of attack difficult. The algorithms built into the circuits on the chip are designed to make eavesdropping hard. You can send different commands to the chip, and ask it to decode different amounts of data, but it will intentionally insert randomness into the time and number of operations to do the work to prevent you from gleaning information about what is going on inside the chip. I’m sure there are circuits that do nothing other than generate spurious electrical impulses so that trying to sense what the chip is doing remotely won’t work. The only way to even attempt an attack like this is to do what Tarnovsky did, and strip off the packaging. Assuming you didn’t just destroy it, even then you aren’t home free. I’m sure there are other safe guards built into the chips. Oh, did the voltage drop just now across that one circuit? That’s probably an attack – the chip just deleted the keys you were trying to recover and is now useless. Did that operation take too long because someone hooked up their own custom circuit in an attempt to decode what was going on? Yeah, that’s out too bye bye secret keys Interrupt the power to the key storage area for a nanosecond while you try to connect your probe? I’m sorry, you’re done. Did you just read out the data out of the protected storage out of sequence? Well, not only is that data encrypted (and therefore useless), the chip detected it, and intentionally burned out a small inaccessible fuse buried inside the chip and bricked itself. You’re done. Did you just inject an internal command with your probe that wasn't expected? Yep, you just blew another fuse. Go home.
You have to connect your probes in exactly the right place, in exactly the right way, and not disturb the electrical properties of the circuit you tapped into to prevent the chip from knowing that you are there and triggering a counter-measure.
I don’t know which counter measures the TPM modules from Infineon implement, but if they are current with the sort of technology out there, this hack was really really super damn hard.
Sure, with enough time, money, skill, patience, and physical access to the machine, anything can eventually be broken. The idea of the TPM was to make it expensive enough to hack that the average thief won’t bother. If you are relying on a TPM only to protect secrets on a mobile device (which can be stolen and then hacked by a well funded company or government) you either deserve what you got, or you’ve made way too many well funded and motivated enemies.
I'll second the Imperial War Museum, the Science Museum, Tate Modern, etc. Someone else also mentioned the Design Museum -- that's pretty cool, too.
On the laptop question: If you have a netbook, or something under about 3 pounds (~1.5kg) I'd consider taking it. Otherwise, leave it behind. I've traveled quite a bit in Europe, and I often bring along my 2.2 pound (1kg) Toshiba Portege 2000 (ancient ultralight notebook, more or less equivalent to a netbook, but a little slower.) What I've found is that on short trips (2-3 days) I hardly use it and wish I'd left it behind. On longer trips, especially when traveling around with no pre-set plan, I find it useful for getting directions, booking tickets to events, hotels, flights, checking the opening and closing times of certain attractions, and the occasional e-mail, but I still use it less than I thought I would. Anything heavier/larger is just a drag. The key to having fun is to travel light. Of all the times I've stayed in London, I've never been on the first floor of the hotel, and only about 25% of the hotels I've stayed in had elevators. If you simply fly to London and stay in the same hotel for two weeks, that's not a big issue, but if you travel around a bit (and if you are there that long you SHOULD) the extra weight and bulk of a laptop is really annoying. Bring a carry-on sized bag and *maybe* a small shoulder bag and that's it. Anything more and you stop having fun because you are dragging around your closet with you. Do a load of laundry after your first week rather than bringing two weeks worth of clothes. There are internet cafe's all over London (and most of Europe for that matter.) Easy Internet has several large internet cafe's in central London -- just look for a bright orange sign. (There are loads of other places to go, too.) Bring a digital camera and a bunch of memory cards (they are cheap) and take lots of pictures.
With two weeks, I would strongly consider seeing more of the country (or even other countries.) Easy Jet and Ryan Air have cheap flights all over the place (warning though: these airlines often fly to regional airports rather than major airports, so you have to take public transit to actually get where you want to go even after getting off the flight. Sometimes, it just isn't worth the hassle, and you are better off taking a "regular" airline -- research before you book! They also charge fees for EVERYTHING, so pack light, and bring your own snacks.) Still, it can be a cheap way to dash up to Edinburgh for a few days or see Paris for a weekend. It will make your trip so much more memorable. Get on a train and go somewhere -- many other posts here have great ideas (Bath, Bletchly Park, etc.)
Also, WALK places. You see and experience so much more. Go into Soho and just wander around. See a show, stop off in a pub for lunch, find a little hole-in-the-wall curry place filled with locals (you'll recognize them because they will not be wearing t-shirts, jeans, or sneakers.) It is nearly impossible to get lost in London, because if you get turned around, just ask a passer by where the nearest tube stop is, check the map in the station to see where you are, and take the subway to someplace else you want to be. (As many have said already, get an Oyster card.)
Don't stay at big chain hotels, don't eat at places you've been to in the U.S. (McDonald's, TGI Friday's, etc.) Ask locals for recommendations of where to eat. Don't ask them for what to see -- like locals everywhere, they rarely see the sites that are next door. Get a good tour book for that. Generally spending more (on food, hotels, transportation) simply isolates you more from the people in the country you are in, and robs you of the experience of being somewhere with a different culture. Take public transit, walk, and go to a local pub and talk to people. You'll have a lot more fun!
Yeah? Can you point to ONE virus in the wild that has ever bitten any Mac or Linux user?
Well, here's one: Ramen. Got that about 8 years ago when I was pretty inexperienced with Linux. I placed an unpatched RedHat system on the internet with no firewall, and picked up a worm and rootkit for my trouble.
There's actually a number of malware programs, worms, etc out there for linux: Linux Malware
There are bound to be people out there that have been bitten by these guys. Oh, and while my family members have gotten viruses on their windows machines, I never have. I don't even run anti-virus. I'm just a lot more careful now....
I'm only 33 and I know COBOL. As a matter of fact, that's what I've been doing all day today: writing COBOL (except stopping to read slashdot during lunch)
So California, call me! (You don't really want to hire that old guy above, do you?)
I agree that one of these ultra-portable machines needs to be about on par (or even a little below) a basic desktop machine. However I disagree that it needs to run a different OS or be more PDA like. I've had a Toshiba Portege 2000 for a number of years now. This was the MacBook Air of it's day - just a little over 2 pounds/1kg, super slim, and yet powerful enough for basic tasks. (It has a 750Mhz Pentium III with 512MB of RAM.) That's pretty slow by today's standards, but with XP, an older copy of office, and firefox, it does everything I need it to do while on the road.
What I want:
Good Keyboard/Screen: When I'm typing, I want a comfortable keyboard and a decent screen. This is critical. Don't give me a stupid PDA with one of those folding keyboards. You can't type on one of those and see what you are doing. Try typing e-mail on the train or waiting in the airport when you don't have anything to set the keyboard or PDA on. Browsing the internet on anything with a screen smaller than 9 to 12 inches is an exercise in frustration - you have to scroll every which way to see anything. There's not enough content designed for small screens to be useful. The Toshiba has a 12" screen, which is about perfect. I could handle a screen that was a bit shorter, as it is easier and more natural to scroll up and down rather than right to left. The keyboard is comfortable to type on, so there's no problem there.
Good battery life: I need to go as long as possible away from a power outlet. When I'm on a plane or a train and there's no outlet available, I'd like to have a useful machine for at least 6-8 hours. Longer would be wonderful. The Toshiba falls down a bit here - the internal battery is a joke, but I've got a pair of extended batteries that get me 6 to 7 hours without having to shut down (I can hot-swap the extended batteries - that's really nice. Maybe these devices could have a small internal battery -something that might only last for 10 minutes, but it would be enough to find and swap the main battery without having to shut down. A quick suspend/restore would be okay too.
Moderate power: There needs to be enough processing power to run a web browser (and deal with all those flash animations and google apps), basic word processing, spreadsheets, a chat program, and a media player (to watch movies when I'm done working.) The Toshiba has just enough power to play divx movies (I copy a bunch to the hard drive when I go on trips - there's no optical drive and I don't need one, nor do I want one. I don't need to play 3-D games (gaming on a laptop sitting in the airport is un-fun.) So the processor and graphics don't need to be super fast. The 750Mhz Penttium III is only now getting a tad slow. It seems like you could take a 1Ghz P-III and shrink it down with today's 45nm process and have an acceptably fast cpu with low power consumption and a small size. I generally only run one or two things at a time - I don't need to have 40 applications open when I'm on the move, and so I don't need the horsepower to do that either.
Thin/Lightweight: If it is over about 2 pounds, try again. Oh, and don't forget the power supply. Make this small and lightweight too, please. The Toshiba has a little 45watt power supply that is easy to pack. It also needs to pack small. When I'm on a weekend trip, I want to travel light. I'd really prefer to be able to take just a backpack or a single carry on. On the train, I don't want a separate bag for the laptop and another for my other stuff. In fact, I really hate laptop bags. I'd rather put a little sleeve around it to protect it and through it in a bag with all my other stuff. If it needs its own bag, it stays home.
Connectivity: sd card slot (to copy pictures off my digital camera (don't need to pack the usb cable), two USB ports (for attaching an external hard drive - one for data, one for power, or for a USB mouse when I'm at home, or an external CD-burner which I use once in a while and never take with me on the road, or a
Charge for WiFi access, and give out free coffee? Run it like one of those all-you-can-eat buffets or maybe a gym:
You want to come in? Okay, swipe your card and clock in. Once in, you get "free" WiFi, coffee, muffins, etc. When you leave, you "clock out" and are billed the hourly rate for using the place, drinking coffee (or not), eating muffins (or not), etc.
Maybe set up a combination of open space/tables/couches for people who want to hang out (don't put any electical outlets here) and cubicle-like areas for people who want to work but don't want to be AT work (provide fixed lan/WiFi/outlets/desks/proper chairs/etc.). Give discounts to frequent customers. Unlike standard free WiFi, customers who hang around all day will actually pay for it. Of course, those sorts of people probably won't come to your shop, which might not be a bad thing.
You might have to sell it as renting urban office space rather than as a coffee shop... You won't get anyone poping by to meet a friend for a quick coffee, but you might make more from the business crowd (depending a LOT on location.) [Sell the service to area business at corporate rates for their employees.]
Put a "To Go" counter up front for people who just want to get coffee and go. Don't put any tables/chairs up there. (Hard to use a laptop if you have nothing to set it on.)
It wouldn't really be a coffee shop anymore, but it might work as a business...
While this won't help people now, I've read that AMD and Intel are busy putting dual-core chips together and building in features for partitioning. Maybe the future will hold a PC that can run one operating system on one core, and anther one simultaneously on the other. It would require some sort of switch that would prevent hardware interrrupts from one OS reaching the other OS so that keyloggers wouldn't work, but the scenario could look like this:
1. Boot up OS of your choice (runs on both cores) 2. Put in live CD, tell machine to boot it. 3. All processes running under current OS moved to one core. Current OS runs slower, but is otherwised untouched. 4. Live CD boots on second core, providing a completely isolated and secure environment. It is also able to write data to the harddrive for saving transaction logs, but does not read data. If compromized, the worst that happens is your transaction logs are corrupted/changed, and you have to log back into your bank to see your transaction history.
Other options: Bootable thumbdrive with ROM chip rather than flash ram (solves the "I only have a slot-CD drive" problem. Creates the "My PC won't boot from USB" problem. (However, as time goes on, and new PC's will be able to boot from such devices, this will be less of an issue.)
Variation: PDA-on-chip. The bank provides you with a PDA device that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse (or run stand-alone like a normal PDA), and runs an embedded OS from ROM. Saves data bank to flash-ram. You plug in your Bank PDA, do all your transactions from a controlled environment, then when you are done, you plug the device into your PC and synch quicken to the files on the flash drive. Since the PDA never loads applications from flash, and starts up fresh every time from ROM, you can't install viruses or currupt the OS on the box.
Encrypt the rom chips, and place a key inside the PDA to decode it. Need to send out updates? Send a new ROM chip out. If the encryption key doesn't match the one in the PDA, you can't use the new rom chip. This won't make it impossible for crooks to construct and distribute imposter rom chips, but it will make it harder.
As a bonus -- get the banks to agree to use the same hadrware and rom-signing/encryption system, and the same PDA could connect to many different institutions. (e.g. one box, many accounts.)
Sort of like a portable Atari for all your banks...
1. a screen 2. work without any special software to transfer files 3. have a user-replaceable battery
You don't want a screen? I don't get it. I've got a 1GB Muvo Mico N200. With 1GB, I can fit between 17 and 24 albums (that's 200 to 300 songs at a good bit rate). I like every one of those songs. However, sometimes I like to listen to them in random order, and sometimes I like to listen to one album at a time. If I am listening to one album (say the 1st album on the player) and I want to switch to listening to the 12th album on the player, how do I do this on a ipod flash (with no screen)? Pushing the 'next' button 100 times is NOT acceptable.
Also, I don't understand this devotion to itunes. I look for [and buy] players that specificaly DON'T support itunes (or any other transfer software.) I keep my music organized in the file system by artist, ablum, and track, so I can quickly copy full albums onto different devices -- no special software required. That way, if I get some new album that a friend of mine would like to hear, I can plug in the player, copy the album, and it is done. He doesn't have to install some stupid piece of software just to talk to my player.
Regargable batteries eventually wear out. At a minimum, I want to be able to replace the regargable batteries when this happens. Can't do that with any of the ipods. I prefer players that use standard batteries (AA/AAA). That way, I can have spares already charged up when I am away from any power sources. Better yet, if all of my batteries are used up, and I don't have time for a recharge, I can stop by the petrol station and grab a few alkaline cells. You can get an external battery pack for the ipod mini and standard, but they double the size of the package. With the ipod shuffle, you are out of luck.
The N200 also has an FM tuner, which is useful for listening to NPR/news/traffic/weather --esp. while traveling. However, having a tuner isn't a big deal for me. However, if you do have a tuner (and has other people have pointed out, this works well in health clubs where the TV sound is broadcast over FM) how do you change the station without a screen? You could auto-scan, but sometimes autoscan misses some faint stations and the only way to select them is by setting the station manually. Also, how do you switch FM regions (or know what region is selected) without a screen?
I guess if you don't have very many features, you don't need the feature of having a screen either. However, I can get a lot more features (with pretty good usability) for about the same price as an ipod shuffle, and I don't have to buy a new one when the battery wears out. Why do people buy the shuffle anyway?
Thinking outside the box? I think Apple needs to check out the boxes of some of their competitors...
Compatablity with Word is the difference (IMHO) between a corporate WP, and a personal WP. Where I work, even if I generate the document myself, it usually needs to be based on a template generated by someone else, and nearly always, someone else will need to edit the documents I create, and they will expect all of the formatting imposed by the template to work properly. This makes using OO.o unusable at the office.
At home, pretty much the only thing I need is a word processor. I don't generally give presentations to my house mates, so OO.o works fine. At work, however, I can't get around the two most irritating things (IMHO) about open office:
1. There is too much white space between the last letter you typed and the cursor. 2. With most fonts, there is too much white space between each letter, and not enough white space inserted with a space character.
With the first problem, I am CONSTANTLY deleting characters because it looks like there is a space where there is no space. In every other application where I edit text (Word, notepad, web forms, kopete, konsole, xterms, etc. etc.) the cursor is rendered directly behind the letter so that you are never fooled into thinking there is a space between the cursor and the character immediately preceding the cursor.
With the second problem, I often can't tell the difference between there being one space between two characters and no space between two characters, or the difference between two spaces and one space.
I realize switching to "online layout" mostly fixes this problem, but "online layout" mode (in my experience) really screws up the formatting of a lot of the Word documents I need to work on (the text flows across the full page width [right past the margins] and this hammers much of the formating). So, I have to choose between screwed up formatting, or screwed up kerning. Neither is acceptable for day-to-day use, so I'm stuck on Word... Also, where is the option to FORCE "online layout" mode for every document? (I'm speaking of OO.o 1.1.0 on linux here, so maybe the newer versions fix this, but anyway...) The company I work for will not likely switch to OO.o anytime soon. So until OO.o can deal with some of the more complex formatting in Word while at the same time getting the text rendering right, it will continue to be a non-viable option.
I used to suffer from computer packrat bulimia. I would collect a lot of comuter hardware (much of it old/obsolete) then every so often "purge" everything except the newest machines and start over. That is, until I revived an old 286... It dual-booted msdog/windoze 3.0 and minix. The minix install had a web server that I turned into a remote control for an mp3 player (on a different box, of course.)
So, get this... you had to have a machine with a web browser to see the web page on the 286 minix box so that you could control the mp3 player on 266Mhz linux box, which, of course, was fully capable of running its own web server... The 286 was completely uncessary in the setup, and dramatically slowed everything down. I set up the minix box to prove it could be done, rather than because it was a good idea. The same goes for the caseless 386dx25 I mangled into a NAT/firewall. It used a pair of 8-bit Eagle NE1000 10-base2 cards and was thus incapable of routing a full-speed broadband connection. What's the point in that? I don't know...
So, another purge, and anything slower than a 500Mhz box was sold or tossed. You might call it a hobby. I'd prefer to call it an addiction. With the low cost of wireless access points, print servers, firewalls, and external storage, I find it just isn't worth my time to try and make older machines do anything usefull anymore. If you have anything slower than a Pentium II, toss it. Go buy your self a $60 d-link or linksys appliance, put it in the corner, and forget about it. Less space, less noise, less hassle. If you really feel the need set up your own server, get a decent enough box to run your firewall, web server, dhcp server, http proxy, ltsp server, samba server, etc. etc. and do everything on one box. You still get to learn how it all works, and you won't have to wade through 15 boxes of rubbish and fight off the spaghetti cable monster each time you want to enjoy your hobby.
Check out the refurb section of pricewatch or ebay for some great deals. $100 will buy you a decent enough box. Then again, you could probably get something similar from your next door neighbor who is about to throw a perfectly useable (and not completely obsolete) machine in the dumpster.
Trust me. If it's not at least a Pentium II (or equivalent) don't waste your time.
Booting a broken 386 off floppies and word processing with dos edit??? Oh, god, that man needs help...
As Weird Al said: "What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!"
I'll echo the parent's comments. I've got three external storage devices:
1. Archos 20Gb Jukebox -- It has USB 2.0, backwards compatible to USB 1.1/1.0. While 20GB is lots of storage, I don't find this device useful for transfering files. Why? Well, it is full of music. If I want to transport files, I need to first delete some music, add the files, transport them, then re-add the music, and perhaps rebuild the playlists as well. This is a pain, so I don't do it. You'll run into the same problem with an iPod, unless you get lots more storage than you have music so that you'll always have lots of extra space.
2. FireXpress external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure. This uses standard 9mm height 2.5 inch laptop hard drives. (Search google for firexpress -- you can find them at newegg.com or welovemacs.com) The nice thing about this enclosure is that: a. it is USB 1.0/1.1/2.0 compatible b. firewire compatible c. can be powered by any of (usb port, PS/2 port, firewire port, external dual-voltage power A/C adapter.) The cool thing about the A/C adapter is that it delivers the power through a pass-through firewire connection, so it could be used for other firewire devices that can draw their power from the firewire port (iPod, anyone?). So, just in case your computer can't deliver enough power through the firewire port (I think some [not all] Sony laptops have this problem because they only have a 4-wire (non-powered) "i-link" port) you can use the A/C adapter instead. Then again, you might as well use the USB or PS/2 ports and not have to cary the A/C adapter....
If you partition and format the drive with fat32 partitions, it will work on Linux, Windows, and (I think) Mac OS X. With so many different ways to power the device, you don't usually need to cary around the A/C adapter, and being only slightly bigger than the laptop drive it uses, it is fairly small. This is the device I use when I need to drag around many Gig's of data.
3. PQI iStick. This is one of the smallest and most portable USB flash memory drives I've seen. They come in sizes up to 512MB (last I checked). I have a 256MB stick, and have used it on Windows and Linux. This is the device I use when I need to transfer a smaller amount of data between computers and don't want to mess with configuring windows shares / samba, networking, ftp, sftp, etc. etc.
So, which device you choose really comes down to how much data you want to move. USB flash memory drives aren't good for anything where you will be doing a lot of read/write operations, as flash memory devices will wear out faster than a hard drive (and transfer speeds are typically lower). So, if you are editing video, running an OS, or doing something that causes a lot of disk activity, you're better off using an external hard drive. If not, and a USB device has enough room for the amount of data you want to move around, then go with a USB stick -- they're cheap and easy to use.
If a USB stick isn't going to do the trick, then you're talking external hard drive. Here you need to decide between: 1. portability (more portable means higher cost and lower capacity) 2. capacity (higher capacity means higher cost, and often larger physical size) 3. price 4. ability to play music (consider how much space your music will take up and whether you'll have to delete music in order to move other types of data.)
Some of us don't have that luxury. Outlook and Office are STILL the main things keeping me on Windows. Oh, just use thunderbird, or some such thing... Well, I'd love to, but the company I work for uses Exchange. Oh, well just use Evolution or Kontact! Tried both. While I was able to get them to connect to our servers and send and receive mail, the addressing needs serious work. There's something like 80,000 employees in the company -- adding these one by one into Kontact's address book, or Evolution's address book, or even Thunderbird's address book (when using IMAP) is a major pain. Sure, I don't need to import 80,000 addresses. I need to import several hundred. One by one. By first searching through a list 80,000 names long. The name search feature in Outlook is far and above anything I've seen in any exchange client in Linux. Oh, and why do I have to "import" anything? Why can't I just use the entirety of the company directory AS my address book?? That, and the fact that I need Visio (sorry, Kivio doesn't cut it.) and while OpenOffice works fine for simple docs, I spend most of my time in a word processor working with company templates, most of which include formatting and macros that DO NOT work in OpenOffice. Oh yeah, I'll need a copy of Visual Studio (yes, we are trying to go Java... we just need to kill off these F*@!*#$ vb apps first...)...and some of the corporate benefits web pages only work in internet exploader. So, until there are open source apps that REALLY are able to replace office, I'll be stuck in some sort of hyrbrid world. (not to mention all of the company-specific Windows-only apps like: the timecard system, the purchasing system, the travel system, and, oh, I almost forgot about MS Project....)
My solution? A dual-head box running SuSE 9.0 with Windows stuffed into a vmware box completely covering one monitor. Have to use Windows? Drag the mouse to the right. Get to use Linux? Drag the mouse to the left. Works great. When Windows needs to reboot, it can do so without interrupting my telnet/ssh sessions, XMMS player, Mozilla windows, etc. I only reboot the Linux box when I need to update the kernel. The strange thing? XP actually boots FASTER inside vmware. Just be sure to feed it LOTS of memory.
Documentation is what makes text files superior to the Windows registry (and possibly database configurations in general.) Many of the config files I edit on a regular basis have the documentation of what the options mean (and sometimes what options are available) IN the config file itself.
The windows registy doesn't have this. Unless you happen to have a copy of the manual handy for every little app that has polluted the registry with dwords and hex values and what these mean, the registry is incomprehensible.
Plus, if I do a man sshd_config, I get a reasonably usable manual on what I can put into the config file and what it means. Where is this on Windows? Windows help? Nope. Application help? (maybe, but probably not.)
Putting all configuration options in a registry may or may not be a good idea, but if you loose the ability to include documentation with the configuration, then IMHO it is a net loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes, well... I guess you'll just have to wait until next year when the Human Homing Emergency Life-Preserver Munition Emitter (HHELP-ME) is available. Until then, I guess you can sink 'em or save 'em (or both) with the same weapon, er, um, life saving bazooka...
I wonder when someone will build a mod to put one of these in a first person shooter? BFG? Naw, give me the LPB!
We have private companies that produce better results
Not a single one has ever put anyone in orbit. I'm all for letting private enterprise launch our payloads for us, but until they star launching people, NASA will still be needed. Or would have been, had they retained the ability to launch people into space.
Um, what??
McDonnell (now part of Boeing) built the Mercury and Gemini capsules (sent many people to orbit)
Convair (parts of which are now General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin) built the Atlas rocket that launched Mercury
Martin (now part of Lockheed Martin) build the Titan rockets that launched the Gemini capsules
North American (now part of Boeing) build the Apollo command module
Grumman built the Apollo Lunar Module
Boeing, North American (now part of Boeing), and Douglas (now part of Boeing) contributed to building the Saturn V rocket that was used in the Apollo missions
Rockwell (now part of Boeing) build the Space Shuttle Orbiter
Martin (now part of Lockheed) built the Shuttle's External Tank
Thiokol built the Solid Rocket Boosters for the Shuttle
Private companies have built every vehicle ever used to send Americans (and citizens from many other countries) into space since NASA starting doing that. In fact NASA has NEVER sent anyone into space without a vehicle built by a private company.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin are still very much involved in launching things into space, and do so much more often than NASA does. All they need is a financial reason to send humans up there, and they'll do it -- with or without NASA.
...and remember: DEC had a class A block. Compaq bought DEC, and then HP bought Compaq, so HP now owns TWO Class A blocks.
Wow. I'm amazing they finally brought this idea to market. HP has been kicking around this idea since the mid 90's. There used to be this big push inside the company called "grow usage." The idea was to find ways to get customers to print more so they would use more ink and hence have to buy more ink cartridges. Automatically printing the newspaper every morning was one idea to get people to print more. The revenue projections were used to justify massive investments in R&D and production line tooling. (I was working in R&D with cartridge development at the time.) At one point they projected people would be printing so much (including those morning newspapers, complete with ink-heavy full-color photos) that HP was going to have to order over 100 cartridge manufacturing lines and use the entire world's supply of silicon wafers to keep up with demand. When someone finally called bullshit on the numbers, they reduced the order to only 4 lines. I think they only built 2. Actual orders were only 4% of the new, lowered forecast. (This was the 2000 series ink jet printers, by the way -- the first ones HP made with the replaceable ink-tanks. The technology was supposed to go into home printers, but didn't make it for almost a decade, because the business ink jets were so unprofitable.)
Anyway, the last time HP tried this, it was an unmitigated disaster -- the biggest setback in the inkjet business in HP history. If they are trying it again, it must mean VG and Nigro are getting desperate for ways to grow revenue. Hurd must be pushing them really hard. Growth in the inkjet business has been slowing into stagnation for several years now. At least it was like that when I left, which was a couple of years ago. I can't image things have improved. Has anyone here printed MORE in the last year than the year before? I haven't.
15 years ago, printing out a customized newspaper *might* have made sense to a few people. These days? Who wants that? Most people don't even print out their digital photos anymore. The home printer market is in decline. There might be opportunities in the commercial printing market, but the amount of printing taking place at home is falling, and will continue to fall. HP isn't going to increase it by getting people to print ads with their daily printed newspaper.
Why all that hassle? I'm sure any spam message sent to a printer will have the evil bit set (see: RFC3514), so you can just tell the printer to ignore those messages... Simple!
Okay, I guess I was wrong:
[from the horse's mouth]
Right, that's just what I thought. It is even legal for Apple to refuse payment in cash? I can understand businesses not taking checks, credit cards, debit cards, etc. however not taking CASH? That smacks of a federal crime or something....
So it seems the missile that is supposed to be loaded into these containers is this one:
Klub
This is a modular missile that, according to wikipedia, has 5 different warhead/guidance packages. The anit-ship version uses inertial guidance plus active radar homing. That means you need:
#1 -- know where the ship is
#2 -- get the missile to the target -- solved by inertial guidance
#3 -- get the missile to hit the target accurately -- solved by active radar homing, but with jamming and decoy countermeasures
#4 -- avoid getting shot down -- solved by sea-skimming (at least in this case, the Klub looks to be a sub-sonic sea-skimmer), but there are the counter measures of trying to confuse or decoy the missile #3, or trying to shoot it down with defensive missiles/guns, #4
Against a well defended target (e.g. a carrier battle group), the Klub would probably only be effective in very large numbers (to saturate the defenses, effectively a counter to #4.)
However, that's a traditional war scenario. In such a scenario, the likelyhood that a container ship is going to be allowed within range of a CBG is not likely. Therefore, this system would be better used to attack either smaller task groups or other merchant ships (where it would probably be very effective.) Imagine one of these choking off the persian gulf. Merchant ships/tankers are at risk of attack because other merchant ships now have the ability to shoot missiles. If you forbid any ship capable of parking a container on deck from entry into the persian gulf, you get pretty much the same result: closing the persian gulf. The same can happen at any other shipping choke point. It can also be used in more open waters where you don't have enough escorts to protect your merchant fleet. (Germany nearly strangled England in WWII with their U-Boats, and the US seriously degraded Japan's ability to continue the war in WWII by sinking lots of their merchant ships.)
There is another scenario that is also interesting. There is also a land-attack version of the Klub. Wikipedia says it uses strictly inertial guidance, but GPS type satellite guidance seems like a natural follow on. Most navel ships spend most of their time in port.
#1 -- you know where they are, as they are sitting right there in port. They aren't even moving.
#2 -- inertial guidance and/or GPS will work great here.
#3 -- since the ship isn't even moving and you know exactly where it is, GPS might be enough, no active-radar terminal homing needed. Jamming/decoys are now ineffective.
#4 -- the ships probably aren't even manned, and even if they are, they probably aren't expecting to spool up their defensive systems with only seconds of warning to try and defeat an incoming missile.
So, you stroll up in your innocuous looking container ship and blow up 1/2 of the enemy's fleet while sitting in port with no warning. Great first strike weapon (think Pearl Habor), but probably still effective after the outbreak of war, because most large navel bases are fairly near commercial ports, and unless you suspend merchant shipping during your war, or stop every container ship well out of range and search every container, these things are going to pose a serious problem.
My question:
Would a mass produced chip that is on a lot of business PC motherboards, and which is stated to have little to no physical resistance to attack have all this? TPMs are not that expensive, so I'm sure they would not have near the physical anti-tamper technology that a CAC, a smart cartd, an IBM crypto PCI card, much less a 3U HP HSM would have.
CAC? no.
IBM crypto PCI card? no.
an HSM? certainly not. (no temp/vibration/motion/intrusion/EM field sensors in a TPM)
A smart card? Well... the same technology used in smart cards are also used in chip and pin credit and debit cards. If you are going build millions of chips and put them on little plastic cards that people will loose, bend, stuff in their wallets/purses/back-pockets, etc, they had better be pretty darn cheap. My guess is TPM chips and smart card chips have a lot in common, and smart card chips have a surprising amount of anti-tamper technology baked in. What is a few pennies for another chip on a motherboard that retails for $60-100? Unlike CPU's, TPM chips are really tiny with fewer layers, so they are much cheaper to produce. Many of the anti-tamper features involve detecting voltages being out of spec, detecting out of sequence commands through use of a few simple check flags, adding obfuscation circuit pathways, and the inclusion of volatile memory with an on-chip capacitor to create the functional equivalent of non-volatile memory that becomes fragile when you start messing with the chip. These aren't expensive features to implement.
My understanding is that gen 1 TPM chips were pretty weak in terms of anti-tamper tech. I can only hope they they've gotten better by now. I have no idea what sort of features where in the chip that Tarnovsky hacked.
This won't work.
The purpose of the TPM chip is store a secret key and encrypt/decrypt the data sent to it. In order for your "clip on" chip to work, it would need to know the key inside the TPM. The key inside EACH TPM is different, and the only (known) way to get at that key is the hardware hack that the article describes. If you don't have the key, you can't decrypt data that was already encrypted by the TPM, but you could in theory encrypt new data with a key that you know (because it is in your clip-on chip) and you can then also decrypt this newly encrypted data. However, you can't use it to decrypt data that you stole, because you don't have the key inside the TPM.
This is a different problem than the XBOX hack. There, MS was distributing the same data to everyone, and all XBOX's had to have the ability to decode it. Once the key was found to do this, all XBOX's could be moded. In this case, the key in each and every device is different. Knowing the key from one device and building a chip to bypass the TPM will only help you on that ONE machine, and any data encrypted on it. You can't replicate this to every machine, and the method for getting the key out of the TPM requires some serious hardware hacking, so you can't just drop a chip into the machine and bypass it.
The CPU that does the encryption/decryption is on the same die as the TPM, so the key never leaves the chip. That's why you have to hack the chip itself. If I remember correctly, this wasn't the case with the XBOX. The key was transmitted in the clear across the system bus, so it was a relatively simple matter to connect to the bus and read off the key.
Cracking a TPM is MUCH MUCH harder.
Actually, most likely the keys stored inside the chip's non-volatile memory are probably encrypted, just to prevent that sort of attack.
I worked with similar technology in a previous job. When Tarnovsky said "This chip is mean, man - it's like a ticking time bomb if you don't do something right,"
My guess is he wasn’t kidding. These sorts of chips have all sorts of counter measures to make this sort of attack difficult. The algorithms built into the circuits on the chip are designed to make eavesdropping hard. You can send different commands to the chip, and ask it to decode different amounts of data, but it will intentionally insert randomness into the time and number of operations to do the work to prevent you from gleaning information about what is going on inside the chip. I’m sure there are circuits that do nothing other than generate spurious electrical impulses so that trying to sense what the chip is doing remotely won’t work. The only way to even attempt an attack like this is to do what Tarnovsky did, and strip off the packaging. Assuming you didn’t just destroy it, even then you aren’t home free. I’m sure there are other safe guards built into the chips. Oh, did the voltage drop just now across that one circuit? That’s probably an attack – the chip just deleted the keys you were trying to recover and is now useless. Did that operation take too long because someone hooked up their own custom circuit in an attempt to decode what was going on? Yeah, that’s out too bye bye secret keys Interrupt the power to the key storage area for a nanosecond while you try to connect your probe? I’m sorry, you’re done. Did you just read out the data out of the protected storage out of sequence? Well, not only is that data encrypted (and therefore useless), the chip detected it, and intentionally burned out a small inaccessible fuse buried inside the chip and bricked itself. You’re done. Did you just inject an internal command with your probe that wasn't expected? Yep, you just blew another fuse. Go home.
You have to connect your probes in exactly the right place, in exactly the right way, and not disturb the electrical properties of the circuit you tapped into to prevent the chip from knowing that you are there and triggering a counter-measure.
I don’t know which counter measures the TPM modules from Infineon implement, but if they are current with the sort of technology out there, this hack was really really super damn hard.
Sure, with enough time, money, skill, patience, and physical access to the machine, anything can eventually be broken. The idea of the TPM was to make it expensive enough to hack that the average thief won’t bother. If you are relying on a TPM only to protect secrets on a mobile device (which can be stolen and then hacked by a well funded company or government) you either deserve what you got, or you’ve made way too many well funded and motivated enemies.
I'll second the Imperial War Museum, the Science Museum, Tate Modern, etc. Someone else also mentioned the Design Museum -- that's pretty cool, too.
On the laptop question: If you have a netbook, or something under about 3 pounds (~1.5kg) I'd consider taking it. Otherwise, leave it behind. I've traveled quite a bit in Europe, and I often bring along my 2.2 pound (1kg) Toshiba Portege 2000 (ancient ultralight notebook, more or less equivalent to a netbook, but a little slower.) What I've found is that on short trips (2-3 days) I hardly use it and wish I'd left it behind. On longer trips, especially when traveling around with no pre-set plan, I find it useful for getting directions, booking tickets to events, hotels, flights, checking the opening and closing times of certain attractions, and the occasional e-mail, but I still use it less than I thought I would. Anything heavier/larger is just a drag. The key to having fun is to travel light. Of all the times I've stayed in London, I've never been on the first floor of the hotel, and only about 25% of the hotels I've stayed in had elevators. If you simply fly to London and stay in the same hotel for two weeks, that's not a big issue, but if you travel around a bit (and if you are there that long you SHOULD) the extra weight and bulk of a laptop is really annoying. Bring a carry-on sized bag and *maybe* a small shoulder bag and that's it. Anything more and you stop having fun because you are dragging around your closet with you. Do a load of laundry after your first week rather than bringing two weeks worth of clothes. There are internet cafe's all over London (and most of Europe for that matter.) Easy Internet has several large internet cafe's in central London -- just look for a bright orange sign. (There are loads of other places to go, too.) Bring a digital camera and a bunch of memory cards (they are cheap) and take lots of pictures.
With two weeks, I would strongly consider seeing more of the country (or even other countries.) Easy Jet and Ryan Air have cheap flights all over the place (warning though: these airlines often fly to regional airports rather than major airports, so you have to take public transit to actually get where you want to go even after getting off the flight. Sometimes, it just isn't worth the hassle, and you are better off taking a "regular" airline -- research before you book! They also charge fees for EVERYTHING, so pack light, and bring your own snacks.) Still, it can be a cheap way to dash up to Edinburgh for a few days or see Paris for a weekend. It will make your trip so much more memorable. Get on a train and go somewhere -- many other posts here have great ideas (Bath, Bletchly Park, etc.)
Also, WALK places. You see and experience so much more. Go into Soho and just wander around. See a show, stop off in a pub for lunch, find a little hole-in-the-wall curry place filled with locals (you'll recognize them because they will not be wearing t-shirts, jeans, or sneakers.) It is nearly impossible to get lost in London, because if you get turned around, just ask a passer by where the nearest tube stop is, check the map in the station to see where you are, and take the subway to someplace else you want to be. (As many have said already, get an Oyster card.)
Don't stay at big chain hotels, don't eat at places you've been to in the U.S. (McDonald's, TGI Friday's, etc.) Ask locals for recommendations of where to eat. Don't ask them for what to see -- like locals everywhere, they rarely see the sites that are next door. Get a good tour book for that. Generally spending more (on food, hotels, transportation) simply isolates you more from the people in the country you are in, and robs you of the experience of being somewhere with a different culture. Take public transit, walk, and go to a local pub and talk to people. You'll have a lot more fun!
Yeah? Can you point to ONE virus in the wild that has ever bitten any Mac or Linux user?
Well, here's one: Ramen. Got that about 8 years ago when I was pretty inexperienced with Linux. I placed an unpatched RedHat system on the internet with no firewall, and picked up a worm and rootkit for my trouble.
There's actually a number of malware programs, worms, etc out there for linux:
Linux Malware
There are bound to be people out there that have been bitten by these guys. Oh, and while my family members have gotten viruses on their windows machines, I never have. I don't even run anti-virus. I'm just a lot more careful now....
I'm only 33 and I know COBOL. As a matter of fact, that's what I've been doing all day today: writing COBOL (except stopping to read slashdot during lunch)
So California, call me! (You don't really want to hire that old guy above, do you?)
I agree that one of these ultra-portable machines needs to be about on par (or even a little below) a basic desktop machine. However I disagree that it needs to run a different OS or be more PDA like. I've had a Toshiba Portege 2000 for a number of years now. This was the MacBook Air of it's day - just a little over 2 pounds/1kg, super slim, and yet powerful enough for basic tasks. (It has a 750Mhz Pentium III with 512MB of RAM.) That's pretty slow by today's standards, but with XP, an older copy of office, and firefox, it does everything I need it to do while on the road.
What I want:
Good Keyboard/Screen: When I'm typing, I want a comfortable keyboard and a decent screen. This is critical. Don't give me a stupid PDA with one of those folding keyboards. You can't type on one of those and see what you are doing. Try typing e-mail on the train or waiting in the airport when you don't have anything to set the keyboard or PDA on. Browsing the internet on anything with a screen smaller than 9 to 12 inches is an exercise in frustration - you have to scroll every which way to see anything. There's not enough content designed for small screens to be useful. The Toshiba has a 12" screen, which is about perfect. I could handle a screen that was a bit shorter, as it is easier and more natural to scroll up and down rather than right to left. The keyboard is comfortable to type on, so there's no problem there.
Good battery life: I need to go as long as possible away from a power outlet. When I'm on a plane or a train and there's no outlet available, I'd like to have a useful machine for at least 6-8 hours. Longer would be wonderful. The Toshiba falls down a bit here - the internal battery is a joke, but I've got a pair of extended batteries that get me 6 to 7 hours without having to shut down (I can hot-swap the extended batteries - that's really nice. Maybe these devices could have a small internal battery -something that might only last for 10 minutes, but it would be enough to find and swap the main battery without having to shut down. A quick suspend/restore would be okay too.
Moderate power: There needs to be enough processing power to run a web browser (and deal with all those flash animations and google apps), basic word processing, spreadsheets, a chat program, and a media player (to watch movies when I'm done working.) The Toshiba has just enough power to play divx movies (I copy a bunch to the hard drive when I go on trips - there's no optical drive and I don't need one, nor do I want one. I don't need to play 3-D games (gaming on a laptop sitting in the airport is un-fun.) So the processor and graphics don't need to be super fast. The 750Mhz Penttium III is only now getting a tad slow. It seems like you could take a 1Ghz P-III and shrink it down with today's 45nm process and have an acceptably fast cpu with low power consumption and a small size. I generally only run one or two things at a time - I don't need to have 40 applications open when I'm on the move, and so I don't need the horsepower to do that either.
Thin/Lightweight: If it is over about 2 pounds, try again. Oh, and don't forget the power supply. Make this small and lightweight too, please. The Toshiba has a little 45watt power supply that is easy to pack. It also needs to pack small. When I'm on a weekend trip, I want to travel light. I'd really prefer to be able to take just a backpack or a single carry on. On the train, I don't want a separate bag for the laptop and another for my other stuff. In fact, I really hate laptop bags. I'd rather put a little sleeve around it to protect it and through it in a bag with all my other stuff. If it needs its own bag, it stays home.
Connectivity: sd card slot (to copy pictures off my digital camera (don't need to pack the usb cable), two USB ports (for attaching an external hard drive - one for data, one for power, or for a USB mouse when I'm at home, or an external CD-burner which I use once in a while and never take with me on the road, or a
Tinfoil Hat: On
Okay, who lost the submarine THIS time?
Tinfoil Hat: Off
What about changing the model?
Charge for WiFi access, and give out free coffee? Run it like one of those all-you-can-eat buffets or maybe a gym:
You want to come in? Okay, swipe your card and clock in. Once in, you get "free" WiFi, coffee, muffins, etc. When you leave, you "clock out" and are billed the hourly rate for using the place, drinking coffee (or not), eating muffins (or not), etc.
Maybe set up a combination of open space/tables/couches for people who want to hang out (don't put any electical outlets here) and cubicle-like areas for people who want to work but don't want to be AT work (provide fixed lan/WiFi/outlets/desks/proper chairs/etc.). Give discounts to frequent customers. Unlike standard free WiFi, customers who hang around all day will actually pay for it. Of course, those sorts of people probably won't come to your shop, which might not be a bad thing.
You might have to sell it as renting urban office space rather than as a coffee shop... You won't get anyone poping by to meet a friend for a quick coffee, but you might make more from the business crowd (depending a LOT on location.) [Sell the service to area business at corporate rates for their employees.]
Put a "To Go" counter up front for people who just want to get coffee and go. Don't put any tables/chairs up there. (Hard to use a laptop if you have nothing to set it on.)
It wouldn't really be a coffee shop anymore, but it might work as a business...
While this won't help people now, I've read that AMD and Intel are busy putting dual-core chips together and building in features for partitioning. Maybe the future will hold a PC that can run one operating system on one core, and anther one simultaneously on the other. It would require some sort of switch that would prevent hardware interrrupts from one OS reaching the other OS so that keyloggers wouldn't work, but the scenario could look like this:
1. Boot up OS of your choice (runs on both cores)
2. Put in live CD, tell machine to boot it.
3. All processes running under current OS moved to one core. Current OS runs slower, but is otherwised untouched.
4. Live CD boots on second core, providing a completely isolated and secure environment. It is also able to write data to the harddrive for saving transaction logs, but does not read data. If compromized, the worst that happens is your transaction logs are corrupted/changed, and you have to log back into your bank to see your transaction history.
Other options:
Bootable thumbdrive with ROM chip rather than flash ram (solves the "I only have a slot-CD drive" problem. Creates the "My PC won't boot from USB" problem. (However, as time goes on, and new PC's will be able to boot from such devices, this will be less of an issue.)
Variation:
PDA-on-chip. The bank provides you with a PDA device that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse (or run stand-alone like a normal PDA), and runs an embedded OS from ROM. Saves data bank to flash-ram. You plug in your Bank PDA, do all your transactions from a controlled environment, then when you are done, you plug the device into your PC and synch quicken to the files on the flash drive. Since the PDA never loads applications from flash, and starts up fresh every time from ROM, you can't install viruses or currupt the OS on the box.
Encrypt the rom chips, and place a key inside the PDA to decode it. Need to send out updates? Send a new ROM chip out. If the encryption key doesn't match the one in the PDA, you can't use the new rom chip. This won't make it impossible for crooks to construct and distribute imposter rom chips, but it will make it harder.
As a bonus -- get the banks to agree to use the same hadrware and rom-signing/encryption system, and the same PDA could connect to many different institutions. (e.g. one box, many accounts.)
Sort of like a portable Atari for all your banks...
Any MP3 player I buy must have:
1. a screen
2. work without any special software to transfer files
3. have a user-replaceable battery
You don't want a screen? I don't get it. I've got a 1GB Muvo Mico N200. With 1GB, I can fit between 17 and 24 albums (that's 200 to 300 songs at a good bit rate). I like every one of those songs. However, sometimes I like to listen to them in random order, and sometimes I like to listen to one album at a time. If I am listening to one album (say the 1st album on the player) and I want to switch to listening to the 12th album on the player, how do I do this on a ipod flash (with no screen)? Pushing the 'next' button 100 times is NOT acceptable.
Also, I don't understand this devotion to itunes. I look for [and buy] players that specificaly DON'T support itunes (or any other transfer software.) I keep my music organized in the file system by artist, ablum, and track, so I can quickly copy full albums onto different devices -- no special software required. That way, if I get some new album that a friend of mine would like to hear, I can plug in the player, copy the album, and it is done. He doesn't have to install some stupid piece of software just to talk to my player.
Regargable batteries eventually wear out. At a minimum, I want to be able to replace the regargable batteries when this happens. Can't do that with any of the ipods. I prefer players that use standard batteries (AA/AAA). That way, I can have spares already charged up when I am away from any power sources. Better yet, if all of my batteries are used up, and I don't have time for a recharge, I can stop by the petrol station and grab a few alkaline cells. You can get an external battery pack for the ipod mini and standard, but they double the size of the package. With the ipod shuffle, you are out of luck.
The N200 also has an FM tuner, which is useful for listening to NPR/news/traffic/weather --esp. while traveling. However, having a tuner isn't a big deal for me. However, if you do have a tuner (and has other people have pointed out, this works well in health clubs where the TV sound is broadcast over FM) how do you change the station without a screen? You could auto-scan, but sometimes autoscan misses some faint stations and the only way to select them is by setting the station manually. Also, how do you switch FM regions (or know what region is selected) without a screen?
I guess if you don't have very many features, you don't need the feature of having a screen either. However, I can get a lot more features (with pretty good usability) for about the same price as an ipod shuffle, and I don't have to buy a new one when the battery wears out. Why do people buy the shuffle anyway?
Thinking outside the box? I think Apple needs to check out the boxes of some of their competitors...
Compatablity with Word is the difference (IMHO) between a corporate WP, and a personal WP. Where I work, even if I generate the document myself, it usually needs to be based on a template generated by someone else, and nearly always, someone else will need to edit the documents I create, and they will expect all of the formatting imposed by the template to work properly. This makes using OO.o unusable at the office.
At home, pretty much the only thing I need is a word processor. I don't generally give presentations to my house mates, so OO.o works fine. At work, however, I can't get around the two most irritating things (IMHO) about open office:
1. There is too much white space between the last letter you typed and the cursor.
2. With most fonts, there is too much white space between each letter, and not enough white space inserted with a space character.
With the first problem, I am CONSTANTLY deleting characters because it looks like there is a space where there is no space. In every other application where I edit text (Word, notepad, web forms, kopete, konsole, xterms, etc. etc.) the cursor is rendered directly behind the letter so that you are never fooled into thinking there is a space between the cursor and the character immediately preceding the cursor.
With the second problem, I often can't tell the difference between there being one space between two characters and no space between two characters, or the difference between two spaces and one space.
I realize switching to "online layout" mostly fixes this problem, but "online layout" mode (in my experience) really screws up the formatting of a lot of the Word documents I need to work on (the text flows across the full page width [right past the margins] and this hammers much of the formating). So, I have to choose between screwed up formatting, or screwed up kerning. Neither is acceptable for day-to-day use, so I'm stuck on Word... Also, where is the option to FORCE "online layout" mode for every document? (I'm speaking of OO.o 1.1.0 on linux here, so maybe the newer versions fix this, but anyway...) The company I work for will not likely switch to OO.o anytime soon. So until OO.o can deal with some of the more complex formatting in Word while at the same time getting the text rendering right, it will continue to be a non-viable option.
I used to suffer from computer packrat bulimia. I would collect a lot of comuter hardware (much of it old/obsolete) then every so often "purge" everything except the newest machines and start over. That is, until I revived an old 286... It dual-booted msdog/windoze 3.0 and minix. The minix install had a web server that I turned into a remote control for an mp3 player (on a different box, of course.)
So, get this... you had to have a machine with a web browser to see the web page on the 286 minix box so that you could control the mp3 player on 266Mhz linux box, which, of course, was fully capable of running its own web server... The 286 was completely uncessary in the setup, and dramatically slowed everything down. I set up the minix box to prove it could be done, rather than because it was a good idea. The same goes for the caseless 386dx25 I mangled into a NAT/firewall. It used a pair of 8-bit Eagle NE1000 10-base2 cards and was thus incapable of routing a full-speed broadband connection. What's the point in that? I don't know...
So, another purge, and anything slower than a 500Mhz box was sold or tossed. You might call it a hobby. I'd prefer to call it an addiction. With the low cost of wireless access points, print servers, firewalls, and external storage, I find it just isn't worth my time to try and make older machines do anything usefull anymore. If you have anything slower than a Pentium II, toss it. Go buy your self a $60 d-link or linksys appliance, put it in the corner, and forget about it. Less space, less noise, less hassle. If you really feel the need set up your own server, get a decent enough box to run your firewall, web server, dhcp server, http proxy, ltsp server, samba server, etc. etc. and do everything on one box. You still get to learn how it all works, and you won't have to wade through 15 boxes of rubbish and fight off the spaghetti cable monster each time you want to enjoy your hobby.
Check out the refurb section of pricewatch or ebay for some great deals. $100 will buy you a decent enough box. Then again, you could probably get something similar from your next door neighbor who is about to throw a perfectly useable (and not completely obsolete) machine in the dumpster.
Trust me. If it's not at least a Pentium II (or equivalent) don't waste your time.
Booting a broken 386 off floppies and word processing with dos edit??? Oh, god, that man needs help...
As Weird Al said: "What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!"
I'll echo the parent's comments. I've got three external storage devices:
1. Archos 20Gb Jukebox -- It has USB 2.0, backwards compatible to USB 1.1/1.0. While 20GB is lots of storage, I don't find this device useful for transfering files. Why? Well, it is full of music. If I want to transport files, I need to first delete some music, add the files, transport them, then re-add the music, and perhaps rebuild the playlists as well. This is a pain, so I don't do it. You'll run into the same problem with an iPod, unless you get lots more storage than you have music so that you'll always have lots of extra space.
2. FireXpress external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure. This uses standard 9mm height 2.5 inch laptop hard drives. (Search google for firexpress -- you can find them at newegg.com or welovemacs.com) The nice thing about this enclosure is that:
a. it is USB 1.0/1.1/2.0 compatible
b. firewire compatible
c. can be powered by any of (usb port, PS/2 port, firewire port, external dual-voltage power A/C adapter.) The cool thing about the A/C adapter is that it delivers the power through a pass-through firewire connection, so it could be used for other firewire devices that can draw their power from the firewire port (iPod, anyone?). So, just in case your computer can't deliver enough power through the firewire port (I think some [not all] Sony laptops have this problem because they only have a 4-wire (non-powered) "i-link" port) you can use the A/C adapter instead. Then again, you might as well use the USB or PS/2 ports and not have to cary the A/C adapter....
If you partition and format the drive with fat32 partitions, it will work on Linux, Windows, and (I think) Mac OS X. With so many different ways to power the device, you don't usually need to cary around the A/C adapter, and being only slightly bigger than the laptop drive it uses, it is fairly small. This is the device I use when I need to drag around many Gig's of data.
3. PQI iStick. This is one of the smallest and most portable USB flash memory drives I've seen. They come in sizes up to 512MB (last I checked). I have a 256MB stick, and have used it on Windows and Linux. This is the device I use when I need to transfer a smaller amount of data between computers and don't want to mess with configuring windows shares / samba, networking, ftp, sftp, etc. etc.
So, which device you choose really comes down to how much data you want to move. USB flash memory drives aren't good for anything where you will be doing a lot of read/write operations, as flash memory devices will wear out faster than a hard drive (and transfer speeds are typically lower). So, if you are editing video, running an OS, or doing something that causes a lot of disk activity, you're better off using an external hard drive. If not, and a USB device has enough room for the amount of data you want to move around, then go with a USB stick -- they're cheap and easy to use.
If a USB stick isn't going to do the trick, then you're talking external hard drive. Here you need to decide between:
1. portability (more portable means higher cost and lower capacity)
2. capacity (higher capacity means higher cost, and often larger physical size)
3. price
4. ability to play music (consider how much space your music will take up and whether you'll have to delete music in order to move other types of data.)
16 - huge boxes full of keyboards, modems and other cards, CAT5
Hey there, BACK OFF...
The "Gondola of Mice" and the four boxes of pagers are MINE. [page 16]
Vibrating mice...
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about...
Go get some surrealism!
Some of us don't have that luxury. Outlook and Office are STILL the main things keeping me on Windows. Oh, just use thunderbird, or some such thing... Well, I'd love to, but the company I work for uses Exchange. Oh, well just use Evolution or Kontact! Tried both. While I was able to get them to connect to our servers and send and receive mail, the addressing needs serious work. There's something like 80,000 employees in the company -- adding these one by one into Kontact's address book, or Evolution's address book, or even Thunderbird's address book (when using IMAP) is a major pain. Sure, I don't need to import 80,000 addresses. I need to import several hundred. One by one. By first searching through a list 80,000 names long. The name search feature in Outlook is far and above anything I've seen in any exchange client in Linux. Oh, and why do I have to "import" anything? Why can't I just use the entirety of the company directory AS my address book?? That, and the fact that I need Visio (sorry, Kivio doesn't cut it.) and while OpenOffice works fine for simple docs, I spend most of my time in a word processor working with company templates, most of which include formatting and macros that DO NOT work in OpenOffice. Oh yeah, I'll need a copy of Visual Studio (yes, we are trying to go Java... we just need to kill off these F*@!*#$ vb apps first...) ...and some of the corporate benefits web pages only work in internet exploader. So, until there are open source apps that REALLY are able to replace office, I'll be stuck in some sort of hyrbrid world. (not to mention all of the company-specific Windows-only apps like: the timecard system, the purchasing system, the travel system, and, oh, I almost forgot about MS Project....)
My solution? A dual-head box running SuSE 9.0 with Windows stuffed into a vmware box completely covering one monitor. Have to use Windows? Drag the mouse to the right. Get to use Linux? Drag the mouse to the left. Works great. When Windows needs to reboot, it can do so without interrupting my telnet/ssh sessions, XMMS player, Mozilla windows, etc. I only reboot the Linux box when I need to update the kernel. The strange thing? XP actually boots FASTER inside vmware. Just be sure to feed it LOTS of memory.
Documentation is what makes text files superior to the Windows registry (and possibly database configurations in general.) Many of the config files I edit on a regular basis have the documentation of what the options mean (and sometimes what options are available) IN the config file itself.
The windows registy doesn't have this. Unless you happen to have a copy of the manual handy for every little app that has polluted the registry with dwords and hex values and what these mean, the registry is incomprehensible.
Plus, if I do a man sshd_config, I get a reasonably usable manual on what I can put into the config file and what it means. Where is this on Windows? Windows help? Nope. Application help? (maybe, but probably not.)
Putting all configuration options in a registry may or may not be a good idea, but if you loose the ability to include documentation with the configuration, then IMHO it is a net loss.