Actually happened in my company. Two people were working late, and hmmm, given that they were the only two left in the company at that time of the day, decided it was time to have a little bit of fun together.
They carefully locked the office door, just in case, and let the hot and steamy action begin... completely ignoring the security camera from the parking lot that happened to point directly at their office window!
Next time folks, not only lock the office door, but also close the blinds!
Because it also contained other niceties, such as the removal of in dubito pro reo, severe limitations on freedom of speech, and choices about economic policy which have no place in a constitution.
EU legislating beer glass sizes (making it smaller, of course...). Or EU legislating what a hot dog should be called. Or any of the thousands other equally pointless directives.
The perp should at least notice that his computer seems sluggish. And then ask for competent help.
The competent help will tell him to press Ctrl-Alt-Del, the click Task Manager, and then chose the appropriate tab to display the processes, etc.
However, those noobs are completely oblivious to their computer slowing down in such a dramatic way, and don't even think there could be anything wrong with it...
Hey look, boy. If you don't know how to use a computer, that's fine with us.
Just don't come and bother us.
We don't bother you either, by coming to your football pitch, kicking the ball off-field, all the while shouting "I'm proud to suck at football, but that doesn't mean that I'm a couch potato"
These boxes have little see-through windows, so you can see the CPU from outside.
It would have anything you need just printed on the surface of the box. It wouldn't be weight-matched to the real deal.
Maybe some of these demoes were intended to be handed around at trade shows? There it would help if the weight was matching.
And it wouldn't include a stack of blank paper.
Some of it might be visible through the small plastic window...
Finally, it wouldn't include the fake CPU. If you must have something there, it would be a piece of cardboard with a photo, but as I said there is no need to have anything inside of a demo box
A photo might take care of the window, if looked at from a distance. But having small plastic mockups look way cooler.
The box wouldn't have spelling errors either.
If it came from Intel. Read parent again: what if for some reason (building entire walls out of them...) Asian countries needed huge amounts of these demo boxes? Which would give them a plausible reason to manufacture these locally.
However, it would still be bizarre how these would find their way back into the US...
Another thing to watch out for is sticks which are waaaaaay sloooooow. Apparently you can get USB storage for ridiculously low $XX/GB if you don't mind needing an entire week to fill that storage...
how the hell did that even work? volatile memory is more expensive than flash and i'm not aware of any (simple) technique of telling the OS to store data locally instead.
Easy: just return success to every write, even if it's beyond the end of the device. The read will then come out of the buffer cache. If you do the test on a lightly loaded machine with gobs of RAM, and if you don't remove-and-reinsert the drive, you'll be fooled.
Most people here on Slashdot would probably remove-and-reinsert, but those less knowledgeable may not know that they need to do this for proper testing.
Let's try this with a car analogy. Do you want a car that works fine for several days then suddenly won't start, or one that will lose features over time?
Yeah, such as breaks... And other features could become "always on", such as the gas pedal...
But Sony couldn't patent this, some other Japanese company has prior art...
Why don't cryptome post an account number where people can wire donations to? Yes, there are fees to a wire transfer, but for many they are not that huge, and many people probably won't mind.
If the possibility existed, I'd wire them €50 in a moment, and wouldn't even mind €10 fees...
With a huge mortgage on my house, and the bank breathing down my neck, any influx of cash into my personal finances is welcome. And who'd really stayed true to his principles if offered $75000 to move my employer's mail system back from dovecot plus sendmail to Exchange. Yes, Micro$oft is really paying that much (as long as your company is big or well-known enough). I've heard Adobe offers similar deals (for moving from the Gimp to Photoshop). A couple of well-placed flash animations also pay, although far less.
If you aren't getting the same kind of coin, you aren't negotiating hard enough. Hint: know the selling points of the open source alternatives, and (obviously) arrange for a private after hours meeting with the sales guy, but without your colleagues.
Slashdot Mirror
A potential employeur might use this algorithm to predict my graduation year and area of study instead of just looking at the resume I sent him?
He might figure other, less public, details about you.
Actually they probably can't.
I've had a website hosted on Hurricane Electric since 1997. Email too. They've been really reliable.
Yeah, too bad they no longer are...
So it'd suck for them to go down because of some vigilante reaction to a botnet.
Indeed, that'll suck. I guess it's time now to shop around for a more trustworthy hosting provider?
They are doing all of us webmasters a huge favor, by hasting the long overdue demise of MSIE6
For those of us who have a web site, does anybody have a code snippet to put on our pages? Like changing IE's homepage to goatse, or somesuch...
They carefully locked the office door, just in case, and let the hot and steamy action begin... completely ignoring the security camera from the parking lot that happened to point directly at their office window!
Next time folks, not only lock the office door, but also close the blinds!
Exactly. They sparkle so nicely in the microwave oven. And the lovely smell...
Music And Film Industry Association of America
Because it also contained other niceties, such as the removal of in dubito pro reo, severe limitations on freedom of speech, and choices about economic policy which have no place in a constitution.
EU legislating beer glass sizes (making it smaller, of course...). Or EU legislating what a hot dog should be called. Or any of the thousands other equally pointless directives.
The competent help will tell him to press Ctrl-Alt-Del, the click Task Manager, and then chose the appropriate tab to display the processes, etc.
However, those noobs are completely oblivious to their computer slowing down in such a dramatic way, and don't even think there could be anything wrong with it...
Just don't come and bother us.
We don't bother you either, by coming to your football pitch, kicking the ball off-field, all the while shouting "I'm proud to suck at football, but that doesn't mean that I'm a couch potato"
And mine makes a gentle "whoosh..." sound when it creeps out.
A demo box wouldn't contain anything inside.
These boxes have little see-through windows, so you can see the CPU from outside.
It would have anything you need just printed on the surface of the box. It wouldn't be weight-matched to the real deal.
Maybe some of these demoes were intended to be handed around at trade shows? There it would help if the weight was matching.
And it wouldn't include a stack of blank paper.
Some of it might be visible through the small plastic window...
Finally, it wouldn't include the fake CPU. If you must have something there, it would be a piece of cardboard with a photo, but as I said there is no need to have anything inside of a demo box
A photo might take care of the window, if looked at from a distance. But having small plastic mockups look way cooler.
The box wouldn't have spelling errors either.
If it came from Intel. Read parent again: what if for some reason (building entire walls out of them...) Asian countries needed huge amounts of these demo boxes? Which would give them a plausible reason to manufacture these locally.
However, it would still be bizarre how these would find their way back into the US...
Another thing to watch out for is sticks which are waaaaaay sloooooow. Apparently you can get USB storage for ridiculously low $XX/GB if you don't mind needing an entire week to fill that storage...
how the hell did that even work? volatile memory is more expensive than flash and i'm not aware of any (simple) technique of telling the OS to store data locally instead.
Easy: just return success to every write, even if it's beyond the end of the device. The read will then come out of the buffer cache. If you do the test on a lightly loaded machine with gobs of RAM, and if you don't remove-and-reinsert the drive, you'll be fooled.
Most people here on Slashdot would probably remove-and-reinsert, but those less knowledgeable may not know that they need to do this for proper testing.
As long as you didn't count each individual popcorn...
but why is an idea at this level of abstraction even patentable?
No, or else Toyota would already have patented it.
The first hit is free.
But the trips won't get worse. Or if they do, then paying for the hit wouldn't stop them from becoming worse.
If someone gave me the car for free...
I still wouldn't drive that Toyota...
If it's a PC game somebody is going to find the registry key and post it on the internet so you can regedit it.
Who says that Sony's PC will allow you to regedit this key? That would be a little bit to easy, wouldn't it?
Let's try this with a car analogy. Do you want a car that works fine for several days then suddenly won't start, or one that will lose features over time?
Yeah, such as breaks... And other features could become "always on", such as the gas pedal...
But Sony couldn't patent this, some other Japanese company has prior art...
If the possibility existed, I'd wire them €50 in a moment, and wouldn't even mind €10 fees...
If you aren't getting the same kind of coin, you aren't negotiating hard enough. Hint: know the selling points of the open source alternatives, and (obviously) arrange for a private after hours meeting with the sales guy, but without your colleagues.
Don't worry. I'll just offer them to settle for $10, and the case will be closed ;-)