what I was referring to is that iTunes has been doing this all along and we don't see people nearly this freaked out over it as we do here with the wii.
The difference is they have a pocketful of known exploits they can use. They only implement one. Months later it's patched out. Then they can just get out their list and see which one they're going to use next. Maybe the update eliminated one of the options, maybe it added a few more that they will discover and add to their list in the next few months. That's the difference - preparedness, turn-around time. They're doing their R&D while they already have a working exploit in place. Then when that one stops working, they've got one waiting in the wing to be polished and rolled out.
That's the difference between when the next salvo gets fired. Own the box, wait 4 months, patch. Take another 8 days, owned again. Another 4 month wait for the next patch maybe? You can't possibly say the hackers aren't ahead of the curve here.
we just became a reseller of the Drobo. There's a nice system. Perfect for people that don't want to learn anything. Just plug it in, and in about 5 minutes its set up and going. lets you know if there's a problem, turns on an idiot light, you feed it another drive, and forget about it.
AMEN! It's unbelievable how many people consider RAID their backup. Raid is to help mitigate hardware failure and protect uptime.
My system here does a complete block read of all attached devices (not VOLUMES) twice a month, hunting for bad/slow blocks. When one slice fails is not the time to find out that there's an IO error somewhere on another slice. I typically get an email about once every 3 months by the scripts, that another failing drive has been tagged. Have yet to lose a byte.
maybe not all that useful for the actual spamming, but imagine how useful a cray would be to a herder that's creating gmail accts etc that requires cracking captchas?
That's a double-edged sword too. We sell new and used macs, but we actually don't get in many used macs. People run them for 5, 7, even 10 years before they upgrade. And by then they get handed off to the kids. We see few used desktops to sell, and VERY few used laptops. I have yet to see us set out a used laptop that lasts more than a week before someone buys it.
What that means for the person that buys it is, you are pretty much guaranteed to get a good price when it comes time to sell it. My new macbook is winding its way through FedEx now, and this one will be on ebay sometime next week. It'll be the fourth mac laptop I've sold, (I upgrade every 2-3 yrs) and I expect it to half pay for the new one. Try that with anything else. I also like to think that at over 2 yrs old, this macbook is still pretty high-end. I'm not so sure I'd have that perception with a 2 yr old Lenvo etc. That's all I can think of to explain the resale value, is that others agree with me here.
Also, in a roundabouts sort of way, this tendency to go a long time between upgrading can cause more grief than it solves. People bring in machines running 8 year old software on 9 year old hardware and need it repaired or to fix system/application problems, and that can be very difficult or impossible due to age. I personally think keeping a system past 5 years turns it into a liability. Especially if you're using it for your business.
Sadly I say this while at work I have a PoweMac G5 and a PowerMac G4 as my service machines, and we have an iMac G5 and G4 as our front counter (sales/checkout) machines. (yes that's right, we do mac sales and service, and or business runs on 4-6 yr old machines) Yesterday that was discussed, and "why should we replace them? those work fine?" *sigh* Curst that mac longevity!:P They can keep the imacs up front if they want, but I'm insisting on our demo mac pro to replace the G4 this christmas.
Most PCs now have bios batteries. Some are very hard to get to too. (macbook for example, UNDER the logic board) We get people that bring in things like that which got a drink spilled in them and told us they instantly removed the battery. It probably helped, but didn't save it. Water + electricity =. electrolysis, and that's a great way to grow shorts.
Water can be very hard to get out of modern electronics. Surface mount chip packages can hold water for weeks or months underneath them, and the closely spaced pins wick water like you would not believe. If you place a drop of water on the edge of a surface chip like that, the drop will just shrink and disappear, as it's sucked down under the chip. Getting that back out is just as hard as you can imagine.
You can try to bake the electronics, but you really have to watch the temperature. Lots of plastics in there. I've tossed around ideas like taking a big can of desiccant (like in the "do not eat" packets) and an airtight bag and let it sit that way under a sun lamp for a few days. The idea is the heat doesn't actually remove the water, it just helps keep the humidity mobile. The desiccant WILL pull the humidity out of the air which the warmth has helped free up, and lock it away. Moving air inside the bag would probably speed the process. Remember, more heat isn't necessarily better. Dryer IS pretty much always better. (hope your caps are sealed well...) It's not the heat that dries it out, it's the difference in humidity. (a process accelerated by heat and movement of air)
Certain things just plain can't be saved. LCD panels wick water into the panel, and there's no easy getting that out without actually disassembling the panel (LCD / polarizers / light spreader / etc) But that's more of a cosmetic thing than functional, so if you don't mind the weird effect it has on the panel, ok for you.
Home electronics don't often have a bios battery, but many have "supercaps" - high farad count capacitors that keep your settings alive for a few days if power is removed. Those work just like batteries, creating electrolysis in the presence of water. They're soldered down and usually tucked away, so not easy to unplug either.
Anything with a motor in it is going to be trouble to get water out of. Copper windings can trap water for a very long time. Wire wound and thin film pots can be greatly affected by corrosion and are usually sealed just well enough to hold in water but discourage drying out.
Even water that appears to be clean can bring in other problems. Grit and light film can form in places it does not belong, interfering with optical gates, clouding lenses in your optical disk players, etc. Optical pots can get their optics clouded or blocked.
Good luck. I doubt much you do will make a difference at this point - most of your gear was doomed from day 1. Most of what you manage to save probably didn't need your help to survive. (you didn't make a difference) But you can try - just don't blow too much time or expense in vain.
Are the USA and the UK in some sort of competition to see who can do the more thorough job of obliterating their citizens' rights to privacy?
Lately there's been a morbid tit-for-tat article exchange going on here on slash, like the USA and UK are trying to outdo one another. Just when you think the USA or UK is as bad as it gets, there's a reply.
or they'll hack the usb hardware to support "USB target disk mode". That would be ideal.
For the PC there are these kits you can buy, for $30-some you get a 6ft USB A-to-A (not A-to-B) cable, with a bubble in the middle, and a CD. The bubble is a sort of P2P hub that makes both ends look like a peripheral to the other end, and the software lets you do data transfers. But that's a lot of hassel.
Though we'd still have to track down a USB A-to-A cable. Firewire is so much nicer being peer to peer already.
the original macbook pros lacked a firewire 800 port, which was added to the next refresh on them. I expect to see a fw800 port added to the first refresh on these new macbooks.
Yes, no firewire sucks. I do mac repair work, and I use the firewire port a LOT. This is going to make it a lot harder for me to get my job done. I hate working on the slot load imacs that lack the firewire port.
I use to pity the PC service tech as he always had to disassemble machines and pull the HD out to work on certain things.
I thought combustion (burning) moves slower than explosions? A race would have to develop, between the speed of the venting gases, and the speed at which the burning can spread. This would be eventually overcome by the thinning of the gases as they get farther from the breach.
I picture the effect looking something like the CMEs off the sun, that appear to puff out like a cloud of dust disturbed, swirling away for a limited distance.
Either that or it may be more on keel with say, an oil rig fire, where you've got a jet of say, natural gas, blasting up in the air, and the fire starts 50-100 feet from the well because the flame can't travel fast enough to reach back to the well because of the speed the gas is coming out at.
Still though, this is with a good mix of gas and oxygen, and essentially limitless supply of both the oxygen and gas, so I expect that to burn really well. Ejecting a lot of oxygen into space by itself doesn't DO anything, you have to have something else combustible, and an ignition source. We'll take it for granted that whatever MADE the hole is the ignition source, but I don't think the space ship is venting a bunch of flammable gas in addition to the oxygen?
Considering also the plausible size of the hole made by hostile fire, the accurate representation of the result would likely be pretty short-lived and not too spectacular. About like shooting a can of antiperspirant with a.22 - you get a pop, a short-lived WHOOSH of vented (and certainly not fireballing) gas, and then that's it, show's over in 2-3 sec tops.
But that doesn't make for very good CGI eye-candy now does it? And we LOVE our eye-candy! Watching stuff really blow up is part of watching movies like this. So I suppose the whole discussion of realism here is totally pointless.
For it to be considered "criminal", they would most likely have to show you are making a profit on your pirating, such as selling burned copies of IronMan at a streetcorner stand or something like that on a larger scale.
Most IP infringement occurs between groups such as those on piratebay, none of which make any money (profit) from the infringement. I wonder where we can find some actual real numbers that tell what percentage of copyright violation is for profit or not, or honest numbers as to what the cost of 'casual piracy' is? (specifically, numbers that don't automatically assume every copy made costs the artists 100% of the retail cost of the item)
considering the damage to the plane, I'd be surprised if they were able to make any positive determination as to the crash cause.
Re:Check your own logic before calling others craz
on
Fossett's Plane Found
·
· Score: 1
wouldn't be too far fetched for his carcass to have been carried a a ways from the crash site by a bear/coyote/wolf etc before being eaten either. From the shape his plane was in, I doubt he survived it at all, let alone enough to go on a hike.
Morrow, a 43-year-old ski shop owner, told KNBC-TV in Los Angeles that he was hiking "way, way off" the established trails in the Ansel Adams Wilderness section of the two-million-acre Inyo National Forest when he first spotted a bunch of $100 bills.
And they are still looking for his remains. I think Fossett discovered that a wad of 100's doesn't work on Bears. Considering how badly the plane was shredded he probably hit the ground either dead, or in pieces. They were lucky to find what they did of him.
It's more likely the plane is somewhere else. He may have crash-landed, survived but injured, and collapsed and died a mile or more away from the crash site, where he was eaten by the locals in the woods. If it's at the bottom of a lake somewhere, it may be some time before it's found, even if they now have a better idea where to look.
I don't have any purchased music from wal-mart, but I see this burn-to-cd-and-rip solution as devaluing the product. Transcoded audio is lower quality and is easily argued as less valuable than the original WMA file. So for them to tell me that transcoding it is harmless would be unacceptable. Although I could rip back to flac or something to not LOSE quality, I'd have to lose quality to get it to fit back onto my ipod in a sensible size.
Although my individual chances of getting satisfaction from them would be low, I would be pushing for something more of the class-action type that forces them to produce a DRM-stripping app.
If it's WMA, can't they simply provide an app that has the private key or whatnot in it, that can convert and save as an unprotected WMA file without the transcoding process? WMA supports unencumbered music.
Ultimately what the whole scene needs is legislation saying to vendors "You can play the DRM/authorization game, but if you choose to, you are required to leave an app in escrow somewhere that can losslessly strip the DRM at a future time when you stop providing the auth service either voluntarily or by going out of business". Further, required to set that app in escrow before sales begin, and if there is a change in the DRM (change of key or change in scheme) the new unlocker must be placed in escrow before the new product goes on sale.
I realize some will view this as unacceptable, but compromise on both sides is what keeps the wheels turning. I've seen this idea suggested when the theoretical situation of the vendor folding and shutting down their servers abruptly, but I don't see any reason why that should be the only reasoning behind it. It would prevent problems like this also where the vendor is still in business, and just decides to turn off their servers. The escrow company already has the keys to the music, and it's no longer a matter of drumming up legal action to force the vendor to unlock the goods. The escrow company starts handing out the tools the day the wal-mart announces the servers are being shut down. (or on the day it happens) This needs to be a decision and responsibility that does not depend on the vendor taking action, because some will be unable, and some will simply be unwilling.
Slashdot Mirror
what I was referring to is that iTunes has been doing this all along and we don't see people nearly this freaked out over it as we do here with the wii.
well, the "bugs" were bugs. they were security holes that allowed the otherwise unpermitted mods. so that's all the excuse they needed really.
doesn't itunes always do this?
The difference is they have a pocketful of known exploits they can use. They only implement one. Months later it's patched out. Then they can just get out their list and see which one they're going to use next. Maybe the update eliminated one of the options, maybe it added a few more that they will discover and add to their list in the next few months. That's the difference - preparedness, turn-around time. They're doing their R&D while they already have a working exploit in place. Then when that one stops working, they've got one waiting in the wing to be polished and rolled out.
That's the difference between when the next salvo gets fired. Own the box, wait 4 months, patch. Take another 8 days, owned again. Another 4 month wait for the next patch maybe? You can't possibly say the hackers aren't ahead of the curve here.
we just became a reseller of the Drobo. There's a nice system. Perfect for people that don't want to learn anything. Just plug it in, and in about 5 minutes its set up and going. lets you know if there's a problem, turns on an idiot light, you feed it another drive, and forget about it.
RAID isn't meant as a replacement to backups
AMEN! It's unbelievable how many people consider RAID their backup. Raid is to help mitigate hardware failure and protect uptime.
My system here does a complete block read of all attached devices (not VOLUMES) twice a month, hunting for bad/slow blocks. When one slice fails is not the time to find out that there's an IO error somewhere on another slice. I typically get an email about once every 3 months by the scripts, that another failing drive has been tagged. Have yet to lose a byte.
for me I like going out on the porch at night and the backlit keyboard is a must.
maybe not all that useful for the actual spamming, but imagine how useful a cray would be to a herder that's creating gmail accts etc that requires cracking captchas?
it says it runs windows. that's just what the herders need, a few crays in their herd.
That's a double-edged sword too. We sell new and used macs, but we actually don't get in many used macs. People run them for 5, 7, even 10 years before they upgrade. And by then they get handed off to the kids. We see few used desktops to sell, and VERY few used laptops. I have yet to see us set out a used laptop that lasts more than a week before someone buys it.
What that means for the person that buys it is, you are pretty much guaranteed to get a good price when it comes time to sell it. My new macbook is winding its way through FedEx now, and this one will be on ebay sometime next week. It'll be the fourth mac laptop I've sold, (I upgrade every 2-3 yrs) and I expect it to half pay for the new one. Try that with anything else. I also like to think that at over 2 yrs old, this macbook is still pretty high-end. I'm not so sure I'd have that perception with a 2 yr old Lenvo etc. That's all I can think of to explain the resale value, is that others agree with me here.
Also, in a roundabouts sort of way, this tendency to go a long time between upgrading can cause more grief than it solves. People bring in machines running 8 year old software on 9 year old hardware and need it repaired or to fix system/application problems, and that can be very difficult or impossible due to age. I personally think keeping a system past 5 years turns it into a liability. Especially if you're using it for your business.
Sadly I say this while at work I have a PoweMac G5 and a PowerMac G4 as my service machines, and we have an iMac G5 and G4 as our front counter (sales/checkout) machines. (yes that's right, we do mac sales and service, and or business runs on 4-6 yr old machines) Yesterday that was discussed, and "why should we replace them? those work fine?" *sigh* Curst that mac longevity! :P They can keep the imacs up front if they want, but I'm insisting on our demo mac pro to replace the G4 this christmas.
I noticed two things were overlooked in the review, for the macbook anyway:
1) backlit keyboard (/option)
2) HDMI adapters available for video port
Anyone spot other points overlooked in the review for other models?
I personally am not interested in HDMI, but the backlit keyboard is one of my favorite features of my MBP.
Most PCs now have bios batteries. Some are very hard to get to too. (macbook for example, UNDER the logic board) We get people that bring in things like that which got a drink spilled in them and told us they instantly removed the battery. It probably helped, but didn't save it. Water + electricity =. electrolysis, and that's a great way to grow shorts.
Water can be very hard to get out of modern electronics. Surface mount chip packages can hold water for weeks or months underneath them, and the closely spaced pins wick water like you would not believe. If you place a drop of water on the edge of a surface chip like that, the drop will just shrink and disappear, as it's sucked down under the chip. Getting that back out is just as hard as you can imagine.
You can try to bake the electronics, but you really have to watch the temperature. Lots of plastics in there. I've tossed around ideas like taking a big can of desiccant (like in the "do not eat" packets) and an airtight bag and let it sit that way under a sun lamp for a few days. The idea is the heat doesn't actually remove the water, it just helps keep the humidity mobile. The desiccant WILL pull the humidity out of the air which the warmth has helped free up, and lock it away. Moving air inside the bag would probably speed the process. Remember, more heat isn't necessarily better. Dryer IS pretty much always better. (hope your caps are sealed well...) It's not the heat that dries it out, it's the difference in humidity. (a process accelerated by heat and movement of air)
Certain things just plain can't be saved. LCD panels wick water into the panel, and there's no easy getting that out without actually disassembling the panel (LCD / polarizers / light spreader / etc) But that's more of a cosmetic thing than functional, so if you don't mind the weird effect it has on the panel, ok for you.
Home electronics don't often have a bios battery, but many have "supercaps" - high farad count capacitors that keep your settings alive for a few days if power is removed. Those work just like batteries, creating electrolysis in the presence of water. They're soldered down and usually tucked away, so not easy to unplug either.
Anything with a motor in it is going to be trouble to get water out of. Copper windings can trap water for a very long time. Wire wound and thin film pots can be greatly affected by corrosion and are usually sealed just well enough to hold in water but discourage drying out.
Even water that appears to be clean can bring in other problems. Grit and light film can form in places it does not belong, interfering with optical gates, clouding lenses in your optical disk players, etc. Optical pots can get their optics clouded or blocked.
Good luck. I doubt much you do will make a difference at this point - most of your gear was doomed from day 1. Most of what you manage to save probably didn't need your help to survive. (you didn't make a difference) But you can try - just don't blow too much time or expense in vain.
You cannot waive your constitutional rights (or ammendments therein)
Are the USA and the UK in some sort of competition to see who can do the more thorough job of obliterating their citizens' rights to privacy?
Lately there's been a morbid tit-for-tat article exchange going on here on slash, like the USA and UK are trying to outdo one another. Just when you think the USA or UK is as bad as it gets, there's a reply.
or they'll hack the usb hardware to support "USB target disk mode". That would be ideal.
For the PC there are these kits you can buy, for $30-some you get a 6ft USB A-to-A (not A-to-B) cable, with a bubble in the middle, and a CD. The bubble is a sort of P2P hub that makes both ends look like a peripheral to the other end, and the software lets you do data transfers. But that's a lot of hassel.
Though we'd still have to track down a USB A-to-A cable. Firewire is so much nicer being peer to peer already.
the original macbook pros lacked a firewire 800 port, which was added to the next refresh on them. I expect to see a fw800 port added to the first refresh on these new macbooks.
Yes, no firewire sucks. I do mac repair work, and I use the firewire port a LOT. This is going to make it a lot harder for me to get my job done. I hate working on the slot load imacs that lack the firewire port.
I use to pity the PC service tech as he always had to disassemble machines and pull the HD out to work on certain things.
> So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in.
Oh you thought "openness and transparency" was for the government? no no, they meant for the citizens
I thought combustion (burning) moves slower than explosions? A race would have to develop, between the speed of the venting gases, and the speed at which the burning can spread. This would be eventually overcome by the thinning of the gases as they get farther from the breach.
I picture the effect looking something like the CMEs off the sun, that appear to puff out like a cloud of dust disturbed, swirling away for a limited distance.
Either that or it may be more on keel with say, an oil rig fire, where you've got a jet of say, natural gas, blasting up in the air, and the fire starts 50-100 feet from the well because the flame can't travel fast enough to reach back to the well because of the speed the gas is coming out at.
Still though, this is with a good mix of gas and oxygen, and essentially limitless supply of both the oxygen and gas, so I expect that to burn really well. Ejecting a lot of oxygen into space by itself doesn't DO anything, you have to have something else combustible, and an ignition source. We'll take it for granted that whatever MADE the hole is the ignition source, but I don't think the space ship is venting a bunch of flammable gas in addition to the oxygen?
Considering also the plausible size of the hole made by hostile fire, the accurate representation of the result would likely be pretty short-lived and not too spectacular. About like shooting a can of antiperspirant with a .22 - you get a pop, a short-lived WHOOSH of vented (and certainly not fireballing) gas, and then that's it, show's over in 2-3 sec tops.
But that doesn't make for very good CGI eye-candy now does it? And we LOVE our eye-candy! Watching stuff really blow up is part of watching movies like this. So I suppose the whole discussion of realism here is totally pointless.
For it to be considered "criminal", they would most likely have to show you are making a profit on your pirating, such as selling burned copies of IronMan at a streetcorner stand or something like that on a larger scale.
Most IP infringement occurs between groups such as those on piratebay, none of which make any money (profit) from the infringement. I wonder where we can find some actual real numbers that tell what percentage of copyright violation is for profit or not, or honest numbers as to what the cost of 'casual piracy' is? (specifically, numbers that don't automatically assume every copy made costs the artists 100% of the retail cost of the item)
considering the damage to the plane, I'd be surprised if they were able to make any positive determination as to the crash cause.
wouldn't be too far fetched for his carcass to have been carried a a ways from the crash site by a bear/coyote/wolf etc before being eaten either. From the shape his plane was in, I doubt he survived it at all, let alone enough to go on a hike.
Morrow, a 43-year-old ski shop owner, told KNBC-TV in Los Angeles that he was hiking "way, way off" the established trails in the Ansel Adams Wilderness section of the two-million-acre Inyo National Forest when he first spotted a bunch of $100 bills.
And they are still looking for his remains. I think Fossett discovered that a wad of 100's doesn't work on Bears. Considering how badly the plane was shredded he probably hit the ground either dead, or in pieces. They were lucky to find what they did of him.
It's more likely the plane is somewhere else. He may have crash-landed, survived but injured, and collapsed and died a mile or more away from the crash site, where he was eaten by the locals in the woods. If it's at the bottom of a lake somewhere, it may be some time before it's found, even if they now have a better idea where to look.
They did a poor job of airbrushing the apple off the back of that macbook.
I don't have any purchased music from wal-mart, but I see this burn-to-cd-and-rip solution as devaluing the product. Transcoded audio is lower quality and is easily argued as less valuable than the original WMA file. So for them to tell me that transcoding it is harmless would be unacceptable. Although I could rip back to flac or something to not LOSE quality, I'd have to lose quality to get it to fit back onto my ipod in a sensible size.
Although my individual chances of getting satisfaction from them would be low, I would be pushing for something more of the class-action type that forces them to produce a DRM-stripping app.
If it's WMA, can't they simply provide an app that has the private key or whatnot in it, that can convert and save as an unprotected WMA file without the transcoding process? WMA supports unencumbered music.
Ultimately what the whole scene needs is legislation saying to vendors "You can play the DRM/authorization game, but if you choose to, you are required to leave an app in escrow somewhere that can losslessly strip the DRM at a future time when you stop providing the auth service either voluntarily or by going out of business". Further, required to set that app in escrow before sales begin, and if there is a change in the DRM (change of key or change in scheme) the new unlocker must be placed in escrow before the new product goes on sale.
I realize some will view this as unacceptable, but compromise on both sides is what keeps the wheels turning. I've seen this idea suggested when the theoretical situation of the vendor folding and shutting down their servers abruptly, but I don't see any reason why that should be the only reasoning behind it. It would prevent problems like this also where the vendor is still in business, and just decides to turn off their servers. The escrow company already has the keys to the music, and it's no longer a matter of drumming up legal action to force the vendor to unlock the goods. The escrow company starts handing out the tools the day the wal-mart announces the servers are being shut down. (or on the day it happens) This needs to be a decision and responsibility that does not depend on the vendor taking action, because some will be unable, and some will simply be unwilling.