All unix requires the root account, it's not really that accurate to say disabled. More like "inaccessible", or to say that "logging in as root is disabled". The password hash starts set to a value to which nothing can hash to, and so there is no valid password to login as root. To "enable root" is simply to set a legal password for it so you can login as root. 99% of mac users will never enable root, and most of them don't even know it exists to enable.
To do root level things uses "su" (substitute user) - you can "su root" meaning do something with root's privs, so in that perspective root is always enabled, but only administrators can su, and that requires one to enter their administrator password, which a virus would have a tough time with.
So yes, it would have to take over an account that had aministrator rights, and use that to do whatever. For all practical intents, an administrator can be root anytime they want to, so there is no need to get root. Getting an admin would be enough.
The OS X Server (as opposed to the Client which many think is all that exists) has root enabled by default, with its password set to the same password as the first administrator you create. Not sure why they do this, it's not really necessary. They probably assume that almost every sysadmin will want root enabled and will be close to first on the order of business if it were not the default.
It doesn't work that way. They don't get out the pie charts to decide who to exploit. Sure, a bigger "audience" for their handiwork is surely a bonus, but the typical malcontent, the easier targets always attract 95% of the attacks. Writing viruses for windows seems not too far off from script kiddie class work. There will always be a few "in it for the challenge" to try to hack the gibson etc but they are statistically minor. I view it from the other perspective, that by its intrinsic security and difficulty to write viruses for, that it remains relatively untouched.
Why try to break into fort knox when you can knock over the farmers savings and loan down the street with a baseball bat? If there are 30 of those small banks scattered around town and only one fort knox, can you really say fort knox is not being attacked nearly as much (or as successfully) simply because there's fewer of it?
I doubt they are nearly as worried as they could be. From the looks of it, it can only spread locally on your subnet. Internet worms like code red, that can infect 70% of the vulnerable machines in the world in eight minutes, vs this whic may infect up to 254 machines on the typical network. Anyone that even attempts to put those two exploits in the same timezone needs a beating with a ClueBat.
That's not very revealing. But if we list the contents of the Device folder using ls with the undocumented option af (for "all files"?), we get a far different picture:
[Kant:/Volumes/iDegger/iPod_Control/Device] monroe% ls -laf
"undocumented" l, a, and f flags? "uh, no." Though I must admit I was curious enough to pull out my pod and look to see what all was really in that folder, which of course was the expected "not much". the joy!ppef I could actually see Apple doing to throw you off the track of what the files really were, but then to do the actual hiding with rot-13? "uh, no." There's a reason two articles up there is a thread on the Zune's DRM being cracked, and not Apple's.
Anyone that got to the link to click before realizing this was a fraud needs more edjumacation.
If something is a problem for you but the people that could fix it don't care, then naturally no one is in a hurry to fix it. MAKE it an immediate problem and you will get a faster fix. There will be more collateral damage of course, but the unfortunate part is not the collateral damage, it's that we have to HAVE it to motivate the people to fix their crap. This whole concept of blaming, attacking, and trying to silence the whistleblowers has got to stop. It's not their fault. Are they making the problem worse? You bet they are. But the problem should not have existed in the first place, and the ones that are in a position to fix the problem are in no hurry and so these things just get hidden, ignored, and drug out. By making the problem a magnitude worse, they mostivate people to fix things because they can no longer tolerate the reproducssions of their apathy. (or rather, their customers can't tolerate it, and rocks roll downhill)
I'm all for this. The only ones that are really against this are the producers that are too cheap to invest sufficient funds in securing their product and do not want their cheapness to be exposed - they cry that their shortcoming is someone else's fault, merely because they pointed it out to the public. If I expose your failure, that doesn't make the results of your failure suddenly my fault.
Just ask questions that only people in India can answer. if they pick the correct answer, FAIL!
- What's the capital of Banglador? - Where do you buy your steak?
etc
Or take the opposite approach and ask them questions that, if they researched or were taught the answers, would so thoroughly demoralize them that they would quit.
- What's the minimum wage per hour in the USA? - What do you do if your employer refuses to give you a lunch hour? - how many months do unemployment benefits last?
wire wrap is nice if weight is not a problem. In a launch, every gram matters, and wire wrap adds a lot of weight for several reasons. You have to have posts to wrap around, you have to use fat solid wire instead of thin traces, and the runs of wire are longer than the traces.
Size is also important. Wire wrap boxes are usually very large by comparison with a soldered PCB, especially where there are dense electronics. These rovers probably have several surface mount ICs on them, and you can't wire wrap that.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the longer the connecting traces/wires are, the more likely they are to be hit by EMI etc? So longer runs of wire, in addition to adding weight and bulk, could also invite unwanted and potentially damaging inducted power.
It appears they made all the right choices with the amount of information they had to go on and the design goals they had to meet. I can't think of any other possible way to explain the level of their success as discussed by numerous previous posts.
iirc, the rovers were scheduled for three months, and that's before ANY winters. The thing was designed to work for less than 1/2 yr, in the summer, but they engineered it with the "possibility" of surviving a winter or two. How may winters have they made it through so far? If it finally breaks, think of it like your car lasting you 40 years before you have to replace it. It owes you nothing, be happy for what you got, it's more than you deserved.
About 30% of the consumer electronics nowadays that have batteries in them are hard to replace. Heck, my cordless shaver is an example I can think of right offhand. How about my palm pilot? Or my iPod? Or my pocket flashlight? Or your weed whacker? Or your solar yard lights?
We replace iPod batteries at work. None of them happen to be soldered in, but still, these devices were not designed for battery replacement. If you were concerned about battery replacement, why didn't you ask about it? There are enough "disposable products" out there nowadays that you can't say its assumed the battery in everything is replaceable, so if you didn't ask, don't whine.
There will be replacement battery kits available at our shop as well as most other local computer shops by about November when batteries first start going out. You may not have the equipment (soldering iron) to replace them, but you probably also won't have the tools or the know-how to take it apart without damaging it, so either way you're probably taking it in for the replacement.
Some things are somewhere between "easy" and "difficult" to replace. How many people have you seen just throw away their UPS when the battery dies, rather than try to replace it? (I count > 20, and I have about 10 nice working UPSs in my house as a result) My truck has a replaceable battery, and it's attached using special equipment too. I COULD replace it myself if I had the tools, the knowledge, and the inclinataion. In that case, I do have the tools, do have the knowledge, but it's more of a hassel than I care to deal with so I take it into the shop for them to swap.
If you thought that the smooth outer appearance of the iPhone, with no seams or hatches, was either not battery powered or would never need the battery replaced, you need to spend some time with a ClueBat.
nothing new here? She has one of those 'self-winding' watches. ok maybe that's recovering mechanical energy from movement but this is recovering electrical energy from vibration, not a whole lot of difference really.
I was just thinking on this. I work on macbooks and get to see them apart all the time. Here are some areas where thickness can be improved. Keep in mind when you are at this level, "every little bit helps", so if you can shave off 1/2mm somewhere, it's significant because it adds up to mm's.
The bottom case of the macbook is about 2.5mm thick. The bottom case of the tibook was 0.5 mm thick. Clearly they can do better than 2mm. That case can be beaten with a hammer without breaking it, it's insanely strong polycarbonate. I would bet they cut it to 1mm. The side walls of the case are also that thick and could stand to be thinner to save weight. This would of course make it more prone to damage by dropping, but if you're dropping your laptop, you deserve what you get.
The top case, which houses the keyboard, is quite thick. About 3mm. Because the keys are already pretty shortfall I don't expect a lot of improvement here, but I bet they can shave 1mm off it if they change the design below the keys.
The display is very thick for what it can be. The tibook was another good example of how to make a thin display. I am still surprised I didn't see cracked tibook displays all the time. The "shell" of the display was merely a sheet of metal, it served more as a cover to protect the LCD panel than to actually provide substance and stiffness. Today's LCD panels are very hardy and can serve as their own physical structure. The tibook's entire lid was the size of most LCD panels of the time. So again there is room for improvement. The macbook's panel is not easy to take apart and there are "no serviceable parts" inside so I have not opened one yet, but I suspect both top and bottom of the display can be drastically reduced in thickness.
INSIDE the macbook it's going to be tougher. There are a lot of parts that come right up to the underside of the top case, and it's hard to make a lot of things shorter at once. The optical drive is not made by Apple and is really not up to them, but that will end up being one of the primary factors I'm sure. The hard drive has a little headspace inside. There is a lot of open space on the logic board, so they have room to "sprawl" the parts a bit and cut down on height.
It would not surprise me if Apple went to a smaller hard drive. Right now the existing 2.5" laptop drives are physically a lot larger than they need to be. The higher capacity ones are two platter. It would not be too hard for them to redesign the drives to use only one platter and make them a good 30% thinner. 2.5" drives are up to 200+gb now so you would expect at least 100gb drives of that size, which is enough for most people. Heck, the original MBPs came with a max HD size of 120gb because at that time 120 was the largest commonly available 2.5" HDD. Do not be terribly surprised if the next macbooks come with a solid state HD. That will make them smaller for certain. Lighter too. Apple is well known for hugging the bleeding edge on technology, and this is right up their alley. It's also possible that if memory technology advances fast enough, we might see macbooks that use full height CF cards as solid state HDs.
The optical drive will probably be the hardest to get thinner. Traditional slot load drives pull the disk in, and drop it down to lock it onto the hub ring. If they could reverse this process and raise the hub and optics to meet the disk, they could lose a few mm. I haven't seen anyone try this yet though.
That brings up another issue entirely. Optical disks. Time's up, we need something new. Sure we've made improvements in capacity, from CDs, to DVDs, to DLDVDs, to blueray and such, but the physical size of the disks cannot change and there's not much left to do with the drives. This is another area I expect to see improvement in, industry-wide, in the next few years. It would be much more reasonable to make, for example, SD cards the new standard. We could even start seeing SD ROM cards, that you buy a retail box the size of a pa
Giving them a 50% chance of guessing right seems lame, and the reward for beating 50% odds is only a single laptop, which is equally lame.
Give her 10 laptops and let ber BP one of them. If they guess wrong, she keeps all 10.
THAT'S fair.
I am also having to assume the software must be installed and run by a 3rd party, so we don't have any engineers "snooping" around the system for anomolies to direct their software to investigate. Not that a true 100% BP would mind that, but lets keep everyone honest.
the bottom line here is that recent innovation in marketing - the selective license. "So how much does it cost?" "That depends. How much money do you have?" If you really had a choice, would you do business with someone like that? Of course not.
The real truth here is that they want to charge you more money if you are virtualizing because they know you either have more coin if you are running a VM (most likely an intel mac) or that you are not going to be a long running customer. (most likely running linux emu)
imho this pricing model should be illegal. Products should not be sold based on how valuable it is TO YOU, but how valuable it is on its own merit. Product price should not be allowed to be based on how much money you have to spend, that does not affect the actual value of your product. It's no different than price-gouging based on scarcity in a region. The only thing that keeps this practice in check normally is law of supply and demand, but with software you have a legally supported monopoly so that doesn't help.
I was shocked when I was shopping for a new digital camera and found the best deal at Dell. This was for a Canon PowerShot S3 IS. Everyone and their dog was selling it for between $300 and $400. Then out of the woodwork comes Dell, $239.
I have no idea why it was so cheap from Dell but I am not going to complain. I have no intention of ever buying anything with the Dell brand name on it, but I have no problem buying non branded peripherals from them on the cheap. $60 off a normally bottom-dollar-$300 product is quite amazing.
Their printers are garbage though, they are the absolute bottom of the line HPs you see at places like best buy for $59, rebranded Dell.
these changes are being slipped into a bill that may be voted on Monday or Tuesday, June 18 or 19."
Can someone explain why it is that politicians are allowed to "slip" completely unrelated items into bills that must be voted on all-or-nothing? They do this all the time, tacking on things that only a small minority want, onto a bill that is important and that everyone is going to pass because the main item is needed by most/all.
One reason I could see is if they believed that congress moved too slow to be able to vote on everything unless things were bundled like this. That's a sad excuse still.
The other reason I could see is that there may be too many cases where it was impossible to get a majority vote on any single issue without puting something into the pot for several different interests to help the bill pass.
Anyway, what is this process by which they can just tack on other unrelated provisions? And who gets to say what gets added? Just pay off a senator and it's in basically?
We have seen three customers bring in keyboards that they have put in the dishwasher. All three were nonfunctional and had water inside them when disassembled.
There are three issues with washing electronics
1) rust and corrosion risk 2) creating damaging electrical paths when water is introduced while power is present (this can be in the form of a bios battery) 3) water that lingers after being washed
(1) we don't see so much with keyboards, but that's a very common issue when a laptop takes a drink. I believe this is mainly due to the customer not getting the bios and main batteries disconnected immediately, as corrosion is very rapid while power is present. There are key areas we examine in certain models of laptops where we suspect a liquid spill. Corrosion at those locations (certain chips and connectors) verifies liquid damage. Those machines typically don't even power on. The corrosion seen in many chips shorts their adjacent pins together, (looks a bit like green fuzz) and can either prevent the chip from operating or damage it outright when power is reapplied, even if all the water has been removed. Most of the laptops we get in that have experienced liquid spills have to be sent in for replacement of motherboard due to corrosion on chip pins.
(2) is releated to (1), either the result of lingering water or presense of corrosion when power is reapplied. Often causes permanent damage.
(3) is what gets the keyboards. Most modern keyboards are collapsing membrane variety, and rely on a semiconductive plastic disc to be pressed down on a pad of exposed contacts. When water hits these contacts, it acts just as though the key were down, and produces stuck keys. Some keyboards can be taken apart to dry them out. The membranes are fairly well enclosed though - they have to be open to allow air in and out so they can collapse, but they are close to sealed, so once water gets in, it rarely evaporates out without help. Keyboards have electronics and can be damaged by (2) as well, but it's not very common. I suspet this is because they don't have very sensitive electronics. Motherboards are also heavily at risk here because of the intricate components on the board. Small chips that have dozens of pins on them hug the board, and create capilary action that draws water in between the pins and holds it there, creating a short. Sometimes this damages the chip, and sometimes it just prevents it from working. Other components are even more resistant to drying out, such as choke coils, but in many of those cases the water does not damage or interfere with them. The big thing is wet pins on the chips. Hitting a board with a hair dryer for a good 20 minutes can be enough to clear out all the lingering water.
Also (I work in a school as desktop support) you are not just teaching the staff, you are also teaching the students. (or the staff is teaching the students, as is most often the case) The students are not entirely a blank slate, but close. Once you get the staff up to speed, the ball is rolling and it doesn't matter that it's linux or Macintosh or Windows, the students learn it in the same time. They don't have to "un-learn" windows.
Since the teachers don't use windows at school, they don't often buy windows at home. Students are learning on non-windows machines, and parents also think twice before buying a Dell or some other such crap. (and when they ask us for our opinion, they really do listen) So the community in general is shifting away from Windows, which is really nice to see.
The only problem we run into from time to time is someone bringing in a DOS flash drive from home with a DRM'd media file they want to put in their presentation because their family has a Dell. Converting WMV files to something that is easy to import (AVI usually) takes quite some time and does not always work properly. (no sound, etc) It's usually easier to scrape something off YouTube or Google Video than it is to get WMV to convert properly.
inkjets have long been known for fading. You can pay a lot of money for higher grade ink carts for most printers, that are good for supposedly 10 years.
A lot of the photography shops in my area push the issue really hard, how "digital prints can fade over time" of course recommending you bring your memory stick into them so they can print good photography prints instead. (gotta change with the times or die I suppose, chemical photography is going pro-only)
My argument against this is simple... I can pay you $10 to develop a roll of 36 that will last 10 years and then require me to pay you another $10 to reprint them ten years from now, OR I can inkjet them here for about $1 and reprint them again in 2 years if necessary. Assuming I simlply must keep the prints good forever, I can pay $5/10 yrs or $10/10 yrs, and in many cases I don't need hardcopies ever, I can view them on my computer forever for free. Also in many cases you don't need the whole roll reprinted, just one or two, which makes the inkjet a lot more convenient and much cheaper.
I think I'll stick with my inkjet and its cheap ink. Take it ino the camera store if you need a print of the kids blown up to 8x10 for grandma or something.
Somewhere here I have a good article of "men issues", and this is near the top.
toilet seat. we need it up, you need it down. You're a big girl now, learn to work the seat.
The common man's argument is that we sometimes need it up and sometimes need it down, so we have learned how to use the seat. (you rarely hear of a guy "falling in", and if he did, he certainly wouldn't try to find someone to blame for it, let alone even admit to having fallen in in the first place) Women OTOH who have lived in families or with roommates in an exclusively women household have lost this important life skill of operating the seat, since it is always down. (when visiting friends houses with exclusively women, it's a fun social experiment to slip into the bathroom and lift the lid and run out, and wait for someone to fall in, the screams and resulting argument are always fun to watch!)
A good example to draw is drive to a small town and park your car out front of your friend's house (in a spot where parking is permitted) and go in for a chat. BOOM someone just ran into your car. You run out to find someone rear-ended your parked car, and is upset at you for having left your car there, there isn't usually a car parked there and therefore it's all your fault. Same thing.
Just because you are not acustomed to something being different than you expect, does not negate your responsibility to identify reasonable (and sometimes even frequently occurring) change and adjust your behavior accordingly. Take responsibility for your actions, don't blame me.
well probably not but it had the same effect. I was shopping for an escape and gave ford my email address, made just for them. v1ford at myipdotcom. That is the only web site in the world that ever got my email, and no viruses on this mac thank you. Five dealers in my area contacted me and I did business with them. SIX MONTHS LATER I start getting spam, one per day, to v1ford. I wrote ford a nastygram but they cried innocient.
I later deduced that one of the five (or probably more) dealers that ford forwarded my address to got his PC 0wned and it harvested my address from them.
So they are not guily, but they are certainly not innocent. I wager they care very little or consider themselves totally innocent in such events. I, however, hold them responsible for letting my private data get stolen, regardless of the circumstances.
Fortunately I just remove that alias off my account on my server and the spam just goes away. I bet there are a lot of people out there that wish they could do the same thing. If it were up to me, I'd send a separate address to everyone I email, everyone. Addresses like "v1fromjoesmith@" etc. You never know when a friend's PC will get owned by a spammer's virus and get you on their list.
Even with this, I somehow get a sad letter from the wife of a deceased nigerian prince about once every other month. I have no idea where it's coming from but it's addressed to my primary email address, so it's probably the result of a friend's PC having been had. But I can tolerate one a month. (beats your 30/day!)
Much to my surprise, I have had to clear an alias only maybe 10 times, and none of them from reputable businesses. (most were forum email addresses, "we don't show your registration address to the public"... ya, but what about the hackers and the viruses?)
More computers are coming with backup bios now, (which can either manually, or automatically, switch to their backup if needed) but I rather doubt these keys have a backup bios.
One theory I have is that it's a bit like flashing your BIOS. Only in this case the flash goes bad and it bricks your key. (can't reflash bios once bios is hosed)
There is a very big difference between a trojan and a worm. A trojan is an attachment you receive, that you open, which causes your machine to become infected with the trojan, and it then emails all your friends, hoping they also open the attachment. These require the user to be suckered into opening the attachment, and their rate of spread is limited by how fast people read their email, and the user has an opportunity to make a decision that does not allow the malware to propogate.
A worm on the other hand, can travel between computers without human interaction, through email or direct upload and execution. This is where things like Code Red come from, that can propogate to something like 80% of the vulnerable machines in the world in 7 minutes. Imagine what would have happened if code red had a payload? (hint: there would be a LOT fewer windows users today!) Getting your HD wiped is an excellent incentive to try a more secure OS.
There will always be trojans, you cannot protect a user from that if you allow users to receive executables. Trojans that elevate privs are worse of course, but are not much different than a trojan that an admin clicks on. Macs have yet to see a worm, and I believe if they keep their security the way it is, we will never see one.
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my school? (ducks)
ok maybe not quit 1500 but we do have six class c subnets for a reason.
All unix requires the root account, it's not really that accurate to say disabled. More like "inaccessible", or to say that "logging in as root is disabled". The password hash starts set to a value to which nothing can hash to, and so there is no valid password to login as root. To "enable root" is simply to set a legal password for it so you can login as root. 99% of mac users will never enable root, and most of them don't even know it exists to enable.
To do root level things uses "su" (substitute user) - you can "su root" meaning do something with root's privs, so in that perspective root is always enabled, but only administrators can su, and that requires one to enter their administrator password, which a virus would have a tough time with.
So yes, it would have to take over an account that had aministrator rights, and use that to do whatever. For all practical intents, an administrator can be root anytime they want to, so there is no need to get root. Getting an admin would be enough.
The OS X Server (as opposed to the Client which many think is all that exists) has root enabled by default, with its password set to the same password as the first administrator you create. Not sure why they do this, it's not really necessary. They probably assume that almost every sysadmin will want root enabled and will be close to first on the order of business if it were not the default.
It doesn't work that way. They don't get out the pie charts to decide who to exploit. Sure, a bigger "audience" for their handiwork is surely a bonus, but the typical malcontent, the easier targets always attract 95% of the attacks. Writing viruses for windows seems not too far off from script kiddie class work. There will always be a few "in it for the challenge" to try to hack the gibson etc but they are statistically minor. I view it from the other perspective, that by its intrinsic security and difficulty to write viruses for, that it remains relatively untouched.
Why try to break into fort knox when you can knock over the farmers savings and loan down the street with a baseball bat? If there are 30 of those small banks scattered around town and only one fort knox, can you really say fort knox is not being attacked nearly as much (or as successfully) simply because there's fewer of it?
I doubt they are nearly as worried as they could be. From the looks of it, it can only spread locally on your subnet. Internet worms like code red, that can infect 70% of the vulnerable machines in the world in eight minutes, vs this whic may infect up to 254 machines on the typical network. Anyone that even attempts to put those two exploits in the same timezone needs a beating with a ClueBat.
my favorite "uh, no." in that article was
That's not very revealing. But if we list the contents of the Device folder using ls with the undocumented option af (for "all files"?), we get a far different picture:
[Kant:/Volumes/iDegger/iPod_Control/Device] monroe% ls -laf
"undocumented" l, a, and f flags? "uh, no." Though I must admit I was curious enough to pull out my pod and look to see what all was really in that folder, which of course was the expected "not much". the joy!ppef I could actually see Apple doing to throw you off the track of what the files really were, but then to do the actual hiding with rot-13? "uh, no." There's a reason two articles up there is a thread on the Zune's DRM being cracked, and not Apple's.
Anyone that got to the link to click before realizing this was a fraud needs more edjumacation.
If something is a problem for you but the people that could fix it don't care, then naturally no one is in a hurry to fix it. MAKE it an immediate problem and you will get a faster fix. There will be more collateral damage of course, but the unfortunate part is not the collateral damage, it's that we have to HAVE it to motivate the people to fix their crap. This whole concept of blaming, attacking, and trying to silence the whistleblowers has got to stop. It's not their fault. Are they making the problem worse? You bet they are. But the problem should not have existed in the first place, and the ones that are in a position to fix the problem are in no hurry and so these things just get hidden, ignored, and drug out. By making the problem a magnitude worse, they mostivate people to fix things because they can no longer tolerate the reproducssions of their apathy. (or rather, their customers can't tolerate it, and rocks roll downhill)
I'm all for this. The only ones that are really against this are the producers that are too cheap to invest sufficient funds in securing their product and do not want their cheapness to be exposed - they cry that their shortcoming is someone else's fault, merely because they pointed it out to the public. If I expose your failure, that doesn't make the results of your failure suddenly my fault.
Just ask questions that only people in India can answer. if they pick the correct answer, FAIL!
- What's the capital of Banglador?
- Where do you buy your steak?
etc
Or take the opposite approach and ask them questions that, if they researched or were taught the answers, would so thoroughly demoralize them that they would quit.
- What's the minimum wage per hour in the USA?
- What do you do if your employer refuses to give you a lunch hour?
- how many months do unemployment benefits last?
etc
wire wrap is nice if weight is not a problem. In a launch, every gram matters, and wire wrap adds a lot of weight for several reasons. You have to have posts to wrap around, you have to use fat solid wire instead of thin traces, and the runs of wire are longer than the traces.
Size is also important. Wire wrap boxes are usually very large by comparison with a soldered PCB, especially where there are dense electronics. These rovers probably have several surface mount ICs on them, and you can't wire wrap that.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the longer the connecting traces/wires are, the more likely they are to be hit by EMI etc? So longer runs of wire, in addition to adding weight and bulk, could also invite unwanted and potentially damaging inducted power.
It appears they made all the right choices with the amount of information they had to go on and the design goals they had to meet. I can't think of any other possible way to explain the level of their success as discussed by numerous previous posts.
iirc, the rovers were scheduled for three months, and that's before ANY winters. The thing was designed to work for less than 1/2 yr, in the summer, but they engineered it with the "possibility" of surviving a winter or two. How may winters have they made it through so far? If it finally breaks, think of it like your car lasting you 40 years before you have to replace it. It owes you nothing, be happy for what you got, it's more than you deserved.
About 30% of the consumer electronics nowadays that have batteries in them are hard to replace. Heck, my cordless shaver is an example I can think of right offhand. How about my palm pilot? Or my iPod? Or my pocket flashlight? Or your weed whacker? Or your solar yard lights?
We replace iPod batteries at work. None of them happen to be soldered in, but still, these devices were not designed for battery replacement. If you were concerned about battery replacement, why didn't you ask about it? There are enough "disposable products" out there nowadays that you can't say its assumed the battery in everything is replaceable, so if you didn't ask, don't whine.
There will be replacement battery kits available at our shop as well as most other local computer shops by about November when batteries first start going out. You may not have the equipment (soldering iron) to replace them, but you probably also won't have the tools or the know-how to take it apart without damaging it, so either way you're probably taking it in for the replacement.
Some things are somewhere between "easy" and "difficult" to replace. How many people have you seen just throw away their UPS when the battery dies, rather than try to replace it? (I count > 20, and I have about 10 nice working UPSs in my house as a result) My truck has a replaceable battery, and it's attached using special equipment too. I COULD replace it myself if I had the tools, the knowledge, and the inclinataion. In that case, I do have the tools, do have the knowledge, but it's more of a hassel than I care to deal with so I take it into the shop for them to swap.
If you thought that the smooth outer appearance of the iPhone, with no seams or hatches, was either not battery powered or would never need the battery replaced, you need to spend some time with a ClueBat.
nothing new here? She has one of those 'self-winding' watches. ok maybe that's recovering mechanical energy from movement but this is recovering electrical energy from vibration, not a whole lot of difference really.
I was just thinking on this. I work on macbooks and get to see them apart all the time. Here are some areas where thickness can be improved. Keep in mind when you are at this level, "every little bit helps", so if you can shave off 1/2mm somewhere, it's significant because it adds up to mm's.
The bottom case of the macbook is about 2.5mm thick. The bottom case of the tibook was 0.5 mm thick. Clearly they can do better than 2mm. That case can be beaten with a hammer without breaking it, it's insanely strong polycarbonate. I would bet they cut it to 1mm. The side walls of the case are also that thick and could stand to be thinner to save weight. This would of course make it more prone to damage by dropping, but if you're dropping your laptop, you deserve what you get.
The top case, which houses the keyboard, is quite thick. About 3mm. Because the keys are already pretty shortfall I don't expect a lot of improvement here, but I bet they can shave 1mm off it if they change the design below the keys.
The display is very thick for what it can be. The tibook was another good example of how to make a thin display. I am still surprised I didn't see cracked tibook displays all the time. The "shell" of the display was merely a sheet of metal, it served more as a cover to protect the LCD panel than to actually provide substance and stiffness. Today's LCD panels are very hardy and can serve as their own physical structure. The tibook's entire lid was the size of most LCD panels of the time. So again there is room for improvement. The macbook's panel is not easy to take apart and there are "no serviceable parts" inside so I have not opened one yet, but I suspect both top and bottom of the display can be drastically reduced in thickness.
INSIDE the macbook it's going to be tougher. There are a lot of parts that come right up to the underside of the top case, and it's hard to make a lot of things shorter at once. The optical drive is not made by Apple and is really not up to them, but that will end up being one of the primary factors I'm sure. The hard drive has a little headspace inside. There is a lot of open space on the logic board, so they have room to "sprawl" the parts a bit and cut down on height.
It would not surprise me if Apple went to a smaller hard drive. Right now the existing 2.5" laptop drives are physically a lot larger than they need to be. The higher capacity ones are two platter. It would not be too hard for them to redesign the drives to use only one platter and make them a good 30% thinner. 2.5" drives are up to 200+gb now so you would expect at least 100gb drives of that size, which is enough for most people. Heck, the original MBPs came with a max HD size of 120gb because at that time 120 was the largest commonly available 2.5" HDD. Do not be terribly surprised if the next macbooks come with a solid state HD. That will make them smaller for certain. Lighter too. Apple is well known for hugging the bleeding edge on technology, and this is right up their alley. It's also possible that if memory technology advances fast enough, we might see macbooks that use full height CF cards as solid state HDs.
The optical drive will probably be the hardest to get thinner. Traditional slot load drives pull the disk in, and drop it down to lock it onto the hub ring. If they could reverse this process and raise the hub and optics to meet the disk, they could lose a few mm. I haven't seen anyone try this yet though.
That brings up another issue entirely. Optical disks. Time's up, we need something new. Sure we've made improvements in capacity, from CDs, to DVDs, to DLDVDs, to blueray and such, but the physical size of the disks cannot change and there's not much left to do with the drives. This is another area I expect to see improvement in, industry-wide, in the next few years. It would be much more reasonable to make, for example, SD cards the new standard. We could even start seeing SD ROM cards, that you buy a retail box the size of a pa
Giving them a 50% chance of guessing right seems lame, and the reward for beating 50% odds is only a single laptop, which is equally lame.
Give her 10 laptops and let ber BP one of them. If they guess wrong, she keeps all 10.
THAT'S fair.
I am also having to assume the software must be installed and run by a 3rd party, so we don't have any engineers "snooping" around the system for anomolies to direct their software to investigate. Not that a true 100% BP would mind that, but lets keep everyone honest.
the bottom line here is that recent innovation in marketing - the selective license. "So how much does it cost?" "That depends. How much money do you have?" If you really had a choice, would you do business with someone like that? Of course not.
The real truth here is that they want to charge you more money if you are virtualizing because they know you either have more coin if you are running a VM (most likely an intel mac) or that you are not going to be a long running customer. (most likely running linux emu)
imho this pricing model should be illegal. Products should not be sold based on how valuable it is TO YOU, but how valuable it is on its own merit. Product price should not be allowed to be based on how much money you have to spend, that does not affect the actual value of your product. It's no different than price-gouging based on scarcity in a region. The only thing that keeps this practice in check normally is law of supply and demand, but with software you have a legally supported monopoly so that doesn't help.
I was shocked when I was shopping for a new digital camera and found the best deal at Dell. This was for a Canon PowerShot S3 IS. Everyone and their dog was selling it for between $300 and $400. Then out of the woodwork comes Dell, $239.
I have no idea why it was so cheap from Dell but I am not going to complain. I have no intention of ever buying anything with the Dell brand name on it, but I have no problem buying non branded peripherals from them on the cheap. $60 off a normally bottom-dollar-$300 product is quite amazing.
Their printers are garbage though, they are the absolute bottom of the line HPs you see at places like best buy for $59, rebranded Dell.
these changes are being slipped into a bill that may be voted on Monday or Tuesday, June 18 or 19."
Can someone explain why it is that politicians are allowed to "slip" completely unrelated items into bills that must be voted on all-or-nothing? They do this all the time, tacking on things that only a small minority want, onto a bill that is important and that everyone is going to pass because the main item is needed by most/all.
One reason I could see is if they believed that congress moved too slow to be able to vote on everything unless things were bundled like this. That's a sad excuse still.
The other reason I could see is that there may be too many cases where it was impossible to get a majority vote on any single issue without puting something into the pot for several different interests to help the bill pass.
Anyway, what is this process by which they can just tack on other unrelated provisions? And who gets to say what gets added? Just pay off a senator and it's in basically?
We have seen three customers bring in keyboards that they have put in the dishwasher. All three were nonfunctional and had water inside them when disassembled.
There are three issues with washing electronics
1) rust and corrosion risk
2) creating damaging electrical paths when water is introduced while power is present (this can be in the form of a bios battery)
3) water that lingers after being washed
(1) we don't see so much with keyboards, but that's a very common issue when a laptop takes a drink. I believe this is mainly due to the customer not getting the bios and main batteries disconnected immediately, as corrosion is very rapid while power is present. There are key areas we examine in certain models of laptops where we suspect a liquid spill. Corrosion at those locations (certain chips and connectors) verifies liquid damage. Those machines typically don't even power on. The corrosion seen in many chips shorts their adjacent pins together, (looks a bit like green fuzz) and can either prevent the chip from operating or damage it outright when power is reapplied, even if all the water has been removed. Most of the laptops we get in that have experienced liquid spills have to be sent in for replacement of motherboard due to corrosion on chip pins.
(2) is releated to (1), either the result of lingering water or presense of corrosion when power is reapplied. Often causes permanent damage.
(3) is what gets the keyboards. Most modern keyboards are collapsing membrane variety, and rely on a semiconductive plastic disc to be pressed down on a pad of exposed contacts. When water hits these contacts, it acts just as though the key were down, and produces stuck keys. Some keyboards can be taken apart to dry them out. The membranes are fairly well enclosed though - they have to be open to allow air in and out so they can collapse, but they are close to sealed, so once water gets in, it rarely evaporates out without help. Keyboards have electronics and can be damaged by (2) as well, but it's not very common. I suspet this is because they don't have very sensitive electronics. Motherboards are also heavily at risk here because of the intricate components on the board. Small chips that have dozens of pins on them hug the board, and create capilary action that draws water in between the pins and holds it there, creating a short. Sometimes this damages the chip, and sometimes it just prevents it from working. Other components are even more resistant to drying out, such as choke coils, but in many of those cases the water does not damage or interfere with them. The big thing is wet pins on the chips. Hitting a board with a hair dryer for a good 20 minutes can be enough to clear out all the lingering water.
Also (I work in a school as desktop support) you are not just teaching the staff, you are also teaching the students. (or the staff is teaching the students, as is most often the case) The students are not entirely a blank slate, but close. Once you get the staff up to speed, the ball is rolling and it doesn't matter that it's linux or Macintosh or Windows, the students learn it in the same time. They don't have to "un-learn" windows.
Since the teachers don't use windows at school, they don't often buy windows at home. Students are learning on non-windows machines, and parents also think twice before buying a Dell or some other such crap. (and when they ask us for our opinion, they really do listen) So the community in general is shifting away from Windows, which is really nice to see.
The only problem we run into from time to time is someone bringing in a DOS flash drive from home with a DRM'd media file they want to put in their presentation because their family has a Dell. Converting WMV files to something that is easy to import (AVI usually) takes quite some time and does not always work properly. (no sound, etc) It's usually easier to scrape something off YouTube or Google Video than it is to get WMV to convert properly.
inkjets have long been known for fading. You can pay a lot of money for higher grade ink carts for most printers, that are good for supposedly 10 years.
A lot of the photography shops in my area push the issue really hard, how "digital prints can fade over time" of course recommending you bring your memory stick into them so they can print good photography prints instead. (gotta change with the times or die I suppose, chemical photography is going pro-only)
My argument against this is simple... I can pay you $10 to develop a roll of 36 that will last 10 years and then require me to pay you another $10 to reprint them ten years from now, OR I can inkjet them here for about $1 and reprint them again in 2 years if necessary. Assuming I simlply must keep the prints good forever, I can pay $5/10 yrs or $10/10 yrs, and in many cases I don't need hardcopies ever, I can view them on my computer forever for free. Also in many cases you don't need the whole roll reprinted, just one or two, which makes the inkjet a lot more convenient and much cheaper.
I think I'll stick with my inkjet and its cheap ink. Take it ino the camera store if you need a print of the kids blown up to 8x10 for grandma or something.
Somewhere here I have a good article of "men issues", and this is near the top.
toilet seat. we need it up, you need it down. You're a big girl now, learn to work the seat.
The common man's argument is that we sometimes need it up and sometimes need it down, so we have learned how to use the seat. (you rarely hear of a guy "falling in", and if he did, he certainly wouldn't try to find someone to blame for it, let alone even admit to having fallen in in the first place) Women OTOH who have lived in families or with roommates in an exclusively women household have lost this important life skill of operating the seat, since it is always down. (when visiting friends houses with exclusively women, it's a fun social experiment to slip into the bathroom and lift the lid and run out, and wait for someone to fall in, the screams and resulting argument are always fun to watch!)
A good example to draw is drive to a small town and park your car out front of your friend's house (in a spot where parking is permitted) and go in for a chat. BOOM someone just ran into your car. You run out to find someone rear-ended your parked car, and is upset at you for having left your car there, there isn't usually a car parked there and therefore it's all your fault. Same thing.
Just because you are not acustomed to something being different than you expect, does not negate your responsibility to identify reasonable (and sometimes even frequently occurring) change and adjust your behavior accordingly. Take responsibility for your actions, don't blame me.
ok, that's 1 down. 12,832 to go.
well probably not but it had the same effect. I was shopping for an escape and gave ford my email address, made just for them. v1ford at myipdotcom. That is the only web site in the world that ever got my email, and no viruses on this mac thank you. Five dealers in my area contacted me and I did business with them. SIX MONTHS LATER I start getting spam, one per day, to v1ford. I wrote ford a nastygram but they cried innocient.
I later deduced that one of the five (or probably more) dealers that ford forwarded my address to got his PC 0wned and it harvested my address from them.
So they are not guily, but they are certainly not innocent. I wager they care very little or consider themselves totally innocent in such events. I, however, hold them responsible for letting my private data get stolen, regardless of the circumstances.
Fortunately I just remove that alias off my account on my server and the spam just goes away. I bet there are a lot of people out there that wish they could do the same thing. If it were up to me, I'd send a separate address to everyone I email, everyone. Addresses like "v1fromjoesmith@" etc. You never know when a friend's PC will get owned by a spammer's virus and get you on their list.
Even with this, I somehow get a sad letter from the wife of a deceased nigerian prince about once every other month. I have no idea where it's coming from but it's addressed to my primary email address, so it's probably the result of a friend's PC having been had. But I can tolerate one a month. (beats your 30/day!)
Much to my surprise, I have had to clear an alias only maybe 10 times, and none of them from reputable businesses. (most were forum email addresses, "we don't show your registration address to the public"... ya, but what about the hackers and the viruses?)
More computers are coming with backup bios now, (which can either manually, or automatically, switch to their backup if needed) but I rather doubt these keys have a backup bios.
One theory I have is that it's a bit like flashing your BIOS. Only in this case the flash goes bad and it bricks your key. (can't reflash bios once bios is hosed)
More properly stated I think you will agree, it can only be reprogrammed once
There is a very big difference between a trojan and a worm. A trojan is an attachment you receive, that you open, which causes your machine to become infected with the trojan, and it then emails all your friends, hoping they also open the attachment. These require the user to be suckered into opening the attachment, and their rate of spread is limited by how fast people read their email, and the user has an opportunity to make a decision that does not allow the malware to propogate.
A worm on the other hand, can travel between computers without human interaction, through email or direct upload and execution. This is where things like Code Red come from, that can propogate to something like 80% of the vulnerable machines in the world in 7 minutes. Imagine what would have happened if code red had a payload? (hint: there would be a LOT fewer windows users today!) Getting your HD wiped is an excellent incentive to try a more secure OS.
There will always be trojans, you cannot protect a user from that if you allow users to receive executables. Trojans that elevate privs are worse of course, but are not much different than a trojan that an admin clicks on. Macs have yet to see a worm, and I believe if they keep their security the way it is, we will never see one.