About a quarter of the PCs we see in for service have been "afflicted" with SP2. Laptops in particular, having all sorts of problems including loss of sound. I believe it was Toshiba that issued a statement saying that SP2 was -not- supported on their laptops and should not be installed. Those frequently lose their sound if you SP2 them.
But then I suppose you're screwed either way... mess up your own system with SP2, or let someone else mess it up without SP2?
WMV3 codec is M$ proprietary, and is ONLY found in the Windows Media Player FOR WINDOWS. Not even the Macintosh release of WMP has this codec. You can also forget VLC, Mplayer, QuickTime, and any other player for that matter. WMP for Windows ONLY.
It never ceases to amaze me how many ppl post videos encoded with this codec, because there are so many ppl out there that have absolutely NO way to view it.
Re:Just give them TV a Fridge and Chips
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
but the ping time sucks by the time you get near mars...
After some initial hicups with the system in Mac OS 10.2, the new 10.3 seems to have a usable software RAID solution. It supports just about any method of connecting the drive to the computer (short of network) and supports most any kind of storage device. It doesn't support RAID5 yet though, just stripe and mirror. I've got four mirrored volumes up on my server, and have had few problems with them. Rebuilding must be done with the volume offline. It's not a perfect solution yet, but it's a nice free alternative for your OS X systems.
I've also tried CharismacRAID, and omg... STAY AWAY from this. After the array crashed for the third time for no apparent reason, I was experimenting with the software to test its reliability when it proceeded to try to LOW LEVEL REFORMAT my BOOT DRIVE. (yes, while I was booted up on it!) It actually managed to zero the partition table and boot blocks before asking the OS to lay down a new partition, at which point the OS thankfully gave it the bird. Kudos to Disk Warrior for being able to salvage the volume, and good riddance to CharismacRAID. (aka "AnubisRAID" fyi)
There are some elements to the equation you're missing. One major element is that a majority of immigrants from mexico send money back home. Some of them send a LOT of it back home, with the intent of buying a house (easy to do on a US paycheck for a house in mexico) and then simply move back to mexico. Many of the others are sending money south just to support an extended family back home. These are US dollars that are being spent in mexico, not in the US. This flow of money from the US to mexico results in a net loss to the US economy and net growth of the mexican economy.
There is loss in an optical chip as described here. When gates are set to "opaque" mode, light that hits them is either absorbed or reflected, and if reflected, eventually absorbed somewhere else. Light that passes all the gates is eventually absorbe by a detector or by the switch portion of another optical gate. (remember that ALL energy put into a processor eventually is turned into heat, it doesn't just disappear)
All of the absorption translates the energy of the light to energy of heat. Don't fool yourself, optical chips will get just as hot as (if not hotter than) the electronic chips of today.
Most spyware tricks the user into installing it, burying a one or two line "gotcha" in the middle of a twenty page EULA. Some of the "yes" click are actually people clicking on what looks like a "Cancel" or "no" button that's actually just part of a graphic for a java installer link.
In a few extreme cases, simply visiting a web page with a vulnerable web browser can cause your system to get tanked up with spyware. I watched an interesting example of this occur on my MACINTOSH, where even Safari was tricked into downloading an exe to my desktop, simply by visiting the web site. I have no doubt that had I been running on Windows, that exe would have ran itself after it downloaded. Underhanded techniques like this are the real threat.
I checked reel.com and didn't see it - they usually have the latest B5 things - what's the title of your box set? I've got seasons 1-5 but haven't seen any movies anywhere...
With B5 being complete, the entire 5 season series is availalbe in 5 box set DVDs. ($65 ea if you look around, much cheaper than Farscape's DVDs) I'm waiting for some of the B5 movies to hit the stores. (not sure how many of them there were?)
I bought a Targus case with my previous powerbook, one of the black 14" ones. At the time it was the only laptop bag that the 14" monster would fit in. It wore heavily on its nickel-plated brass attachments to the carrying strap, the outside leather wore heavily and scratched easily, and the bag was overall very thick. Other than that, it protected the laptop well and had lots of room for "stuff".
When I upgraded to a 15" powerbook, the targus was clearly not going to fit it, so I got a Brenthaven. This was again a no-brainer, being the only laptop bag made at the time that would fit a tibook. I've had it over a year now and I have to say it's wearing a lot better than the Targus. The strap clasps still look like new, and so does the rest of the outside of the case. The outer panels are made of some heavy woven nylon that you'd have trouble marring with a box cutter. The bag is significantly wider than the targus and several inches thinner, making it more comfortable to carry. Both bags are minimal on their outer logos, although I think the Brenthaven, without its leather paneling, doesn't "look as expensive" from the thief perspective.
Both bags cost about the same iirc, about $150 as purchased from the Apple store. (meaning the same could probably be had for $120 elsewhere...)
Oh, like THAT will take the virus/worm writers all of 3 minutes to work around...
They'll just make the same mistakes in the hardware/firmware as they do over and over again in the software. Nothing will change, other than the less technically savvy losing more of their computer to the manufacturers and developers.
Macs have always had good support for users with visual and physical disabilities. In OS X, go to System Preferences - Universal Access. The visual enhancements availabe there can switch the display to black-and-white, greyscale, enhance contrast, and can magnify the display greatly for people with low vision. Zoom can be set from 2x to 20x. On my powerbook, 20x zoom makes the mouse pointer almost 3" long, which should be plenty enough for anyone that's not completely blind.
These enhancements are part of the base OS, there is no additional software to buy.
I wonder if it's the display that's lagging, or the video drivers? The last time I recall seeing an LCD display "lag" was back before the days of TFT screens, where your mouse would "submarine". (disappear while it was on the move)
I got a JetFlash 512mb as a gift last year and used it to death, but ran out of space storing service apps and soforth on it. It was also physically large, which was a minus. I recently replaced it with a SanDisk Cruzer mini 1gb, and love it. It's very small and fits into USB ports even when they're stuffed up in a "port cave" on the back of a computer. The JetFlash was so wide and thick that it often was blocked by the other device plugged into the adjacent (to the side OR top) usb port.
There is one disadvantage to today's larger capacity drives - they're ("high speed") USB 2.0. Now this SOUNDS like an advantage, but unfortunately this also means they "register" on the USB bus as requiring power, and as such they cannot be plugged into unpowered hubs such as those on keyboards. (macs mainly) You have to plug them into a powered hub or directly into the computer. The speed increase you get is not necessarily worth it, as flash memory is still quite slow and you only realize maybe a 2x speed increase at the added inconvenience of having to climb under the desk to plug it in.
Since the gov't seems bound and determined to make any form of hardware hacks illegal, they may as well have a monthly column on the state of affairs on the DMCA and all that other crap they're trying to pass.
Reminds me of that movie where ppl buy 'consumer goods', then take them home and put them down a chute. You can buy it, they want you to buy it, but you can't DO anything with it.
Laptops are designed with energy efficiency in mind. In my tests I found that (at least for macintoshes) laptops draw under 40 watts even when running at full tilt, and sip less than 20 watts when relatively idle. You also get a built-in UPS, so you save money and electricity there too. Laptops also don't require a CRT display, saving you another 50 watts or so, plus considerable space savings. If you need additional storage, make sure you get a model with a firewire port on it, or just get one with an 80gb HD if that's enough for you to sprawl on.
Hashing also works well for generating pseud-random streams for xoring against data to encrypt it. It amounts to giving you the ability to generate a one-time-pad without having to store a huge pad. In its most basic form, you simply feed the hash incremental numbers.. "1", "2", "3".... and it kicks out say, 8 or 16 byte pseudorandoms for your pad. Of course in reality you'd tack on a password and feed it with "grapeape1", "grapeape2", "grapeape3"... instead, and that would make for a reasonably secure encryption.
More back to the original thread though, it appears Lexar got the encryption step reasonably correct, but they picked a poor way to store the password. This may have been blatant stupidity, but I tend to think someone using AES would know better than to store a password in a recoverable form. The only reason you do that is because you WANT to be able to recover the password. The tinfoil hats will say this method is handed to the govt so they can suck data off your flash drive if they want to, and I can't say I entirely disagree with this factor, though it's more likely that the company itself wanted to be able to recover data if say it came up in a court case and they were asked to produce the data.
A more secure way to go is to randomly generate two salts. Store the salts in plain form (as that doesn't compromise security) and use one salt on the password to encrypt the flash data, and use the other salt on the password to encrypt the password. Then when the user enters the password, you salt it and use it to encrypt the entered password, and then compare it against the stored encrypted password, which if the correct password was entered, will match. This provides you with the ability to confirm the password entered was correct without being able to _recover_ the password. This check is only necessary because we need to avoid confusing the OS etc by trying to read a directory on the flash drive that's been incorrectly decrypted and is essentially pumping out garbage, and instead give the user a "password incorrect" message.
Of course the method used to encrypt the password into its "check value" needs to be strong, and preferably a long thing to calculate, since it will be the primary point of attacks, brute-force and otherwise. Something like that makes sense to hash more than once. I liked one method I saw, where they hashed it for 0.5 seconds. That way, as technology advanced the algorythm kept up by hashing more and more, taking more processor power, and nullifying the new faster processors.
The mod pts thing is easy, though I don't know why. I usually get them in waves... 5 on Monday, spent by Wednesday, 5 more on Thursday, repeat the pattern for about 2 wks straight, then quiet for 1-3 weeks and it starts all over again.
I dunno how I does it, I just does it. Maybe it's my post frequency, maybe my karma. *shrug*
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About a quarter of the PCs we see in for service have been "afflicted" with SP2. Laptops in particular, having all sorts of problems including loss of sound. I believe it was Toshiba that issued a statement saying that SP2 was -not- supported on their laptops and should not be installed. Those frequently lose their sound if you SP2 them.
But then I suppose you're screwed either way... mess up your own system with SP2, or let someone else mess it up without SP2?
Spare CPU cycles on Windows boxes... I thought that's what viruses were for?
I wonder if the packbot comes with a standard Quake interface?
(gives new meaning to "first person shooter")
true, but isn't that usually just a few brief moments before the Evil Villian falls to the hero? ("famous last words" for Evil Villians)
Anyone else notice on the "Jens of Sweden MP-400", that besides being nicely compact, it's got an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) display?
0 .j pg
http://www.mp3newswire.net/Graphics/Jens%20MP40
WMV3 codec is M$ proprietary, and is ONLY found in the Windows Media Player FOR WINDOWS. Not even the Macintosh release of WMP has this codec. You can also forget VLC, Mplayer, QuickTime, and any other player for that matter. WMP for Windows ONLY.
It never ceases to amaze me how many ppl post videos encoded with this codec, because there are so many ppl out there that have absolutely NO way to view it.
but the ping time sucks by the time you get near mars...
After some initial hicups with the system in Mac OS 10.2, the new 10.3 seems to have a usable software RAID solution. It supports just about any method of connecting the drive to the computer (short of network) and supports most any kind of storage device. It doesn't support RAID5 yet though, just stripe and mirror. I've got four mirrored volumes up on my server, and have had few problems with them. Rebuilding must be done with the volume offline. It's not a perfect solution yet, but it's a nice free alternative for your OS X systems.
I've also tried CharismacRAID, and omg... STAY AWAY from this. After the array crashed for the third time for no apparent reason, I was experimenting with the software to test its reliability when it proceeded to try to LOW LEVEL REFORMAT my BOOT DRIVE. (yes, while I was booted up on it!) It actually managed to zero the partition table and boot blocks before asking the OS to lay down a new partition, at which point the OS thankfully gave it the bird. Kudos to Disk Warrior for being able to salvage the volume, and good riddance to CharismacRAID. (aka "AnubisRAID" fyi)
Doesn't appear so here.
I just tested their spoof http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/29/new_
So it would appear that the mac is (at least for the two main browsers of choice) not affected by this security hole.
There are some elements to the equation you're missing. One major element is that a majority of immigrants from mexico send money back home. Some of them send a LOT of it back home, with the intent of buying a house (easy to do on a US paycheck for a house in mexico) and then simply move back to mexico. Many of the others are sending money south just to support an extended family back home. These are US dollars that are being spent in mexico, not in the US. This flow of money from the US to mexico results in a net loss to the US economy and net growth of the mexican economy.
There is loss in an optical chip as described here. When gates are set to "opaque" mode, light that hits them is either absorbed or reflected, and if reflected, eventually absorbed somewhere else. Light that passes all the gates is eventually absorbe by a detector or by the switch portion of another optical gate. (remember that ALL energy put into a processor eventually is turned into heat, it doesn't just disappear)
All of the absorption translates the energy of the light to energy of heat. Don't fool yourself, optical chips will get just as hot as (if not hotter than) the electronic chips of today.
... if it's legal or not? They'll still get mugged by the lawyers. Legality has little to do with issues like this anymore.
Most spyware tricks the user into installing it, burying a one or two line "gotcha" in the middle of a twenty page EULA. Some of the "yes" click are actually people clicking on what looks like a "Cancel" or "no" button that's actually just part of a graphic for a java installer link.
In a few extreme cases, simply visiting a web page with a vulnerable web browser can cause your system to get tanked up with spyware. I watched an interesting example of this occur on my MACINTOSH, where even Safari was tricked into downloading an exe to my desktop, simply by visiting the web site. I have no doubt that had I been running on Windows, that exe would have ran itself after it downloaded. Underhanded techniques like this are the real threat.
I checked reel.com and didn't see it - they usually have the latest B5 things - what's the title of your box set? I've got seasons 1-5 but haven't seen any movies anywhere...
With B5 being complete, the entire 5 season series is availalbe in 5 box set DVDs. ($65 ea if you look around, much cheaper than Farscape's DVDs) I'm waiting for some of the B5 movies to hit the stores. (not sure how many of them there were?)
> they must protect their intellectual property or risk being
> 'sacked by open source-touting bandits
By "protect" we are to assume they mean "pay protection money to us, the SCO" ?
I bought a Targus case with my previous powerbook, one of the black 14" ones. At the time it was the only laptop bag that the 14" monster would fit in. It wore heavily on its nickel-plated brass attachments to the carrying strap, the outside leather wore heavily and scratched easily, and the bag was overall very thick. Other than that, it protected the laptop well and had lots of room for "stuff".
When I upgraded to a 15" powerbook, the targus was clearly not going to fit it, so I got a Brenthaven. This was again a no-brainer, being the only laptop bag made at the time that would fit a tibook. I've had it over a year now and I have to say it's wearing a lot better than the Targus. The strap clasps still look like new, and so does the rest of the outside of the case. The outer panels are made of some heavy woven nylon that you'd have trouble marring with a box cutter. The bag is significantly wider than the targus and several inches thinner, making it more comfortable to carry. Both bags are minimal on their outer logos, although I think the Brenthaven, without its leather paneling, doesn't "look as expensive" from the thief perspective.
Both bags cost about the same iirc, about $150 as purchased from the Apple store. (meaning the same could probably be had for $120 elsewhere...)
Oh, like THAT will take the virus/worm writers all of 3 minutes to work around...
They'll just make the same mistakes in the hardware/firmware as they do over and over again in the software. Nothing will change, other than the less technically savvy losing more of their computer to the manufacturers and developers.
Macs have always had good support for users with visual and physical disabilities. In OS X, go to System Preferences - Universal Access. The visual enhancements availabe there can switch the display to black-and-white, greyscale, enhance contrast, and can magnify the display greatly for people with low vision. Zoom can be set from 2x to 20x. On my powerbook, 20x zoom makes the mouse pointer almost 3" long, which should be plenty enough for anyone that's not completely blind.
These enhancements are part of the base OS, there is no additional software to buy.
I wonder if it's the display that's lagging, or the video drivers? The last time I recall seeing an LCD display "lag" was back before the days of TFT screens, where your mouse would "submarine". (disappear while it was on the move)
I got a JetFlash 512mb as a gift last year and used it to death, but ran out of space storing service apps and soforth on it. It was also physically large, which was a minus. I recently replaced it with a SanDisk Cruzer mini 1gb, and love it. It's very small and fits into USB ports even when they're stuffed up in a "port cave" on the back of a computer. The JetFlash was so wide and thick that it often was blocked by the other device plugged into the adjacent (to the side OR top) usb port.
There is one disadvantage to today's larger capacity drives - they're ("high speed") USB 2.0. Now this SOUNDS like an advantage, but unfortunately this also means they "register" on the USB bus as requiring power, and as such they cannot be plugged into unpowered hubs such as those on keyboards. (macs mainly) You have to plug them into a powered hub or directly into the computer. The speed increase you get is not necessarily worth it, as flash memory is still quite slow and you only realize maybe a 2x speed increase at the added inconvenience of having to climb under the desk to plug it in.
Since the gov't seems bound and determined to make any form of hardware hacks illegal, they may as well have a monthly column on the state of affairs on the DMCA and all that other crap they're trying to pass.
Reminds me of that movie where ppl buy 'consumer goods', then take them home and put them down a chute. You can buy it, they want you to buy it, but you can't DO anything with it.
Idiots.
Laptops are designed with energy efficiency in mind. In my tests I found that (at least for macintoshes) laptops draw under 40 watts even when running at full tilt, and sip less than 20 watts when relatively idle. You also get a built-in UPS, so you save money and electricity there too. Laptops also don't require a CRT display, saving you another 50 watts or so, plus considerable space savings. If you need additional storage, make sure you get a model with a firewire port on it, or just get one with an 80gb HD if that's enough for you to sprawl on.
Hashing also works well for generating pseud-random streams for xoring against data to encrypt it. It amounts to giving you the ability to generate a one-time-pad without having to store a huge pad. In its most basic form, you simply feed the hash incremental numbers.. "1", "2", "3".... and it kicks out say, 8 or 16 byte pseudorandoms for your pad. Of course in reality you'd tack on a password and feed it with "grapeape1", "grapeape2", "grapeape3"... instead, and that would make for a reasonably secure encryption.
More back to the original thread though, it appears Lexar got the encryption step reasonably correct, but they picked a poor way to store the password. This may have been blatant stupidity, but I tend to think someone using AES would know better than to store a password in a recoverable form. The only reason you do that is because you WANT to be able to recover the password. The tinfoil hats will say this method is handed to the govt so they can suck data off your flash drive if they want to, and I can't say I entirely disagree with this factor, though it's more likely that the company itself wanted to be able to recover data if say it came up in a court case and they were asked to produce the data.
A more secure way to go is to randomly generate two salts. Store the salts in plain form (as that doesn't compromise security) and use one salt on the password to encrypt the flash data, and use the other salt on the password to encrypt the password. Then when the user enters the password, you salt it and use it to encrypt the entered password, and then compare it against the stored encrypted password, which if the correct password was entered, will match. This provides you with the ability to confirm the password entered was correct without being able to _recover_ the password. This check is only necessary because we need to avoid confusing the OS etc by trying to read a directory on the flash drive that's been incorrectly decrypted and is essentially pumping out garbage, and instead give the user a "password incorrect" message.
Of course the method used to encrypt the password into its "check value" needs to be strong, and preferably a long thing to calculate, since it will be the primary point of attacks, brute-force and otherwise. Something like that makes sense to hash more than once. I liked one method I saw, where they hashed it for 0.5 seconds. That way, as technology advanced the algorythm kept up by hashing more and more, taking more processor power, and nullifying the new faster processors.
The mod pts thing is easy, though I don't know why. I usually get them in waves... 5 on Monday, spent by Wednesday, 5 more on Thursday, repeat the pattern for about 2 wks straight, then quiet for 1-3 weeks and it starts all over again.
I dunno how I does it, I just does it. Maybe it's my post frequency, maybe my karma. *shrug*