For an even slightly more robust machine, use Windows 7 Ultimate with BitLocker and a strong password for your logon.
I seem to remember speculation/rumor/unsubstantiated claims awhile back regarding bitlocker having a second way to unlock the data but only the public key was seen, no one knew specifically who had the private key. (govt/ms?) Was this ever either put to rest or proven?
This also allows Apple to prune it's App Store and get rid of all the crap and make discoverability easier.
I already have problems finding applications because when I look for say, a grocery list app, there's not 1 or 2 or 20. there's like 100, and it's hard to find a big difference between them. Of the say 100, 40-60 of them are either free or free demo, and so I download a dozen or so among them and try them out. If I don't find one I like, I have to go back to the store and find another dozen to try out. If I'm lucky I find something I like. What I really might have liked I may never have even gotten a look at.
It would be nice if there were better quality control than there is now. It'd be like trying to decide which cable company you want to sign up for, and there's 30 of them in town. Sometimes too much choice is a bad thing - it's good to have someone you can reasonably trust to filter through the huge pile and just present you with the top-ten-list. But I don't think "there are already too many of these on the store" is a major actual reason for rejection right now. "Competes (if even only slightly) with one of Apple's bundled apps" and "can change behavior once installed" seem to account for around 90% of rejections as of late. The former being greed and the latter being protective.
Wouldn't it have been tonnes easier to just drop a dll in and have VB call that?
Nope, in fact that was sort of the core issue. Actually I fibbed a little, it wasn't VB, it was RB, but I figured you all could relate better to it. This code needed to be mac/windows/linux cross platform, and RB's compiler can target all three. Start relying on DLLs and plugins and you restrict what platforms you can target. We actually had a crypto plugin already that did windows and mac, but not linux. The original plan was to ifdev it so that only the linux build used the RB implementation, but in the end we started gunning for ALL the plugins because they were known to break from time to time and we preferred having total control over things and not relying on black-box solutions.
After following that idea, we eliminated two of the other plugins we were also relying on. We did finally have to accept that one was just not going to be removable though, due to language limitations.
well in this case all we actually ended up needing was the SHA1 and MD5 hashing, but he wanted to be complete about things so we did the full RFC. Still we had to hash 1mb blocks so speed was important. 4 seconds was dropped to a very small fraction of a second. But you really got to see the improvements when trying to do actual encryption.
But when coding crypto, the tool isn't the first place you should look for security - pay more attention to the meatbag.
"Managed code is like antilock brakes. You used to have to be a good driver on ice or you would die. Now you don't have to pump your brakes anymore."
Might have been more appropriate to compare it in that people in the high performance arena (nascar) don't like antilock brakes because of their limits and the separation you get from your task at hand. (you lose your "feel for the road")
Tho I'm a little strangely biased, I miss the days of assembly, when 10k was a LOT of code to write to solve a problem, thing ran at blindingly fast speed with almost no disk or memory footprint. Nowadays, Hello World is a huge production in itself. 97% of today's coders don't have any idea what they've missed out on and just accept what they've got. Even someone that understands the nerf tools like VB at a lower level can get sooo much more out of them. I recall taking someone's crypto code in VB and producing a several thousand-fold speed boost because of my understanding of how VB was translating things. They didn't know what to say, they'd just accepted that what they were doing was going to be dog slow. (and unfortunately the users are also falling under the same hypnosis)
Since batteries have to be replaced every few years that will not be any fun taking those servers out of the racks one by one to replace their batteries. One would hope they'd be changeable from the back or front, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Also, UPSs can be retained when you buy upgraded servers. But if it's built in, you get to buy it again.
And capacity? You can't just get a bigger UPS to run longer on battery. Although if you have true external (genny) power you just need something to hold for the cutover blip I suppose. I'd be in agreement that any server could benefit from an internal UPS that could hold it for say, 10 seconds.
"What would happen if you were standing in front of the beam? You would die. It would be a pretty spectacular death, and you wouldn't know a lot about it.... It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body."
Am I the only one that IMMEDIATELY pulled up the vision of the green beams combining inside the deathstar?
AV Vendors please go back to the windows desktop PC where you came from.
And a portion of the irony here is that this is partly the reason that windows has such a virus and malware problem. "We want the mac platform to be just as exploitable as the windows platform, so we can profit from it too."
Was just thinking a little more on this and have also concluded that the only thing judges "make" is "precedence", which just lends credit to their particular interpretation of the law.
This entire thing is just laughable. "we can't write A/V software for your product because no one can write software for the iphone that is, or that stops, viruses". So, they're asking Apple to create the problem, which they will then be able to sell a fix for.
Just HOW stupid do they think we all are?
The only people right now that have any use for antivirus or antimalware software for their iphone are those that have jailbroken them, in which case they could also install and run AV software But there's not a big enough market for that at this point. If they really wanted to write it, they could, right now. There's just not enough profit in it yet.
And as happens so often, a judge basically says "Well, technically what you're doing isn't illegal, but I still don't like what you're doing, and people are breathing down my neck to do something about you, so stoppit or we're going to bring the legal system down on you anyway. We may not be able to make it stick, but we certainly can make your life hell in the attempt." Surrender your rights and we'll leave you alone - persist and we'll make you regret it. Wonderful legal system we have here.
Judges that make rulings like that need to either be re-educated, or removed. Their job isn't to make the law, but to judge whether or not you've broken a law. (except in trial by jury, and then they don't even get that) Whether or not they like what you're doing, or whether or not they think what you did should be illegal isn't supposed to have anything to do with it. If they're more interested in writing the law, they need to give up their bench and run for senator.
Senators make laws and place restrictions on police and judges. Citizens break laws. Police arrest citizens that appear to have broken laws. Juries (/judges) interpret law and decide if citizens have broken a law. Judges insure a fair trial. Problem here is everyone wants a piece of everyone else's action. Oh if it only weren't for that pesky "separation of powers" thing...
And for God sake why would you want to store the number as a string any ways?
It's not so much the storage as it is the transport. Sometimes you need to send things as a flat text file with one record per line, for data exchange. Then you start running into all sorts of problems like tabs vs spaces, field widths, line delimiters, right vs left justification, and other oddness like these separators. Really if they wanted to do that more smartly, they'd omit all separators in a numeric field and simply state number of pennies. Problem solved. Every time I've had to put a dollar amount in a text field it's been in pennies for this exact reason.
Pagers can be more reliable than TM. And a lot of people turn off their cell phone when they are sleeping. Ringing cell phones often aren't loud enough to wake you up anyway. Not everyone has a cell phone. (I don't) A lot of automated systems are still only able to do a broadcast-style alert to multiple pagers, not text messaging. (volunteer fire departments are good examples) Pagers can run a month or more on a single AA battery which increases their reliability. Lots of reasons to stick with pagers.
The nice thing I will miss is the ability to reach for the mic and just chat with people and catch up on things as you're driving around. And it functions like a party line, and that's an aspect that for the most part hasn't been replaced by cell phones. (tho some now have functionality similar to that, but it's limited) Works like an irc/etc chat room you can use in time that's otherwise not usable while driving so it's a good time saver.
Also CBs were cheap. $25 at a pawn shop gives you unlimited service for the next several years.
cell phone proliferation has already all but wiped CB radio off the map. And it's making ham radio less and less useful. But I suppose it's still the only reliable communications in disaster areas. (katrina etc where towers and grid power were down)
And repetitions are the only way for most people to really learn something.
There's never one "right way" to teach anything. Maybe that works best for you, but maybe not for me.
In my case, application of what I've learned, as soon as possible after learning it, is critical. I don't have any statistics atm but that's true of a LOT of people. For me anyway, the reason is I have a severely defective factual memory, and a near perfect memory for method, audio, and visual. Tell me to write down a spelling word 100x and see how far you get. Now ask me to read it aloud three times and get a surprise. Give me a list of steps to assemble something and have me study it all day long and still get it wrong. Or show me how to do it hands-on and I have it down by the second time, regardless of complexity.
The homework itself isn't useless, but when you're sending all 70 of your students home to learn the exact same way, some of the students are just getting screwed. For some, it ends up being boring, frustrating, and completely unproductive. There's a reason we have teachers, to find the best way to teach the children in their class, by whatever method works best for the student, which varies from child to child. Once you send them all home with the same assignment, you completely remove that from the equation.
Unfortunately for me, 95% of what I was sent home with when I was in school was of little or no value whatsoever, and only served to bitter my view of education in general. Even when I got back to school the next day all I got to hear was how poor the quality of my homework was, which affected my motivation to try when I was in school. I vastly preferred 6 hrs of school over 1 hr of homework.
I fix computers for a living, and I will vouch for the pain that is working on a "three pack a day" computer. It's not terribly bad as long as they keep a clean house, but when there's a lot of dust in the machine, AND they're a very heavy smoker, the entire inside of the computer is filled with a matte of dustbunny solidified by tar. It's a dark mustard looking soft foam and reeks to high heaven, and when you touch it, it wipes off on your hands like ash AND sends a fine dark yellow cloud up into the air. Takes 5 minutes of hand scrubbing to get most of it off after you're done working on it.
I don't think I'd call it a "biohazard", as there's not a lot of chance of my inhaling any nicotine, but it's certainly unpleasant to work on. It also tints the entire machine a dingy yellow, especially the white plastics and the front of LCD panels. It also kills optical drives. (clouds the laser lens) Occasionally we get in a machine that looks ok, but reeks of tar when you pick it up. When we open it up, it's obviously a heavy smoker's computer, that they took the time to clean the outside case before bringing it in. "surprise!"
Most computers have active air cooling, and function like air filters. If you're filling the air with nasty, you should expect a lot of it to collect inside your computer, and nobody likes dealing with that.
Twice we've had to refuse warranty repair for a killed optical drive, and once a smoker wanted us to replace (under warranty) an LCD panel that had "become discolored". No, really? Like the WALLS and CURTAINS in your house? ick ick ick.
Slashdot Mirror
thx for the sig link, Absolute Shisen-Sho is addictive
For an even slightly more robust machine, use Windows 7 Ultimate with BitLocker and a strong password for your logon.
I seem to remember speculation/rumor/unsubstantiated claims awhile back regarding bitlocker having a second way to unlock the data but only the public key was seen, no one knew specifically who had the private key. (govt/ms?) Was this ever either put to rest or proven?
This also allows Apple to prune it's App Store and get rid of all the crap and make discoverability easier.
I already have problems finding applications because when I look for say, a grocery list app, there's not 1 or 2 or 20. there's like 100, and it's hard to find a big difference between them. Of the say 100, 40-60 of them are either free or free demo, and so I download a dozen or so among them and try them out. If I don't find one I like, I have to go back to the store and find another dozen to try out. If I'm lucky I find something I like. What I really might have liked I may never have even gotten a look at.
It would be nice if there were better quality control than there is now. It'd be like trying to decide which cable company you want to sign up for, and there's 30 of them in town. Sometimes too much choice is a bad thing - it's good to have someone you can reasonably trust to filter through the huge pile and just present you with the top-ten-list. But I don't think "there are already too many of these on the store" is a major actual reason for rejection right now. "Competes (if even only slightly) with one of Apple's bundled apps" and "can change behavior once installed" seem to account for around 90% of rejections as of late. The former being greed and the latter being protective.
Wouldn't it have been tonnes easier to just drop a dll in and have VB call that?
Nope, in fact that was sort of the core issue. Actually I fibbed a little, it wasn't VB, it was RB, but I figured you all could relate better to it. This code needed to be mac/windows/linux cross platform, and RB's compiler can target all three. Start relying on DLLs and plugins and you restrict what platforms you can target. We actually had a crypto plugin already that did windows and mac, but not linux. The original plan was to ifdev it so that only the linux build used the RB implementation, but in the end we started gunning for ALL the plugins because they were known to break from time to time and we preferred having total control over things and not relying on black-box solutions.
After following that idea, we eliminated two of the other plugins we were also relying on. We did finally have to accept that one was just not going to be removable though, due to language limitations.
Who let a VB coder implement a cryptosystem
well in this case all we actually ended up needing was the SHA1 and MD5 hashing, but he wanted to be complete about things so we did the full RFC. Still we had to hash 1mb blocks so speed was important. 4 seconds was dropped to a very small fraction of a second. But you really got to see the improvements when trying to do actual encryption.
But when coding crypto, the tool isn't the first place you should look for security - pay more attention to the meatbag.
"Managed code is like antilock brakes. You used to have to be a good driver on ice or you would die. Now you don't have to pump your brakes anymore."
Might have been more appropriate to compare it in that people in the high performance arena (nascar) don't like antilock brakes because of their limits and the separation you get from your task at hand. (you lose your "feel for the road")
Tho I'm a little strangely biased, I miss the days of assembly, when 10k was a LOT of code to write to solve a problem, thing ran at blindingly fast speed with almost no disk or memory footprint. Nowadays, Hello World is a huge production in itself. 97% of today's coders don't have any idea what they've missed out on and just accept what they've got. Even someone that understands the nerf tools like VB at a lower level can get sooo much more out of them. I recall taking someone's crypto code in VB and producing a several thousand-fold speed boost because of my understanding of how VB was translating things. They didn't know what to say, they'd just accepted that what they were doing was going to be dog slow. (and unfortunately the users are also falling under the same hypnosis)
You thought you had trouble finding room for your elbows, now imagine trying to encroach half a foot to the left and right.
I'd say a 17" laptop is almost too big in those cases. 15" seems to be about the right compromise unless you absolutely need maximum space.
I know I'd have a problem with someone hanging half their display over my lap when I'm trying to read a magazine or my Kindle.
it's full of stars...
Since batteries have to be replaced every few years that will not be any fun taking those servers out of the racks one by one to replace their batteries. One would hope they'd be changeable from the back or front, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Also, UPSs can be retained when you buy upgraded servers. But if it's built in, you get to buy it again.
And capacity? You can't just get a bigger UPS to run longer on battery. Although if you have true external (genny) power you just need something to hold for the cutover blip I suppose. I'd be in agreement that any server could benefit from an internal UPS that could hold it for say, 10 seconds.
Not a good idea on several fronts.
"What would happen if you were standing in front of the beam? You would die. It would be a pretty spectacular death, and you wouldn't know a lot about it. ... It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body."
Am I the only one that IMMEDIATELY pulled up the vision of the green beams combining inside the deathstar?
(deathsar firing at 30 sec)
AV Vendors please go back to the windows desktop PC where you came from.
And a portion of the irony here is that this is partly the reason that windows has such a virus and malware problem. "We want the mac platform to be just as exploitable as the windows platform, so we can profit from it too."
Uh... NO . go away.
Was just thinking a little more on this and have also concluded that the only thing judges "make" is "precedence", which just lends credit to their particular interpretation of the law.
This entire thing is just laughable. "we can't write A/V software for your product because no one can write software for the iphone that is, or that stops, viruses". So, they're asking Apple to create the problem, which they will then be able to sell a fix for.
Just HOW stupid do they think we all are?
The only people right now that have any use for antivirus or antimalware software for their iphone are those that have jailbroken them, in which case they could also install and run AV software But there's not a big enough market for that at this point. If they really wanted to write it, they could, right now. There's just not enough profit in it yet.
And as happens so often, a judge basically says "Well, technically what you're doing isn't illegal, but I still don't like what you're doing, and people are breathing down my neck to do something about you, so stoppit or we're going to bring the legal system down on you anyway. We may not be able to make it stick, but we certainly can make your life hell in the attempt." Surrender your rights and we'll leave you alone - persist and we'll make you regret it. Wonderful legal system we have here.
Judges that make rulings like that need to either be re-educated, or removed. Their job isn't to make the law, but to judge whether or not you've broken a law. (except in trial by jury, and then they don't even get that) Whether or not they like what you're doing, or whether or not they think what you did should be illegal isn't supposed to have anything to do with it. If they're more interested in writing the law, they need to give up their bench and run for senator.
Senators make laws and place restrictions on police and judges. Citizens break laws. Police arrest citizens that appear to have broken laws. Juries (/judges) interpret law and decide if citizens have broken a law. Judges insure a fair trial. Problem here is everyone wants a piece of everyone else's action. Oh if it only weren't for that pesky "separation of powers" thing...
there are no criminals only potential terrorists.
first time through I read that wrong
there are no criminals only potential tourists.
whooshed the whoosh
And statistically speaking, who do you think is more likely to survive the encounter?
A: the Ron Paul'er standing across the street pointing a finger and laughing at the two.
I (and many friends) use apostrophe as decimal separator in handwriiteing
can't say as I've ever seen this done before. Did you make it up or is it in use somewhere else?
(perhaps you should work on your spelling before trying to reinvent numeric notation)
And for God sake why would you want to store the number as a string any ways?
It's not so much the storage as it is the transport. Sometimes you need to send things as a flat text file with one record per line, for data exchange. Then you start running into all sorts of problems like tabs vs spaces, field widths, line delimiters, right vs left justification, and other oddness like these separators. Really if they wanted to do that more smartly, they'd omit all separators in a numeric field and simply state number of pennies. Problem solved. Every time I've had to put a dollar amount in a text field it's been in pennies for this exact reason.
Whoosh 3,0
Pagers can be more reliable than TM. And a lot of people turn off their cell phone when they are sleeping. Ringing cell phones often aren't loud enough to wake you up anyway. Not everyone has a cell phone. (I don't) A lot of automated systems are still only able to do a broadcast-style alert to multiple pagers, not text messaging. (volunteer fire departments are good examples) Pagers can run a month or more on a single AA battery which increases their reliability. Lots of reasons to stick with pagers.
The nice thing I will miss is the ability to reach for the mic and just chat with people and catch up on things as you're driving around. And it functions like a party line, and that's an aspect that for the most part hasn't been replaced by cell phones. (tho some now have functionality similar to that, but it's limited) Works like an irc/etc chat room you can use in time that's otherwise not usable while driving so it's a good time saver.
Also CBs were cheap. $25 at a pawn shop gives you unlimited service for the next several years.
cell phone proliferation has already all but wiped CB radio off the map. And it's making ham radio less and less useful. But I suppose it's still the only reliable communications in disaster areas. (katrina etc where towers and grid power were down)
And repetitions are the only way for most people to really learn something.
There's never one "right way" to teach anything. Maybe that works best for you, but maybe not for me.
In my case, application of what I've learned, as soon as possible after learning it, is critical. I don't have any statistics atm but that's true of a LOT of people. For me anyway, the reason is I have a severely defective factual memory, and a near perfect memory for method, audio, and visual. Tell me to write down a spelling word 100x and see how far you get. Now ask me to read it aloud three times and get a surprise. Give me a list of steps to assemble something and have me study it all day long and still get it wrong. Or show me how to do it hands-on and I have it down by the second time, regardless of complexity.
The homework itself isn't useless, but when you're sending all 70 of your students home to learn the exact same way, some of the students are just getting screwed. For some, it ends up being boring, frustrating, and completely unproductive. There's a reason we have teachers, to find the best way to teach the children in their class, by whatever method works best for the student, which varies from child to child. Once you send them all home with the same assignment, you completely remove that from the equation.
Unfortunately for me, 95% of what I was sent home with when I was in school was of little or no value whatsoever, and only served to bitter my view of education in general. Even when I got back to school the next day all I got to hear was how poor the quality of my homework was, which affected my motivation to try when I was in school. I vastly preferred 6 hrs of school over 1 hr of homework.
I fix computers for a living, and I will vouch for the pain that is working on a "three pack a day" computer. It's not terribly bad as long as they keep a clean house, but when there's a lot of dust in the machine, AND they're a very heavy smoker, the entire inside of the computer is filled with a matte of dustbunny solidified by tar. It's a dark mustard looking soft foam and reeks to high heaven, and when you touch it, it wipes off on your hands like ash AND sends a fine dark yellow cloud up into the air. Takes 5 minutes of hand scrubbing to get most of it off after you're done working on it.
I don't think I'd call it a "biohazard", as there's not a lot of chance of my inhaling any nicotine, but it's certainly unpleasant to work on. It also tints the entire machine a dingy yellow, especially the white plastics and the front of LCD panels. It also kills optical drives. (clouds the laser lens) Occasionally we get in a machine that looks ok, but reeks of tar when you pick it up. When we open it up, it's obviously a heavy smoker's computer, that they took the time to clean the outside case before bringing it in. "surprise!"
Most computers have active air cooling, and function like air filters. If you're filling the air with nasty, you should expect a lot of it to collect inside your computer, and nobody likes dealing with that.
Twice we've had to refuse warranty repair for a killed optical drive, and once a smoker wanted us to replace (under warranty) an LCD panel that had "become discolored". No, really? Like the WALLS and CURTAINS in your house? ick ick ick.