Batteries are far from clean as well, the cheapest ones we have are full of lead and the best ones we have are full of lithium and all have a lifespan of 3-5 years.
You forgot to mention NiMH batteries. Properly cycled, they can last for decades.
NiMH batteries are what keep several multi-decade satellites going. The original Toyota Prius used essentially the exact same type of battery technology as do multi-decade satellites.
My friend (a guru of a satellite engineer) would go on and on about it every chance he got if you rode in his Prius. This was a dude with numerous Program-secret clearances and access to SCI (he was way above Top Secret), so he knew what was what.
Li-ion batteries are the rage, but NiMH is already proven. Many other battery technologies exist, or are yet to be invented.
The problem is that although solar and wind are decent peak generators, people have been eschewing clean base load generation for decades. Natural gas, nuclear and hydro power, even wind power has been under attack from all forms of "nature freaks" the only thing that doesn't piss anyone off today is solar and coal because we already have coal and they don't understand the environmental impact of silicon production.
RE base load. The answer is batteries (or flywheels, or molten metal). You can go off-grid with solar and wind if you have a massive battery-pack to load-level when neither is generating.
You know you have screwed things up when you have to look at China and India, two countries that have long been considered backwards when it comes to using renewable sources of energy, for a brighter tomorrow.
Given that the combined population of China and India is over 35% of the world's population it makes perfect sense to look to them for long term solutions. Making changes in those countries will have the greatest impact overall.
No. Getting the biggest polluters (by total output, not per capita) to do something about it is what makes perfect sense.
Or hey, put the two ideas, above, together, and simply go kill them all (tabloidists) in their homes!
Whoa, dude. Killing people is way over the line.
softly, with his song.
I see that my reference to the Roberta Flack song was too tangential to come across. Ah well, I was trying too hard to be clever...
So, no, I do not advocate murdering tabloid "journalists". Despising them, yes. They get sued for libel often, and deservedly so, judging from their track record of losses in such cases.
Here in LA, they cause traffic accidents by careering across multiple lanes to pursue a car going the opposite direction – just to get a photo. Their behavior led to some of the provisions of the anti-stalking laws we have here. Scumbags.
So someone copied a list of email addresses from Bell.
Yawn.
You seen unaware that Bell Canada provides managed security services for government and corporate clients. The irony is as thick as fog in Halifax Harbour.
Agreed. NSA bears a huge responsibility for any bad things that happen.
NSA not only kept zero-days exploits secret, but they weaponized them. And, apparently, even wrote manuals for these weapons. Then they failed to keep these weapons secure –– now they are out there.
Every day that NSA lets this stuff just sit out there, without doing anything to mitigate potential damage from their weapons, puts more and more responsibility on their shoulders.
This makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the claims, and if they're really from a group with this kind of power or if they're just someone trolling for teh lulz.
RULE #1: Don't hold the whole world for ransom –– where would you go once they paid-up?
No, every piece of music is lossy because analog cannot be encoded into digital without an infinite amount of loss. A 100 terabyte hardrive could not hold a single piano note without introducing loss.
Perfection is not really the goal. The goal is compression without detectable artifacts, or at least with a tolerably low level of imperfection.
Is it time to doxx everyone involved in the production and distribution of these tabloids?
Sounds like a great idea. Go over to Reddit and get cracking...
Alternatively, you could boycott anything printed by the same company that prints the tabloids so that they drop the tabloids as client. (printing presses are expensive)
Excellent idea also. Boycott anyone who advertises in these three known garbage press outlets!
Or hey, put the two ideas, above, together, and simply go kill them all (tabloidists) in their homes! Two birds with one stone, I say.
FTA: Microsoft supported Windows XP for over a decade before finally putting it to sleep.
Win XP still works, and so do the apps that have run on it forever. It is enough for most people.
The computer hardware/software industries' game of constant upgrades worked for a while, while hardware was improving at an exponential rate. That is not happening any more, making it more difficult to keep customers on the treadmill.
This is behind the move to "rented" apps from MS, Adobe, Intuit, and many other companies who used to sell a stand-alone product. They have already done most everything that needs to be done. But rather than go off and conquer some new market-space, they are instead tied to juicing the one that they dominate. They end up trying to get people to rent the software that they use, often for their regular job.
An app (a computer program) is simply a recipe. Think of your mother's box of recipe cards. When she uses them, she employs her own hardware (kitchen) to run through the recipe––there is no reason why she should have to pay every time she refers to the recipe. Extend that analogy to computer programs that you have bought and paid-for. Why start renting them now? Especially if you have had to re-purchase, or purchase multiple upgrades, along the way? There is no justification for continuing payments. None.
Renting software is stupid, but I won't bother with a rant in a dead thread.
No, but I will fault the copyright/patent law that prevents me from making and selling my own parts for the '64 model. At the very least, compulsory licensing should be applied for those who want to support legacy systems, and cars.
The after-market auto parts industry must be a crazy, headache inducing mess. For every part that an after-market manufacturer might want to make and sell, they first have to do a thorough (tedious, and expensive) Patent search in order to avoid getting sued.
As for your '64 model, you are completely free to do as you wish. Patents last only 20 years (and only 17 years back in '65). No Patent assertions can be supported at all. And you can't copyright a device or part, so you are free from constraints there, too.
For your " '65 case", I think someone at a major auto company lied to you, and you simply believed it. Just go ask a lawyer. It will be $150 well-spent.
Indefinitely? No, only as long as they want to keep their copyright/patent privileges on those systems.
Can someone familiar with "abandoned copyrighted" or "orphaned copyrighted" works chime in?
A seller refusing to meet market demand by producing (copies of) a copyrighted work is abandoning it. Many people have used this logic to make their own copies of books, back-catalog jazz music, orchestral sheet music, and so on. How do these cases relate to an abandoned (copyrighted) set of computer code such as Windows XP?
Why is the NSA more to blame for using it and keeping it secret then Microsoft is for creating it, profiting from it, refusing to fix it, and keeping it secret?
MS bears lots of blame, of course. But it was the NSA who not only discovered the exploit, but turned it into a weapon, complete with instructions.
That sounds like a complete disaster! I can't imagine the time, expense, and repercussions that resulted. When it comes to specialty equipment with not off-the-shelf hardware I definitely wouldn't put into auto-update mode.
The first thing I do when I am charged with such an instrument is to go turn auto-update OFF.
The first thing I do when I use someone else's system is to ask them if they have auto-update turned OFF.
I have plenty more first-hand experience. Aside from the above, I had a 24-hour scan on an instrument (= $$$$) lose all of my collected data because the stupid vendor (Bruker) failed to turn auto-update OFF. The computer restarted in the middle of the night, and did not bother to save any of my data from the very-delicate scan. Pus all calibrations were lost, since the computer rebooted with the instrument in a state that it did not record. We had to waste a few hours with Bruker on the phone in order to get the thing to recognize where all of its fiducials and zero-points were. And if I recall correctly, we did not have Admin rights on the computer, but at least a Bruker tech was wise enough to just tell it to me so that I could turn auto-update OFF.
Another system at the same lab ran on DOS. The maker of the specialty hardware (the only one that made the specific thingamajig to do the specific thing) was long out-of-business. Their interface card ran only on DOS 3.1 or 6, and only on a specific make, model and brand of some specific 386 computer! It was uncommon, so the guy in charge of it had to stockpile spare parts for the particular computer, for when the mobo or whatever died. Yes, DOS. Did I mention that this was in 2005? There was no alternative source. I asked the guy, "What if the interface card fails?" His answer was, essentially, "Then we are fucked." I won't say where this was, but it was an institution that produced a standard-reference series of data and books that everyone in my field knows and uses. Talk about dangling from a thread!
Okay I guess I did ask for it when I mentioned the rhetorical question. The MS security patches being notorious for bricking expensive equipment reference. Any somewhat recent and significant examples?
2008 or so. A pushed Windows update bricked ALL Oxford-brand EDS systems globally for a couple of days. A driver update for the interface card fixed it, but it took time. What is an EDS? It's an analytical tool that allows chemical analysis in electron microscopes. Every university has several. Every big company, especially in tech, has tens of them (or 100's if you're Intel). The EDS systems would not work, preventing not only day-to-day use of this basic analysis-lab capability, but also mission-critical needs to use it.
I was in the satellite industry at the time, and can tell you that in this industry, delay of a rocket on-the-launchpad costs about $3–5 million per day. We didn't have an emergency to cover at the time, fortunately, but day-to-day work was impossible. Not only that, but our time was wasted trying to fix the problem. A lot of PhDs the world-over wasted probably 12 hours each trying to figure out why things had suddenly stopped working. Staff scientists' time costs about $150/hr (w/overhead). Multiply that by thousands, or tens of thousands, of PhDs wasting their time thanks to MS auto-pushing out an under-QC'd service pack/update/patch. I am still stunned that a class action lawsuit did not ensue.
The biggest worms, trojans, etc. all hit Windows? Rhetorical question, so no jesting or serious responses requested:) But this one looks to be fairly sizeable.
NYT noted up to 74 countries reporting having been hit.
Serious answer: MS puts out patches all the time. In institutions with multi-million $$ equipment, or life-critical equipment, avoid patching if at all possible. Such equipment is designed for a couple of decades of service or more. The computer-interface card might only have drivers up to Windows XP. Applying a MS patch could be either impossible, or if you run Win 8.1, say, something to be avoided. MS security patches are notorious for bricking expensive equipment, which stay bricked until the manufacturer (if still in business) updates the driver for its interface hardware.
Smart institutions would like to air-gap the expensive instruments, but huge data-flows makes that infeasible. The only workable implementation is to hide them behind an intermediary Linux box having two Ethernet cards, to hide the instrument's computer from the network. Prudent configuration of the Linux box is recommended.
The US NSA are to blame for this global (dozens of countries) IT clusterfuck. I wonder how the leaders of all of those other countries are feeling about the US right now...
Several experts monitoring the situation have linked the infections to vulnerabilities released by a group known as The Shadow Brokers, which recently claimed to have dumped hacking tools stolen from the NSA.
This is a global demonstration of why "Security through obscurity" and "NSA back-doors" are a very, very bad idea. I can't even imagine of a clearer demonstration.
Too bad the political response will not be to do draconian things, rather than instituting open code reviews and such. Those NSA spooks like to have their little secret treasures, even if that endangers everyone in the world with an internet connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Batteries are far from clean as well, the cheapest ones we have are full of lead and the best ones we have are full of lithium and all have a lifespan of 3-5 years.
You forgot to mention NiMH batteries. Properly cycled, they can last for decades.
NiMH batteries are what keep several multi-decade satellites going. The original Toyota Prius used essentially the exact same type of battery technology as do multi-decade satellites.
My friend (a guru of a satellite engineer) would go on and on about it every chance he got if you rode in his Prius. This was a dude with numerous Program-secret clearances and access to SCI (he was way above Top Secret), so he knew what was what.
Li-ion batteries are the rage, but NiMH is already proven. Many other battery technologies exist, or are yet to be invented.
The problem is that although solar and wind are decent peak generators, people have been eschewing clean base load generation for decades. Natural gas, nuclear and hydro power, even wind power has been under attack from all forms of "nature freaks" the only thing that doesn't piss anyone off today is solar and coal because we already have coal and they don't understand the environmental impact of silicon production.
RE base load. The answer is batteries (or flywheels, or molten metal). You can go off-grid with solar and wind if you have a massive battery-pack to load-level when neither is generating.
Batteries! (energy storage)
You know you have screwed things up when you have to look at China and India, two countries that have long been considered backwards when it comes to using renewable sources of energy, for a brighter tomorrow.
Given that the combined population of China and India is over 35% of the world's population it makes perfect sense to look to them for long term solutions. Making changes in those countries will have the greatest impact overall.
No. Getting the biggest polluters (by total output, not per capita) to do something about it is what makes perfect sense.
Who said financial reward was their ultimate goal ?
. . .
One way or another, this is a huge setback for the USA. And if that's the goal, the money is a smoke screen.
Hmmn. $300 does seem kind of low for a ransom, doesn't it?
Or hey, put the two ideas, above, together, and simply go kill them all (tabloidists) in their homes!
Whoa, dude. Killing people is way over the line.
softly, with his song.
I see that my reference to the Roberta Flack song was too tangential to come across. Ah well, I was trying too hard to be clever...
So, no, I do not advocate murdering tabloid "journalists". Despising them, yes. They get sued for libel often, and deservedly so, judging from their track record of losses in such cases.
Here in LA, they cause traffic accidents by careering across multiple lanes to pursue a car going the opposite direction – just to get a photo. Their behavior led to some of the provisions of the anti-stalking laws we have here. Scumbags.
So someone copied a list of email addresses from Bell.
Yawn.
You seen unaware that Bell Canada provides managed security services for government and corporate clients. The irony is as thick as fog in Halifax Harbour.
Whoa. Thanks. LOL
So someone copied a list of email addresses from Bell.
Yawn.
Agreed. NSA bears a huge responsibility for any bad things that happen.
NSA not only kept zero-days exploits secret, but they weaponized them. And, apparently, even wrote manuals for these weapons. Then they failed to keep these weapons secure –– now they are out there.
Every day that NSA lets this stuff just sit out there, without doing anything to mitigate potential damage from their weapons, puts more and more responsibility on their shoulders.
This makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the claims, and if they're really from a group with this kind of power or if they're just someone trolling for teh lulz.
RULE #1: Don't hold the whole world for ransom –– where would you go once they paid-up?
No, every piece of music is lossy because analog cannot be encoded into digital without an infinite amount of loss.
A 100 terabyte hardrive could not hold a single piano note without introducing loss.
Perfection is not really the goal. The goal is compression without detectable artifacts, or at least with a tolerably low level of imperfection.
This is an example of how the Patent system should work.
Fraunhofer invented something good. They Patented it. Patents last 20 years, after which they expire forever.
Fraunhofer enjoyed the monopoly on use of this technology, but only for a short time. Now, the Public owns it (it is in the public domain).
Or hey, put the two ideas, above, together, and simply go kill them all (tabloidists) in their homes!
Whoa, dude. Killing people is way over the line.
softly, with his song.
I'm about to install Windows 8.1 on a Boot Camp partition of my laptop's HD.
Please share any tips or web-links that you found most helpful. Or to the 3rd-party software.
Is it time to doxx everyone involved in the production and distribution of these tabloids?
Sounds like a great idea. Go over to Reddit and get cracking...
Alternatively, you could boycott anything printed by the same company that prints the tabloids so that they drop the tabloids as client. (printing presses are expensive)
Excellent idea also. Boycott anyone who advertises in these three known garbage press outlets!
Or hey, put the two ideas, above, together, and simply go kill them all (tabloidists) in their homes! Two birds with one stone, I say.
FTA: Microsoft supported Windows XP for over a decade before finally putting it to sleep.
Win XP still works, and so do the apps that have run on it forever. It is enough for most people.
The computer hardware/software industries' game of constant upgrades worked for a while, while hardware was improving at an exponential rate. That is not happening any more, making it more difficult to keep customers on the treadmill.
This is behind the move to "rented" apps from MS, Adobe, Intuit, and many other companies who used to sell a stand-alone product. They have already done most everything that needs to be done. But rather than go off and conquer some new market-space, they are instead tied to juicing the one that they dominate. They end up trying to get people to rent the software that they use, often for their regular job.
An app (a computer program) is simply a recipe. Think of your mother's box of recipe cards. When she uses them, she employs her own hardware (kitchen) to run through the recipe––there is no reason why she should have to pay every time she refers to the recipe. Extend that analogy to computer programs that you have bought and paid-for. Why start renting them now? Especially if you have had to re-purchase, or purchase multiple upgrades, along the way? There is no justification for continuing payments. None.
Renting software is stupid, but I won't bother with a rant in a dead thread.
No, but I will fault the copyright/patent law that prevents me from making and selling my own parts for the '64 model. At the very least, compulsory licensing should be applied for those who want to support legacy systems, and cars.
The after-market auto parts industry must be a crazy, headache inducing mess. For every part that an after-market manufacturer might want to make and sell, they first have to do a thorough (tedious, and expensive) Patent search in order to avoid getting sued.
As for your '64 model, you are completely free to do as you wish. Patents last only 20 years (and only 17 years back in '65). No Patent assertions can be supported at all. And you can't copyright a device or part, so you are free from constraints there, too.
For your " '65 case", I think someone at a major auto company lied to you, and you simply believed it. Just go ask a lawyer. It will be $150 well-spent.
Should they go back and patch Win95 while they're at it? Make Win386 rock-solid in the face of current virii and ransomware?
By that same logic, you could insist that Ford go back and install safety glass and airbags on any existing Model T's still running.
Nope. Product recalls forcing manufacturers to correct physical defects in automobiles happen all the time.
The simple fact is that OS's are a treadmill.
Yes. You nailed it. But why should that be the de facto case? My Edison cylinder music player still works fine, as does my cassette tape player.
Indefinitely? No, only as long as they want to keep their copyright/patent privileges on those systems.
Can someone familiar with "abandoned copyrighted" or "orphaned copyrighted" works chime in?
A seller refusing to meet market demand by producing (copies of) a copyrighted work is abandoning it. Many people have used this logic to make their own copies of books, back-catalog jazz music, orchestral sheet music, and so on. How do these cases relate to an abandoned (copyrighted) set of computer code such as Windows XP?
So, basically, the UK is following the lead of the USS... I mean the USA... in having an agency illegally monitor internal political dissenters?
Why is the NSA more to blame for using it and keeping it secret then Microsoft is for creating it, profiting from it, refusing to fix it, and keeping it secret?
MS bears lots of blame, of course. But it was the NSA who not only discovered the exploit, but turned it into a weapon, complete with instructions.
That sounds like a complete disaster! I can't imagine the time, expense, and repercussions that resulted. When it comes to specialty equipment with not off-the-shelf hardware I definitely wouldn't put into auto-update mode.
The first thing I do when I am charged with such an instrument is to go turn auto-update OFF.
The first thing I do when I use someone else's system is to ask them if they have auto-update turned OFF.
I have plenty more first-hand experience. Aside from the above, I had a 24-hour scan on an instrument (= $$$$) lose all of my collected data because the stupid vendor (Bruker) failed to turn auto-update OFF. The computer restarted in the middle of the night, and did not bother to save any of my data from the very-delicate scan. Pus all calibrations were lost, since the computer rebooted with the instrument in a state that it did not record. We had to waste a few hours with Bruker on the phone in order to get the thing to recognize where all of its fiducials and zero-points were. And if I recall correctly, we did not have Admin rights on the computer, but at least a Bruker tech was wise enough to just tell it to me so that I could turn auto-update OFF.
Another system at the same lab ran on DOS. The maker of the specialty hardware (the only one that made the specific thingamajig to do the specific thing) was long out-of-business. Their interface card ran only on DOS 3.1 or 6, and only on a specific make, model and brand of some specific 386 computer! It was uncommon, so the guy in charge of it had to stockpile spare parts for the particular computer, for when the mobo or whatever died. Yes, DOS. Did I mention that this was in 2005? There was no alternative source. I asked the guy, "What if the interface card fails?" His answer was, essentially, "Then we are fucked." I won't say where this was, but it was an institution that produced a standard-reference series of data and books that everyone in my field knows and uses. Talk about dangling from a thread!
Okay I guess I did ask for it when I mentioned the rhetorical question. The MS security patches being notorious for bricking expensive equipment reference. Any somewhat recent and significant examples?
2008 or so. A pushed Windows update bricked ALL Oxford-brand EDS systems globally for a couple of days. A driver update for the interface card fixed it, but it took time. What is an EDS? It's an analytical tool that allows chemical analysis in electron microscopes. Every university has several. Every big company, especially in tech, has tens of them (or 100's if you're Intel). The EDS systems would not work, preventing not only day-to-day use of this basic analysis-lab capability, but also mission-critical needs to use it.
I was in the satellite industry at the time, and can tell you that in this industry, delay of a rocket on-the-launchpad costs about $3–5 million per day. We didn't have an emergency to cover at the time, fortunately, but day-to-day work was impossible. Not only that, but our time was wasted trying to fix the problem. A lot of PhDs the world-over wasted probably 12 hours each trying to figure out why things had suddenly stopped working. Staff scientists' time costs about $150/hr (w/overhead). Multiply that by thousands, or tens of thousands, of PhDs wasting their time thanks to MS auto-pushing out an under-QC'd service pack/update/patch. I am still stunned that a class action lawsuit did not ensue.
The biggest worms, trojans, etc. all hit Windows? Rhetorical question, so no jesting or serious responses requested :) But this one looks to be fairly sizeable.
NYT noted up to 74 countries reporting having been hit.
Serious answer: MS puts out patches all the time. In institutions with multi-million $$ equipment, or life-critical equipment, avoid patching if at all possible. Such equipment is designed for a couple of decades of service or more. The computer-interface card might only have drivers up to Windows XP. Applying a MS patch could be either impossible, or if you run Win 8.1, say, something to be avoided. MS security patches are notorious for bricking expensive equipment, which stay bricked until the manufacturer (if still in business) updates the driver for its interface hardware.
Smart institutions would like to air-gap the expensive instruments, but huge data-flows makes that infeasible. The only workable implementation is to hide them behind an intermediary Linux box having two Ethernet cards, to hide the instrument's computer from the network. Prudent configuration of the Linux box is recommended.
Thank you NSA for developing this exploit for the ransomware hackers to use.
The US NSA are to blame for this global (dozens of countries) IT clusterfuck. I wonder how the leaders of all of those other countries are feeling about the US right now...
Several experts monitoring the situation have linked the infections to vulnerabilities released by a group known as The Shadow Brokers, which recently claimed to have dumped hacking tools stolen from the NSA.
This is a global demonstration of why "Security through obscurity" and "NSA back-doors" are a very, very bad idea. I can't even imagine of a clearer demonstration.
Too bad the political response will not be to do draconian things, rather than instituting open code reviews and such. Those NSA spooks like to have their little secret treasures, even if that endangers everyone in the world with an internet connection.