Technology can certainly help us in times of need. The Mayor of New Orleans was able to order an evacuation, through the great telecommunication and media infrastructures that we have, people were able to be warned, which probably saved thousands of lives.
I say this, because when natural disasters like this hit third world countries, there are many, many, many more deaths. So our communications infrastructure and other technologies DO HELP.
Of course, we have had television and radio and the like for a while, an evacuation and warning like this would have been possible probably even 40 years ago. This catagory of technology would also include things like interstate highways, helicopters, boats, and the like, which help rescue operations get where they are needed.
Another development we have that helps is a highly organized and functional government. George Bush can immediately grant disaster funding to these states and the rescue operations get moving. Without government direction and organization, it would take whatever volunteer goodwill organizations that go down there a lot longer to coordinate their efforts, and would be much less effective.
It is true that the cell phones stop working when the power is cut to the tower, but the same is true for regular phones. But, the amazing thing is, to restore phone service we can fly a couple satellites, which is a lot easier than waiting for the water to recede and rebuild all the phone lines. So technology is helping in this case as well.
A disaster like this does show us how powerful nature is, and that sometimes there is nothing we can do to stop a disaster, but we can do our best to minimize the tragedy.
I'd be interested in seeing slash-dot publish their readership percentages over time. I wonder if the overall percentage of slashdot readers that are on linux has gone down while the overall percentage on a mac have gone up.
I use t-Mobile, the second to lowest scoring provider. I havn't had that many service problems, with the exception of coverage. Thier coverage could be a lot better, but I use them over Verizon because of the quality of their customer service. It is really excellent, and customer service, to me, makes all the difference.
What I would like to know is how to honestly figure out a cell phone companies coverage (other than taking their 7 day trials or whatever and walking your route, that is annoying). Like, how can I find a map of all the cell phone towers in and around Groton, Massachusetts, and which companies run them. Having such a map at my disposal would be far more useful than the "coverage maps" the companies hand out with the entire nation shaded red.
I have heard that some of the mobile shops have these, but that they really aren't allowed to share them. Surely these towers' locations have to be registered somewhere
Any good ISPs out there that destroy records?
on
The RIAA's Hit List Named
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Does anyone know of any good ISPs that have a policy of destoying thier records of who connected with what ip daily?
I know that many librarians, after the Patriot act was passed, started to destroy circulation records daily - it wasn't illegal for them to do it, and they felt very strongly that the government shouldn't be able to see what books people were getting. (Incidentally, this is a tragedy in some literary circles since a popular field of study in literature now is examining old library records from the 18th century onward to see which books were popular during eras past).
These big ISPs, comcast, earthlink, etc. offer unlimited plans, and have no need to record which account is mapped to which IP for anything longer than a day (just to ensure bandwidth usage isn't being abused or something). If they were to have a policy of discarding the records every day at midnight, it would save them hassle (what a pain in the neck it must be to recieve 200 lettes from the RIAA in the morning) and protect thier user's rights. How can they go wrong?
I don't usually complain about stories getting rejected, but I submitted this story more than 24 hours ago, when Hatch's site still hadn't been updated. I had heard about it on instapundit which had linked to the same blog that wired sites in its article: Laurence Simon's Amish Tech Support.
I wonder why Slashdot waited until this story hit the mainsteam (wired) before covering it. I love slashdot, but I wish that the editors would be more willing to post stories that are breaking in the blogosphere, and not waiting until the mainstream press gets a hold of them until highlighting the story.:-(
Uhh, besides that, I'd be willing to bet most manufacturers will just say "screw it", and give their cards the full speed anyhow, standard be-dammed.
Exactly, this is precisely what will happen. It is incredibly stupid for the IEEE to kill the throughput because now manufacturers will IGNORE the standard. Once one company does it, and continues to claim 54 Mbps on their box, all the other ones will have to follow to remain competitive, and then the IEEE will have been a failure, since there will no longer be a universal 802.11 standard
Point well taken, I guess I am thinking from the point of view of the PC gaming industry. Patches have been supplied for free in the PC Gaming industry for years, and developers still seemed to be able to turn a profit. Add-on content shouldn't be free, and traditionally hasn't been (all the blizard game expansions come to mind).
There is no doubt that online services will cost extra for the developer (just the development costs alone are substantial) but I guess I feel that online play is a feature that will increase a games appeal and will thus help to sell more copies. X-Box live, I think, would be liberating to these developers. They can implement the feature and not worry about the costs and logistics of actually running a server. Their ongoing costs would be no more than if they were developing a PC game.
I can see one big "gotcha" with this plan. Cable sells access to the stations but then (most stations) run advertisements in with their programming. So you still pay, by watching commercials, and the individual stations can still make money from ad revenue. It isn't clear how online gaming, as an ongoing revenue stream, pays off for the developers
However, Cable channells need to pay to keep their station up and running. They need to always be producing or purchasing new content. An online interactive game, assuming microsoft is paying for the servers, has no continuing costs which the publisher needs to make back. (other then patches and other maintence releases, but those don't happen on console games... yet). What microsoft's xbox live service allows is for publishers to add an online gaming "feature" at no cost to them, and at no benefit other then increased initial sales.
Let's give record companies reason not to go with Apple-style DRM and come running into the arms of Microsoft-style DRM.
That's so true. This SpyMac thing really pissed me off cause it totally justifies the "treat the user as a criminal" approach that Apple is condeming.
It's just so lame - as other posts have mentioned, it's ineffective because it's streaming, so no one is gaining anything, but it is generating a ton of badwill for the "DRM light" approach that Apple is taking among the execs. It just proves that customers can't be trusted, which is incredibly sad.
Gateway gave our school a $3000 demo unit, and I was allowed to use it for a day.
I must say, it was pretty hot. I took it into class, I loaded up the journal program and took notes with it, I had the day's reading (which had been distributed via electronic reserve) loaded into acrobat reader, and it worked well. The best was, of course, the wireless internet, and as we were discussing the latest nigerian elections I was able to pull up nyt.com and report on the latest news from the region.
On the other hand, I found the handwriting recognition horrible (it's supposed to learn your handwriting as you use it, which is why it always works so well for the demo people). The process of converting my three pages of notes from the journal program to ascii text took about a half hour - it would have been faster to retype them. Battery was almost dead after a 2 hour class, and I couldn't have used it in more than one class. Taking notes is fine, cause you can clean it up later, but basic input is very difficult (entering nyt.com via handwriting took about 60 seconds, and then I had to enter my username and password - and since the password was **** starred out, I didn't really know whether it had correctly interpereted my handwriting until I got the big error screen from the times.
My conclusion: TabletPCs are the future for academic environments, but not for three or four generations of the products, and not until apple makes one:-p.
and I assume that a games slashbox will be an option shortly, but what I would _love_ is to have the ability to force all news items in a particular section to be on my front page.
It would be the opposite of the current "exclude" feature. Right now, if I wanted to, I could exclude all games content from the front page, but what I want to do is pull _all_ games content on the front page, even if the editors didn't determine it to be front page worthy. I would do the same for the apple section. Currently I am limited to slashboxes, which I guess are good, but often they are wasted space since, for example, the apple section might go a day without news. If I could just integrate it all into the front page, I could then use more usefull slashboxes like poll, eff alerts, etc. Stuff that really looks like they belong in the boxes.
You're especially susceptible to this if you subscribe to the view that Google's PageRank? is "inherently democratic," which is how Google, Inc. describes it.
And this Googlewash took just 42 days.
PageRank _is_ democratic! The internet started talking about Moore's writing about "Second Superpower", linking to it, etc, and so it showed up on google, that only makes sense The high rank in google is justified because the majority of links on internet blogs with the text "second superpower" were pointing to moore's page. Google never claimed to be a measure of what THE WORLD was talking about, just a measure of what THE INTERNET is talking about, and that is precisly what it is doing here.
If the original coiners of the term want thier definition to be the top definition on the internet, then they should have thier own blogs where they talk about it, and democracy will take over in google's pagerank process, whichever sites get the most links will have a higher ranking.
Google is a COMPUTER it isn't making value judgements, it is just following a formulla that gives every website a vote.
I am a Mac user, and for the time being am stuck without NWN. I have never had a linux system as my home system so my understanding of linux and its various distros is limited. Here is my theory:
Would it be possible for me to install yellow dog linux or linux PPC onto a partition on my G4, and boot to that partition, buy NWN for windows, and then install the linux client on my powerPC? Or would the client only work for linux running on x86 systems? If it would work, it is a very tempting reason to install linux, since I have drooled over this game since it came out for windows. I apologize if my question is stupid and this is clearly technically impossible, as I have a feeling it might be, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.
Seriously, is there any demographic (outside of sales) more technophobic than university professors? Or was my experience atypical?
My experience with professors has been hit and miss. Sure, some are indeed technophobic, but more and more professors are becoming tech savy as they realise what computers can do for them. It begins with simple things like powerpoint presentations in class or e-mailing an interesting New York Times article to the students. Eventually professors really get excited about this computer stuff and eventually learn HTML to make class web pages or record thier lectures and put them online.
That aside, most colleges make it easy for even the most technophobic professors to use courseware. At my college the library handles all document sharing, so if a professor wants to put a document on electronic reserve, h/she just brings it to the library where workers (usually students on work-study) scan them in and put them online.
As professors realize the power of technology (and especially when their institutions make it easy for them to take advantage of) they become less and less scared of it and more and more excited about it.
"I have this old broken Monitor that I am going to replace - how can I get rid of it"
"Well you can either dump it illegally or pay someone to get it recycled"
"Well, I don't want to break any laws or hurt the environment. Who do I contact? How much does it cost?"
"Ummm"
This is a good solution to a dilema that many face - how to recycle thier old computer stuff ethically. This makes it easy and relativly painless - it still seems rediculous to pay to recycle the stuff, but $15 is pretty good compared to going rates.
A Nielsen point is the percentage of televisions in the US that tuned into the show. So a 2 would mean that 2% of the households with televisions in the united states (or roughly 2 million televisions) had tuned into the show. (More information at the Nielsen FAQ.
For reference, the most popular TV show last week was CSI, followed by Monday Night football. CSI got 13 points, Monday Night Football 11 (data here). So though a 2 isn't blockbuster (the lowest scoring show in the top twenty got a 6), it is still impressive. I don't know if farscape can do it.
Phrack on Cell Phones in 1986
on
New Phrack
·
· Score: 1
Intrigued by this "phrack" I started reading through the archives and found this article from 1986 that was an overview of cellular telephone technology. This was an interesting paragraph:
Cellular Telephones come in two basic versions, as car phones and portable
phones, with a briefcase hybrid. Car phones are by far the most common,
because they are much cheaper. But most believe that, ultimately, portables
will be the most popular. Washington Post Company president Richard Simmons,
whose company is a partner in several cellular systems, even predicts that by
the early 1990's
"There will be phones roughly the size of a calculators that
you carry around in your pocket. They will cost no more than five hundred
dollars. They will emancipate people from the necessity of locating a phone to
make calls. The bad news is, you will never be able to get away from the phone,
and we'll call it progress."
It turns out these guys were predicting the future...
Last christmas the head of the physics department at my college had all the physics students and faculty over to his house for a christmas party... what did we do but sing physics christmas carols! Here is an example:
"STATIC EQUILIBRIUM" (sung to "Winter Wonderland") by Alvin Lee, Wakefield High School, Arlington VA, 1983
All my moments have cancelled,
sum of forces is equal,
I'm fully inert, and doing no work,
here in sta-tic e-qui-lib-ri-um.
Every push meets another,
every pull has a counter,
the state I allude is true lassitude,
here in sta-tic e-qui-lib-ri-um.
All my forces balance out exactly,
you can even put me to the test.
Push me out in any ole direction,
And you'll find I'll no longer be at rest.
Can't you see that I'm happy?
Sitting here, calm and mellow?
Don't want to go home,
So leave me alone,
here in sta-tic e-qui-lib-ri-um.
My physics professor maintains an archive of physics songs at physicssongs.org and it includes an impressive array of physics carols (where I copied the above song from)
It turns out that "a senior apple executive" offered Smith the standard employee discount if he wanted to buy a new powerbook G4. This story is covered in the register, where we learn:
But there's a happy ending: a senior Apple executive who Smith declined to name has offered him a coutesy employee discount on a spanking new G4 PowerBook. ®
At my College, we have a room full of cycled out computers, PIIs and 15 inch CRTs that are very usable, but are just sitting there in a heap in the basement.
We _try_ to donate them, but whenever we donate, we need the reciever to sign a contract holding _them_ liable for disposal costs, our legal department makes us do this, for good reasons, if the institutions we donate to dump the computers, and they are traced back to us, we have to pay huge fines.
Whenever we mention an agreement like that most of these organizations back away and look for thier computers elsewhere. They want nothing to do with disposal fees. About once a year we pay a lot of money to have all our old computers disposed of.
If the computer manufacturerers became liable for disposal costs, then we wouldn't have to worry about them, and we could donate the computers at will.
Err, that is "sit in my bed and control divx movies." I previewed twice - I promise!
Other nice things about wireless keyboards:
I can sit with my legs on my desk and my keyboard on my lap and my mouse by my side and play Warcraft III in relaxed comfort instead of a tense haunch.
I can put my keyboard in a shelf in my desk when I need to clear my (very small college dorm) desk space to put a linear algebra book on and do a problem set.
I can position my computer in a more convenient location since I am no longer constrained by the cable length of the keyboard - now just the length of the VGA cable.
I just picked up a Logitech Cordless Access Keyboard a week ago, and I am incredibly happy with it. The convenience of being able to sit in my bad and control divx movies in mplayer is great:-)
To avoid the chance of interference between cordless products, every Logitech cordless product integrates a 12-bit security ID, which allows the receiver to uniquely identify the emitter (i.e., the cordless device, itself) that it is listening to. The 12-bit ID provides 4096 unique combinations of digits, lowering the risk of interference to less than 0.25%. Additionally, in some Logitech cordless keyboards and mice, multi-channel RF technology allows the channel to be changed in the event of a conflict.
To further minimize the impact of the already uncommon conflict or interference, some Logitech cordless keyboards now include secure encryption that protects the security of the data being typed on and transmitted by the keyboard.
But I can't find any more details about this technology. So some logitech keyboard have encryption, some don't. I wonder how easy it is to add encryption to these thigns without latency. I don't want to press "a" and wait 2 seconds while the signal decrpyts for the a to appear on my screen. I wonder how simple or complex the encryption is on my cordless access keyboard. Is it a simple XOR like the AIM passwords or is it real encryption? I don't know. But frankly, I am not worried.
Bottom Line: zero encryption with 12-but ID codes is good enough for me. If someone really wanted to get at my credit card numbers, they would probobly come into my unlocked room and find my wallet with my credit card in it instead of building a device to pick up the radio signals from my keyboard. Logitech claims a.25% chance of interference, and as long as my keyboard work, that is also good enough for me.
Yeah, we have a deal with Dell and a deal with Apple, they give thier education discount rates to all the students we refer to them.
The default on all of Dell's setups now is a flat-screen, and if you are buying from thier website you have to deselect the lcd monitor and specifically select a CRT. With apple of course, you can only get an iMac in flatscreen (it is interesting to note that though several students did come in with nice new iMacs, none of them came in with the cheaper , CRT-Based eMacs)
Slashdot Mirror
Technology can certainly help us in times of need. The Mayor of New Orleans was able to order an evacuation, through the great telecommunication and media infrastructures that we have, people were able to be warned, which probably saved thousands of lives. I say this, because when natural disasters like this hit third world countries, there are many, many, many more deaths. So our communications infrastructure and other technologies DO HELP. Of course, we have had television and radio and the like for a while, an evacuation and warning like this would have been possible probably even 40 years ago. This catagory of technology would also include things like interstate highways, helicopters, boats, and the like, which help rescue operations get where they are needed. Another development we have that helps is a highly organized and functional government. George Bush can immediately grant disaster funding to these states and the rescue operations get moving. Without government direction and organization, it would take whatever volunteer goodwill organizations that go down there a lot longer to coordinate their efforts, and would be much less effective. It is true that the cell phones stop working when the power is cut to the tower, but the same is true for regular phones. But, the amazing thing is, to restore phone service we can fly a couple satellites, which is a lot easier than waiting for the water to recede and rebuild all the phone lines. So technology is helping in this case as well. A disaster like this does show us how powerful nature is, and that sometimes there is nothing we can do to stop a disaster, but we can do our best to minimize the tragedy.
I'd be interested in seeing slash-dot publish their readership percentages over time. I wonder if the overall percentage of slashdot readers that are on linux has gone down while the overall percentage on a mac have gone up.
I use t-Mobile, the second to lowest scoring provider. I havn't had that many service problems, with the exception of coverage. Thier coverage could be a lot better, but I use them over Verizon because of the quality of their customer service. It is really excellent, and customer service, to me, makes all the difference. What I would like to know is how to honestly figure out a cell phone companies coverage (other than taking their 7 day trials or whatever and walking your route, that is annoying). Like, how can I find a map of all the cell phone towers in and around Groton, Massachusetts, and which companies run them. Having such a map at my disposal would be far more useful than the "coverage maps" the companies hand out with the entire nation shaded red. I have heard that some of the mobile shops have these, but that they really aren't allowed to share them. Surely these towers' locations have to be registered somewhere
I know that many librarians, after the Patriot act was passed, started to destroy circulation records daily - it wasn't illegal for them to do it, and they felt very strongly that the government shouldn't be able to see what books people were getting. (Incidentally, this is a tragedy in some literary circles since a popular field of study in literature now is examining old library records from the 18th century onward to see which books were popular during eras past).
These big ISPs, comcast, earthlink, etc. offer unlimited plans, and have no need to record which account is mapped to which IP for anything longer than a day (just to ensure bandwidth usage isn't being abused or something). If they were to have a policy of discarding the records every day at midnight, it would save them hassle (what a pain in the neck it must be to recieve 200 lettes from the RIAA in the morning) and protect thier user's rights. How can they go wrong?
I don't usually complain about stories getting rejected, but I submitted this story more than 24 hours ago, when Hatch's site still hadn't been updated. I had heard about it on instapundit which had linked to the same blog that wired sites in its article: Laurence Simon's Amish Tech Support. I wonder why Slashdot waited until this story hit the mainsteam (wired) before covering it. I love slashdot, but I wish that the editors would be more willing to post stories that are breaking in the blogosphere, and not waiting until the mainstream press gets a hold of them until highlighting the story. :-(
There is no doubt that online services will cost extra for the developer (just the development costs alone are substantial) but I guess I feel that online play is a feature that will increase a games appeal and will thus help to sell more copies. X-Box live, I think, would be liberating to these developers. They can implement the feature and not worry about the costs and logistics of actually running a server. Their ongoing costs would be no more than if they were developing a PC game.
That's so true. This SpyMac thing really pissed me off cause it totally justifies the "treat the user as a criminal" approach that Apple is condeming.
It's just so lame - as other posts have mentioned, it's ineffective because it's streaming, so no one is gaining anything, but it is generating a ton of badwill for the "DRM light" approach that Apple is taking among the execs. It just proves that customers can't be trusted, which is incredibly sad.
I must say, it was pretty hot. I took it into class, I loaded up the journal program and took notes with it, I had the day's reading (which had been distributed via electronic reserve) loaded into acrobat reader, and it worked well. The best was, of course, the wireless internet, and as we were discussing the latest nigerian elections I was able to pull up nyt.com and report on the latest news from the region.
On the other hand, I found the handwriting recognition horrible (it's supposed to learn your handwriting as you use it, which is why it always works so well for the demo people). The process of converting my three pages of notes from the journal program to ascii text took about a half hour - it would have been faster to retype them. Battery was almost dead after a 2 hour class, and I couldn't have used it in more than one class. Taking notes is fine, cause you can clean it up later, but basic input is very difficult (entering nyt.com via handwriting took about 60 seconds, and then I had to enter my username and password - and since the password was **** starred out, I didn't really know whether it had correctly interpereted my handwriting until I got the big error screen from the times.
My conclusion: TabletPCs are the future for academic environments, but not for three or four generations of the products, and not until apple makes one :-p.
It would be the opposite of the current "exclude" feature. Right now, if I wanted to, I could exclude all games content from the front page, but what I want to do is pull _all_ games content on the front page, even if the editors didn't determine it to be front page worthy. I would do the same for the apple section. Currently I am limited to slashboxes, which I guess are good, but often they are wasted space since, for example, the apple section might go a day without news. If I could just integrate it all into the front page, I could then use more usefull slashboxes like poll, eff alerts, etc. Stuff that really looks like they belong in the boxes.
http://www.blackboard.com/docs/Statement_on_System _Security.pdf
PageRank _is_ democratic! The internet started talking about Moore's writing about "Second Superpower", linking to it, etc, and so it showed up on google, that only makes sense The high rank in google is justified because the majority of links on internet blogs with the text "second superpower" were pointing to moore's page. Google never claimed to be a measure of what THE WORLD was talking about, just a measure of what THE INTERNET is talking about, and that is precisly what it is doing here.
If the original coiners of the term want thier definition to be the top definition on the internet, then they should have thier own blogs where they talk about it, and democracy will take over in google's pagerank process, whichever sites get the most links will have a higher ranking.
Google is a COMPUTER it isn't making value judgements, it is just following a formulla that gives every website a vote.
Would it be possible for me to install yellow dog linux or linux PPC onto a partition on my G4, and boot to that partition, buy NWN for windows, and then install the linux client on my powerPC? Or would the client only work for linux running on x86 systems? If it would work, it is a very tempting reason to install linux, since I have drooled over this game since it came out for windows. I apologize if my question is stupid and this is clearly technically impossible, as I have a feeling it might be, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.
My experience with professors has been hit and miss. Sure, some are indeed technophobic, but more and more professors are becoming tech savy as they realise what computers can do for them. It begins with simple things like powerpoint presentations in class or e-mailing an interesting New York Times article to the students. Eventually professors really get excited about this computer stuff and eventually learn HTML to make class web pages or record thier lectures and put them online.
That aside, most colleges make it easy for even the most technophobic professors to use courseware. At my college the library handles all document sharing, so if a professor wants to put a document on electronic reserve, h/she just brings it to the library where workers (usually students on work-study) scan them in and put them online.
As professors realize the power of technology (and especially when their institutions make it easy for them to take advantage of) they become less and less scared of it and more and more excited about it.
"I have this old broken Monitor that I am going to replace - how can I get rid of it"
"Well you can either dump it illegally or pay someone to get it recycled"
"Well, I don't want to break any laws or hurt the environment. Who do I contact? How much does it cost?"
"Ummm"
This is a good solution to a dilema that many face - how to recycle thier old computer stuff ethically. This makes it easy and relativly painless - it still seems rediculous to pay to recycle the stuff, but $15 is pretty good compared to going rates.
For reference, the most popular TV show last week was CSI, followed by Monday Night football. CSI got 13 points, Monday Night Football 11 (data here). So though a 2 isn't blockbuster (the lowest scoring show in the top twenty got a 6), it is still impressive. I don't know if farscape can do it.
It turns out these guys were predicting the future...
"STATIC EQUILIBRIUM" (sung to "Winter Wonderland")
by Alvin Lee, Wakefield High School, Arlington VA, 1983
All my moments have cancelled,
sum of forces is equal,
I'm fully inert, and doing no work,
here in sta-tic e-qui-lib-ri-um.
Every push meets another,
every pull has a counter,
the state I allude is true lassitude,
here in sta-tic e-qui-lib-ri-um.
All my forces balance out exactly,
you can even put me to the test.
Push me out in any ole direction,
And you'll find I'll no longer be at rest.
Can't you see that I'm happy?
Sitting here, calm and mellow?
Don't want to go home,
So leave me alone,
here in sta-tic e-qui-lib-ri-um.
My physics professor maintains an archive of physics songs at physicssongs.org and it includes an impressive array of physics carols (where I copied the above song from)
We _try_ to donate them, but whenever we donate, we need the reciever to sign a contract holding _them_ liable for disposal costs, our legal department makes us do this, for good reasons, if the institutions we donate to dump the computers, and they are traced back to us, we have to pay huge fines.
Whenever we mention an agreement like that most of these organizations back away and look for thier computers elsewhere. They want nothing to do with disposal fees. About once a year we pay a lot of money to have all our old computers disposed of.
If the computer manufacturerers became liable for disposal costs, then we wouldn't have to worry about them, and we could donate the computers at will.
Other nice things about wireless keyboards:
I live in a dorm situation, so it is very possible kids who are nearbye will interfere/send keystrokes/recieve keystrokes from my computer. However, Logitech promises Cordless freedom through multi-channel digital radio technology with secure encryption.
Loitech assures us that the kind of stuff mentioned in the article cannot happen:
But I can't find any more details about this technology. So some logitech keyboard have encryption, some don't. I wonder how easy it is to add encryption to these thigns without latency. I don't want to press "a" and wait 2 seconds while the signal decrpyts for the a to appear on my screen. I wonder how simple or complex the encryption is on my cordless access keyboard. Is it a simple XOR like the AIM passwords or is it real encryption? I don't know. But frankly, I am not worried.Bottom Line: zero encryption with 12-but ID codes is good enough for me. If someone really wanted to get at my credit card numbers, they would probobly come into my unlocked room and find my wallet with my credit card in it instead of building a device to pick up the radio signals from my keyboard. Logitech claims a .25% chance of interference, and as long as my keyboard work, that is also good enough for me.
The default on all of Dell's setups now is a flat-screen, and if you are buying from thier website you have to deselect the lcd monitor and specifically select a CRT. With apple of course, you can only get an iMac in flatscreen (it is interesting to note that though several students did come in with nice new iMacs, none of them came in with the cheaper , CRT-Based eMacs)