I know someone who works at Symbian, and he gets all the phones to test before they are released. In November I think, he had a P800 with him, and I had a play... and I thought generally, it was a very nice piece of kit.
The thing that I think I was most impressed with was the handwriting recognition. I have really bad writing, and I've never liked any of the funny "Graffiti" methods or anything. All this had was some different strokes for "i" and punctuation really. But it works, quickly and reliably on my writing. That is very cool...
ALso, if you do lose the stylus, at a pinch, your finger works. And you can ditch the flip keyboard and leave it off, since all it does is press the touch screen. I thought it was a good idea doing this.
Still, I would never get one. I'm happy with my Trium 110, which does all I want it to, has two games which are better than other phones (useful for boredom on tube), and the battery lasts ages. It's taken a good hammering now as well, and works fine.
Hardware design tools tend to be extremely poor. Doing an EE degree, you get to use quite a few of them, and soon realise that no proper software engineer could have been involved in the design of these tools.
Shall I show some examples?
Open/Save/etc. dialogs that always start from the same directory (eg. something nested really deeply in the windows directory). This is common in programs which require you to open many files, eg. VHDL compilers.
Context senstive menu bars... Altera Max Plus does this. The menu bar changes depending which window you are in. It makes options that affect other windows only accessible from others. It changes the order of the menu bar. Very annoying.
Old style open/save dialog boxes from win 3.11 era that don't have Desktop and all those other buttons....
Meaningless errors all over the shop... they don't reflect on the design you are working on, but still, get in the way.
Ok/Cancel pop ups after every single stage in the compilation/simulation process. This would be good if it took hours and I wanted to stop it, but these things pop up, always in the centre of the screen, away from where you are using the mouse. Why?
Horrible visual design (Synplify)... the buttons on the screen are entirely random sizes. Looks like it was programmed by kids, there is no consistency between one screen and another, so you have to hunt for buttons.
Huge amounts of windows (Modelsim) - if you are simulating a design, you can end up with over 20 windows open, all seperate, and it gets very confusing, especially with some of them not having any informative information (such as the name of the file) on the taskbar button.
Assuming that you work at a given resolution (eg. 1024x768). Most development environments benefit greatly from being used on high resolutions... but when the designed of the software assumed you would use one resolution alone, you end up with tiny text, things that look very odd when maximised etc.
Different implementations of VHDL - what works in one compiler may not in others. This can lead to tearing hair out.
Stupidly expensive - some of these packages cost more than $10,000... you think they would work better.
I could go on and on and on...
Essentially, there are so many stupid, small mistakes in the user interfaces in these pieces of software, that it leads to people making mistakes. The less time you have to spend using them the better, so designs don't get tested or verified fully....
No, when something bad happens, it normally highlights smaller problems that all are part of the situation. So, instead of mourning the loss of 7 people who you probabky didn't know, which is futile, get something out of it.
I also don't understand why this is worse than other people who die in air crashes, as soldiers, in cars, or whatever. They've done something with their lives. Get over it.
It's no worse than the Challenger disaster, and certainly no worse than the Apollo fire. Those men died horrible, slow deaths, for no reason.
Yes, but what he is saying is that people are conditioned to like random bass noises, which is entirely true. They don't look for fidelity or anything else. People often turn up the volume so that the systems distorts badly, but it is loud, so they don't care.
Other people turn things up past distortion and like it because it is louder, which is all they seem to care about.
Yes, but what he is saying is that people are conditioned to like random bass noises, which is entirely true. They don't look for fidelity or anything else. People often turn up the volume so that the systems distorts badly, but it is loud, so they don't care.
The whole of Europe, where it was invented, call them LEGO bricks. It's the way it is. On slashdot, people pick holes in comments and stories all the time. This one comes up again and again and again. I thought I would point it out.
No, I don't use aspirin, because I am alergic to it. Band Aids, no, hardly anyone calls it that, they are plasters, and no, if a cut is so small you can use one, it doesn't need it. And we photocopy things over here, not xerox them.
And it's "arsehole" not asshole.
Can you not come up with a better insult than "sepia toothed". It's lame. Dental care has a less big impact on general health than being overweight, and that's something you lot have a big problem with.
I wasn't alive then, and I doubt you were either. So, no, you've done nothing for me. In fact, it would be fair to say that America is making the world more dangerous for the average person by the "war against terrorism".
By calling our culture a waste of space, you imply yours is to, as they are very similar. It just so happens that obesity, crime, and stupidity is less rife over here.
I care what I think, and don't give a shit what you think, unsurprisingly.
So, go lose some weight, get a new president, sort out your space program, and watch the thousands of hours of shit tv broadcast each day in the US.
Ok, there are a lot of replies here that seem to be saying that physical security, especially regarding locks, is not that important. You would be surprised.
Let's look at places that have master keyed systems:
Schools
Universities
Office blocks
Residential blocks
Shopping centres
Airports
Entertainment complexes
Etc.
So, it shouldn't be taken lightly that many master key systems are vulnerable to attack.
You can talk about your electronic lock systems all day, but most (at least in the UK) have a normal lock as part of them, with the electronic system for convenience and being able to tell who is where and when. If they don't have a normal lock in them, then they quite often have fire crash bars on the other side.
I haven't had a chance to read the paper yet, as the crypto.com site is slashdotted, as is the mirror I found. However, a lot of master key systems have vulnerabilities. For example:
Some keys have ridges down the sides. Sub master keys only differ from master keys in that they have these ridges, preventing them from being used in other parts of the building. File off the the ridges, and off you go.
Get two or more keys from a mastered building. Notice similarities and differences. It is often very easy to deduce the master key from this, because often the mastering works by pins having several splits in them.
These are extremely simple ways of finding masters. There is of course the fact that keys are often badly controlled, and unlike passwords, are not easy to change from a central location.
Security through obscurity is often a method used with locks. And it works reasonably well. I would say that lock picking is a far rarer skill than being able to use a computer well.
Some of the more recent lock systems (Assa, Schlage etc.) are very hard to copy, sometimes involving three separate mechanisms in the lock which all need to work. This is if you can obtain blanks. Some even involve small magnets. They are hard, if not impossible to pick as well.
More worrying, however, is the lack of physical strength in most doors. If you aren't afraid of leaving traces, opening most doors by force is remarkably easy. Yale locks (front door latches) often only take one kick to open. Even mortice locks are often badly installed and not that strong. Even if the lock holds up, the door, most of the time, won't hold up to a crowbar, or in desperate situations, an electric saw of any kind.
So, although I am sure that the technique presented in the paper has been around for years, it's going public big time now. We're going to have to welcome the script kiddies who practise on the real world soon.
If I had the manual I could tell you, but it only has these cryptic 7 segment words to say:
Phmid
Other things id
To be fair, you've got any number of:
Voltage (4 readings, PH1,2,3 and Neutral)
Current (4, same)
Power (3 types of, 3 phases)
Phase Angle (3 phases)
Power factor
Phase errors (such as running single phase on all 3 phases)
Average Current
Average Power (Seems to be some number which gives a guide to how much power is being used, it's an average across phases and time.)
So, there can be a lot. Not that we do any phase balancing or care, but...
Very few. Hmm. The little monitor on our distro shows about 40 different stats for 3 phase mains. And I have no idea what half of them mean. But then, on a seven segment inl1l2l3 woudln't strike me as average current, but it is....
Though thing is, when people say wattage, most of the time they mean power, because people who say it generally don't know the difference between Watts and kVA.
The comment I made earlier has started a right little discussion going. Not bad.
Ok, now, at least in countries and universities where a degree counts for something, to do an electronic engineering degree, you need a physics A-level or equivalent. You certainly need a science anyway. So you would know that water has a very high specific heat capacity.
If you know about thermal effects in electronics, it is fairly easy to work out that water is very effective at moving heat. I certainly learnt this in my first year of my degree.
You cannot be a electronic engineer if you don't understand thermal effects with regards to electronics. It's one of the most important performance limitations in a PC. It's important in most electronics, if not all, apart from muppet circuits you build on a 250 in one electronics lab.
Ok, I can't read the site because it is slashdotted, and yeah, you shouldn't trust these guys anyway, because of what they are doing.
But nonetheless, your logic is shit. I know HV electricians, pipe workers, welders, heavy plant operators, who don't even know what the internet is, but spend their lives doing stuff more dangerous that you can comprehend.
It constantly annoys me that geeks think that they know better than everyone else, just because they know the exact ins and outs of computers and networking. Yes, they are important... but there are far more important things in life.
Unless this is recent, this is just wrong. People are allowed to own Geiger Counters. Why wouldn't they be?
Maplin used to sell a kit until a few years ago to make one. Second hand militaty units are available on many sites. Scientific suppliers often carry them.
Also, a dosimeter is a different device to a Geiger counter. Is the watch still illegal?
I should imagine that if this were like anything else, then dealers would get in a lot more trouble than the buyer, and I have never heard of that happening.
No, this is a long way from the best system I have ever seen. I'm going to be harsh and say why...
What's with the shitty toggle switch "baybus" fan controllers? The site reports that the fans don't even start on the lowest speed. That isn't good engineering, and they shouldn't really ship a product like that. I would expect all the fans to be intelligently controlled by a microprocessor independant of the motherboard. This would include fan failure detection, CPU throttling etc.
They've put a live drive behind a door... erm, isn't that a little stupid? Now you're going to have to leave the door open all the time, or hack a hole in it, or not use the live drive.. oh well/
Raid 0 with no proper backup? I don't think so. I've seen far too many people lose data on raid 0 now to ever use it. At this kind of price, it would be nice to see two very fast and small scsi drives raided for a boot drive. Then larger IDE drives for data. But still no raid 0.
There seems to be some confusion about SCSI and IDE. People suddenly thought that IDE drives were better, especially in RAIDs... and it's plain wrong. SCSI is more reliable (the drives are built far better), it is faster, the bus is quicker. When you are doing things like photo or video editing, then having a fast page file and scratch disk is very important. SCSI has lower access and seek times, and the difference notices a hell of a lot.
The paint job looks pretty shite as well.
I just don't believe they are charging that much for this system. It's not amazing or anything.
Something that beats it? Go to The Overclocking Store and take a look at their Advance Micronics systems. Refigerator based cooling, complete systems, which are better configured and specced. You get an LCD and bluetooth mouse and keyboard for less than the system in the slashdot story. But...
They aren't coming anywhere near my girlfriends "analog hole".....
Re:220 isn't much more dangerous than 110
on
Hardware Bits
·
· Score: 2
You would be surprised at how much current can flow during fault conditions. For a fraction of a second, very, very, very big currents flow. It can cause fairly sizeable pieces of cable to vapourise.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Reverse domains haven't been used for years and years, and it was only for academic use, i.e. people who should know what they are doing.
E-mail at all universities is someone@*.ac.uk, not the other way round.
I know someone who works at Symbian, and he gets all the phones to test before they are released. In November I think, he had a P800 with him, and I had a play... and I thought generally, it was a very nice piece of kit.
The thing that I think I was most impressed with was the handwriting recognition. I have really bad writing, and I've never liked any of the funny "Graffiti" methods or anything. All this had was some different strokes for "i" and punctuation really. But it works, quickly and reliably on my writing. That is very cool...
ALso, if you do lose the stylus, at a pinch, your finger works. And you can ditch the flip keyboard and leave it off, since all it does is press the touch screen. I thought it was a good idea doing this.
Still, I would never get one. I'm happy with my Trium 110, which does all I want it to, has two games which are better than other phones (useful for boredom on tube), and the battery lasts ages. It's taken a good hammering now as well, and works fine.
Hardware design tools tend to be extremely poor. Doing an EE degree, you get to use quite a few of them, and soon realise that no proper software engineer could have been involved in the design of these tools.
Shall I show some examples?
Essentially, there are so many stupid, small mistakes in the user interfaces in these pieces of software, that it leads to people making mistakes. The less time you have to spend using them the better, so designs don't get tested or verified fully....
No, when something bad happens, it normally highlights smaller problems that all are part of the situation. So, instead of mourning the loss of 7 people who you probabky didn't know, which is futile, get something out of it.
I also don't understand why this is worse than other people who die in air crashes, as soldiers, in cars, or whatever. They've done something with their lives. Get over it.
It's no worse than the Challenger disaster, and certainly no worse than the Apollo fire. Those men died horrible, slow deaths, for no reason.
Can you not understand English?
"Sheesh"
Yes, but what he is saying is that people are conditioned to like random bass noises, which is entirely true. They don't look for fidelity or anything else. People often turn up the volume so that the systems distorts badly, but it is loud, so they don't care.
Other people turn things up past distortion and like it because it is louder, which is all they seem to care about.
Where did I suggest I like distorted sound?
Yes, but what he is saying is that people are conditioned to like random bass noises, which is entirely true. They don't look for fidelity or anything else. People often turn up the volume so that the systems distorts badly, but it is loud, so they don't care.
I think I may have annoyed you. Heh.
It's so funny how annoyed you lot get. And most of you are too chicken to actually post with a real name.
The whole of Europe, where it was invented, call them LEGO bricks. It's the way it is. On slashdot, people pick holes in comments and stories all the time. This one comes up again and again and again. I thought I would point it out.
No, I don't use aspirin, because I am alergic to it. Band Aids, no, hardly anyone calls it that, they are plasters, and no, if a cut is so small you can use one, it doesn't need it. And we photocopy things over here, not xerox them.
And it's "arsehole" not asshole.
Can you not come up with a better insult than "sepia toothed". It's lame. Dental care has a less big impact on general health than being overweight, and that's something you lot have a big problem with.
I wasn't alive then, and I doubt you were either. So, no, you've done nothing for me. In fact, it would be fair to say that America is making the world more dangerous for the average person by the "war against terrorism".
By calling our culture a waste of space, you imply yours is to, as they are very similar. It just so happens that obesity, crime, and stupidity is less rife over here.
I care what I think, and don't give a shit what you think, unsurprisingly.
So, go lose some weight, get a new president, sort out your space program, and watch the thousands of hours of shit tv broadcast each day in the US.
I refer you here and here (last page).
Both clearly state that "legos" is wrong. I was wrong by calling it Lego, it is LEGO. So?
Get it right you stupid Americans. Every sodding time there is a Lego story, you go round calling them "legos".
Lego is the name of the toy.
You have Lego bricks and Lego pieces. Not fucking Legos.
Ok?
Ok, there are a lot of replies here that seem to be saying that physical security, especially regarding locks, is not that important. You would be surprised.
Let's look at places that have master keyed systems:
So, it shouldn't be taken lightly that many master key systems are vulnerable to attack.
You can talk about your electronic lock systems all day, but most (at least in the UK) have a normal lock as part of them, with the electronic system for convenience and being able to tell who is where and when. If they don't have a normal lock in them, then they quite often have fire crash bars on the other side.
I haven't had a chance to read the paper yet, as the crypto.com site is slashdotted, as is the mirror I found. However, a lot of master key systems have vulnerabilities. For example:
Some keys have ridges down the sides. Sub master keys only differ from master keys in that they have these ridges, preventing them from being used in other parts of the building. File off the the ridges, and off you go.
Get two or more keys from a mastered building. Notice similarities and differences. It is often very easy to deduce the master key from this, because often the mastering works by pins having several splits in them.
These are extremely simple ways of finding masters. There is of course the fact that keys are often badly controlled, and unlike passwords, are not easy to change from a central location.
Security through obscurity is often a method used with locks. And it works reasonably well. I would say that lock picking is a far rarer skill than being able to use a computer well.
Some of the more recent lock systems (Assa, Schlage etc.) are very hard to copy, sometimes involving three separate mechanisms in the lock which all need to work. This is if you can obtain blanks. Some even involve small magnets. They are hard, if not impossible to pick as well.
More worrying, however, is the lack of physical strength in most doors. If you aren't afraid of leaving traces, opening most doors by force is remarkably easy. Yale locks (front door latches) often only take one kick to open. Even mortice locks are often badly installed and not that strong. Even if the lock holds up, the door, most of the time, won't hold up to a crowbar, or in desperate situations, an electric saw of any kind.
So, although I am sure that the technique presented in the paper has been around for years, it's going public big time now. We're going to have to welcome the script kiddies who practise on the real world soon.
If I had the manual I could tell you, but it only has these cryptic 7 segment words to say: Phmid Other things id To be fair, you've got any number of: Voltage (4 readings, PH1,2,3 and Neutral) Current (4, same) Power (3 types of, 3 phases) Phase Angle (3 phases) Power factor Phase errors (such as running single phase on all 3 phases) Average Current Average Power (Seems to be some number which gives a guide to how much power is being used, it's an average across phases and time.) So, there can be a lot. Not that we do any phase balancing or care, but...
Very few. Hmm. The little monitor on our distro shows about 40 different stats for 3 phase mains. And I have no idea what half of them mean. But then, on a seven segment inl1l2l3 woudln't strike me as average current, but it is....
Though thing is, when people say wattage, most of the time they mean power, because people who say it generally don't know the difference between Watts and kVA.
The comment I made earlier has started a right little discussion going. Not bad.
Ok, now, at least in countries and universities where a degree counts for something, to do an electronic engineering degree, you need a physics A-level or equivalent. You certainly need a science anyway. So you would know that water has a very high specific heat capacity.
If you know about thermal effects in electronics, it is fairly easy to work out that water is very effective at moving heat. I certainly learnt this in my first year of my degree.
You cannot be a electronic engineer if you don't understand thermal effects with regards to electronics. It's one of the most important performance limitations in a PC. It's important in most electronics, if not all, apart from muppet circuits you build on a 250 in one electronics lab.
For fuck's sake, this is a geek's site. Learn your shit properly.
THERE ARE NO SUCH WORDS AS AMPERAGE AND WATTAGE
AMPERAGE is actually CURRENT
WATTAGE is actually POWER
Ok, I can't read the site because it is slashdotted, and yeah, you shouldn't trust these guys anyway, because of what they are doing.
But nonetheless, your logic is shit. I know HV electricians, pipe workers, welders, heavy plant operators, who don't even know what the internet is, but spend their lives doing stuff more dangerous that you can comprehend.
It constantly annoys me that geeks think that they know better than everyone else, just because they know the exact ins and outs of computers and networking. Yes, they are important... but there are far more important things in life.
Unless this is recent, this is just wrong. People are allowed to own Geiger Counters. Why wouldn't they be?
Maplin used to sell a kit until a few years ago to make one. Second hand militaty units are available on many sites. Scientific suppliers often carry them.
Also, a dosimeter is a different device to a Geiger counter. Is the watch still illegal?
I should imagine that if this were like anything else, then dealers would get in a lot more trouble than the buyer, and I have never heard of that happening.
No, this is a long way from the best system I have ever seen. I'm going to be harsh and say why...
What's with the shitty toggle switch "baybus" fan controllers? The site reports that the fans don't even start on the lowest speed. That isn't good engineering, and they shouldn't really ship a product like that. I would expect all the fans to be intelligently controlled by a microprocessor independant of the motherboard. This would include fan failure detection, CPU throttling etc.
They've put a live drive behind a door... erm, isn't that a little stupid? Now you're going to have to leave the door open all the time, or hack a hole in it, or not use the live drive.. oh well/
Raid 0 with no proper backup? I don't think so. I've seen far too many people lose data on raid 0 now to ever use it. At this kind of price, it would be nice to see two very fast and small scsi drives raided for a boot drive. Then larger IDE drives for data. But still no raid 0.
There seems to be some confusion about SCSI and IDE. People suddenly thought that IDE drives were better, especially in RAIDs... and it's plain wrong. SCSI is more reliable (the drives are built far better), it is faster, the bus is quicker. When you are doing things like photo or video editing, then having a fast page file and scratch disk is very important. SCSI has lower access and seek times, and the difference notices a hell of a lot.
The paint job looks pretty shite as well.
I just don't believe they are charging that much for this system. It's not amazing or anything.
Something that beats it? Go to The Overclocking Store and take a look at their Advance Micronics systems. Refigerator based cooling, complete systems, which are better configured and specced. You get an LCD and bluetooth mouse and keyboard for less than the system in the slashdot story. But...
I'm normally bored of a porn mag by the time the pages are stuck together. So I can't really see the point.
Anyway, not being able to wipe it off just adds character. And it helps to stop other people stealing your porn.
They aren't coming anywhere near my girlfriends "analog hole".....
You would be surprised at how much current can flow during fault conditions. For a fraction of a second, very, very, very big currents flow. It can cause fairly sizeable pieces of cable to vapourise.