recall that apple just patented a design for an oversized PDA/ undersized tablet. But what processor wwould it use. there are no ultra-low-power Power PC chips. On the other hand Apple loves the ARM chip (which they pioneered for the Newton and later sold to intel)
Few articles have speculated on what chip they will use. I can think of two possibly three. Itanium, pentium-M and some unannounced response to the Cell processor.
The case for the Itanium is that the reason it failed in the Wintel world was the difficulty of programming for it, notably its ramant use of out of order instruction capability. And when Windows did not really embrace it that was the death sentence. But Apple has a unique position of controlling the hardware and the OS. Thus they could potentially master this beast. Going Itanium could let them leapfrog the x86 world and have more headroom for growth. I also wonder if the itanium has, like the Power series, support for both big/little endian, thus making the transition easier?
Pentium-M. Well this is no brainer. They need a new chip for the laptop and there's none on the horizon. The interesting thing here is that if they went with a hybrid strategy of Pentium-M in the laptops and G5 in the desktops they have a good transistion strategy available. The graphic artisits and application-specific power users will not settle for emulation of their favorite applications. Thus they have to keep G5 on the desktop till all the applications like Photoshop and Maya have swithced over.. But that class of folks wont be using Laptops as their main machine. And the laptop users might be well satisfied with a fast pentium-M machine that occasionally had to run some applications in a slower emulation mode.
Surely intel has some response to the Cell. Are they going to cede the entire video game/ digital hub market to xbox, sony and the cell? I suspect not. But to enter that market they need a partner. And who better than the maker of the ipod and the only company with a coherent home digital hub strategy (think iLife). Well that would be apple. You cant argue market share dictates windows since the ipod proves that wrong and Microsoft already has its bets on the xbox.
So maybe this is about a video console and not about general purpose computers???
Why is everybody so convinced that electronic voting machines don't work? My town has had electronic voting machines for a decade with no problems.
1) how do you know they work?
2) how do you know the errors are not intermittent?
It's a well proven fact that misporgrammed voting machines have made serious errors. The sad thing is we only know about the ones that are so spectacular they get noticed.
We require all public meetings to be open and notes kept. We dont allow any secret laws on the books. Why should we settle for closed source software?
The sodtware in these things is not that sophisticated. Not a lot more to it than a vending machine and a data base. Thus there are no trade secret justifications for keeping it closed.
However unlike a vending machine, the transactions on a voting machine are secret. economic transactions always traceable. Buy something on line and you know if the package arrived. Deposit your check and you can check the bank statement. But with voting its intended that no one can reverse engnieer your vote after you step away from the machine.
Thus one has to have more than an "accurate" machine. It has to be provably accurate. Pure electronic transactions cannot meet that criteria and they cannot be trusted on faith without open source.
For all we know most voting machines work fine. But we do know that some do not. And we do know that there are many close elections. and we do know there are even more upset elections with unexpected outcomes.
This is not a good situation to be in. The essence of democracy is not in the voting or the vote counitng as some have said. The true essence is in the willingness of the loser to believe they were proven wrong byt the outcome. For that you need to instill confidence in the process--even when you personally think it is not neccessary. Voting has to be both secret and transparent
Their other numbers seem to corroborate the virus-based estimate if you assume that windows users dont pirate most of their software and you assume that the number of computers per user is the same.
According to US News and World Report, Macintosh owners buy 30% more software than their Windows counterparts. Further, Macintosh software comprises over 18% of all software sold, according to the Software and Information Industry Association.
I find these numbers more convincing since the sales figures on software are directly quantifiable if you assume that the levels of piracy on windows and macintosh are comparable. For example lets' assume no one pirates software.
in that case if the install base was about 13.5% then if mac users buy 30% more software per machine then that brings the purchase rate to about 18%.
Yet the google zeitgeist put the number somewhere closer to 5%. How to we explain this? Well what if windows users typically had more computers? maybe at work they have a windows desktop and a laptop AND THEY SHARE THE SOFTWARE, whereas the home macintosh user has only a single computer. In that case there could be more Windows machines yet less software sold per machine.
Then one can asume that home windows computers may pirate more software.
SO maybe this explains the difference. People replace windows machines more often and keep the old ones around. Macs tend to have longer useful lives and less "bit rot" characteristic of an aging dll and registry poisoned windows machine and so when you replace them they are truly outdated and get junked.
So for a given rms voltage level, the lower the resistance the greater the power dissipated.
Of course that's not the end of the story. One could always simply raise the voltages on the higher impedance headphones and thereby equalize the power. But for battery powered gizmhos the maximum voltage is slightly costly to produce since voltage multiplication of the battery voltage invariably has higher losses. Conversely one does not want to go to too low of a voltage either since one looses two ways there: first the fixed 0.7v diode drops across transistors become significant and second because ohmic losses in transformers and wires go up as the current goes up.
So there really is not strict relationship between resistance, power and goodness.
magine the climactic effects, and effects on the oceans ecosystems
Now, here you make a good point.
No you have it utterly wrong.
imagine you have a certain power need to produce electricity, get water, and grow crops.
now you can create this by burning fossil fuels. This dumps all this power into waste heat and thus changes the worlds tempeature by the equivalent amount.
now imagine you create this power by extracting it from sea water. Well you have first dissipated less heat. second to the extent that this is sustainable (given solar heating) there is no net heat generated whatsoever.
you have homenized the ocean. But if this is sustainable the solar energy should act to restore this. that is to say the net process is this.
1) heat is absorbed from the sun
2) some of this heat goes into reducing the entropy of the ocean by segregating the hot and cold water. the remainder is radiated away in equilibrium. (this has to be true since we are in equilibrium)
3) you can extract work by increasing the entropy of the ocean. mixing it.
4) the solar energy will now act to restore the segregation and less will be reflected.
5) a new equilibrium will be established. but this may not require a large or unsustainable change in ocean temperature.
the question is how much is too much. if the oceans cool just a few degrees on average this could reduce the amount of evaporation and hence the total rainfall on the earth. it would reduce rain transport to the polls shrinking the ice packs. which would change many other things. So the question is how much is too much.
the good news is human power consumption is a fraction of what the total solar flux provides. and since we are now producing less heat frm fossil fuels than before there are other nice benefits. there certainly will be no global warmning!
worse comes to worse one could induce global warming to try to offset the global ocean cooling. Basically our we could create a thermostat.
Prices Differ; profit margin is huge..
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've never understood the range of prices in mice. Should I really believe the most expencive optical mouse cost $5 more to make and distribute than the cheapest mouse? With the microsoft mouse it seems like they get larger and more sculpted as the price zooms higher but I can't believe the price would be any different. If you want to say well there's a lot of research in those sculpted mice shapes then I say, well okay but it would cost no extra to make all the mice that way.
the profit margin on these given the price range must be 400%. So these things probably earn more per unit than selling a dell shitbox, and x-box or maybe even an ipod.
Here is the man page from my macintosh OSX for open SSL
OPENSSL
NAME openssl - OpenSSL command line tool
DESCRIPTION OpenSSL is a cryptography toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) network protocols and related cryptography standards required by them.
The openssl program is a command line tool for using the various cryptography functions of OpenSSL's crypto library from the shell. It can be used for
Creation of RSA, DH and DSA key parameters
Creation of X.509 certificates, CSRs and CRLs
Calculation of Message Digests --->Encryption and Decryption with Ciphers
SSL/TLS Client and Server Tests
Handling of S/MIME signed or encrypted mail
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Here is one way you could collect a ransom nearly untracably, at least on a small scale.
Require the victim to send you valuable information or perform a valuable service instead of cash. For example, ask them to buy a new copy of adobe photoshop or windows and send the registration keys. Now you can resell this on e-bay or wherever as a legimate copy.
If you were an eco-terrorist you could require them to give a donation to the sierra club or the red-cross disaster relief or donate to president bush's re-election and provide a recepit.
if you were out for revenge or a pervert, you could ask them to post a nude picture of themselves.
you could ask them to buy a large quantity of a stock with few outstanding shares. Do this enough times and you could drive the price up.
I frequently use steganography to write down my passwords and pins. I take and old, legitimate document or drawing and write my password into it in a way that it does not stick out like a sore thumb. I'm also not stupid enough to make the password a single word in the document. (otherwsie someone could do a dictionary attack using the keywords from a desktop search database. Instead I'll break it up into several peices and put them in places that make sesne to me but no one else. That is to say, since I wrote the document it's easy for me to see what does not belong. For example, pehaps the zipcode is wrong for my address. Further by using phonem type passwords it's very easy to incorporate these into other words.
I highly reccomend this. It beats the tape dispensor method. you can cary the document with you on a USB key. and if you are paranoid you can even encrypt the document with a master password or use a biometric USB key.
Everyone speculates that laundering the money will be hard. Perhaps not so hard really. This happens daily on E-bay with the western union scams. Apparentyl none of those are ever traced so why not these?
As for tracing the e-mail well that wont work either: again people do this all the time on e-bay rip offs and none of those get traced.
besides which the attacker might very well be logging your keystrokes and simply watching for you to send any text continaing a fake address he gave you, then sending this real text somewhere else. Fat chance you would notice this in time to do anything about it. He just picks off the western union number, then pays some street urchin to go collect for him.
or you could rig this as sort of a two part thing. One is to have the virus encrypt the files. then "coincidentally" this spam e-mail comes offer to sell you a universal decoder program for the low price of 49.99$. THe company could be legitimate in the same sense that McAffee is legit. They just sell decryption tools. Sure they might be suspect but some company IS going to crack this and when they do they are going to SELL the decoder. The evil-doer merely has to be one of many companies offer this product for sale. It would be in his interest to leak the decoding method just so those decoy compamies would appear.
Let's see, do you get paid $50 to 100/hour like most of your sys admin peers? if so then buying that, pressing install, and doing something else was well worth it compared to say trying to located download and resolve all the dependencies of a linux upgrade. But we both know this was not what was meant by a patch. Still I glad you made my point for me.
By any logic macs are therefore the cheapest to patch. They are partly open source like Linux and yet run in a consistent distribution and platform like windows--actually it's even more consistent. And a large company is actively patching many things for you.
Of course whether linux or mac or windows is cheaper despends upon what is meant by patch. You mean some CUSTOM kernel patch to let it talk to some non standard company tcip system? or do you mean fix a bug? or do you mean downlaod and apply a patch (e.g. software update).
the meaning of those varies. Few would consdier or have the knowledge to tinker with the Windows kernel, but the Linux kernel is more open. Still that's a realm for the hardest core programmers, not user or even most software developers. Applying a patch someone else wrote is entirely another matter. That's certainly going to be easier in a consistent distribution. But it's more likely to exist for linux sooner than for windows.
With macs you have the best of these. See you on the fan-boy list!
Walmart had 100,000 customers. netflix has ow shouldhave about 4 million paying customers. so this addition of customers is lost in the noise: a 2.5% increase. Plus they are paying less than the ususal so it even costs netflix some money to buy them!
The nice thing for net flix is the cross marketing.
The Nytimes is for people with a brain and not seeking titilation. The columnists there defined the talking points of most politically active people. Sure there's the washington post and the LA times which shines in invesitgative news but not so much in analysis or quantity of elite columninsts.
Of course many people liek USA today, wired and salon for quick adrenline producing flash-in-the pan news story. Get that dopmine perk then forget what you just read cause it contained only information and mabe some extrapolative speculation but no serious analysis. That's the distraction you seek, your brain emits some domapmine as a reward.
One the other hand look to the times to tell you in depth penetrating detail the nuances of polotics and regulation and the things that believe it or not actually affect your standard of living more than next nintendo or future shock piece in wired.
Want to interpret what the heck is going on in the middle east. Who yuo gonna read first: freidman or some pre-pubesent web site or god forbid fox news?
Since this comment exceed three paragraphs I seriously doubt you even read it.
If As Seen on TV is to be believed there were two key points he made. 1) the continous run life of an ipod disk is measured in hours. mp3 and tiny photo loads are quick and played from cache. Movie playing would be real time streaming from disk and would kill it.
2) watch the airport express.
3) video is immersive and people dont do it on the GO (aside from cars which again are sedentary)
The key I think is 2. As Cringley observed, the mac mini does not need an optical audio jack because it's on the airport express. And the mac mini does not need the HDTV horse power since that too can be offloaded to a custom $20 chip. Thus the mac mini is the internet download appliance and storage center. the processing power will be be custom and hence the need for a standard.
But I think there is an even more important reason to offload the decoding to hardware. DRM. forget what you feel about DRM and just ask what would be the best way to do it.
You dont want to do it on a custom reconfigurable computer. Because as we have seen repeatedly this means that you can intercept the digital decode step and rip a perfect copy with no DRM.
Microsoft is trying to use paladium and now Janus to move the decode step out to a remote piece of trusted hardware closer to the delivery point, and most importantly away from the compute program.
an airport express like device would serve.
The trouble in implementing a real airport express would be the badnwidth needed. Can wireless support real time video streams. It certainly cant if the video stream is uncompressed. thus if it is to work it has to be sent compressed. so once again we are led back to the decoding at the airport express not at the computer.
so I suspect all the clues about some modular video device are really about a new airport express module and not a video ipod
When I have downloaded application containing widgets they all came packaged as Zip files. the OS warned me that the file I was downloading contained an application. Safari then unzipped and the widget was autoinstalled into the dashbar. The first time I ran it it said this is the first time you are running this and gave me a warning dialog before executing it.
So really I had my warnings. If you are worried that people get inured to click through warnings then you might as well worry about people running any application they downloaded.
The only thing that was even vaguely troubling was that it was never stated the item would be auto-installed in the dashboard. Thus even though I was not in danger of running something I did not ask for, I was in danger of installing something in the dashbar I did not understand that I was approving when I allowed it to unzip.
So the advisory you want is pretty pointless. if people dont listen to the warnings of their own computer then why an advisory. The advisory is more likely just to make people needlessly fearful.
audio cassette tapes worked MOST of the time. But they were lower quality and more prone to damage. Also the data cassettes did not have a blank leader tape. thus you could start recording the moment you turned them on and not have to wait some period of time after a rewind to start recording. Finally when the recorder was controlled by the computer and not the human pushing buttons it could rewind and seek by itself. At that time audio grade readhead were not reccomended for fast forwarding the tape as they would be destroyed by wear. computer readheads were hardened.
but in simple fact for simple storage needs audio tapes and recorders sis work well. but there was a slightly higher risk of data loss.
I worked in a computer shop selling computers at the time the apple II came on the scene. The brands around then were Imsai, cromenco, Sol, Northside, and even an altair if you wanted one. With the exception of the comodore pet, they all ran on 8080, 8085 or Z-80.
All had traditional power gobbling transfomer-rectifier-capacitor power supplies. If they had a bus it was an enornmous S-100 bus. None had memory mapped I/O or could interleave graphics and text. If they had disks, they were hard sectored disks. And most important of all none used Dynamic memory natively. You could buy dynamic memory cards as S-100 plug ins but they were not reliable.
Unlike the 8080/Z-80 the 6502 had a symmetric instruction clock cycle and all so there was a free cycle where memory woas gaurenteed not to be accessed every other cycle dependably. (not true of the 8080) This meant you could use that interval to refresh the dynamic ram. Thus one never had to insert wait states or have flaky thing happen when there was an irregular refresh rate. It simply worked.
But Wozniak and co, were even more clever. Why waste that clock refresh? since the duration was the same as the regular memory fecth time, they made it a full fetch. But what fetch that had to increment repetiviely over the upper 8 bits of address space would be useful? The video memory! so they backsided the video memory fetch on that.
Contrary to today having memory mapped video was better than having th e video memory on a graphics card. On most grpahic cards when the CPU was accessing the memory they video card could no and you saw glitches. thus video updates were usualy timed by the CPU to occur in thehorizonatal and veritcal re-trace blanking intervals. very clumsy and slow.
Apple used a switching power supply. the first I had ever seen. it was small, and took up no room. the imsai, altair, cromenco and northside computer were huge and half of them were the power supply. some of the capacitors in those were 8 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. The switching powersupply made this thing a lighe weight "desktop" freindly unit. you could pick it up and easily move it.
It was partly the use of dynamic memory instead of static memory that made this possible. The power draw on static memory is enourmous. and the memory density on static memory was tiny. plus it was very expensive. it consumed most of the mother board. Today's computers would not be possible without it.
I assumed the apple II was a toy when I saw it's teeny tiny plug-in buss cards. until I looked at it's design. svelt memory mapped cards. all the address space decoding was done by the mother board so you didn't have to waste repetative logic on each card decoding it's own address. same with the power regulation. The switich power supply also gave lower ripple so less regulation was needed.
When apple came out with a disk it was the first reliable soft sectored floppy. I had sold lots of softsectored (8") floppies made by others and saw most of them come back too. Who wants an unrelaible storage system. The apple one worked. and soft secotring made it cheap since it had almost no added electorinics on board. It was all driven from software.
Then of course there was the choice of the 6502. it was a breath fo freshair compared to the 8080. It piplined the next instruction. it used relative jump extensively (calucalting an offset based on a register value not the hardwired instruction). It only had an accumulator and three registers. All the rest were memory mapped to the first 256 bytes of memory. So effectively it had enough registers you could really do something. the 8080 was hamstrung and register bound. and because of the pipelining the 6502 didn't lose any speed for the memory fetch using memory mapped registers.
However even then the MHZ myth was strong. people thought a 4Mhz intel must be faster than a 1Mhz 6502. It was not. nearly all the 8080 instructions were 3 to 5 clock cycles in length
If you read to discussion on the so-called eploit then you would have read this too:
"Aside from the fundamentally critical nature of the exploit, it is however important to note that successful exploitation requires that the site is allowed to install software (the only sites which are allowed these privileges by default are "update.mozilla.org" and "addons.mozilla.org"). ie. you need to have whitelisted the exploit site in order for the exploit to work."
So in other words there is no exploit at all. none whatsoever. it's no more of an exploit than granting a java script installer elevated privledges or accepting a security ceritfication. Bot of those require you to acknowledge what you are doing is granting a site elevated privledges to access your local file system.
whoop-te-doo. The only thin news worthy here is that this pathway to doing this was unintentional. But fortunately the attacker has to be someone you granted install privs to, not just any site you visit.
this is not the security exploit you're looking for. move along.
In principle one pixel would be enough, if you could pan your head and remember what you saw at each pixel. With 16 pixels this is simplified. Your 4096x1024 pixel scanner on your desktop does not have 4 mllion sensors, it has just 1/4000th of that number: 1024 and it uses them in a pushbroom fashion. Those 360 degree pan cameras also just use a narrow slit they push broom. Same with many sattelites.
the question is whether your brain is up to of synthesizing a image from a pan and deconvolving the large pixels down to high resolution. There's some evidence it might be able to synthesize the image from the pan since it already does that for your blind spot. And the ganglia in the eyeball do some deconvolution already so that might be possible too.
I guess we'll find out when the blind people tell us.
Slashdot Mirror
recall that apple just patented a design for an oversized PDA/ undersized tablet. But what processor wwould it use. there are no ultra-low-power Power PC chips. On the other hand Apple loves the ARM chip (which they pioneered for the Newton and later sold to intel)
The Itanium supports both big and little endian. thus switching to this processor would be simpler than X86.
The case for the Itanium is that the reason it failed in the Wintel world was the difficulty of programming for it, notably its ramant use of out of order instruction capability. And when Windows did not really embrace it that was the death sentence. But Apple has a unique position of controlling the hardware and the OS. Thus they could potentially master this beast. Going Itanium could let them leapfrog the x86 world and have more headroom for growth. I also wonder if the itanium has, like the Power series, support for both big/little endian, thus making the transition easier?
Pentium-M. Well this is no brainer. They need a new chip for the laptop and there's none on the horizon. The interesting thing here is that if they went with a hybrid strategy of Pentium-M in the laptops and G5 in the desktops they have a good transistion strategy available. The graphic artisits and application-specific power users will not settle for emulation of their favorite applications. Thus they have to keep G5 on the desktop till all the applications like Photoshop and Maya have swithced over.. But that class of folks wont be using Laptops as their main machine. And the laptop users might be well satisfied with a fast pentium-M machine that occasionally had to run some applications in a slower emulation mode.
Surely intel has some response to the Cell. Are they going to cede the entire video game/ digital hub market to xbox, sony and the cell? I suspect not. But to enter that market they need a partner. And who better than the maker of the ipod and the only company with a coherent home digital hub strategy (think iLife). Well that would be apple. You cant argue market share dictates windows since the ipod proves that wrong and Microsoft already has its bets on the xbox.
So maybe this is about a video console and not about general purpose computers???
1) how do you know they work?
2) how do you know the errors are not intermittent?
It's a well proven fact that misporgrammed voting machines have made serious errors. The sad thing is we only know about the ones that are so spectacular they get noticed.
We require all public meetings to be open and notes kept. We dont allow any secret laws on the books. Why should we settle for closed source software?
The sodtware in these things is not that sophisticated. Not a lot more to it than a vending machine and a data base. Thus there are no trade secret justifications for keeping it closed.
However unlike a vending machine, the transactions on a voting machine are secret. economic transactions always traceable. Buy something on line and you know if the package arrived. Deposit your check and you can check the bank statement. But with voting its intended that no one can reverse engnieer your vote after you step away from the machine.
Thus one has to have more than an "accurate" machine. It has to be provably accurate. Pure electronic transactions cannot meet that criteria and they cannot be trusted on faith without open source.
For all we know most voting machines work fine. But we do know that some do not. And we do know that there are many close elections. and we do know there are even more upset elections with unexpected outcomes.
This is not a good situation to be in. The essence of democracy is not in the voting or the vote counitng as some have said. The true essence is in the willingness of the loser to believe they were proven wrong byt the outcome. For that you need to instill confidence in the process--even when you personally think it is not neccessary. Voting has to be both secret and transparent
According to US News and World Report, Macintosh owners buy 30% more software than their Windows counterparts. Further, Macintosh software comprises over 18% of all software sold, according to the Software and Information Industry Association.
I find these numbers more convincing since the sales figures on software are directly quantifiable if you assume that the levels of piracy on windows and macintosh are comparable. For example lets' assume no one pirates software.
in that case if the install base was about 13.5% then if mac users buy 30% more software per machine then that brings the purchase rate to about 18%.
Yet the google zeitgeist put the number somewhere closer to 5%. How to we explain this? Well what if windows users typically had more computers? maybe at work they have a windows desktop and a laptop AND THEY SHARE THE SOFTWARE, whereas the home macintosh user has only a single computer. In that case there could be more Windows machines yet less software sold per machine.
Then one can asume that home windows computers may pirate more software.
SO maybe this explains the difference. People replace windows machines more often and keep the old ones around. Macs tend to have longer useful lives and less "bit rot" characteristic of an aging dll and registry poisoned windows machine and so when you replace them they are truly outdated and get junked.
No! No! No! No!
Remember Ohm's law: V= IR
voltage equals current times resistance.
and power is voltage * current.
so power = voltage*voltage/resistance
So for a given rms voltage level, the lower the resistance the greater the power dissipated.
Of course that's not the end of the story. One could always simply raise the voltages on the higher impedance headphones and thereby equalize the power. But for battery powered gizmhos the maximum voltage is slightly costly to produce since voltage multiplication of the battery voltage invariably has higher losses. Conversely one does not want to go to too low of a voltage either since one looses two ways there: first the fixed 0.7v diode drops across transistors become significant and second because ohmic losses in transformers and wires go up as the current goes up.
So there really is not strict relationship between resistance, power and goodness.
can you explain what that says?
Now that's a good video. I'm assuming it's a ballon on an RC controlled plane. Good presentation!
Now, here you make a good point.
No you have it utterly wrong. imagine you have a certain power need to produce electricity, get water, and grow crops.
now you can create this by burning fossil fuels. This dumps all this power into waste heat and thus changes the worlds tempeature by the equivalent amount.
now imagine you create this power by extracting it from sea water. Well you have first dissipated less heat. second to the extent that this is sustainable (given solar heating) there is no net heat generated whatsoever.
you have homenized the ocean. But if this is sustainable the solar energy should act to restore this. that is to say the net process is this.
1) heat is absorbed from the sun
2) some of this heat goes into reducing the entropy of the ocean by segregating the hot and cold water. the remainder is radiated away in equilibrium. (this has to be true since we are in equilibrium)
3) you can extract work by increasing the entropy of the ocean. mixing it.
4) the solar energy will now act to restore the segregation and less will be reflected.
5) a new equilibrium will be established. but this may not require a large or unsustainable change in ocean temperature.
the question is how much is too much. if the oceans cool just a few degrees on average this could reduce the amount of evaporation and hence the total rainfall on the earth. it would reduce rain transport to the polls shrinking the ice packs. which would change many other things. So the question is how much is too much.
the good news is human power consumption is a fraction of what the total solar flux provides. and since we are now producing less heat frm fossil fuels than before there are other nice benefits. there certainly will be no global warmning!
worse comes to worse one could induce global warming to try to offset the global ocean cooling. Basically our we could create a thermostat.
the profit margin on these given the price range must be 400%. So these things probably earn more per unit than selling a dell shitbox, and x-box or maybe even an ipod.
Here is the man page from my macintosh OSX for open SSL
OPENSSL
NAME openssl - OpenSSL command line tool
DESCRIPTION OpenSSL is a cryptography toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) network protocols and related cryptography standards required by them.
The openssl program is a command line tool for using the various cryptography functions of OpenSSL's crypto library from the shell. It can be used for
Creation of RSA, DH and DSA key parameters
Creation of X.509 certificates, CSRs and CRLs
Calculation of Message Digests
--->Encryption and Decryption with Ciphers
SSL/TLS Client and Server Tests
Handling of S/MIME signed or encrypted mail
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Here is one way you could collect a ransom nearly untracably, at least on a small scale.
Require the victim to send you valuable information or perform a valuable service instead of cash. For example, ask them to buy a new copy of adobe photoshop or windows and send the registration keys. Now you can resell this on e-bay or wherever as a legimate copy.
If you were an eco-terrorist you could require them to give a donation to the sierra club or the red-cross disaster relief or donate to president bush's re-election and provide a recepit.
if you were out for revenge or a pervert, you could ask them to post a nude picture of themselves.
you could ask them to buy a large quantity of a stock with few outstanding shares. Do this enough times and you could drive the price up.
it's as untracable as can be.
I frequently use steganography to write down my passwords and pins. I take and old, legitimate document or drawing and write my password into it in a way that it does not stick out like a sore thumb. I'm also not stupid enough to make the password a single word in the document. (otherwsie someone could do a dictionary attack using the keywords from a desktop search database. Instead I'll break it up into several peices and put them in places that make sesne to me but no one else. That is to say, since I wrote the document it's easy for me to see what does not belong. For example, pehaps the zipcode is wrong for my address. Further by using phonem type passwords it's very easy to incorporate these into other words. I highly reccomend this. It beats the tape dispensor method. you can cary the document with you on a USB key. and if you are paranoid you can even encrypt the document with a master password or use a biometric USB key.
As for tracing the e-mail well that wont work either: again people do this all the time on e-bay rip offs and none of those get traced.
besides which the attacker might very well be logging your keystrokes and simply watching for you to send any text continaing a fake address he gave you, then sending this real text somewhere else. Fat chance you would notice this in time to do anything about it. He just picks off the western union number, then pays some street urchin to go collect for him.
or you could rig this as sort of a two part thing. One is to have the virus encrypt the files. then "coincidentally" this spam e-mail comes offer to sell you a universal decoder program for the low price of 49.99$. THe company could be legitimate in the same sense that McAffee is legit. They just sell decryption tools. Sure they might be suspect but some company IS going to crack this and when they do they are going to SELL the decoder. The evil-doer merely has to be one of many companies offer this product for sale. It would be in his interest to leak the decoding method just so those decoy compamies would appear.
Let's see, do you get paid $50 to 100/hour like most of your sys admin peers? if so then buying that, pressing install, and doing something else was well worth it compared to say trying to located download and resolve all the dependencies of a linux upgrade. But we both know this was not what was meant by a patch. Still I glad you made my point for me.
Of course whether linux or mac or windows is cheaper despends upon what is meant by patch. You mean some CUSTOM kernel patch to let it talk to some non standard company tcip system? or do you mean fix a bug? or do you mean downlaod and apply a patch (e.g. software update).
the meaning of those varies. Few would consdier or have the knowledge to tinker with the Windows kernel, but the Linux kernel is more open. Still that's a realm for the hardest core programmers, not user or even most software developers. Applying a patch someone else wrote is entirely another matter. That's certainly going to be easier in a consistent distribution. But it's more likely to exist for linux sooner than for windows.
With macs you have the best of these. See you on the fan-boy list!
Walmart had 100,000 customers. netflix has ow shouldhave about 4 million paying customers. so this addition of customers is lost in the noise: a 2.5% increase. Plus they are paying less than the ususal so it even costs netflix some money to buy them!
The nice thing for net flix is the cross marketing.
The Nytimes is for people with a brain and not seeking titilation. The columnists there defined the talking points of most politically active people. Sure there's the washington post and the LA times which shines in invesitgative news but not so much in analysis or quantity of elite columninsts.
Of course many people liek USA today, wired and salon for quick adrenline producing flash-in-the pan news story. Get that dopmine perk then forget what you just read cause it contained only information and mabe some extrapolative speculation but no serious analysis. That's the distraction you seek, your brain emits some domapmine as a reward.
One the other hand look to the times to tell you in depth penetrating detail the nuances of polotics and regulation and the things that believe it or not actually affect your standard of living more than next nintendo or future shock piece in wired.
Want to interpret what the heck is going on in the middle east. Who yuo gonna read first: freidman or some pre-pubesent web site or god forbid fox news?
Since this comment exceed three paragraphs I seriously doubt you even read it.
If As Seen on TV is to be believed there were two key points he made.
1) the continous run life of an ipod disk is measured in hours. mp3 and tiny photo loads are quick and played from cache. Movie playing would be real time streaming from disk and would kill it.
2) watch the airport express.
3) video is immersive and people dont do it on the GO (aside from cars which again are sedentary)
The key I think is 2. As Cringley observed, the mac mini does not need an optical audio jack because it's on the airport express. And the mac mini does not need the HDTV horse power since that too can be offloaded to a custom $20 chip. Thus the mac mini is the internet download appliance and storage center. the processing power will be be custom and hence the need for a standard.
But I think there is an even more important reason to offload the decoding to hardware. DRM. forget what you feel about DRM and just ask what would be the best way to do it.
You dont want to do it on a custom reconfigurable computer. Because as we have seen repeatedly this means that you can intercept the digital decode step and rip a perfect copy with no DRM.
Microsoft is trying to use paladium and now Janus to move the decode step out to a remote piece of trusted hardware closer to the delivery point, and most importantly away from the compute program.
an airport express like device would serve.
The trouble in implementing a real airport express would be the badnwidth needed. Can wireless support real time video streams. It certainly cant if the video stream is uncompressed. thus if it is to work it has to be sent compressed. so once again we are led back to the decoding at the airport express not at the computer.
so I suspect all the clues about some modular video device are really about a new airport express module and not a video ipod
So really I had my warnings. If you are worried that people get inured to click through warnings then you might as well worry about people running any application they downloaded.
The only thing that was even vaguely troubling was that it was never stated the item would be auto-installed in the dashboard. Thus even though I was not in danger of running something I did not ask for, I was in danger of installing something in the dashbar I did not understand that I was approving when I allowed it to unzip.
So the advisory you want is pretty pointless. if people dont listen to the warnings of their own computer then why an advisory. The advisory is more likely just to make people needlessly fearful.
3D0G,
well if you are really a man, then it means a damn cold night in the arctic. A 3 dog night in fact.
audio cassette tapes worked MOST of the time. But they were lower quality and more prone to damage. Also the data cassettes did not have a blank leader tape. thus you could start recording the moment you turned them on and not have to wait some period of time after a rewind to start recording. Finally when the recorder was controlled by the computer and not the human pushing buttons it could rewind and seek by itself. At that time audio grade readhead were not reccomended for fast forwarding the tape as they would be destroyed by wear. computer readheads were hardened.
but in simple fact for simple storage needs audio tapes and recorders sis work well. but there was a slightly higher risk of data loss.
I worked in a computer shop selling computers at the time the apple II came on the scene. The brands around then were Imsai, cromenco, Sol, Northside, and even an altair if you wanted one. With the exception of the comodore pet, they all ran on 8080, 8085 or Z-80.
All had traditional power gobbling transfomer-rectifier-capacitor power supplies. If they had a bus it was an enornmous S-100 bus. None had memory mapped I/O or could interleave graphics and text. If they had disks, they were hard sectored disks. And most important of all none used Dynamic memory natively. You could buy dynamic memory cards as S-100 plug ins but they were not reliable.
Unlike the 8080/Z-80 the 6502 had a symmetric instruction clock cycle and all so there was a free cycle where memory woas gaurenteed not to be accessed every other cycle dependably. (not true of the 8080) This meant you could use that interval to refresh the dynamic ram. Thus one never had to insert wait states or have flaky thing happen when there was an irregular refresh rate. It simply worked.
But Wozniak and co, were even more clever. Why waste that clock refresh? since the duration was the same as the regular memory fecth time, they made it a full fetch. But what fetch that had to increment repetiviely over the upper 8 bits of address space would be useful? The video memory! so they backsided the video memory fetch on that.
Contrary to today having memory mapped video was better than having th e video memory on a graphics card. On most grpahic cards when the CPU was accessing the memory they video card could no and you saw glitches. thus video updates were usualy timed by the CPU to occur in thehorizonatal and veritcal re-trace blanking intervals. very clumsy and slow.
Apple used a switching power supply. the first I had ever seen. it was small, and took up no room. the imsai, altair, cromenco and northside computer were huge and half of them were the power supply. some of the capacitors in those were 8 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. The switching powersupply made this thing a lighe weight "desktop" freindly unit. you could pick it up and easily move it.
It was partly the use of dynamic memory instead of static memory that made this possible. The power draw on static memory is enourmous. and the memory density on static memory was tiny. plus it was very expensive. it consumed most of the mother board. Today's computers would not be possible without it.
I assumed the apple II was a toy when I saw it's teeny tiny plug-in buss cards. until I looked at it's design. svelt memory mapped cards. all the address space decoding was done by the mother board so you didn't have to waste repetative logic on each card decoding it's own address. same with the power regulation. The switich power supply also gave lower ripple so less regulation was needed.
When apple came out with a disk it was the first reliable soft sectored floppy. I had sold lots of softsectored (8") floppies made by others and saw most of them come back too. Who wants an unrelaible storage system. The apple one worked. and soft secotring made it cheap since it had almost no added electorinics on board. It was all driven from software.
Then of course there was the choice of the 6502. it was a breath fo freshair compared to the 8080. It piplined the next instruction. it used relative jump extensively (calucalting an offset based on a register value not the hardwired instruction). It only had an accumulator and three registers. All the rest were memory mapped to the first 256 bytes of memory. So effectively it had enough registers you could really do something. the 8080 was hamstrung and register bound. and because of the pipelining the 6502 didn't lose any speed for the memory fetch using memory mapped registers.
However even then the MHZ myth was strong. people thought a 4Mhz intel must be faster than a 1Mhz 6502. It was not. nearly all the 8080 instructions were 3 to 5 clock cycles in length
"Aside from the fundamentally critical nature of the exploit, it is however important to note that successful exploitation requires that the site is allowed to install software (the only sites which are allowed these privileges by default are "update.mozilla.org" and "addons.mozilla.org"). ie. you need to have whitelisted the exploit site in order for the exploit to work."
So in other words there is no exploit at all. none whatsoever. it's no more of an exploit than granting a java script installer elevated privledges or accepting a security ceritfication. Bot of those require you to acknowledge what you are doing is granting a site elevated privledges to access your local file system.
whoop-te-doo. The only thin news worthy here is that this pathway to doing this was unintentional. But fortunately the attacker has to be someone you granted install privs to, not just any site you visit.
this is not the security exploit you're looking for. move along.
the question is whether your brain is up to of synthesizing a image from a pan and deconvolving the large pixels down to high resolution. There's some evidence it might be able to synthesize the image from the pan since it already does that for your blind spot. And the ganglia in the eyeball do some deconvolution already so that might be possible too.
I guess we'll find out when the blind people tell us.