I really don't have a clue where you are getting this from ?! Sure, I agree, Breivik surely upped the average about a year ago and gets plenty of attention. And I'm sure there's plenty of crime going on all over Europe, some of which involves guns; but whenever I hear of some guy (it's always guys it seems) going mental and starting a killing spree at the local school : my bet is it's in the USA.
Maybe you look at this the wrong way, I guess the mother didn't look at guns as self-defence but rather as a hobby. Why does Jay Leno need 100 cars ?
Friend of mine has 5 fire-arms (guns & rifles) and makes his own ammo. If he ever goes mental I'm sure it will make the world-news too... But as far as I can tell he's a sane, laid-back kind of guy with a hobby he practices perfectly within the law. Who am I to deprive him of that ?
And where to draw the line ? Crossbows ? Bows ? Slingshots ? Knives ? IMHO, most people around here (Belgium, strict laws) play with guns for a hobby, few have it for self-defence. AFAIK.
I used to hang out mostly with people who (at the time) ran DOS or OS/2 (that should be XOR I guess =) when I had my Amiga. It was kinda fun to hear about all their problems and things they could not do that came 'out of the box' for me. (And, I'll admit, also because Amiga-owners were sparse -to put it mildly- in my neighbourhood =)
No need to be in the tropics for that. Had the same happen to some cd's (not cd-roms !) too and that's in Belgium.
It looked like some kind of mould had eaten its way through the 'shiny layer'. Discs were completely unreadable by the time I noticed. I'll admit they had been stuffed away in a damp, badly-ventilated corner of the cellar but still I was shocked by the effect. Out of about a 100 discs in that box I lost 3 of them. Remarkably, all 3 of them had been 'cheap' compilation CDs -although totally unrelated and bought on totally different times-. I assume there are different ways to make CDs and these were part of the 'lower end' production line.
Anyway, giving away my age I remember when CDs came out and they promised how the medium would be 'indestructible'; they actually showed cigarettes being put out on them and then still getting perfect sound out of it. I guess someone figured out that replacing the original material by some cheaper polycarbonate would mean more profit... IMHO this is most annoying with cd-roms of games for the kids. I've gone so far that they are not allowed to touch them any more because some 'unlucky' scratch will make the thing unreadable and thanks to some stupid copy-protection those games won't play without them in the drive. Maddening =(
And as I'm ranting anyway : those laptop-DVD_RWs are no help either. Often I can perfectly read the disc on my old PIII600 desktop with CDROM drive, but the DVD-drive will simply start whizzing and nothing more...
PS: if anyone has a tip on how to make some kind of.iso (and mount it as needed) from these (old) cd-roms, I'm all ears. Apart from the fact that these discs are fragile they're also ridiculously slow. I have 40Gb free disk space on that laptop but pretty much every setup only puts like 100Mb on the HDD and fetches all the data from the cd-rom causing stutter etc...
I was 'challenged' by a similar one when I was in school; could have taken me years to work it out by myself but (luckily) they explained it to me after about a week.
I was actually wondering about that. I have Win7 Pro, an i5 and TPM but can't quite believe it would be '100% transparent' ?!?
I do quite a bit of development on my machine. If anyone would "find" it, at worst they'd have access to my mail, documents, photos and a big bunch of code that is unlikely to be useful for anyone but me or my colleagues who have the same access to the repositories anyway.
None of that is going to be interesting to 99.999% of the population. The ONLY thing that might be annoying is that they might be able to reverse engineer my passwords from the cache in FireFox etc.
I do quite bit of development in SQL and a bit in c#. The latter probably will not notice the presence of BitLocker working in the background, but I can't imagine the RDBMS not to suffer from it given the heavy dependence on I/O and throughput ?!? I might consider setting up a specific partition for the db's to get around that but I hate splitting disks into partitions if not strictly needed... (I always end up with the need to store a 12Gb file and 7Gb free on one partition and 9Gb on the other)
Anyway, I HAVE considered running BitLocker but instead I actually had to remove it completely when I moved from my HDD to an SSD. => Doing an image copy from one disk to another (using RedoBackup, Ghost,...) simply refused to boot until I removed the BitLocker partition entirely and then did the move. (BitLocker was not active, but it had this 'hidden' partition). This makes me wary to try it again doubly so! Given the way SSD's die I run an image backup of the disk every weekend. I now expect that restoring the image to a new disk will probably cause the same situation where the restored image (of gibberish) will refuse to boot. Heck, is RedoBackup even able to handle encrypted partitions ? Worse, let's assume that not just the disk is 'lost' but the entire machine; will I be able to restore the image on another machine ? (Even if it were the same model and specs?).
From my point of view the choice comes down to : * do not encrypt the disk and have easy backups, a fair shot at recovering the latest information in case the FS goes mad, full performance * do encrypt and know my not-very-important-data can't fall in 'the wrong hands' but backing up is suddenly more challenging, restoring might be even more so, in case the FS goes mad it's unlikely any forensic tools will be able to read anything useful and meanwhile the extra layers probably causes some degradation in performance.
Just wondering, but isn't the speedometer a necessity in racing ? As is some indication that you're over-revving the machine for instance ? => Sure, your "gut" can guesstimate how hard you're turning into a corner but if you KNOW it can be done at speed x, then why assume that you can 'feel' it better than (or just as good as) a quick glance at the speedometer ? Feels like a lost opportunity if you actively shut it out.... Heck, you probably could have the app tell you if you're above or below the 'required' speed using some kind of signal (audibly (probably not an option as those racebikes make one hell of a noise, really not my cup of tea) or visibly via some light that's mounted in the peripheral of your eyes. Red = too fast, blue = too slow, green = within margin). You'd still need to decide if you go along with it, but I'd guess that it would make you think twice to add that little bit of extra when science predicts you won't make it.
On a related note : I've found myself on the road going into situations where I assumed my speed was x while in fact it was well above that... (*) Luckily I don't have to drive 'at the edge' and so at worst I was mildly surprised and needed to brake a bit harder than foreseen; but I guess when you're flirting with the laws of physics you don't have that luxury.
(*: I guess this happens when doing a long drive and the brain seems to get used to the speed, or maybe I just got drowsy, not impossible either. In each case, IMHO 70 kph in the first 5 minutes always feels faster than 70 kph after doing an hour of 120 kph on the highway)
Sure, Apple makes A LOT more money from their products, I fully agree. The question is though : what will happen once EVERYBODY starts to realise this too. The money Apple 'makes' must come from somewhere... either they are ripping of their producers (probably) or they are ripping of their customers (definitely).
I'm not saying Apple is bad. In fact, I think they've done some things quite well; regardless whether it was acquired or self-invented : they got it out to the masses and 'it just works'. But along the way they've given themselves a bit of an ego and in the end it's mostly that what you get to pay for. (*)
(*: which for 'more than a few' is actually part of the product, I know. ("Look at me, I have an iPhone 5 : I must be a superhuman !"). I just wonder what would happen if they brought down the prices to realistic levels and the connectors to main-stream interfaces. They'd lose the 'flair of exclusivity' and some user-base, but they'd probably make up for it in sheer volume, heck, they'd probably fetch more than two thirds of the market. Off course, it's never going to happen. After the initial mega-sell, those people would be a lot less willing to switch to the iPad 4 'just because' while the current user base would rather die than be seen with the not-the-latest version. So for Apple it would be a much more difficult road on the long run.)
So basically, you got "lucky" and some of the cells failed. From what I've heard it's more often the controller that gives up causing the disk to change overnight from a nice piece of electronics into a shiny paper-weight. No hope for recovery at all; the thing simply won't show up in the BIOS. Because of this it's also impossible to read the SMART info so it's hard to say if the controller failures are related to some cells being end-of-life confusing the hell out of the controller or if it's something else... But regardless of its true cause : (further) messing up the filesystem is the least of your worries at that point.
PS: Yes, I have an SSD and I think it's the most efficient 'upgrade' I've ever done to a machine; I would advice it to everyone given they understand the risk (*). On top of that I really don't try to be 'gentle' to it either (**) : I've bought it to get work done quicker and don't see good reason to cripple that performance in the hopes that it will last 10 years instead of 5. In fact, I'm kind of *expecting* the controller will give up first, so it might actually not be relevant how many bytes were written to the cells as the cause is something 'unrelated' (e.g. something in the power-board that says poof). Hence, might as well make the best of it.
And yes, I do backup on a more-or-less regular basis so when I get bitten it won't hurt THAT much... (RedoBackup to an external HDD (eSata), takes 1 hour to image the entire disk).
(*: it's not like HDD's are fail-proof either! At best you get a bit of a warning, question is if the user is able to tell the signs...) (**: Swap en hibernation file are both on the SSD and I do a LOT of database stuff on it. SMART tells me I've managed to R/W 3.74/3.77 TB respectively in the past (almost) 9 months. I did switch off the 'last accessed' option in the filesystem though, don't see much use in it anyway.)
You (naively) assume he spoke the truth about there being a competitor who ordered this ?! More likely it's just a way to give the initial price more credibility.
All true what you say but apart from the remarkably faster load-times of applications the main benefit I get from the SSD is the lack of disk-trashing. I'm not going to promote running a high-load RDBMS on an SSD as there seems to be a lot of evidence around that this indeed kills them rather quickly (*) but things like the swap and %TEMP% are well within the limitations of what you can throw at these beasts. (IMHO)
My Intel 320 120Gb was installed about a 8 months ago and currently stands at 3.48Tb Total Reads / 3.65 Tb Total writes and still shows 100%.
(SSD-Life claims 9 years, but I'm not putting too much value on that number)
(*: the high number of writes in SMART probably is due to my work with the databases. I'm not even sure if the value means actual bytes written or if it represents the total of blocks that were updated on the flash-chips which could be much higher! Anyway, I realise it eats at the drive's lifetime but there simply is no comparing to doing the same things on the HDD... To be entirely honest, if possible I try to run these things on a RAM-disk as it's even faster and I DO care about the SSD's limitations, but my laptop is limited to 8Gb and I need 'some' of that for other purposes too =)
Simply compare Social Engineering to tv-commercials. => My 7 year old is remarkable good at making the distinction between 'information' and 'marketing'.
I'm pretty sure that when time arrives (**) it wont be too difficult to explain the 'real' from the 'trap' on the internet either. Then again, marketing is kinda obvious while social engineering can be really devious =/
(**: I haven't had the need yet to explain the 'dangers' of the internet to her yet as she's currently limited to local software and some web-based flash games (long live ABP!) and hasn't entered the realms of email or social networking, yet. Also not speaking English probably helps too in avoiding some of the obvious pitfalls : when you only speak Dutch, the internet suddenly is a much smaller place =)
I'm not saying you're lying, but going by all my experiences with AV software, MSE is one of the less intrusive ones ! Maybe there simply is an issue with your hardware (I/O?) that shows via MSE ?
=> my laptop at work (i5) runs McAffee and it's mind-blowing how often mcshield.exe hogs an entire cpu =( => a friends pc (Q9550) ran AVG for years but the thing simply got slower and slower. We installed AVAST and the machine felt a lot snappier but the warnings/update messages etc confused him and so I decided to install MSE instead. Things went from good to great. => my laptop at home (P4M) runs MSE and although I'll agree that it makes the startup process of the machine remarkably slower than without an AV; once it's up it's hardly noticeable. => same for my dad's i5 based desktop. Logon on that machine is strangely slow but once up & running there is nothing 'slowing' or 'hogging' about it. => my little file server at home (Atom N230) runs MSE and yes, there it clearly shows. I'm guessing the CPU needs to run certain operations in software that are done in hardware on other types of CPUs and sadly MSE seems to be using that one a lot. I haven't tried running anything else [AV-wise] on it though as it gets the job done, requires virtually no maintenance and costs me nothing. RAM is much more at a premium on that little machine and MSE actually has a rather small footprint.
The only downside of MSE is that it considers your machine 'at risk' if you don't scan at least once a week. This might confuse people and I'm not sure why it insists on this as by default I have real-time protection on anyway so don't feel like scanning the entire machine on a regular basis. (for the file-server that's running 24/7 running a scan is no biggy (sunday-night it doesn't bother anyone; but for the laptop that only is on when being worked on it's a pain)
I think about this differently. I don't do anything special to prolong the (expected) life of my SSD (Intel 320 120Gb) except for disabling the last-acces-time thingy. Why should I buy a tool that speeds up 'my computer experience' and then cripple it on purpose ? I reboot at most once every 3 days so fast booting is nice and all but hardly the a selling point.Then again, when straining the machine while running tests, compiling stuff, having 20 applications open at once, browsing, etc etc... not having to wait for the spinning platters to store whatever temporary data that needs to be dumped makes one hell of a difference! (And funnily, yes that includes my RDBMS's tempdb =) (space restrictions 'force' me to put my db-data-files on the HDDs)
OK, so maybe my drive will crap out after 4 year instead of after 12 years but at least I got as much out of it as possible in the meantime. Who knows what I'll replace the drive with in 4 years anyway ? Could be we have 1Tb SSD's by then on SATA-4 outperforming current RAM. Or whatever.
That said, I DO back up the system on a regular basis. If I'm unlucky and the thing fails cold turkey I'll lose say a week's worth of work. Not fun, but IMHO it does not out-weigh the advantages I got from it over the years.
I agree that you should use some basic caution regarding expensive electronic equipment : heat, shocks, etc... but not fully using for its intended purpose shouldn't be one of them.
Shining a laser into a crowd seems like an effective attempt at 'mass-blindning' to me ?! If the laser is sufficiently powerful, the time needed to cause eye-damage is (ridiculously) short so a couple of sweeps across the room on the right level would disable quite a bit of people... holding some eye-catcher to get the attention of the crowd first would probably increase "efficiency". Reminds me of 'The day of the Triffids' actually.
I know the Geneva convention prohibits it, but my paranoid self is rather convinced "the armies" have precisely that kind of 'technology' in stock, or at least researched. Unless there are only a handful of frequencies available to build sight-threatening lasers (not too familiar with the matter) I doubt one can easily make some kind of goggles (*) that would filter those out specifically but still let in enough of the other frequencies to allow normal functioning.
(*: passive ones that is, I realize (active) night-goggles would offer protection as you're not looking at the 'original' light but rather at a (boosted) recreation of the photons hitting the sensor-side).
GUID's are kind of 'sequential' numbers based on the time and either a MAC address or a random number. By design it's (theoretically) impossible to generate the same GUID twice because either the time will have progressed in sequential calculations and/or different 'base' numbers are used when running on different hardware as to 'force' the generation happen to simultaneously.
Hash functions are based on a block of data being 'examined' and will return the same result over and over again for the same blocks of data. If the hash-result changes, the source-data must have changed, period.But! vice versa is not necessarily true : it is well possible that 2 different blocks of data return the same hash function, but are not identical and we then have a so-called Hash-collision.
If you truly believe we could safely assume that a hash represents one and only one potential data-block, you would have the ultimate compression-software in your hands ! Admittedly, decompressing would take a while because you'd have to iterate over I don't know how many blocks of random data until you find the right hash, but how often do you really need eg. backups anyway ? Just hash your entire disk, write the hash on some napkin and feel safe.
This is kinda interesting... Having read all above I think most of the confusion is in semantics, especially about the term 'heat'. Wikipedia describes it as " energy transferred from one system to another by thermal interaction" and that doesn't really make it easy to talk about it. So for my own mental sanity I'll allow myself to rather abuse the term 'heat-transfer' then which makes it easier to understand although at the same time I realize that it's akin to saying something like 'a fluid liquid' which sounds wrong too if you start thinking about it.
Anyway, in order to satisfy my (very naive) curiosity : let's assume the following experiment :
1) a 'small block' of copper is squeezed in between two equally sized vessels of water, one having a temperature of 10`C, the other 90`C. 2) a 'small block' of the article-material is squeezed in between two equally sized vessels of water, one having a temperature of 10`C, the other 90`C. 3) a 'small block' of the article-material is squeezed in between two equally sized vessels of water, one having a temperature of 10`C, the other 90`C and the 'wires are attached' resulting in a small lamp being powered in the next room.
It seems fair to assume that situations 1 and 2 will both result in everything ending up at about 50`C assuming the 'small blocks' are really very small in relation to the vessels of water and hence have (virtually) no effect on the "calorimetric sum" of the entire setup. The main difference being that they probably will require a (very?) different time-span to reach equilibrium. I guess we have no issues there ?
Likewise, it seems 'logical to me' that the energy required to light the lamp must come from 'somewhere' in situation 3. Hence, the end-state of the third setup then must end up with a lower total energy because some of it was piped away in the form of electricity. This leads me to assume that in the end, the system will end up in an equilibrium of somewhere in the upper forties degrees C at what time no electricity will be 'generated' any more.
Given that in the last setup the 'cold' side ends up at a lower temperature than in the first two setup, I too 'feel' that less heat is transferred. However, from a point of view of the (initially) hot vessel in situation 3, actually MORE heat was transferred as the end situation is at a lower temperature than the other setups so more energy was drained from it.
So both sides are correct : both less AND more heat was transferred =)
The older stuff, yes. Those new core i3/i5/i7 CPU's : the integrated graphics have become VERY potent.
And yes, I have an i5 that comes with HD Graphics 3000 so I should know.
In fact, I also have an Nvidia NVS 4200M sitting in my Dell Lattitude that automatically kicks in when I require 3D stuff (read : games) and battery is not a concern. So for fun I started AION on the Intel hardware goofed around a bit, closed the application and then started it up again but on the Nvidia hardware (easy thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus). Im not saying AION is the new standard to test things on, but for a 3D game it looks good (lots of details & eye-candy) and I simply happen to have it on my machine. (1680x1050 btw, I had the settings on automatic) To be honest I'm a bit shocked to notice they both look VERY alike. The nvidia picture seems to have more hmm 'powerful colours' (?) while the intel gfx were a bit more washed out but then again seemed to have less visible edges (AA?) though some of the effects looked 'simplified'. Otherwise, both maintained a steady 45+ fps which is more than good enough for me. wow.
Seems they come pretty close to each other and the difference in DirectX version supported might explain the noticed difference in effects. They were still there, but just slightly less... hmm... complex.
Sure there are a lot more powerful dedicated gfx cards around (hey, laptop here!), but trust me when I say that for 95% of the market, these integrated graphics are more than sufficient ! If you're in the 5% of users that 'needs' a powerful 3D processor, then by all means do; but claiming all Intel IGP's are a piece of shit is like saying that you don't have a decent printer if you don't go for the Xerox iGen 150 !
Strange how everyone seems to think it has to be one xor the other. In my experience they can easily co-exist.
My daughters (aged 7 and 4) both love going to the library every 3 weeks and bring back as many books they are allowed to. The oldest one usually takes along a bunch of Jommeke's and an actual reading book (AVI 8) which are pretty much all read within the week, and then read again a couple of times before we have to return them. The youngest one is more likely to select books with things (drawings) she recognizes from school (Jules, Nijntje, etc) and/or from having brought along somewhere in the past. That age LOVES repeating things =) She'll sit down in the sofa and start making up stories based on the pictures or if it was something she had already been explained (by us, or at school or I sometimes honestly have no clue where she gets it from) she can actually make people believe she's actually reading the book, it's amazing how detailed they can remember something. That just to say : my kids love books. On the other hand I have an old laptop (P4M 2GHz) with XP on that they've been using since. hmm... 5 years ? to play around with. In the beginning it was mostly watching DVD's I had copied on it (Bumba, Nouky, Dora,...) but over time it's gotten more into the interactive realms like GCompris and websites like Ketnet (Kaatje!), studio100.be, spelletjes.nl, etc... For now, they pretty much stick to starting the machine, clicking the shortcuts and playing the game/movie, close the program again and turn off the machine. Nothing fancy, just the usual routine and for me, that's OK. I don't need them to know what's inside, how it's all connected etc...They're fluent with the mouse/keyboard by now (eye-hand coordination + the concept of planning their actions (first move mouse to icon, then click, then press enter ('aimed' double clicking is hard when you're 3 so I showed them this way and they still do), waiting for MoviePlayer to come up and start playing and then double clicking somewhere to make it full-screen)).
For now, I think it's fine if they simply see it as a magic-box they know how to operate; if they want to know how it works internally I'm sure they'll let me know or go exploring themselves; that's how it was with me and it worked out fine IMHO. (C64 at the age of 12. At the time I only bought it to play games and did so for about 2 year. Got kind of bored with that and more curious about 'how it worked' and got into hardware and programming over the years and still am.) If they never make that switch, well, so be it. I never had much interest for football and other high-profile sports and I'm glad my parents never 'pushed' me into that direction although as far as I can remember the whole world seemed to be crazy about those game$. I'll try to do the same with my kids. I just hope they'll never get interested in horse-riding 'cause I really don't feel like getting a pony =)
Anyway, there ARE 2 problems with the computer however:
1) there is only one computer but 2 kids,
2) there is an infinite range of things to do on the computer but only 24 hours in a day.
The first is solved by a simple timer and they take turns every 15 minutes; actually teaches them the concept of time too. The second is by introducing the rule that if there is no computering when the weather outside is too good to sit behind a desk. Although totally inconsistent of me, I know, they CAN read books, draw, paint, play with Lego/Playmobile/dolls/whatever inside even when the weather outside is paradise, but the pc remains off. It's probably not the best of rules, but it works and given our Belgian climate they do get to play on the thing now and then but not in a way I would consider 'over the top'.
PS: Same goes for the TV btw. PPS: for those who wonder why I choose XP. I actually had Ubuntu on there for the first years, joking that my kids were the Linux specialists in the house (I use windows because I know it and need it for work, not saying
Slashdot Mirror
honestly : citation needed !
I really don't have a clue where you are getting this from ?!
Sure, I agree, Breivik surely upped the average about a year ago and gets plenty of attention. And I'm sure there's plenty of crime going on all over Europe, some of which involves guns; but whenever I hear of some guy (it's always guys it seems) going mental and starting a killing spree at the local school : my bet is it's in the USA.
Disclaimer : this is just my personal opinion.
Maybe you look at this the wrong way, I guess the mother didn't look at guns as self-defence but rather as a hobby. Why does Jay Leno need 100 cars ?
Friend of mine has 5 fire-arms (guns & rifles) and makes his own ammo. If he ever goes mental I'm sure it will make the world-news too... But as far as I can tell he's a sane, laid-back kind of guy with a hobby he practices perfectly within the law. Who am I to deprive him of that ?
And where to draw the line ? Crossbows ? Bows ? Slingshots ? Knives ?
IMHO, most people around here (Belgium, strict laws) play with guns for a hobby, few have it for self-defence. AFAIK.
Might be !
I used to hang out mostly with people who (at the time) ran DOS or OS/2 (that should be XOR I guess =) when I had my Amiga. It was kinda fun to hear about all their problems and things they could not do that came 'out of the box' for me.
(And, I'll admit, also because Amiga-owners were sparse -to put it mildly- in my neighbourhood =)
It probably would help a lot more of Red Bull gave me glasses...
No need to be in the tropics for that. Had the same happen to some cd's (not cd-roms !) too and that's in Belgium.
It looked like some kind of mould had eaten its way through the 'shiny layer'. Discs were completely unreadable by the time I noticed. I'll admit they had been stuffed away in a damp, badly-ventilated corner of the cellar but still I was shocked by the effect. Out of about a 100 discs in that box I lost 3 of them. Remarkably, all 3 of them had been 'cheap' compilation CDs -although totally unrelated and bought on totally different times-. I assume there are different ways to make CDs and these were part of the 'lower end' production line.
Anyway, giving away my age I remember when CDs came out and they promised how the medium would be 'indestructible'; they actually showed cigarettes being put out on them and then still getting perfect sound out of it. I guess someone figured out that replacing the original material by some cheaper polycarbonate would mean more profit... IMHO this is most annoying with cd-roms of games for the kids. I've gone so far that they are not allowed to touch them any more because some 'unlucky' scratch will make the thing unreadable and thanks to some stupid copy-protection those games won't play without them in the drive. Maddening =(
And as I'm ranting anyway : those laptop-DVD_RWs are no help either. Often I can perfectly read the disc on my old PIII600 desktop with CDROM drive, but the DVD-drive will simply start whizzing and nothing more...
PS: if anyone has a tip on how to make some kind of .iso (and mount it as needed) from these (old) cd-roms, I'm all ears. Apart from the fact that these discs are fragile they're also ridiculously slow. I have 40Gb free disk space on that laptop but pretty much every setup only puts like 100Mb on the HDD and fetches all the data from the cd-rom causing stutter etc...
I was 'challenged' by a similar one when I was in school; could have taken me years to work it out by myself but (luckily) they explained it to me after about a week.
Time flies
you can't
only the slow ones.
Humppfff... Cough...rip-off... cough...
I was actually wondering about that. I have Win7 Pro, an i5 and TPM but can't quite believe it would be '100% transparent' ?!?
I do quite a bit of development on my machine. If anyone would "find" it, at worst they'd have access to my mail, documents, photos and a big bunch of code that is unlikely to be useful for anyone but me or my colleagues who have the same access to the repositories anyway.
None of that is going to be interesting to 99.999% of the population.
The ONLY thing that might be annoying is that they might be able to reverse engineer my passwords from the cache in FireFox etc.
I do quite bit of development in SQL and a bit in c#. The latter probably will not notice the presence of BitLocker working in the background, but I can't imagine the RDBMS not to suffer from it given the heavy dependence on I/O and throughput ?!? I might consider setting up a specific partition for the db's to get around that but I hate splitting disks into partitions if not strictly needed ... (I always end up with the need to store a 12Gb file and 7Gb free on one partition and 9Gb on the other)
Anyway, I HAVE considered running BitLocker but instead I actually had to remove it completely when I moved from my HDD to an SSD. ...) simply refused to boot until I removed the BitLocker partition entirely and then did the move. (BitLocker was not active, but it had this 'hidden' partition).
=> Doing an image copy from one disk to another (using RedoBackup, Ghost,
This makes me wary to try it again doubly so!
Given the way SSD's die I run an image backup of the disk every weekend. I now expect that restoring the image to a new disk will probably cause the same situation where the restored image (of gibberish) will refuse to boot. Heck, is RedoBackup even able to handle encrypted partitions ? Worse, let's assume that not just the disk is 'lost' but the entire machine; will I be able to restore the image on another machine ? (Even if it were the same model and specs?).
From my point of view the choice comes down to :
* do not encrypt the disk and have easy backups, a fair shot at recovering the latest information in case the FS goes mad, full performance
* do encrypt and know my not-very-important-data can't fall in 'the wrong hands' but backing up is suddenly more challenging, restoring might be even more so, in case the FS goes mad it's unlikely any forensic tools will be able to read anything useful and meanwhile the extra layers probably causes some degradation in performance.
Just wondering, but isn't the speedometer a necessity in racing ? As is some indication that you're over-revving the machine for instance ?
=> Sure, your "gut" can guesstimate how hard you're turning into a corner but if you KNOW it can be done at speed x, then why assume that you can 'feel' it better than (or just as good as) a quick glance at the speedometer ? Feels like a lost opportunity if you actively shut it out.... Heck, you probably could have the app tell you if you're above or below the 'required' speed using some kind of signal (audibly (probably not an option as those racebikes make one hell of a noise, really not my cup of tea) or visibly via some light that's mounted in the peripheral of your eyes. Red = too fast, blue = too slow, green = within margin). You'd still need to decide if you go along with it, but I'd guess that it would make you think twice to add that little bit of extra when science predicts you won't make it.
On a related note : I've found myself on the road going into situations where I assumed my speed was x while in fact it was well above that... (*) Luckily I don't have to drive 'at the edge' and so at worst I was mildly surprised and needed to brake a bit harder than foreseen; but I guess when you're flirting with the laws of physics you don't have that luxury.
(*: I guess this happens when doing a long drive and the brain seems to get used to the speed, or maybe I just got drowsy, not impossible either. In each case, IMHO 70 kph in the first 5 minutes always feels faster than 70 kph after doing an hour of 120 kph on the highway)
It's not a matter of fanboism IMHO.
Sure, Apple makes A LOT more money from their products, I fully agree. The question is though : what will happen once EVERYBODY starts to realise this too. The money Apple 'makes' must come from somewhere ... either they are ripping of their producers (probably) or they are ripping of their customers (definitely).
I'm not saying Apple is bad. In fact, I think they've done some things quite well; regardless whether it was acquired or self-invented : they got it out to the masses and 'it just works'. But along the way they've given themselves a bit of an ego and in the end it's mostly that what you get to pay for. (*)
(*: which for 'more than a few' is actually part of the product, I know. ("Look at me, I have an iPhone 5 : I must be a superhuman !"). I just wonder what would happen if they brought down the prices to realistic levels and the connectors to main-stream interfaces. They'd lose the 'flair of exclusivity' and some user-base, but they'd probably make up for it in sheer volume, heck, they'd probably fetch more than two thirds of the market. Off course, it's never going to happen. After the initial mega-sell, those people would be a lot less willing to switch to the iPad 4 'just because' while the current user base would rather die than be seen with the not-the-latest version. So for Apple it would be a much more difficult road on the long run.)
All IMHO off course.
So basically, you got "lucky" and some of the cells failed. From what I've heard it's more often the controller that gives up causing the disk to change overnight from a nice piece of electronics into a shiny paper-weight. No hope for recovery at all; the thing simply won't show up in the BIOS. Because of this it's also impossible to read the SMART info so it's hard to say if the controller failures are related to some cells being end-of-life confusing the hell out of the controller or if it's something else... But regardless of its true cause : (further) messing up the filesystem is the least of your worries at that point.
PS: Yes, I have an SSD and I think it's the most efficient 'upgrade' I've ever done to a machine; I would advice it to everyone given they understand the risk (*). On top of that I really don't try to be 'gentle' to it either (**) : I've bought it to get work done quicker and don't see good reason to cripple that performance in the hopes that it will last 10 years instead of 5. In fact, I'm kind of *expecting* the controller will give up first, so it might actually not be relevant how many bytes were written to the cells as the cause is something 'unrelated' (e.g. something in the power-board that says poof). Hence, might as well make the best of it.
And yes, I do backup on a more-or-less regular basis so when I get bitten it won't hurt THAT much... (RedoBackup to an external HDD (eSata), takes 1 hour to image the entire disk).
(*: it's not like HDD's are fail-proof either! At best you get a bit of a warning, question is if the user is able to tell the signs...)
(**: Swap en hibernation file are both on the SSD and I do a LOT of database stuff on it. SMART tells me I've managed to R/W 3.74/3.77 TB respectively in the past (almost) 9 months. I did switch off the 'last accessed' option in the filesystem though, don't see much use in it anyway.)
Incredible, even Trailers are 'forbidden' outside the US ...
You (naively) assume he spoke the truth about there being a competitor who ordered this ?! More likely it's just a way to give the initial price more credibility.
All true what you say but apart from the remarkably faster load-times of applications the main benefit I get from the SSD is the lack of disk-trashing.
I'm not going to promote running a high-load RDBMS on an SSD as there seems to be a lot of evidence around that this indeed kills them rather quickly (*) but things like the swap and %TEMP% are well within the limitations of what you can throw at these beasts. (IMHO)
My Intel 320 120Gb was installed about a 8 months ago and currently stands at 3.48Tb Total Reads / 3.65 Tb Total writes and still shows 100%.
(SSD-Life claims 9 years, but I'm not putting too much value on that number)
(*: the high number of writes in SMART probably is due to my work with the databases. I'm not even sure if the value means actual bytes written or if it represents the total of blocks that were updated on the flash-chips which could be much higher! Anyway, I realise it eats at the drive's lifetime but there simply is no comparing to doing the same things on the HDD... To be entirely honest, if possible I try to run these things on a RAM-disk as it's even faster and I DO care about the SSD's limitations, but my laptop is limited to 8Gb and I need 'some' of that for other purposes too =)
Simply compare Social Engineering to tv-commercials.
=> My 7 year old is remarkable good at making the distinction between 'information' and 'marketing'.
I'm pretty sure that when time arrives (**) it wont be too difficult to explain the 'real' from the 'trap' on the internet either. Then again, marketing is kinda obvious while social engineering can be really devious =/
(**: I haven't had the need yet to explain the 'dangers' of the internet to her yet as she's currently limited to local software and some web-based flash games (long live ABP!) and hasn't entered the realms of email or social networking, yet. Also not speaking English probably helps too in avoiding some of the obvious pitfalls : when you only speak Dutch, the internet suddenly is a much smaller place =)
I'm not saying you're lying, but going by all my experiences with AV software, MSE is one of the less intrusive ones ! Maybe there simply is an issue with your hardware (I/O?) that shows via MSE ?
=> my laptop at work (i5) runs McAffee and it's mind-blowing how often mcshield.exe hogs an entire cpu =(
=> a friends pc (Q9550) ran AVG for years but the thing simply got slower and slower. We installed AVAST and the machine felt a lot snappier but the warnings/update messages etc confused him and so I decided to install MSE instead. Things went from good to great.
=> my laptop at home (P4M) runs MSE and although I'll agree that it makes the startup process of the machine remarkably slower than without an AV; once it's up it's hardly noticeable.
=> same for my dad's i5 based desktop. Logon on that machine is strangely slow but once up & running there is nothing 'slowing' or 'hogging' about it.
=> my little file server at home (Atom N230) runs MSE and yes, there it clearly shows. I'm guessing the CPU needs to run certain operations in software that are done in hardware on other types of CPUs and sadly MSE seems to be using that one a lot. I haven't tried running anything else [AV-wise] on it though as it gets the job done, requires virtually no maintenance and costs me nothing. RAM is much more at a premium on that little machine and MSE actually has a rather small footprint.
The only downside of MSE is that it considers your machine 'at risk' if you don't scan at least once a week. This might confuse people and I'm not sure why it insists on this as by default I have real-time protection on anyway so don't feel like scanning the entire machine on a regular basis. (for the file-server that's running 24/7 running a scan is no biggy (sunday-night it doesn't bother anyone; but for the laptop that only is on when being worked on it's a pain)
I think about this differently.
I don't do anything special to prolong the (expected) life of my SSD (Intel 320 120Gb) except for disabling the last-acces-time thingy. Why should I buy a tool that speeds up 'my computer experience' and then cripple it on purpose ? I reboot at most once every 3 days so fast booting is nice and all but hardly the a selling point.Then again, when straining the machine while running tests, compiling stuff, having 20 applications open at once, browsing, etc etc... not having to wait for the spinning platters to store whatever temporary data that needs to be dumped makes one hell of a difference! (And funnily, yes that includes my RDBMS's tempdb =)
(space restrictions 'force' me to put my db-data-files on the HDDs)
OK, so maybe my drive will crap out after 4 year instead of after 12 years but at least I got as much out of it as possible in the meantime. Who knows what I'll replace the drive with in 4 years anyway ? Could be we have 1Tb SSD's by then on SATA-4 outperforming current RAM. Or whatever.
That said, I DO back up the system on a regular basis. If I'm unlucky and the thing fails cold turkey I'll lose say a week's worth of work. Not fun, but IMHO it does not out-weigh the advantages I got from it over the years.
I agree that you should use some basic caution regarding expensive electronic equipment : heat, shocks, etc... but not fully using for its intended purpose shouldn't be one of them.
Shining a laser into a crowd seems like an effective attempt at 'mass-blindning' to me ?! If the laser is sufficiently powerful, the time needed to cause eye-damage is (ridiculously) short so a couple of sweeps across the room on the right level would disable quite a bit of people... holding some eye-catcher to get the attention of the crowd first would probably increase "efficiency". Reminds me of 'The day of the Triffids' actually.
I know the Geneva convention prohibits it, but my paranoid self is rather convinced "the armies" have precisely that kind of 'technology' in stock, or at least researched.
Unless there are only a handful of frequencies available to build sight-threatening lasers (not too familiar with the matter) I doubt one can easily make some kind of goggles (*) that would filter those out specifically but still let in enough of the other frequencies to allow normal functioning.
(*: passive ones that is, I realize (active) night-goggles would offer protection as you're not looking at the 'original' light but rather at a (boosted) recreation of the photons hitting the sensor-side).
Which is more ore less what I was trying to convey...?!? Maybe I should have added a smiley or 'sarcasm-tag' at the end of my 'feel safe' sentence.
Maybe because a GUID isn't a hash ?
GUID's are kind of 'sequential' numbers based on the time and either a MAC address or a random number. By design it's (theoretically) impossible to generate the same GUID twice because either the time will have progressed in sequential calculations and/or different 'base' numbers are used when running on different hardware as to 'force' the generation happen to simultaneously.
Hash functions are based on a block of data being 'examined' and will return the same result over and over again for the same blocks of data. If the hash-result changes, the source-data must have changed, period.But! vice versa is not necessarily true : it is well possible that 2 different blocks of data return the same hash function, but are not identical and we then have a so-called Hash-collision.
If you truly believe we could safely assume that a hash represents one and only one potential data-block, you would have the ultimate compression-software in your hands ! Admittedly, decompressing would take a while because you'd have to iterate over I don't know how many blocks of random data until you find the right hash, but how often do you really need eg. backups anyway ? Just hash your entire disk, write the hash on some napkin and feel safe.
You can still try to get it 'back', it probably never was erased.
This is kinda interesting... Having read all above I think most of the confusion is in semantics, especially about the term 'heat'. Wikipedia describes it as " energy transferred from one system to another by thermal interaction" and that doesn't really make it easy to talk about it. So for my own mental sanity I'll allow myself to rather abuse the term 'heat-transfer' then which makes it easier to understand although at the same time I realize that it's akin to saying something like 'a fluid liquid' which sounds wrong too if you start thinking about it.
Anyway, in order to satisfy my (very naive) curiosity : let's assume the following experiment :
1) a 'small block' of copper is squeezed in between two equally sized vessels of water, one having a temperature of 10`C, the other 90`C.
2) a 'small block' of the article-material is squeezed in between two equally sized vessels of water, one having a temperature of 10`C, the other 90`C.
3) a 'small block' of the article-material is squeezed in between two equally sized vessels of water, one having a temperature of 10`C, the other 90`C and the 'wires are attached' resulting in a small lamp being powered in the next room.
It seems fair to assume that situations 1 and 2 will both result in everything ending up at about 50`C assuming the 'small blocks' are really very small in relation to the vessels of water and hence have (virtually) no effect on the "calorimetric sum" of the entire setup. The main difference being that they probably will require a (very?) different time-span to reach equilibrium. I guess we have no issues there ?
Likewise, it seems 'logical to me' that the energy required to light the lamp must come from 'somewhere' in situation 3. Hence, the end-state of the third setup then must end up with a lower total energy because some of it was piped away in the form of electricity. This leads me to assume that in the end, the system will end up in an equilibrium of somewhere in the upper forties degrees C at what time no electricity will be 'generated' any more.
Given that in the last setup the 'cold' side ends up at a lower temperature than in the first two setup, I too 'feel' that less heat is transferred. However, from a point of view of the (initially) hot vessel in situation 3, actually MORE heat was transferred as the end situation is at a lower temperature than the other setups so more energy was drained from it.
So both sides are correct : both less AND more heat was transferred =)
Right ?
The older stuff, yes.
Those new core i3/i5/i7 CPU's : the integrated graphics have become VERY potent.
And yes, I have an i5 that comes with HD Graphics 3000 so I should know.
In fact, I also have an Nvidia NVS 4200M sitting in my Dell Lattitude that automatically kicks in when I require 3D stuff (read : games) and battery is not a concern. So for fun I started AION on the Intel hardware goofed around a bit, closed the application and then started it up again but on the Nvidia hardware (easy thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus). Im not saying AION is the new standard to test things on, but for a 3D game it looks good (lots of details & eye-candy) and I simply happen to have it on my machine. (1680x1050 btw, I had the settings on automatic)
To be honest I'm a bit shocked to notice they both look VERY alike. The nvidia picture seems to have more hmm 'powerful colours' (?) while the intel gfx were a bit more washed out but then again seemed to have less visible edges (AA?) though some of the effects looked 'simplified'.
Otherwise, both maintained a steady 45+ fps which is more than good enough for me. wow.
If you're more of a numbers guy, feel free to compare yourself :
* http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/NVIDIA+NVS+4200M/
* http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/Intel+HD+Graphics+3000+Mobile
Seems they come pretty close to each other and the difference in DirectX version supported might explain the noticed difference in effects. They were still there, but just slightly less... hmm... complex.
Sure there are a lot more powerful dedicated gfx cards around (hey, laptop here!), but trust me when I say that for 95% of the market, these integrated graphics are more than sufficient ! If you're in the 5% of users that 'needs' a powerful 3D processor, then by all means do; but claiming all Intel IGP's are a piece of shit is like saying that you don't have a decent printer if you don't go for the Xerox iGen 150 !
Strange how everyone seems to think it has to be one xor the other. In my experience they can easily co-exist.
My daughters (aged 7 and 4) both love going to the library every 3 weeks and bring back as many books they are allowed to. The oldest one usually takes along a bunch of Jommeke's and an actual reading book (AVI 8) which are pretty much all read within the week, and then read again a couple of times before we have to return them. The youngest one is more likely to select books with things (drawings) she recognizes from school (Jules, Nijntje, etc) and/or from having brought along somewhere in the past. That age LOVES repeating things =) She'll sit down in the sofa and start making up stories based on the pictures or if it was something she had already been explained (by us, or at school or I sometimes honestly have no clue where she gets it from) she can actually make people believe she's actually reading the book, it's amazing how detailed they can remember something. ...) but over time it's gotten more into the interactive realms like GCompris and websites like Ketnet (Kaatje!), studio100.be, spelletjes.nl, etc... For now, they pretty much stick to starting the machine, clicking the shortcuts and playing the game/movie, close the program again and turn off the machine. Nothing fancy, just the usual routine and for me, that's OK. I don't need them to know what's inside, how it's all connected etc...They're fluent with the mouse/keyboard by now (eye-hand coordination + the concept of planning their actions (first move mouse to icon, then click, then press enter ('aimed' double clicking is hard when you're 3 so I showed them this way and they still do), waiting for MoviePlayer to come up and start playing and then double clicking somewhere to make it full-screen)).
That just to say : my kids love books.
On the other hand I have an old laptop (P4M 2GHz) with XP on that they've been using since. hmm... 5 years ? to play around with. In the beginning it was mostly watching DVD's I had copied on it (Bumba, Nouky, Dora,
For now, I think it's fine if they simply see it as a magic-box they know how to operate; if they want to know how it works internally I'm sure they'll let me know or go exploring themselves; that's how it was with me and it worked out fine IMHO. (C64 at the age of 12. At the time I only bought it to play games and did so for about 2 year. Got kind of bored with that and more curious about 'how it worked' and got into hardware and programming over the years and still am.) If they never make that switch, well, so be it. I never had much interest for football and other high-profile sports and I'm glad my parents never 'pushed' me into that direction although as far as I can remember the whole world seemed to be crazy about those game$. I'll try to do the same with my kids. I just hope they'll never get interested in horse-riding 'cause I really don't feel like getting a pony =)
Anyway, there ARE 2 problems with the computer however :
1) there is only one computer but 2 kids,
2) there is an infinite range of things to do on the computer but only 24 hours in a day.
The first is solved by a simple timer and they take turns every 15 minutes; actually teaches them the concept of time too.
The second is by introducing the rule that if there is no computering when the weather outside is too good to sit behind a desk. Although totally inconsistent of me, I know, they CAN read books, draw, paint, play with Lego/Playmobile/dolls/whatever inside even when the weather outside is paradise, but the pc remains off. It's probably not the best of rules, but it works and given our Belgian climate they do get to play on the thing now and then but not in a way I would consider 'over the top'.
PS: Same goes for the TV btw.
PPS: for those who wonder why I choose XP. I actually had Ubuntu on there for the first years, joking that my kids were the Linux specialists in the house (I use windows because I know it and need it for work, not saying
It would be rather funny if he then pulled the trigger and the pistol would go "...Poink!" =P
But anyway, from browsing around a bit, it seems that when properly stored (sealed, cool) gun powder has a pretty long shelf-life.