Possibly the best summary of the plot of Beowulf is to be found in Terry Pratchett's Guards!Guards!
In fact, I like it so much I am going to plead fair use and extract it.
"Monsters are getting more uppity, too...I heard where there was this guy, he killed this monster in this lake, no problem, stuck its arm up over the door-"
"Pour encourjay lays ortras," said one of the listeners. "Right, and you know what? Its mum come and complained. It's actual mum come right down to the hall next day and complained. Actually complained That's the respect you get."
Last night I removed 297 (really) assorted viruses, trojans and spyware from Joe Sixpack's computer which he needs to run his business. His anti virus protection was out of date and he didn't know how to get it updated. He was annoyed by popups (where do you think the adware came from) but hadn't a clue what to do about it. So once again the "expert" (as far as Windows is concerned I'm just an average corporate type user) set up some protection, read the riot act, installed Firefox....
I'm sorry, but Windows does not have huge ease of use. It has huge long term familiarity and many people around the place who kind of know how to do things. OS X does not have ease of use for a typical user upgrading from OS 9; considerable retraining is required. In fact, I can well remember when I had to migrate from Unix + Mac Os to Windows: it was a steep uphill learning curve, especially making networking work.
I keep making this point, I will doubtless do it again. Twenty years ago, Diesel cars were a rarity in Europe. Gas ruled. "Everybody" understood gas engines which were "simple". Diesel was slow, smelly, hard to figure out. Where's the carb? The spark plugs? Only Diesel used about 30% less fuel than gas engines, and had a few other hidden advantages. Twenty years on, and in Europe Diesel technology is heading for 50% of the market in some countries. The reason? Cost, and it turned out that it was actually harder to develop better gas engines than Diesel engines. Development has taken care of the problems, and Diesel has developed much faster than gas engines over the same period. Now, even Jaguar has to have a Diesel. If, in the US, SUVs and large cars ran on Diesel, Iraq wouldn't be a US problem.Middle East oil? Who needs it?
So look at the broader picture. Which platforms really look to have the easiest development route and the real lowest long term cost?
Heuristic algorithmically programmed computers that don't decide to take over the mission? Science fiction precedent shows that being a hibernating crew member on a long voyage means you don't make it to the end of the movie. I guess we will need some of that old Russian technology with drum timers.
Also, if the eventual mechanism is based on bear hibernation, how are the astronauts going to wake up and poo in the woods periodically?
Although they don't specify how this will work, it seems likely that the pins could be replaced with much larger conductors for power, ground and heat removal. With the existing multi-hundred-pin chips, many of those pins are for power and ground and have to connect to individual circuit board layers. Power devices, with few I/O connections, can devote an entire side of the package to ground or Vcc.
As for the technique of capacitive coupling, that is how signals used to pass through low voltage amps virtually since the triode tube. The technique has been used for isolation amplifiers for many years. The signal on one side of the voltage barrier is digitised in some way (perhaps just PCM) and transmitted across a voltage barrier using very small capacitors, to where it is decoded. In some cases, power for the input side is also transmitted by capacitive coupling across the barrier.
Because the transmitting and receiving side of the capacitors is so tiny and the electric field therefore so constrained, it is not going to be possible to read the signals with an external aerial.
I believe Philips, among others, earlier suggested using LEDs and photodiodes along the edges of packages, but appart from requiring power they could only be unidirectional. Capacitive coupling itself absorbs begligible power and can be fully bidirectional.
Yes, there are. Despite the Constitution, data protection is weaker in the US than in Europe. Although the UK does not have a Constitution, as a member of the EU it is required to subscribe to the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which the last time I heard wasn't ratified by the US. (In fact, there is a real issue with EU law not allowing personal data to be sent to insecure countries, and I am amazed that UK corporations are allowed to outsource customer service to countries like India because of it.) IN the US, private corporations keep detailed records on you, and the US Govt. spends approx. $40 billion a year on various security agencies, though, as the Senate has recently reported, a lot of it is wasted.
This isn't a troll, just statement of fact, and I can't resist adding another fact. Years ago in the 80s, I used to work with two Englishmen who had spent a roughly equal amount of time (months)working in the US and the Soviet Union, in the Detroit auto industry and at Akademgorodok. They both insisted that there was actually more individualism and freedom in the bit of the Soviet Union they had visited than in the US. A lot less material prosperity, perhaps, but more real freedom to be an individual. I know this is heresy, but I'm just reporting. I also wonder if the climate that far East was very different from Moscow.
I found it difficult to argue with this point of view because the only country in the world where I have ever had a gun pointed at me is the US, and that by a security guard; and the only countries in the world where I have ever been fingerprinted and sniffed for drugs are the US and Mexico. (I won't get started on Mexico, except to say that every time I think of the place, the words "shit" and "hole" spring to mind.)
I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's Havelock Vetinari, (various Discworld books) who gets his pet scientist to devise him cyphers that are merely fiendishly difficult - because he wants his enemies to think they know what he is thinking. This is actually a valid point about intelligence. Although it's obvious that there are places where uncrackable encryption should be used if at all possible, there are many others where disinformation can be used to great effect. An example is where a message crackable in finite time is allowed to be intercepted because by the time it is decrypted it is too late to take action, the object being to build up the credibility of an information source prior to shovelling out a great load of disinformation. I believe this technique was used ahead of the D-Day landings as part of the plan to persuade the Germans that the invasion would actually be in the Pas de Calais.
For this reason I would have thought it was unwise for official bodies to make statements about the use of different forms of encryption - unless it's a double bluff and DES will continue to be used for short-life messages. Tinfoil hat? Stress-relieved oxygen-free copper plated mumetal in my case.
It depends if you know where the RFID tag is located. A coil that sat on the end of a finger, under Elastoplast with a layer of shielding, could easily be brought up next to the tag to reprogram it, resulting in a lower power demand and very short range detectability. Having done some research into metal detectors for -ahem- covert operations some years ago, I can assure you that there are ways and means within the scope of home build.
Supermarkets would just love to ban people from bringing in mobile phones, palmtops, laptops in standby mode, and all the other gadgets that create background RF noise, wouldn't they? The whole object is to make it look as if you can just walk in, load up and walk out.
I can't find the reference, but I believe a student has already made a demonstrator as a college project.
It should be pointed out that scanning the barcode is NOT photographing it and the shops would have difficulty arguing against the practice. If anything, it might direct shoppers to the ethical goods shelves where margins are higher... I think there is a case for aids for the partially sighted that would scan barcodes to report back what is on the shelf. Adding an ethical score to the internal database would be comparatively trivial.
Back in the distant past, we had a Unix box on the top floor of a new building. There was a ventilation grille on top of the rack, with a dome cover.
Came in on Monday morning after the first heavy snowfall of winter, to find the top floor full of snow. The builders had omitted the seals between the roof and the top of the walls and snow had blown in sideways, It had then melted onto the ceiling tiles, causing them to collapse. The Unix box had a pile of slush on the top. Inside, water was gently dripping down over the racks along with bits of ceiling tile. Water was trickling through the power supply, the VME rack holding the CPU and memory boards, and over the hard drives. It had missed the tape drive and the boot floppy.
Naturally, the system was still running and was still logging data from an experiment that had been running all weekend. The experimental gear was under a polycarbonate safety cover, surrounded with snow.
The only real casualty was the site engineer who had signed off the building without exploring the roof space, and who was released to allow him to explore alternative career options.
I do not want anything going around the network trying to do automatic patching, thank you very much. I'd much rather see ISPs mandated to remove machines from the network which are originating virus-laden emails, and a more aggressive approach to denying all access to ISPs that don't control the problem.
In the physical world, you may be a common carrier but you are not exempt from all control over the things you carry. The US post office is not _allowed_ to carry letters full of anthrax without regard to the consequences. The contents of trucks can be inspected if it is suspected they are illegal. It used to be regarded in some quarters as a joke that strong encryption is treated in the US as a "munition", but it's quite a rational point of view. In the same way if an email contains a virus, it could be considered to be a weapon - intended to cause damage to a system or be used as an adjunct to stealing email addresses. If airlines can be required to screen passengers for concealed weapons, I do not see why ISPs should be exempt.
OK, in the short run it might cost a little more. In the long run, it should save us all time and money.
There is also the separate issue of whether Microsoft is liable in some way for supplying products which make it easy for such things to spread. I guess this occupies the minds of their lawyers since their efforts to fix the problem are now so intensive. I am not suggesting that something which innocently contains a security hole is liable, but I am suggesting that manufacturers of operating systems should have a duty of care. Designing everything to interoperate silently perhaps could be regarded as negligence.
This is not a libertarian attitude, but it is rooted in the idea that the freedom of movement of your fist stops short of my nose. The solution to that kind of problem is rule of law, not to have a crowd of alternative fist-swingers who attempt to collide with your fist before it reaches my nose.
The controversy surrounds the extent to which the team is devoted to making Armstrong the winner, i.e. only one of them is really in the competition. It's exactly the same controversy as in F1 with Schumacher's teammates being instructed to let him past even if they could win.
The proportion of xenophobic idiots, I imagine, is about the same in most countries.
Er. yes, I did read the original proposal. And the latest explanation.
You don't seem to understand that the criminals and fraudsters will put a great deal of effort into finding ways to profit from the system. The development of premium rate numbers is a good example. Who would have expected in the first place that $45/min lines would emerge, or that fraudsters would find ways to get PCs to dial them automatically? Or seen the conflict of interest of the telecoms companies (zero interest in stopping the fruads because they benefit from them commercially?
The fact is, any system which allows money to be taken from your bank account without your intervention, whether it be dialing a phone number or this escrow system, is a thief magnet. And there are many, many thieves.
In many parts of the world, including the UK, they have trees quite close to railroad tracks. This has led to trains being unable to move owing to loss of adhesion when leaves fall on the line in the fall. I would imagine that a system which uses road tires for traction would have even bigger problems because the unit loading on the traction tires would not be the full weight. In any case, a tire optimised for asphalt is not likely to work so well on a narrow steel rail.
The problem is exacerbated because the main use of such vehicles is likely to be in short haul urban areas where zoning density pushes things closer to railroads. The presence of buildings can act as wind traps tending to keep fallen leaves closer to the line.
My guess? Designers trying to get funding for a "feasibility study".
First, look at the opportunities for fraud. Say I set up a porn site with an email address. You email me and the system asks you to post a huge bond to get the message through, say $1000. Somewhere out there will be id10ts who haven't configured their systems properly. The bond gets posted, I mark your message spam. Result: legal profit. Or if I get lots of replies, I can just set the bond to say 49c and then collect lots of small sums from people.
Second, who else will profit from this? The escrow companies. Do we really want bankers in charge of the email system? They will simply see this as an opportunity to print money. Before long, you won't be able to contact your mobile phone provider, electricity company etc. without posting a bond - and they will own the escrow companies, and you will be paying them an annual subscription to use their escrow account. It's as good a scam as having special rate phone lines, which means when you call them they get part of the cost of the call.
Third, increased email traffic around the system due to the challenge/response cycle will partly compensate for any reduction in spam.
The only way to fix spam is to make it unprofitable for the people who pay the spammers. Given that Joe Sixpack is the idiot who buys from spam and so makes the system possible, and that he will no more be able to set up an escrow account than he is able to understand to install Firefox to remove annoying popups,and Thunderbird for the junk mail filter, the system won't work - the majority of users will be unaffected, the ones who are affected are probably corporate users with spam blocking tools in place already.
There have been various forms of 3D printers around for a while, and incremental improvements aren't really news.
However, the Google translation is really quite funny. Google seems to have got to about the stage that the Japanese translators of manuals into English reached in the early 80s.
You need a block of stone in the first place, from which you remove stuff. It's exactly the same as standard sculpture except that instead of apprentices, laborers and great big stone saws, they're using a milling machine to get a high quality rough. And (RTFA) this does produce a rough: hand finishing is required, just as special finishing is required with the output of most machine tools. The comments this is getting suggest to me that too many people nowadays don't have a clue about manufacturing - and we in the West will surely regret this one day.
Printing is a process that involves ADDING material to a substrate, not taking it away.
So yes, it's a nice application of one of those multi-axis machine tools the Italians do so well, but it's basically the same as any die-sinking process.
More useful to junior criminals would be an expensive cell phone detector that only detects triband models with cameras, avoiding the tedium of finding you've mugged someone for a cheap phone.
I think a cheap detector for cell phones is meant.
And now having exhausted the day's ration of pedantry, to work.
(equivalent to DOD) has just excelled itself by vastly overrunning budget just moving its computers from its old electronic surveillance building to the new one. They have apparently also bought top of range Hermann Miller chairs for everyone claiming this will save them money in time off for backache. And, as we know, they can't equip the soldiers properly for Iraq or find the WMDs.
If they go the way of Enron , I guess before long someone will be auctioning a used Carnivore or Echelon system, one careful owner. But don't hold your breath.
What about the missing plutonium? Or the supplies of Pu and U in parts of the former Soviet Union that are almost certainly inadequately guarded? Who needs the essential data to design a deep bunker buster bomb when help from an NZ cruise missile designer, a few kilos of plutonium, plenty of TNT and a good machine shop would allow you to build a weapon which, while it might not fission, would be able to kill large numbers of people a long way away?
A few terrorists with box cutters have got us to the state that the US government is now prepared to shoot down a commercial aircraft if its transponder and radio systems fail. Yet the US seems to be focussing on a "missile shield" in former Warsaw Pact countries, and doing research into ever smaller more efficient nuclear weapons. Why? What credible threat is there that the present arsenal can't meet? If no new data on yet more advanced nuclear weapons was being created, there would be no security problem in keeping it secret.
Pressurised cooling systems are for heat engines running at a high temperature which would quickly evaporate an open water system. The whole idea is to keep the processor down in the 30s C. And freons aren't too good - they lack the thermal capacity and the transfer efficiency of ordinary water which just happens to be a superb liquid cooling medium.
There are several things I think are wrong with Nokia phones, some of which have been touched on here but perhaps need summarising.
Overly complex layouts with weird button positioning
Difficult to identify buttons by touch
redundant buttons on the business phones
poor bluetooth support
Ridiculous pushfit connectors that frequently fail to make contact reliably or break ears after a while
There are also things I think they do right:
Good development platform
Relatively rugged
Good battery life
No external aerials and generally good reception, at least on euro bands.
My perception of this is that Nokia have neglected the business market. Business people want consistent layouts and user interfaces to reduce learning time when they change phones, reliable connectors for chargers and computer connections, and easy button recognition by touch - partly because, as you get older, eyesight adaptation reduces, and partly because with a bluetooth phone it would be nice to be able to put people on hold etc. without having to get the phone out of a pocket.
The number of people who are happy to wander around with an arm up clutching a phone to the ear (and doing this illegally while driving) never ceases to amaze me - but I feel that Nokia doesn't really take handsfree seriously. Look, idiots, if millions of people are happy to use iPods with a plug-in handsfree system, why can't you produce a decent one for phones that will encourage people to use them safely?
On the whole I prefer the business oriented Motorola phones, but the plan sellers (including our business supplier) don't.
I use a simple phone adaptor which has a neck microphone and a small inductive loop. Sound quality is excellent (there is a very small rattle in my car which has the VW Pump Duese engine, but it is hardly noticeable when someone is speaking) and I have had no interference problems. What is more, the battery life is about 3 months, the additional drain on the phone battery is unnoticeable, and I can use the same loop with both hearing aids (I have a Widex for sports and outdoors and a larger Siemens with better sound quality for home and office.)
Unlike with Bluetooth, there is no additional weight on the ear. Both my colleagues who use bluetooth headsets complain of short battery life and of the weight on the ear. The only downside is the people who look at you as if you are mad as you make a phone call with no visible phone equipment at all.
In a way this could be a Good Thing for the rest of us. The longer the Chinese Government tries to keep out the round eye foreign devils outside the Wall, and protect its people from harmful influences (like democracy) and from questioning why party officials have Ferraris and peasants are still allowed to pull plows by hand, the longer it will be before the Chinese Empire takes over from the US Empire. If you think the Bush attitude to global warming, pollution and the rights of the citizen is backward, it's probably better for your blood pressure not to ask about China.
Last week there was a large pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong, which was (shamefully) handed over to the Chinese by the British in 1997, in circumstances that were never envisaged in the original treaty. The British built Hong Kong into a capitalist economy, educated the Chinese and taught them all about Western systems of government, and then said "Well, forget all that stuff about the Rights of Man and government by the people, we're handing you over to the 800lb gorilla who thinks Genghis Khan was an enlightened ruler." The people of Hong Kong seem, so some reason, to think this was a retrograde step. I guess the Chinese Government doesn't want that sort of thing happening in Shanghai or Beijing, and turning their back on the rest of the world may look like a good way to maintain the status quo.
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In fact, I like it so much I am going to plead fair use and extract it.
I'm sorry, but Windows does not have huge ease of use. It has huge long term familiarity and many people around the place who kind of know how to do things. OS X does not have ease of use for a typical user upgrading from OS 9; considerable retraining is required. In fact, I can well remember when I had to migrate from Unix + Mac Os to Windows: it was a steep uphill learning curve, especially making networking work.
I keep making this point, I will doubtless do it again. Twenty years ago, Diesel cars were a rarity in Europe. Gas ruled. "Everybody" understood gas engines which were "simple". Diesel was slow, smelly, hard to figure out. Where's the carb? The spark plugs? Only Diesel used about 30% less fuel than gas engines, and had a few other hidden advantages.
Twenty years on, and in Europe Diesel technology is heading for 50% of the market in some countries. The reason? Cost, and it turned out that it was actually harder to develop better gas engines than Diesel engines. Development has taken care of the problems, and Diesel has developed much faster than gas engines over the same period. Now, even Jaguar has to have a Diesel. If, in the US, SUVs and large cars ran on Diesel, Iraq wouldn't be a US problem.Middle East oil? Who needs it?
So look at the broader picture. Which platforms really look to have the easiest development route and the real lowest long term cost?
Also, if the eventual mechanism is based on bear hibernation, how are the astronauts going to wake up and poo in the woods periodically?
As for the technique of capacitive coupling, that is how signals used to pass through low voltage amps virtually since the triode tube. The technique has been used for isolation amplifiers for many years. The signal on one side of the voltage barrier is digitised in some way (perhaps just PCM) and transmitted across a voltage barrier using very small capacitors, to where it is decoded. In some cases, power for the input side is also transmitted by capacitive coupling across the barrier.
Because the transmitting and receiving side of the capacitors is so tiny and the electric field therefore so constrained, it is not going to be possible to read the signals with an external aerial.
I believe Philips, among others, earlier suggested using LEDs and photodiodes along the edges of packages, but appart from requiring power they could only be unidirectional. Capacitive coupling itself absorbs begligible power and can be fully bidirectional.
This isn't a troll, just statement of fact, and I can't resist adding another fact. Years ago in the 80s, I used to work with two Englishmen who had spent a roughly equal amount of time (months)working in the US and the Soviet Union, in the Detroit auto industry and at Akademgorodok. They both insisted that there was actually more individualism and freedom in the bit of the Soviet Union they had visited than in the US. A lot less material prosperity, perhaps, but more real freedom to be an individual. I know this is heresy, but I'm just reporting. I also wonder if the climate that far East was very different from Moscow.
I found it difficult to argue with this point of view because the only country in the world where I have ever had a gun pointed at me is the US, and that by a security guard; and the only countries in the world where I have ever been fingerprinted and sniffed for drugs are the US and Mexico. (I won't get started on Mexico, except to say that every time I think of the place, the words "shit" and "hole" spring to mind.)
This is actually a valid point about intelligence. Although it's obvious that there are places where uncrackable encryption should be used if at all possible, there are many others where disinformation can be used to great effect. An example is where a message crackable in finite time is allowed to be intercepted because by the time it is decrypted it is too late to take action, the object being to build up the credibility of an information source prior to shovelling out a great load of disinformation. I believe this technique was used ahead of the D-Day landings as part of the plan to persuade the Germans that the invasion would actually be in the Pas de Calais.
For this reason I would have thought it was unwise for official bodies to make statements about the use of different forms of encryption - unless it's a double bluff and DES will continue to be used for short-life messages.
Tinfoil hat? Stress-relieved oxygen-free copper plated mumetal in my case.
Having done some research into metal detectors for -ahem- covert operations some years ago, I can assure you that there are ways and means within the scope of home build.
Supermarkets would just love to ban people from bringing in mobile phones, palmtops, laptops in standby mode, and all the other gadgets that create background RF noise, wouldn't they? The whole object is to make it look as if you can just walk in, load up and walk out.
It should be pointed out that scanning the barcode is NOT photographing it and the shops would have difficulty arguing against the practice. If anything, it might direct shoppers to the ethical goods shelves where margins are higher...
I think there is a case for aids for the partially sighted that would scan barcodes to report back what is on the shelf. Adding an ethical score to the internal database would be comparatively trivial.
Came in on Monday morning after the first heavy snowfall of winter, to find the top floor full of snow. The builders had omitted the seals between the roof and the top of the walls and snow had blown in sideways, It had then melted onto the ceiling tiles, causing them to collapse. The Unix box had a pile of slush on the top. Inside, water was gently dripping down over the racks along with bits of ceiling tile. Water was trickling through the power supply, the VME rack holding the CPU and memory boards, and over the hard drives. It had missed the tape drive and the boot floppy.
Naturally, the system was still running and was still logging data from an experiment that had been running all weekend. The experimental gear was under a polycarbonate safety cover, surrounded with snow.
The only real casualty was the site engineer who had signed off the building without exploring the roof space, and who was released to allow him to explore alternative career options.
In the physical world, you may be a common carrier but you are not exempt from all control over the things you carry. The US post office is not _allowed_ to carry letters full of anthrax without regard to the consequences. The contents of trucks can be inspected if it is suspected they are illegal. It used to be regarded in some quarters as a joke that strong encryption is treated in the US as a "munition", but it's quite a rational point of view. In the same way if an email contains a virus, it could be considered to be a weapon - intended to cause damage to a system or be used as an adjunct to stealing email addresses. If airlines can be required to screen passengers for concealed weapons, I do not see why ISPs should be exempt.
OK, in the short run it might cost a little more. In the long run, it should save us all time and money.
There is also the separate issue of whether Microsoft is liable in some way for supplying products which make it easy for such things to spread. I guess this occupies the minds of their lawyers since their efforts to fix the problem are now so intensive. I am not suggesting that something which innocently contains a security hole is liable, but I am suggesting that manufacturers of operating systems should have a duty of care. Designing everything to interoperate silently perhaps could be regarded as negligence.
This is not a libertarian attitude, but it is rooted in the idea that the freedom of movement of your fist stops short of my nose. The solution to that kind of problem is rule of law, not to have a crowd of alternative fist-swingers who attempt to collide with your fist before it reaches my nose.
The proportion of xenophobic idiots, I imagine, is about the same in most countries.
You don't seem to understand that the criminals and fraudsters will put a great deal of effort into finding ways to profit from the system. The development of premium rate numbers is a good example. Who would have expected in the first place that $45/min lines would emerge, or that fraudsters would find ways to get PCs to dial them automatically? Or seen the conflict of interest of the telecoms companies (zero interest in stopping the fruads because they benefit from them commercially?
The fact is, any system which allows money to be taken from your bank account without your intervention, whether it be dialing a phone number or this escrow system, is a thief magnet. And there are many, many thieves.
The problem is exacerbated because the main use of such vehicles is likely to be in short haul urban areas where zoning density pushes things closer to railroads. The presence of buildings can act as wind traps tending to keep fallen leaves closer to the line.
My guess? Designers trying to get funding for a "feasibility study".
Second, who else will profit from this? The escrow companies. Do we really want bankers in charge of the email system? They will simply see this as an opportunity to print money. Before long, you won't be able to contact your mobile phone provider, electricity company etc. without posting a bond - and they will own the escrow companies, and you will be paying them an annual subscription to use their escrow account. It's as good a scam as having special rate phone lines, which means when you call them they get part of the cost of the call.
Third, increased email traffic around the system due to the challenge/response cycle will partly compensate for any reduction in spam.
The only way to fix spam is to make it unprofitable for the people who pay the spammers. Given that Joe Sixpack is the idiot who buys from spam and so makes the system possible, and that he will no more be able to set up an escrow account than he is able to understand to install Firefox to remove annoying popups,and Thunderbird for the junk mail filter, the system won't work - the majority of users will be unaffected, the ones who are affected are probably corporate users with spam blocking tools in place already.
However, the Google translation is really quite funny. Google seems to have got to about the stage that the Japanese translators of manuals into English reached in the early 80s.
Printing is a process that involves ADDING material to a substrate, not taking it away.
So yes, it's a nice application of one of those multi-axis machine tools the Italians do so well, but it's basically the same as any die-sinking process.
I think a cheap detector for cell phones is meant.
And now having exhausted the day's ration of pedantry, to work.
If they go the way of Enron , I guess before long someone will be auctioning a used Carnivore or Echelon system, one careful owner. But don't hold your breath.
A few terrorists with box cutters have got us to the state that the US government is now prepared to shoot down a commercial aircraft if its transponder and radio systems fail. Yet the US seems to be focussing on a "missile shield" in former Warsaw Pact countries, and doing research into ever smaller more efficient nuclear weapons. Why? What credible threat is there that the present arsenal can't meet? If no new data on yet more advanced nuclear weapons was being created, there would be no security problem in keeping it secret.
Oh well, enough naive rant for one day.
Pressurised cooling systems are for heat engines running at a high temperature which would quickly evaporate an open water system. The whole idea is to keep the processor down in the 30s C. And freons aren't too good - they lack the thermal capacity and the transfer efficiency of ordinary water which just happens to be a superb liquid cooling medium.
- Overly complex layouts with weird button positioning
- Difficult to identify buttons by touch
- redundant buttons on the business phones
- poor bluetooth support
- Ridiculous pushfit connectors that frequently fail to make contact reliably or break ears after a while
There are also things I think they do right:- Good development platform
- Relatively rugged
- Good battery life
- No external aerials and generally good reception, at least on euro bands.
My perception of this is that Nokia have neglected the business market. Business people want consistent layouts and user interfaces to reduce learning time when they change phones, reliable connectors for chargers and computer connections, and easy button recognition by touch - partly because, as you get older, eyesight adaptation reduces, and partly because with a bluetooth phone it would be nice to be able to put people on hold etc. without having to get the phone out of a pocket.The number of people who are happy to wander around with an arm up clutching a phone to the ear (and doing this illegally while driving) never ceases to amaze me - but I feel that Nokia doesn't really take handsfree seriously. Look, idiots, if millions of people are happy to use iPods with a plug-in handsfree system, why can't you produce a decent one for phones that will encourage people to use them safely?
On the whole I prefer the business oriented Motorola phones, but the plan sellers (including our business supplier) don't.
They work in all SI units. So, no conversions. Perhaps that's why Ariane is reliable.
I use a simple phone adaptor which has a neck microphone and a small inductive loop. Sound quality is excellent (there is a very small rattle in my car which has the VW Pump Duese engine, but it is hardly noticeable when someone is speaking) and I have had no interference problems. What is more, the battery life is about 3 months, the additional drain on the phone battery is unnoticeable, and I can use the same loop with both hearing aids (I have a Widex for sports and outdoors and a larger Siemens with better sound quality for home and office.)
Unlike with Bluetooth, there is no additional weight on the ear. Both my colleagues who use bluetooth headsets complain of short battery life and of the weight on the ear. The only downside is the people who look at you as if you are mad as you make a phone call with no visible phone equipment at all.
Last week there was a large pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong, which was (shamefully) handed over to the Chinese by the British in 1997, in circumstances that were never envisaged in the original treaty. The British built Hong Kong into a capitalist economy, educated the Chinese and taught them all about Western systems of government, and then said "Well, forget all that stuff about the Rights of Man and government by the people, we're handing you over to the 800lb gorilla who thinks Genghis Khan was an enlightened ruler." The people of Hong Kong seem, so some reason, to think this was a retrograde step. I guess the Chinese Government doesn't want that sort of thing happening in Shanghai or Beijing, and turning their back on the rest of the world may look like a good way to maintain the status quo.