Except that Microsoft does say that with the Xbox and Xbox 360. They have 2 different platforms with 2 different lisencing strategies for their hardware. Windows is lisenced to anyone and everyone for an exorbinant fee, while the Xbox OS is not lisenced to anyone and used only for running hardware assembled and sold by Microsoft.
Microsoft doesn't sell the "Xbox OS" as a separate product. Apple does sell OS X independently of their hardware.
It was as if the writers were suddenly sacked and the ending written by the janitor because there was no money left for anything else.
Most of the fourth season was written by Manny Coto. The last episode was a product of "the dread Berman Beam". I always figured Berman was upset that Coto did what no one else had managed in the three previous seasons.
Since before the dawn of time, Man has dreamed of the laser cannon - even when Woman said it was dumb and that the costumes on Star Trek were ridiculous. The ancient Hebrews called it "Uriel" - "the flame of God". The Romans had an entire god (Apollo) devoted to the laser cannon and its many uses. The Greeks dreamed of Prometheus stealing the laser cannon of Zeus and giving it to mortals. In Norse mythology, the end of Ragnarok is marked by the wolf Skoll consuming the last remaining laser cannon and condemning the world to a laser cannon-less eternal night. Today, the laser cannon is at last ours. Thank you, Northrop-Grumman, and thank you, US military-industrial complex. The spirits of countless millennia stand in silent awe at what you have wrought.
Of course, I've always had a soft spot for the TXT file floating around that describes how to enrich uranium in your backyard with little more than a bucket. Perfect (and humorous) example of what NOT to do when processing uranium.;-)
That's what DIY telepresence waldoes are for. Er, not that I have any such plans myself.
Shouldn't we concentrate on putting the country back on its feet now, and leave space flight for another generation?
Why not use space flight to help put the country back on its feet? I wasn't born yet during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Skylab era, but from learning its history it sure seems to me as though that enormous effort was a great way to get a bunch of Americans working on a project together. It created a bunch of new jobs and new technologies, and wasn't directly intended to kill or even antagonize anyone.
Yes, I'm aware of the "rocket research was mainly for the benefit of ICBM technology" argument, but look at all of the peaceful things that came out of it - including the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission.
I don't know how anyone can be aware of such times as the Red Scare and McCarthyism, or the modus operatus of groups like the CIA and KGB, and yet believe that this doesn't happen to people.
Have you ever known someone with a psychotic mental disorder? I've known several. It's surreal, because movies like A Beautiful Mind aren't an exaggeration or based on cliches. Their brains really do produce results exactly like that. I find it very sad, but also really interesting that something as complicated as the human brain can fail in exactly the same way in so many people.
A similarly-eerie delusion is the one that's been mentioned on Slashdot before about the victims' bodies supposedly spontaneously producing coloured stringy material. What is it about the hardware and software in our brains that makes them capable of coming up with that sort of thing independently of each other?
The psychologists quoted in the interview are right - it's necessary to do an in-person, individual diagnosis. If you speak with someone who is psychotic for long enough, it will become obvious sooner or later that that's what's going on. Beyond the increasingly bizarre and improbable descriptions of their delusion(s), there are some very odd speech patterns (Wikipedia has a list of some) that are strong indications of a problem. These are also very interesting - some of them have the timbre and cadence of normal speech, but if you actually try to parse them, they don't convey any meaning.
Anyway, while that formal diagnosis is necessary rather than immediately discounting 100% of the people with these beliefs, statistically it is much more likely for someone to be psychotic than to actually be persecuted by a conspiracy of mysterious people.
Prepared (or parametrized) statements are an easy and absolute defense against SQL injection attacks.
They're actually not an absolute protection. If anything you are doing ends up working with stored procedures that do concatenation internally, your prepared statements can still end up allowing a SQL injection.
Prepared statements are a very, very good idea that provides a lot of built-in resistance to SQL injection, but they're not bulletproof.
I would hope enterprise environments would use something a bit more sophisticated than windows file sharing.
Such as?
If you have Windows clients and Windows servers, SMB is the most common way to get files between them. This is true whether you're connecting two Windows machines to your home wifi router or you're running a corporate environment with tens of thousands of Windows machines on it.
While that is a better approach, I would argue that the entire concept of using a diff to try to determine what an installer is doing is usually a bad idea.
It can be useful for troubleshooting, but most people (and software vendors) try this kind of thing to build "repackaging" installer-builders. It's a terrible idea.
An installer may do completely different things depending on the system configuration. There is the factor you mention about existing file versions. If the user chooses a different install path/install options, has different OS components or software, etc. etc. that can potentially change things like registry keys or even the data inside binary files.
Unless you're building for an environment that is 100% standardized on a particular model of device, with a consistent OS version/patch level, there's just no point. Use the vendor's own MSI's or other installers in silent mode - that's what they're there for!
Using this type of approach for a pseudo-uninstall is equally dangerous, for similar reasons. Because Windows is such a hack-job for backwards compatibility purposes (which I think is the only option MS has, due to the public's perception that issues with backwards compatibility are their fault rather than the fault of terrible software developers), the only safe way to do this kind of thing that I can think of is what Vista does with its Windows-on-Windows (ew!) file and registry virtualization. It's a huge space hog, it's a waste of RAM (IMO), but it works.
Windows caters more to the "regular user", and Microsoft's interpretation of that is "automate everything, and run a lot in the background of the OS"
There are Linux distributions that have at least as many services running as Vista, and in my (somewhat limited) experience, they still manage to run faster. For example, I installed Kubuntu on a PC for a friend last week, and its Task Manager-equivalent had a list about as long as a Vista machine. It also has a UI that seems in the same general category of graphics complexity as Vista. The difference is that I was running Kubuntu on a 1.5GHz P4 with 768MB of RAM instead of a Core 2 with 4GB of RAM and it was performing very well.
Vista doesn't really have a lot of unnecessary services running, but even with those disabled it is still very slow (at actual work like copying files, not the UI responsiveness). I tend to side with those who blame the new DRM layer.
You are using "virtualize" in the marketing sense. There is no good reason to virtualize the entire OS of a desktop machine just so that you can copy your documents and preferences to a cellphone and back. That's not using a sledgehammer instead of a flyswatter. It's building a fleet of space-tugs, sending them to the asteroid belt to bring back asteroids, and then dropping those asteroids from orbit onto the flies.
Imagine behind able to transfer the entire state of your machine between different physical hardware.
So you're arguing for virtualizing the entire OS as a workaround for application vendors who can't be bothered to write configuration-migrating utilities? For a *cellphone*?
I know I'm getting old, but isn't that a *bit* of overkill? And if the vendor can't be bothered to understand their configuration file/database well enough to migrate just those settings, do you really want to be running their software at all?
Really, what support from the vendor? Have you/read/ your EULA for any software you've used? Ever?
I know it's popular on Slashdot to claim that vendor support doesn't exist, but if you work for a large customer of a particular vendor and ask intelligent questions of the right person working for that vendor, you will generally get good support.
In most situations, it doesn't make economic sense for everyone to have someone on staff who knows the ins and outs of every product they work with as well as a dedicated support person at the vendor does. I tend to get into the nuts and bolts of what I support a lot more than most people would, but there's only so much time in the day, and I support a *lot* of different software for my employer.
My experience has been that - while there are some vendors who have terrible support overall - generally it's just the first tier that's like that, to act as a buffer because most people who call their vendor's support line are not highly technical and only need basic support (IE something they could have learned from the manual). If you are willing to do the necessary investigation beforehand and put together a package of information (network captures, etc.) you will usually get good results.
The Xbox 360 wireless adapter still doesn't support WPA2 (even though the manual says it does), which is why I have my wireless router set to WPA instead. Thanks MS!
and really 16 bit encoding is nearly enough to represent the entire capability of any real-life speaker currently.
I think you are thinking of the Nyquist frequency, which is related to the sample rate and not the bit depth. Either way, you're right that 16-bit, 44KHz audio theoretically can represent anything that most speakers can reproduce, but I'm talking about something else.
The quality of the speaker doesn't have a whole lot to do with the quantization of the data encoding. Quieter audio (when recorded digitally) will sound worse than louder audio because fewer bits are being used to represent each sample. So when the digital data is converted back to analogue, its harmonics will be less like the original sound than if it had been recorded at a higher volume.
An extreme example would be a waveform recorded at such a low volume that the difference between the peak and trough is only one bit. When that digital data is converted back to analogue, the DAC is going to more or less smooth it out into a sine wave no matter what the original shape was.
Sorry, maybe I worded my post badly - maybe I shouldn't have used the decibel unit? Or maybe the equations on Wikipedia give an "average" value (like the ones that tell you how much data can be stored in half a bit or whatever?).
In addition to the "add it to the trusted root list" that other people elaborated on, my point was more that whether or not Firefox (or whatever) complains, end users in Australia would still have two choices: - Let the government snoop on their traffic. - Don't use the internet at all. The "get the keys offline" method is the only one I could think of for a workaround as well.
If Australia does what a lot of "secure web gateway" vendors are doing with their products - implement a man-in-the-middle attack against encrypted traffic by using a forged cert. So then Australians' choice becomes the same as employees of companies that deploy those systems - agree to being snooped on, or don't use the internet. If Australia's government requires that PCs sold there include the root cert used to forge the other certs (again, like SWG vendors), most citizens wouldn't even notice the difference.
But every African American that voted for him just because he is African American is just as racist as every none African American that didn't vote for him just because he was African American.
Well, I conceded that if their *sole* reason was his race, then yes, you are correct.
I would argue that using it as a contributing factor isn't racism. A non-white person growing up in the US (even today) is going to have a very different perspective than a white person. I like the idea of bringing people with different perspectives into office. Not wholesale replacing every white man with someone who isn't a white man, but mixing things up a bit to help introduce new ideas and approaches.
There is a whole community of people, who tend to listen to classical music, that is EXTREMELY interested in precise musical reproduction. They know what an orchestra sounds like, and they know a CD doesn't reproduce it very well. They will get annoyed if the sound is bumped up just to sound louder.
The problem with most of that type of person is that they refuse to participate in and/or accept the results of double-blind tests to see if they are perceiving something that's actually different or it's a psychological effect.
Anyway, the main issue I'm aware of in terms of dynamic range isn't related to speakers or microphones. It's that all of the standard digital audio systems I'm aware of use linear instead of logarithmic encoding. Digital cameras are the same way. Our ears are logarithmically sensitive, and the exposure model retained from film cameras is too.
For whatever reason (simplicity, I assume?) digital audio and imaging systems use a linear model. This means that in the case of digital audio, half of the bits in each sample are allocated to the top decibel of loudness, just like half of the bits in each pixel of an RGB image are allocated to the top f-stop of brightness. So either the recording is compressed to make the most use of those bits, or a ton of fidelity is thrown away.
If you'd like to experiment with the results of this type of encoding, you can easily simulate an exaggerated version by opening a digital audio file in Audacity (or some other app), reducing its volume to 0.1% (or 0.01%, etc.) and then normalizing it. The sample quantization (and associated added noise) that results is the same thing.
I've heard of experimental systems based on logarithmic encoding, and I'm really not sure why they haven't caught on. The difference in processing difficulty must be negligible with today's technology.
SO anyway to get to the the point, I'm all for the more secure packaging.
Me too. Amazon's motive here seems like a good one, but there is no way I'm going to order items shipped in easily-identifiable, easily-opened packaging. It's too much of a hassle to deal with returns/wait for the delivery window to expire if someone steals some/all of the contents.
That was my question as well. I think it's especially important to have answered given that Google has already failed to meet a 99.9% uptime at least once this year. When they fail in that way, how long is it before they are able to make a particular uptime claim again? Apparently the answer is "less than a few months" at best. I suspect it's actually "immediately" instead of the more appropriate "when they prevent their service from going down long enough to meet the stated uptime percentage including statistics for as long as the service has been offerered."
Isn't it more than a bit arrogant and unrealistic to think the US is the only country with these technologies?
The US seems to be the only country with advanced uncooled thermal imaging technology. Earlier this year I read a story about several Chinese being caught trying to smuggle thermal imagers out of the US and into China (presumably for reverse-engineering and cloning).
I suppose this makes me a "traitor", but I actually hope they succeed in grabbing that technology. I'd love to buy a thermal imager, especially if someone can bump up the resolution to several times the current 320x200. However, they still cost many thousands of dollars because of the limited manufacturing.
I can't speak to other technologies, but I have trouble believing that's the only one that fits in with what the article was describing.
Would you make the same recommendation to someone whose primary interest isn't x86 disassembly? IDA Pro supports disassembly of executables for a lot of other architectures.
There are basically two endings. The first, good ending (written by Manny Coto), and then one episode later the legendary "Dread Berman Beam" is used to carve a disappointing one.
If you haven't gotten to season 4 yet, you're in for a treat. Early in that season Manny Coto basically took over, and it temporarily became awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Microsoft does say that with the Xbox and Xbox 360. They have 2 different platforms with 2 different lisencing strategies for their hardware. Windows is lisenced to anyone and everyone for an exorbinant fee, while the Xbox OS is not lisenced to anyone and used only for running hardware assembled and sold by Microsoft.
Microsoft doesn't sell the "Xbox OS" as a separate product. Apple does sell OS X independently of their hardware.
It was as if the writers were suddenly sacked and the ending written by the janitor because there was no money left for anything else.
Most of the fourth season was written by Manny Coto. The last episode was a product of "the dread Berman Beam". I always figured Berman was upset that Coto did what no one else had managed in the three previous seasons.
Since before the dawn of time, Man has dreamed of the laser cannon - even when Woman said it was dumb and that the costumes on Star Trek were ridiculous.
The ancient Hebrews called it "Uriel" - "the flame of God". The Romans had an entire god (Apollo) devoted to the laser cannon and its many uses. The Greeks dreamed of Prometheus stealing the laser cannon of Zeus and giving it to mortals. In Norse mythology, the end of Ragnarok is marked by the wolf Skoll consuming the last remaining laser cannon and condemning the world to a laser cannon-less eternal night.
Today, the laser cannon is at last ours. Thank you, Northrop-Grumman, and thank you, US military-industrial complex. The spirits of countless millennia stand in silent awe at what you have wrought.
Of course, I've always had a soft spot for the TXT file floating around that describes how to enrich uranium in your backyard with little more than a bucket. Perfect (and humorous) example of what NOT to do when processing uranium. ;-)
That's what DIY telepresence waldoes are for. Er, not that I have any such plans myself.
Shouldn't we concentrate on putting the country back on its feet now, and leave space flight for another generation?
Why not use space flight to help put the country back on its feet? I wasn't born yet during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Skylab era, but from learning its history it sure seems to me as though that enormous effort was a great way to get a bunch of Americans working on a project together. It created a bunch of new jobs and new technologies, and wasn't directly intended to kill or even antagonize anyone.
Yes, I'm aware of the "rocket research was mainly for the benefit of ICBM technology" argument, but look at all of the peaceful things that came out of it - including the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission.
I don't know how anyone can be aware of such times as the Red Scare and McCarthyism, or the modus operatus of groups like the CIA and KGB, and yet believe that this doesn't happen to people.
Have you ever known someone with a psychotic mental disorder? I've known several. It's surreal, because movies like A Beautiful Mind aren't an exaggeration or based on cliches. Their brains really do produce results exactly like that. I find it very sad, but also really interesting that something as complicated as the human brain can fail in exactly the same way in so many people.
A similarly-eerie delusion is the one that's been mentioned on Slashdot before about the victims' bodies supposedly spontaneously producing coloured stringy material. What is it about the hardware and software in our brains that makes them capable of coming up with that sort of thing independently of each other?
The psychologists quoted in the interview are right - it's necessary to do an in-person, individual diagnosis. If you speak with someone who is psychotic for long enough, it will become obvious sooner or later that that's what's going on. Beyond the increasingly bizarre and improbable descriptions of their delusion(s), there are some very odd speech patterns (Wikipedia has a list of some) that are strong indications of a problem. These are also very interesting - some of them have the timbre and cadence of normal speech, but if you actually try to parse them, they don't convey any meaning.
Anyway, while that formal diagnosis is necessary rather than immediately discounting 100% of the people with these beliefs, statistically it is much more likely for someone to be psychotic than to actually be persecuted by a conspiracy of mysterious people.
Prepared (or parametrized) statements are an easy and absolute defense against SQL injection attacks.
They're actually not an absolute protection. If anything you are doing ends up working with stored procedures that do concatenation internally, your prepared statements can still end up allowing a SQL injection.
Prepared statements are a very, very good idea that provides a lot of built-in resistance to SQL injection, but they're not bulletproof.
I would hope enterprise environments would use something a bit more sophisticated than windows file sharing.
Such as?
If you have Windows clients and Windows servers, SMB is the most common way to get files between them. This is true whether you're connecting two Windows machines to your home wifi router or you're running a corporate environment with tens of thousands of Windows machines on it.
While that is a better approach, I would argue that the entire concept of using a diff to try to determine what an installer is doing is usually a bad idea.
It can be useful for troubleshooting, but most people (and software vendors) try this kind of thing to build "repackaging" installer-builders. It's a terrible idea.
An installer may do completely different things depending on the system configuration. There is the factor you mention about existing file versions. If the user chooses a different install path/install options, has different OS components or software, etc. etc. that can potentially change things like registry keys or even the data inside binary files.
Unless you're building for an environment that is 100% standardized on a particular model of device, with a consistent OS version/patch level, there's just no point. Use the vendor's own MSI's or other installers in silent mode - that's what they're there for!
Using this type of approach for a pseudo-uninstall is equally dangerous, for similar reasons. Because Windows is such a hack-job for backwards compatibility purposes (which I think is the only option MS has, due to the public's perception that issues with backwards compatibility are their fault rather than the fault of terrible software developers), the only safe way to do this kind of thing that I can think of is what Vista does with its Windows-on-Windows (ew!) file and registry virtualization. It's a huge space hog, it's a waste of RAM (IMO), but it works.
Windows caters more to the "regular user", and Microsoft's interpretation of that is "automate everything, and run a lot in the background of the OS"
There are Linux distributions that have at least as many services running as Vista, and in my (somewhat limited) experience, they still manage to run faster. For example, I installed Kubuntu on a PC for a friend last week, and its Task Manager-equivalent had a list about as long as a Vista machine. It also has a UI that seems in the same general category of graphics complexity as Vista. The difference is that I was running Kubuntu on a 1.5GHz P4 with 768MB of RAM instead of a Core 2 with 4GB of RAM and it was performing very well.
Vista doesn't really have a lot of unnecessary services running, but even with those disabled it is still very slow (at actual work like copying files, not the UI responsiveness). I tend to side with those who blame the new DRM layer.
You are using "virtualize" in the marketing sense. There is no good reason to virtualize the entire OS of a desktop machine just so that you can copy your documents and preferences to a cellphone and back. That's not using a sledgehammer instead of a flyswatter. It's building a fleet of space-tugs, sending them to the asteroid belt to bring back asteroids, and then dropping those asteroids from orbit onto the flies.
Imagine behind able to transfer the entire state of your machine between different physical hardware.
So you're arguing for virtualizing the entire OS as a workaround for application vendors who can't be bothered to write configuration-migrating utilities? For a *cellphone*?
I know I'm getting old, but isn't that a *bit* of overkill? And if the vendor can't be bothered to understand their configuration file/database well enough to migrate just those settings, do you really want to be running their software at all?
Really, what support from the vendor? Have you /read/ your EULA for any software you've used? Ever?
I know it's popular on Slashdot to claim that vendor support doesn't exist, but if you work for a large customer of a particular vendor and ask intelligent questions of the right person working for that vendor, you will generally get good support.
In most situations, it doesn't make economic sense for everyone to have someone on staff who knows the ins and outs of every product they work with as well as a dedicated support person at the vendor does. I tend to get into the nuts and bolts of what I support a lot more than most people would, but there's only so much time in the day, and I support a *lot* of different software for my employer.
My experience has been that - while there are some vendors who have terrible support overall - generally it's just the first tier that's like that, to act as a buffer because most people who call their vendor's support line are not highly technical and only need basic support (IE something they could have learned from the manual). If you are willing to do the necessary investigation beforehand and put together a package of information (network captures, etc.) you will usually get good results.
The Xbox 360 wireless adapter still doesn't support WPA2 (even though the manual says it does), which is why I have my wireless router set to WPA instead. Thanks MS!
and really 16 bit encoding is nearly enough to represent the entire capability of any real-life speaker currently.
I think you are thinking of the Nyquist frequency, which is related to the sample rate and not the bit depth. Either way, you're right that 16-bit, 44KHz audio theoretically can represent anything that most speakers can reproduce, but I'm talking about something else.
The quality of the speaker doesn't have a whole lot to do with the quantization of the data encoding. Quieter audio (when recorded digitally) will sound worse than louder audio because fewer bits are being used to represent each sample. So when the digital data is converted back to analogue, its harmonics will be less like the original sound than if it had been recorded at a higher volume.
An extreme example would be a waveform recorded at such a low volume that the difference between the peak and trough is only one bit. When that digital data is converted back to analogue, the DAC is going to more or less smooth it out into a sine wave no matter what the original shape was.
Sorry, maybe I worded my post badly - maybe I shouldn't have used the decibel unit? Or maybe the equations on Wikipedia give an "average" value (like the ones that tell you how much data can be stored in half a bit or whatever?).
There's a good explanation of the imaging equivalent of what I meant here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml
In addition to the "add it to the trusted root list" that other people elaborated on, my point was more that whether or not Firefox (or whatever) complains, end users in Australia would still have two choices:
- Let the government snoop on their traffic.
- Don't use the internet at all.
The "get the keys offline" method is the only one I could think of for a workaround as well.
If Australia does what a lot of "secure web gateway" vendors are doing with their products - implement a man-in-the-middle attack against encrypted traffic by using a forged cert. So then Australians' choice becomes the same as employees of companies that deploy those systems - agree to being snooped on, or don't use the internet.
If Australia's government requires that PCs sold there include the root cert used to forge the other certs (again, like SWG vendors), most citizens wouldn't even notice the difference.
But every African American that voted for him just because he is African American is just as racist as every none African American that didn't vote for him just because he was African American.
Well, I conceded that if their *sole* reason was his race, then yes, you are correct.
I would argue that using it as a contributing factor isn't racism. A non-white person growing up in the US (even today) is going to have a very different perspective than a white person. I like the idea of bringing people with different perspectives into office. Not wholesale replacing every white man with someone who isn't a white man, but mixing things up a bit to help introduce new ideas and approaches.
There is a whole community of people, who tend to listen to classical music, that is EXTREMELY interested in precise musical reproduction. They know what an orchestra sounds like, and they know a CD doesn't reproduce it very well. They will get annoyed if the sound is bumped up just to sound louder.
The problem with most of that type of person is that they refuse to participate in and/or accept the results of double-blind tests to see if they are perceiving something that's actually different or it's a psychological effect.
Anyway, the main issue I'm aware of in terms of dynamic range isn't related to speakers or microphones. It's that all of the standard digital audio systems I'm aware of use linear instead of logarithmic encoding. Digital cameras are the same way. Our ears are logarithmically sensitive, and the exposure model retained from film cameras is too.
For whatever reason (simplicity, I assume?) digital audio and imaging systems use a linear model. This means that in the case of digital audio, half of the bits in each sample are allocated to the top decibel of loudness, just like half of the bits in each pixel of an RGB image are allocated to the top f-stop of brightness. So either the recording is compressed to make the most use of those bits, or a ton of fidelity is thrown away.
If you'd like to experiment with the results of this type of encoding, you can easily simulate an exaggerated version by opening a digital audio file in Audacity (or some other app), reducing its volume to 0.1% (or 0.01%, etc.) and then normalizing it. The sample quantization (and associated added noise) that results is the same thing.
I've heard of experimental systems based on logarithmic encoding, and I'm really not sure why they haven't caught on. The difference in processing difficulty must be negligible with today's technology.
SO anyway to get to the the point, I'm all for the more secure packaging.
Me too. Amazon's motive here seems like a good one, but there is no way I'm going to order items shipped in easily-identifiable, easily-opened packaging. It's too much of a hassle to deal with returns/wait for the delivery window to expire if someone steals some/all of the contents.
That was my question as well. I think it's especially important to have answered given that Google has already failed to meet a 99.9% uptime at least once this year.
When they fail in that way, how long is it before they are able to make a particular uptime claim again? Apparently the answer is "less than a few months" at best. I suspect it's actually "immediately" instead of the more appropriate "when they prevent their service from going down long enough to meet the stated uptime percentage including statistics for as long as the service has been offerered."
Isn't it more than a bit arrogant and unrealistic to think the US is the only country with these technologies?
The US seems to be the only country with advanced uncooled thermal imaging technology. Earlier this year I read a story about several Chinese being caught trying to smuggle thermal imagers out of the US and into China (presumably for reverse-engineering and cloning).
I suppose this makes me a "traitor", but I actually hope they succeed in grabbing that technology. I'd love to buy a thermal imager, especially if someone can bump up the resolution to several times the current 320x200. However, they still cost many thousands of dollars because of the limited manufacturing.
I can't speak to other technologies, but I have trouble believing that's the only one that fits in with what the article was describing.
Would you make the same recommendation to someone whose primary interest isn't x86 disassembly? IDA Pro supports disassembly of executables for a lot of other architectures.
So... it ends like Saint Elsewhere?
There are basically two endings. The first, good ending (written by Manny Coto), and then one episode later the legendary "Dread Berman Beam" is used to carve a disappointing one.
If you haven't gotten to season 4 yet, you're in for a treat. Early in that season Manny Coto basically took over, and it temporarily became awesome.