I'm going to have to disagree, if anything, the inclination of the thief is indeterminate. Just as many that would be deterred from stealing the notebook as it has distinct markings may take that as a sign of greater value and take preference to stealing it over unmarked laptops. If a car thief saw a porsche parked in a dimly lit area alongside a honda he would likely steal the Porsche first, as the reward is much greater, even though the risk is significantly higher (A Porsche is less common than a Honda). Value doesn't scale quite as well with notebooks and they aren't something you just leave laying around anyway; and if somebody breaks into your house or office, they're going to take it regardless of whether the message "This device is equipped with LoJack." is engraved on the lid.
The best security for a notebook is physical security, not a plainly visible watermark. If the thief isn't a professional (i.e. an angry girlfriend, frat ass buddy or what not) perhaps it could be useful as it leaves little ambiguity as to who actually owns the device (though I doubt they'd be smart enough to wipe the disk drives and remove the serials, and the latter could be considered incriminating anyway).
The lid can be replaced at negligible cost < 80.00 for mine from the manufacturer (and you know how inflated that price is). It doesn't make any sense to spend exponentially more money on something that makes the object marginally harder to steal.
It seems my initial analysis is way off and rather than adding energy to the reaction the hydrogen is used to get the most out of the diesel fuel (i.e., burn it completely). It says it only uses ~15 amps of electricity which is the equivalent of the headlights drain on the truck, so certainly it is a rather insignificant amount of hydrogen being added to the combustion chamber.
It seems that that is the only likely explanation, unless they used super capacitors to charge batteries on braking to power the electrolysis, the system does cost *quite* a bit to install (14k USD or CAD?). Trucks have a shitload of energy to convert to thermal energy when braking so it certainly seems feasible, (also converted into mechanical energy normally via 'compression brake, which raises pressure inside of cylinders by cycling valves at the 'wrong' times, which makes the engine do more work to get the same w (or it slows down)).
It is hard to believe, though I have little knowledge of chemistry or the mechanics of combustion, that a synergistic reaction would be efficient enough to make up for the terrible inefficiency of electrolysis, or so i'm told,
Suffice to say, if you think having two sets of RCA or component jacks in the back of your reciever is something only a "hardcore geek" would have, you are an idiot. Any joe sixpack that buys decent hardware (the kind that is going to go drop 600.00 on a bloody console) is likely to have some sort of input switcher, even if they don't have a reciever, hell, my tv has 5 component inputs and 2 hdmi inputs, and it is pretty much bargain barrel when it comes to HD. A non trivial number of people who have two or more of the next generation consoles hooked up. The fact is, backwards compatibility only serves as a holiday buffer to make people go dump the cash on the console that has next to no games for it. 6 months from now, almost nobody will care.
I love my NES but the thing is just too damn old, plus all the carts are packed away somewhere at my parents house. I run an NES emulator with an xbox controller, which is an *extremely* simple mod as the xbox interface is really a usb interface with an extra sensing wire for lightgun type controllers. It runs well on my laptop and is great fun when I got some time to kill. With some of the different sampling techniques that they have developed you actually get a fairly nice look to everything, better than originally anyways.
The rootkit goes through all the effort of cloaking itself to only interfere with certain programs. rename itunes IPOOP.exe and it will be able to burn copies. YOu might have to edit the title string too.. Of course, just remove the rootkit and don't worrry about it:)
There are the people that acknowledge, hey, that was a major fuckup, there must exist a better way to do this, and then there are those eggshell walkers who claim:
"I'm qualified because I gave the director head and I let the manager prime my asshole, oh, and I have a Master's in bullshit. If everyone developed software MY way [which incidentally, pads my job security, being that I otherwise perform absolutely no function] these kind of things wouldn't happen!"
And it's just these sort of inflexible dick brains that end up fucking everything up! I propose, on average 90% of everything is shit, but with these sorts, there is no average, it's pure shit.
Even with a 100 megabit connection you'd need 3 weeks to download a feature length movie at this bitrate. And that's at 100% speed 24/7. It would take 4 minutes to download 30 frames of this video (1 sec) and take up 3 gigabytes of disk space.
Even more to the point - no video source has a resolution even half of that. All the masters in existance would have to be upsampled to fit the format. Just think of the processing power used decoding something like that! It's truly amazing that they even rolled out the solution considering the costs involved and its relevance today
I guess that's why all the other corporations with market maximal market saturation have founders donating billions every year to stuff that doesn't affect them.
Way to make a strawman out of it, you did it like the pro's at apple. Personally I think the whole video on an obscenely small screen thing is pure nonsense.
But if it is really something you want to do: PSP = $250.00 1 GiB card = $100.00 DeCSS or equivalent = free encoding softare = free to 50.00 (depending on format).
Then rip all your movie collection to a format that looks good at the native resolution of the PSP. Granted this against the law (the whole copy protection circumvention part) but seriously who gives a fuck, no harm is likely to come from it. The media cartel's bad men aren't going to bust down your door and read you your rights because you didn't feel obligated to go buy 5 different versions of the same content in different packaging. I suppose the whole model breaks down if you are really that thirsty to watch something as soon as it is released on tv but I think there are other avenues that have negligible costs (aside from the 80.00 you pay every month for cable & pvr to the cartel) for such situations.
Read the comments on mark's article, there is a post to a google cache link of some guy with an @first4internet address asking how to write a cd driver filter. http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:hDmbqX5yahgJ:w ww.osronline.com/showThread.cfm over 2 years old.
I read that and it made me think maybe it didn't matter so much that my ultraportable wasn't a tablet (I have an X40). I always thought it would be cool for taking notes since that is what I got the ultraportable for, but it seems that it is not a reasonable task after reading that review. I guess pencil and paper are superior in some instances. That has been my solution thus far, in classes which require diagrams or formula's that are difficult to express using a keyboard I just do it by hand. Although I think I could do mathematical notation pretty well if I learned LaTeX, it seems to be fairly efficient and I'm a rather slow writer. That would be a killer app IMO, and it probably already exists and I just don't know about it:)
I think you're probably wrong on your first account. It's true that cars have rev limiters to prevent the air/fuel ratio from becoming too lean (i.e. injectors are at maxed capacity) to prevent mechanical damage (valve float) and another thing as if those too weren't bad enough, to prevent it from going outside it's efficient operating range. What remains to question however is if the motor operating at full speed under no load has a higher thermal load than it operating at a moderate speed under heavy load. Even if that in itself isn't enough to cause your car to stop functioning the fact that you are operating the engine under very stressful conditions for a long period of time will, increase your chance of damage to the motor.
In fact, given a long enough time span, they will all break down. This shouldn't be unexpected, all motors will eventually be so far beyond their mechanical tolerances or had a 'catastrophic' failure that they cease to run. It just stands to reason that if operation alone is a prime motivator for deterioration of an engine and other components of the vehicle, operation under extreme conditions is only moreso. Again we can note that there are many other factors that may affect the engine's lifespan which are not dependant on operation.
Regardless, the analogy is terrible. Both situations are completely unique relative to each other and the vehicle 'problems' he poses are rather intractable economically with current technologies. A more analogous situation would be the user flipping the 240 switch on the back and powering on his system. Barring an auto-sensing power supply (I hear they are mandatory in europe, guess they're just too dumb to figure it out; note: sarcasm) no software will save that pc. One could argue that collision evasion is actually a software problem, but, this is not relevant as car manufacturing and design [for the most part] are not.
I'm learning to code as well and the direction our instructors have taken is very elementary although I have a distaste for the fact we are using java instead of an older programming language like c. All we do is learn basic techniques like recursion and study elementary algorithms like binary search. I feel the pace of the class is quite slow unfortunately because many people aren't able to grasp syntax/notation very well (for example, we've been at it for 2 quarters and people still wonder what the difference between --n and n-- are). That being said, I'm not a cs major so the department locks me out of all the more interesting courses. What is interesting though is you have these people in the class which are 'self-learned' and they use complex ide's like eclipse because it's better. I use a very simple text editor with syntax recognition and that is it. People insist that they have tangible advantages in using something like eclipse for writing programs that have less than 200 lines of code on average. It's like buying a big calculator and thinking you 'know' how to do integration when you're just plugging a set of symbols. Or better yet, learning how to 'integrate' a function using the algorithms and never really understanding what it means. Such tools ultimately undermine those who partake in their poison.
This reminds me about a story of an engineer, a toaster, a king and a computer 'scientist'.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes." "The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
I propose we parallelize the task! All we need is a bit more wetware which can easily be accomplished via the euthanization of baby squirrels and another set of eyes, might as well make those eagle eyes while we're at it!
In Have other a news, nice documents day! are On now second interleaved thought to perhaps take we advantage need of something advances a in bit text more processing. powerful We than must squirrel observe brains. equal phoneme transit time!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to have to disagree, if anything, the inclination of the thief is indeterminate. Just as many that would be deterred from stealing the notebook as it has distinct markings may take that as a sign of greater value and take preference to stealing it over unmarked laptops. If a car thief saw a porsche parked in a dimly lit area alongside a honda he would likely steal the Porsche first, as the reward is much greater, even though the risk is significantly higher (A Porsche is less common than a Honda). Value doesn't scale quite as well with notebooks and they aren't something you just leave laying around anyway; and if somebody breaks into your house or office, they're going to take it regardless of whether the message "This device is equipped with LoJack." is engraved on the lid.
The best security for a notebook is physical security, not a plainly visible watermark. If the thief isn't a professional (i.e. an angry girlfriend, frat ass buddy or what not) perhaps it could be useful as it leaves little ambiguity as to who actually owns the device (though I doubt they'd be smart enough to wipe the disk drives and remove the serials, and the latter could be considered incriminating anyway).
The lid can be replaced at negligible cost < 80.00 for mine from the manufacturer (and you know how inflated that price is). It doesn't make any sense to spend exponentially more money on something that makes the object marginally harder to steal.
In other news, there is now a large market for notebook lid replacements. Sure, it is an additional barrier, but not much of one.
here is more information on it
It seems my initial analysis is way off and rather than adding energy to the reaction the hydrogen is used to get the most out of the diesel fuel (i.e., burn it completely). It says it only uses ~15 amps of electricity which is the equivalent of the headlights drain on the truck, so certainly it is a rather insignificant amount of hydrogen being added to the combustion chamber.
It seems that that is the only likely explanation, unless they used super capacitors to charge batteries on braking to power the electrolysis, the system does cost *quite* a bit to install (14k USD or CAD?). Trucks have a shitload of energy to convert to thermal energy when braking so it certainly seems feasible, (also converted into mechanical energy normally via 'compression brake, which raises pressure inside of cylinders by cycling valves at the 'wrong' times, which makes the engine do more work to get the same w (or it slows down)).
It is hard to believe, though I have little knowledge of chemistry or the mechanics of combustion, that a synergistic reaction would be efficient enough to make up for the terrible inefficiency of electrolysis, or so i'm told,
Xbox 400
Xbox 10_Pi
Xbox 6400
Xbox 6.28318531
Xbox 4 * arcsin(1)
Xbox (4/3 * Pi * r^3) d/dr / 2 * r^2
In other news, marketroid goes with the flow
Suffice to say, if you think having two sets of RCA or component jacks in the back of your reciever is something only a "hardcore geek" would have, you are an idiot. Any joe sixpack that buys decent hardware (the kind that is going to go drop 600.00 on a bloody console) is likely to have some sort of input switcher, even if they don't have a reciever, hell, my tv has 5 component inputs and 2 hdmi inputs, and it is pretty much bargain barrel when it comes to HD. A non trivial number of people who have two or more of the next generation consoles hooked up. The fact is, backwards compatibility only serves as a holiday buffer to make people go dump the cash on the console that has next to no games for it. 6 months from now, almost nobody will care.
I love my NES but the thing is just too damn old, plus all the carts are packed away somewhere at my parents house. I run an NES emulator with an xbox controller, which is an *extremely* simple mod as the xbox interface is really a usb interface with an extra sensing wire for lightgun type controllers. It runs well on my laptop and is great fun when I got some time to kill. With some of the different sampling techniques that they have developed you actually get a fairly nice look to everything, better than originally anyways.
The rootkit goes through all the effort of cloaking itself to only interfere with certain programs. rename itunes IPOOP.exe and it will be able to burn copies. YOu might have to edit the title string too.. Of course, just remove the rootkit and don't worrry about it :)
There are the people that acknowledge, hey, that was a major fuckup, there must exist a better way to do this, and then there are those eggshell walkers who claim:
"I'm qualified because I gave the director head and I let the manager prime my asshole, oh, and I have a Master's in bullshit. If everyone developed software MY way [which incidentally, pads my job security, being that I otherwise perform absolutely no function] these kind of things wouldn't happen!"
And it's just these sort of inflexible dick brains that end up fucking everything up! I propose, on average 90% of everything is shit, but with these sorts, there is no average, it's pure shit.
Even with a 100 megabit connection you'd need 3 weeks to download a feature length movie at this bitrate. And that's at 100% speed 24/7. It would take 4 minutes to download 30 frames of this video (1 sec) and take up 3 gigabytes of disk space.
Even more to the point - no video source has a resolution even half of that. All the masters in existance would have to be upsampled to fit the format. Just think of the processing power used decoding something like that! It's truly amazing that they even rolled out the solution considering the costs involved and its relevance today
I think the save anywhere go back to checkpoint feature is a particularly welcomed one in my book :)
I guess that's why all the other corporations with market maximal market saturation have founders donating billions every year to stuff that doesn't affect them.
Way to make a strawman out of it, you did it like the pro's at apple. Personally I think the whole video on an obscenely small screen thing is pure nonsense.
But if it is really something you want to do:
PSP = $250.00
1 GiB card = $100.00
DeCSS or equivalent = free
encoding softare = free to 50.00 (depending on format).
Then rip all your movie collection to a format that looks good at the native resolution of the PSP. Granted this against the law (the whole copy protection circumvention part) but seriously who gives a fuck, no harm is likely to come from it. The media cartel's bad men aren't going to bust down your door and read you your rights because you didn't feel obligated to go buy 5 different versions of the same content in different packaging. I suppose the whole model breaks down if you are really that thirsty to watch something as soon as it is released on tv but I think there are other avenues that have negligible costs (aside from the 80.00 you pay every month for cable & pvr to the cartel) for such situations.
Read the comments on mark's article, there is a post to a google cache link of some guy with an @first4internet address asking how to write a cd driver filter. http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:hDmbqX5yahgJ:w ww.osronline.com/showThread.cfm over 2 years old.
I read that and it made me think maybe it didn't matter so much that my ultraportable wasn't a tablet (I have an X40). I always thought it would be cool for taking notes since that is what I got the ultraportable for, but it seems that it is not a reasonable task after reading that review. I guess pencil and paper are superior in some instances. That has been my solution thus far, in classes which require diagrams or formula's that are difficult to express using a keyboard I just do it by hand. Although I think I could do mathematical notation pretty well if I learned LaTeX, it seems to be fairly efficient and I'm a rather slow writer. That would be a killer app IMO, and it probably already exists and I just don't know about it :)
I think you're probably wrong on your first account. It's true that cars have rev limiters to prevent the air/fuel ratio from becoming too lean (i.e. injectors are at maxed capacity) to prevent mechanical damage (valve float) and another thing as if those too weren't bad enough, to prevent it from going outside it's efficient operating range. What remains to question however is if the motor operating at full speed under no load has a higher thermal load than it operating at a moderate speed under heavy load. Even if that in itself isn't enough to cause your car to stop functioning the fact that you are operating the engine under very stressful conditions for a long period of time will, increase your chance of damage to the motor.
In fact, given a long enough time span, they will all break down. This shouldn't be unexpected, all motors will eventually be so far beyond their mechanical tolerances or had a 'catastrophic' failure that they cease to run. It just stands to reason that if operation alone is a prime motivator for deterioration of an engine and other components of the vehicle, operation under extreme conditions is only moreso. Again we can note that there are many other factors that may affect the engine's lifespan which are not dependant on operation.
Regardless, the analogy is terrible. Both situations are completely unique relative to each other and the vehicle 'problems' he poses are rather intractable economically with current technologies. A more analogous situation would be the user flipping the 240 switch on the back and powering on his system. Barring an auto-sensing power supply (I hear they are mandatory in europe, guess they're just too dumb to figure it out; note: sarcasm) no software will save that pc. One could argue that collision evasion is actually a software problem, but, this is not relevant as car manufacturing and design [for the most part] are not.
I'm learning to code as well and the direction our instructors have taken is very elementary although I have a distaste for the fact we are using java instead of an older programming language like c. All we do is learn basic techniques like recursion and study elementary algorithms like binary search. I feel the pace of the class is quite slow unfortunately because many people aren't able to grasp syntax/notation very well (for example, we've been at it for 2 quarters and people still wonder what the difference between --n and n-- are). That being said, I'm not a cs major so the department locks me out of all the more interesting courses. What is interesting though is you have these people in the class which are 'self-learned' and they use complex ide's like eclipse because it's better. I use a very simple text editor with syntax recognition and that is it. People insist that they have tangible advantages in using something like eclipse for writing programs that have less than 200 lines of code on average. It's like buying a big calculator and thinking you 'know' how to do integration when you're just plugging a set of symbols. Or better yet, learning how to 'integrate' a function using the algorithms and never really understanding what it means. Such tools ultimately undermine those who partake in their poison.
To be fair, they do make nice keychain ornaments!
This reminds me about a story of an engineer, a toaster, a king and a computer 'scientist'.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer , answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist , immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes." "The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
BUT... BUT..!!!
I propose we parallelize the task! All we need is a bit more wetware which can easily be accomplished via the euthanization of baby squirrels and another set of eyes, might as well make those eagle eyes while we're at it!
In Have other a news, nice documents day! are On now second interleaved thought to perhaps take we advantage need of something advances a in bit text more processing. powerful We than must squirrel observe brains. equal phoneme transit time!
In other news, statistics are up 360%.
I'd say that ultraportables are definitely unlike pda's in functionality. A phone or a portable music device is certainly more suited for such a task.
The superiority of the ipod... or Its rather....