Well, -15v is pretty low compared to +15v. Both are officially the lower and upper bounds of the RS-232 signaling voltage range, after all. Certainly, the common -12v "mark" level is much lower (i.e., less positive) than the 3.3v or 5v typical for logic levels nowadays.
Yes, GPP mistakenly conflated "serial" and "RS-232". I'm sure he meant "logic-voltage asynchronous serial". And I'm sure you understood, but that sure was good electronics pedantry.
Well, my Desire CDMA is fully unlocked, rooted, S-OFF'ed, and running Cyanogenmod 7. I don't doubt that the unlockers behind Unrevoked were wizards and worked very hard to come up with the jailbreaks necessary, but from a user perspective? Turn on USB debugging, plug the phone into my laptop, and run two programs. Rooted and fully-write-enabled. After that, the world's my oyster and Bob's my uncle.
Well, I guess I haven't tried carrier-unlocking the thing. So far, my carrier hasn't pissed me off. I guess a freedom I haven't used is still a valuable freedom, but practically speaking it hasn't hurt me yet. We shall see.
Arguably, restrictions on the capabilities of firearms are intended to keep law enforcement and other branches of lawful state power ahead in the literal arms race.
I don't know of any comparable state power or public safety rationale for prohibiting modification of personally-owned electronic communication or entertainment devices, although some apologists might raise half-hearted "unlicensed over-power radio transmitters" arguments.
So, your contention is that if I don't actually buy their phone, they're going to secretly charge me for it anyway?
Do you actually have a citation or actual evidence of this? Besides the voices in your head, I mean. And the secret message traffic among the members of the Trilateral Commission that you intercepted. Maybe at least a Wikipedia entry? That would be somewhat more credible than your bald assertion.
Thank God I'm running CM7.1 nightlies!* Hell, the built-in stuff doesn't work all the time! Certainly this remote-installing nightmare-hell of malware is guaranteed to fail!
*Or was, until I broke my smartphone's screen... <sad>. Can you imagine how hard it is to use a touchscreen OS when you can't see what's on the screen?
Along those lines, I'd like to point out that "egg-shaped" is, per definition, a shape. A good shape, even, for selected applications. (Like for an egg.)
"I'm not out of shape. This (gestures at rotund body) is a shape, you Sesame Street failure."
Or until you get run over by the a school bus being driven by a drunk, overweight, chain-smoking loser who will spend the rest of his long, unproductive life behind bars.
I could see the move to IPV6 as an excuse for ISPs to charge per device for a while.
So the only ones paying the price will be the bold early adopters, the ones who take the cataclysmic tone of editors like this article's seriously.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll turn on IPv6 as default protocol when every single route to every single address I use more than once a month is full-path IPv6, no tunneling, no NAT, and my service provider doesn't see each v6 addressed issued as a new cash cow^w^wsubscriber charge.
The relevant saying here? "You can always tell the pioneers. They're the ones laying face down with the arrows in their backs."
Down in the machine room, monitoring a software test on the backup mainframe. (Basically, reading off the test procedure to the system operator and watching for results.)
The backup mainframe also ran some of the tasks of the master production checklist for this organization's worldwide weather prediction mission, so the operator was also starting production jobs and checking them off the backup production checklist.
The shift NCO walks up to the operator and, in a quiet voice, asks him to recheck the checklist and to make sure everything's in order, because a Class A Mishap investigation may be coming down the pike.
A Class A mishap is the loss of a military aviation mission that results in complete loss of the aircraft or any loss of life. So I ask what's up, and the shift super says that the shuttle had just blown up.
My initial impulse was that it was a bizarre joke, but you could tell from the sergeant's face that I'd be in serious trouble if I chuckled.
Worse yet... they'll treat it as another piece of marketing demographic metadata, tagging the sucker (I mean browser user) as concerned with privacy and security... a perfect mark (I mean potential customer) for antivirus software, network security products, and privacy protection services.
OTOH, any iDevice with in built-in sealed nuclear reactor cell may finally justify pentalobular security screws on a more reasonable basis than propietarial dickishness.
The hardcore DIY community isn't the target of this change. They'll do whatever it takes.
Don't forget, Apple is not really a computer company any more. It's an consumer electronics company. They sell to consumers, not geeks. (Geeks buy anyway, because the engineering is great, but again that's clearly the minority case.)
Consumers have Phillips screwdrivers in the tool box. Consumers may try to save a few dozen bucks trying to replace the battery in their iPod or upgrade the mass storage in their iPad. Apple doesn't want that to happen, for a variety of reasons. For instance, most Apple products truly have no user-serviceable components at the skill level of most Apple customers. Apple probably wants inept DIY attempts to fail as expensively as possible--full-price off-the-shelf replacement ("You voided your warranty, and killed your iPhone. You'll have to buy anew."), expensive service work, etc. And in the few cases where there are genuinely user-serviceable bits in the product, Apple still wants to capture the service money.
I guess what you're really asking is "how many different 'non-standard' 'security' fasteners are there on the market?"
Patent would be relevant only if it were recent enough to be enforceable, making licensing of the design a viable protection for the exclusivity of the tools to work with it. In other words, if Apple invented a novel fastener design that included a patented tool to work with it, and then never licensed the design of the tool to anyone. That way, the fastener could only be worked using an Apple branded tool, presumably kept securely in authorized service settings and used only by authorized service personnel. Which means that DIY becomes impossible without some theft or subterfuge.
And, in the spirit of actually being immediately helpful, The Register's article about this subject had a link to a kit with the appropriate screwdriver and replacement non-bondange-and-domination Phillips screws for an iPhone 4. Just don't take it to any Apple service outlet after that; as TFA points out, they'll undo your work and put those ridiculous screws back in.
That's a good point, very often overlooked. But it can't be overlooked, really, when talking about the behaviors and desires of the management class. The dumbest things ever uttered were probably spoken in perfect and innocent sincerity by a PHB at some point in time.
Too many are the times I've chuckled at the ridiculous and clearly humorous pronouncement of a manager, only to be greeted with a bewildered stare and a "What's so funny?".
So, yeah, dumb stuff isn't always humor, and stuff like that makes an incredibly ineffective "whoosh".
In other words they want to create this situation rather than one even worse:
1: "If you don't give us secrets, we will let NASA know you've had sex with animals. You'll lose your job."
2: "They already know."
1: "Oh. Now we must kill you because our clumsy blackmail attempt has exposed us."
FTFY.
OTOH, at least you died a valuable contributor to a project absolutely vital to the security of the Nation, and your odd little secrets can stay safely hidden until they're declassified and outed. Or wikileaked immediately. Whichever comes first.
No, but if the water company switches to IPv6 water and your plumbing is incompatible, you might blame them. After all, water is water, and the plumbing worked just fine until they changed something.
Or, to put it in light of a bit of recent history, a lot of Americans are still grumbling at local broadcasters and the FCC because over-the-air TV was working JUST FINE until June 2009, when ALL OF A SUDDEN the rabbit ears weren't enough. And that was with a sustained, repetitive, annoyingly pervasive advertising campaign to raise awareness of the upcoming DTV transition, plus subsidies for converter gear. And a distinct minority still missed the transition. And that's just broadcast TV, which is stupid simple in terms of end-user infrastructure.
IPv6, implemented piecemeal, will simply black out parts of the net to many (most?) users until something like the DTV transition makes it (A) obvious to Joe Intarwebuser that the transition IS UNAVOIDABLY COMING, and (B) subsidizes replacements of incompatible key components of the users' and providers' network path. (I'm looking at you, manufacturers of residential gateway router devices and network ISPs.)
Re:Amiga had it first.
on
PC Virus Turns 25
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Your Amiga has come alive"
Unfortunately the DOS was flaky enough as it was. The DOS unintentionally ruined disks.
FTFY.
How many times did I read, through panic-stricken teary eyes, "Your disk structure is corrupt. Use DISKDOCTOR to fix it."?
The Amiga was my first PC love, but by God did I hate how crufty and fragile AmigaDOS was. It was like being in love with a beautiful, adoring, and creative woman with an unfortunate habit of accidentally setting fires and leaving them to burn.
Sigh. At least I was lucky enough to never have to deal with an Amiga virus.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, -15v is pretty low compared to +15v. Both are officially the lower and upper bounds of the RS-232 signaling voltage range, after all. Certainly, the common -12v "mark" level is much lower (i.e., less positive) than the 3.3v or 5v typical for logic levels nowadays.
Yes, GPP mistakenly conflated "serial" and "RS-232". I'm sure he meant "logic-voltage asynchronous serial". And I'm sure you understood, but that sure was good electronics pedantry.
Sure it has. There was the app that killed "Other OS", and the app that killed the ability to run games completely offline...
Well, my Desire CDMA is fully unlocked, rooted, S-OFF'ed, and running Cyanogenmod 7. I don't doubt that the unlockers behind Unrevoked were wizards and worked very hard to come up with the jailbreaks necessary, but from a user perspective? Turn on USB debugging, plug the phone into my laptop, and run two programs. Rooted and fully-write-enabled. After that, the world's my oyster and Bob's my uncle.
Well, I guess I haven't tried carrier-unlocking the thing. So far, my carrier hasn't pissed me off. I guess a freedom I haven't used is still a valuable freedom, but practically speaking it hasn't hurt me yet. We shall see.
Arguably, restrictions on the capabilities of firearms are intended to keep law enforcement and other branches of lawful state power ahead in the literal arms race.
I don't know of any comparable state power or public safety rationale for prohibiting modification of personally-owned electronic communication or entertainment devices, although some apologists might raise half-hearted "unlicensed over-power radio transmitters" arguments.
So, your contention is that if I don't actually buy their phone, they're going to secretly charge me for it anyway?
Do you actually have a citation or actual evidence of this? Besides the voices in your head, I mean. And the secret message traffic among the members of the Trilateral Commission that you intercepted. Maybe at least a Wikipedia entry? That would be somewhat more credible than your bald assertion.
Thank God I'm running CM7.1 nightlies!* Hell, the built-in stuff doesn't work all the time! Certainly this remote-installing nightmare-hell of malware is guaranteed to fail!
*Or was, until I broke my smartphone's screen... <sad>. Can you imagine how hard it is to use a touchscreen OS when you can't see what's on the screen?
Along those lines, I'd like to point out that "egg-shaped" is, per definition, a shape. A good shape, even, for selected applications. (Like for an egg.)
"I'm not out of shape. This (gestures at rotund body) is a shape, you Sesame Street failure."
Or until you get run over by the a school bus being driven by a drunk, overweight, chain-smoking loser who will spend the rest of his long, unproductive life behind bars.
So the only ones paying the price will be the bold early adopters, the ones who take the cataclysmic tone of editors like this article's seriously.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll turn on IPv6 as default protocol when every single route to every single address I use more than once a month is full-path IPv6, no tunneling, no NAT, and my service provider doesn't see each v6 addressed issued as a new cash cow^w^wsubscriber charge.
The relevant saying here? "You can always tell the pioneers. They're the ones laying face down with the arrows in their backs."
Similar story.
Down in the machine room, monitoring a software test on the backup mainframe. (Basically, reading off the test procedure to the system operator and watching for results.)
The backup mainframe also ran some of the tasks of the master production checklist for this organization's worldwide weather prediction mission, so the operator was also starting production jobs and checking them off the backup production checklist.
The shift NCO walks up to the operator and, in a quiet voice, asks him to recheck the checklist and to make sure everything's in order, because a Class A Mishap investigation may be coming down the pike.
A Class A mishap is the loss of a military aviation mission that results in complete loss of the aircraft or any loss of life. So I ask what's up, and the shift super says that the shuttle had just blown up.
My initial impulse was that it was a bizarre joke, but you could tell from the sergeant's face that I'd be in serious trouble if I chuckled.
I saw the video that evening on the news.
Worse yet... they'll treat it as another piece of marketing demographic metadata, tagging the sucker (I mean browser user) as concerned with privacy and security... a perfect mark (I mean potential customer) for antivirus software, network security products, and privacy protection services.
OTOH, any iDevice with in built-in sealed nuclear reactor cell may finally justify pentalobular security screws on a more reasonable basis than propietarial dickishness.
"We've perfected the transmutation of the elements! Heavy, lustrous gold can now be alchemically tranformed into LEAD!"
Well, technically, it's the 3 1/2th part of the trilogy, since this is just Volume 4A.
For my part, I'll hold off buying until Volume 4 is actually complete. Assuming the world survives 2012 and Y2G.
But "chin.music"* would be a baseball domain!
*Not to be confused with "chin.music.cn", which would in fact be a music-related domain in china for the various musicians whose names are Chin.
The hardcore DIY community isn't the target of this change. They'll do whatever it takes.
Don't forget, Apple is not really a computer company any more. It's an consumer electronics company. They sell to consumers, not geeks. (Geeks buy anyway, because the engineering is great, but again that's clearly the minority case.)
Consumers have Phillips screwdrivers in the tool box. Consumers may try to save a few dozen bucks trying to replace the battery in their iPod or upgrade the mass storage in their iPad. Apple doesn't want that to happen, for a variety of reasons. For instance, most Apple products truly have no user-serviceable components at the skill level of most Apple customers. Apple probably wants inept DIY attempts to fail as expensively as possible--full-price off-the-shelf replacement ("You voided your warranty, and killed your iPhone. You'll have to buy anew."), expensive service work, etc. And in the few cases where there are genuinely user-serviceable bits in the product, Apple still wants to capture the service money.
It doesn't matter that it was *patented* a long time ago.
<pedantic>Well, by your limited criteria, the Phillips screw design is itself a niche design, since it appears to have been patented a long time ago (30s).</pedantic>
I guess what you're really asking is "how many different 'non-standard' 'security' fasteners are there on the market?"
Patent would be relevant only if it were recent enough to be enforceable, making licensing of the design a viable protection for the exclusivity of the tools to work with it. In other words, if Apple invented a novel fastener design that included a patented tool to work with it, and then never licensed the design of the tool to anyone. That way, the fastener could only be worked using an Apple branded tool, presumably kept securely in authorized service settings and used only by authorized service personnel. Which means that DIY becomes impossible without some theft or subterfuge.
I can't believe you passed up the opportunity.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pentalobular+screwdriver
And, in the spirit of actually being immediately helpful, The Register's article about this subject had a link to a kit with the appropriate screwdriver and replacement non-bondange-and-domination Phillips screws for an iPhone 4. Just don't take it to any Apple service outlet after that; as TFA points out, they'll undo your work and put those ridiculous screws back in.
That's a good point, very often overlooked. But it can't be overlooked, really, when talking about the behaviors and desires of the management class. The dumbest things ever uttered were probably spoken in perfect and innocent sincerity by a PHB at some point in time.
Too many are the times I've chuckled at the ridiculous and clearly humorous pronouncement of a manager, only to be greeted with a bewildered stare and a "What's so funny?".
So, yeah, dumb stuff isn't always humor, and stuff like that makes an incredibly ineffective "whoosh".
FTFY.
OTOH, at least you died a valuable contributor to a project absolutely vital to the security of the Nation, and your odd little secrets can stay safely hidden until they're declassified and outed. Or wikileaked immediately. Whichever comes first.
What, a "newtzi?"
I've said this before, and I'll say it now.
"Nuclear launch detected" will mean so much more when it's blaring out of loudspeakers in the city or camp your character is in RIGHT NOW.
No, but if the water company switches to IPv6 water and your plumbing is incompatible, you might blame them. After all, water is water, and the plumbing worked just fine until they changed something.
Or, to put it in light of a bit of recent history, a lot of Americans are still grumbling at local broadcasters and the FCC because over-the-air TV was working JUST FINE until June 2009, when ALL OF A SUDDEN the rabbit ears weren't enough. And that was with a sustained, repetitive, annoyingly pervasive advertising campaign to raise awareness of the upcoming DTV transition, plus subsidies for converter gear. And a distinct minority still missed the transition. And that's just broadcast TV, which is stupid simple in terms of end-user infrastructure.
IPv6, implemented piecemeal, will simply black out parts of the net to many (most?) users until something like the DTV transition makes it (A) obvious to Joe Intarwebuser that the transition IS UNAVOIDABLY COMING, and (B) subsidizes replacements of incompatible key components of the users' and providers' network path. (I'm looking at you, manufacturers of residential gateway router devices and network ISPs.)
"Your Amiga has come alive"
Unfortunately the DOS was flaky enough as it was. The DOS unintentionally ruined disks.
FTFY.
How many times did I read, through panic-stricken teary eyes, "Your disk structure is corrupt. Use DISKDOCTOR to fix it."?
The Amiga was my first PC love, but by God did I hate how crufty and fragile AmigaDOS was. It was like being in love with a beautiful, adoring, and creative woman with an unfortunate habit of accidentally setting fires and leaving them to burn.
Sigh. At least I was lucky enough to never have to deal with an Amiga virus.
It certainly embiggens the discussion.