Not likely, I was about to post the same. This is definately a good way to get people to give you money: make sure that you are seen as a cheap but trustworthy (Medion does not have a bad name in Europe) system manufacturer. Medion creates its own laptops as well, most of the time for quality brands, but they also sell under their own name. "Medison" uses this as one of their reasons why they can sell cheap. Medion machines are not really bad machines, and their support seems to be pretty good, but if you buy a laptop from them, expect desktop parts in them (they are portable in the sense that they are easy to put in a car). I've got a 30 euro TV card from Medion that works very reasonable under Linux.
Well, they did that by now. Maybe their website was not the first of their concerns. Anyway it shouldn't be, and I think the first poster was distasteful as hell.
"While I'm sure case modders and extreme performance enthusiasts don't care about this point, the rest of us like lower power consumption and quieter computers, while still being very fast."
I've been looking for such systems for a while now, and I finally got something that is getting close to it. It's a fanless VIA EPIA system at 1.2 GHz. It's running from an ultra-quiet notebook WD drive using a laptop like PSU. I'm posting from it now (Ubuntu/Firefox). Of course, the thing lacking from it is CPU, GPU and hard drive performance. That said, Office applications run fine, and I am about to attach a very fast flash drive to it to 1) make it even more silent as my first computer (an MSX, you could just hear the PSU on those things) and 2) make it faster and 3) make it use even less energy.
With very low powered Xscale CPU's from Intel and Geodes from AMD, I am still waiting on their first true fan-less systems with a bit of raw (64 bit?) performance. But it seems that performance is still considered to be top priority. I would be much more interested in a low powered system on a chip myself (maybe with an external GPU and memory for performance).
Unless you are using something different than Visual Studio in your company. Then you are stuck using the client software directly or paying through the nose for integration. E.g. Eclipse (Java) integration with Team Builder currently costs about $500 per seat. That's pretty steep in my opinion. Also, in my company, they think Team Builder is a mixed bag, and there definitely seem to be problems with it. Of course, as another poster already commented, nothing even comes close to Source Safe in terms of crappy version management system, so that's a given.
But hey, I'll give Team Foundation Server a try if I am stuck on.net for my next software application.
I've always understood that SMS is transmitted through the control channel of mobile phones. Initially phone companies did not see much in text messaging, since they thought that just giving people a call would be much more likely. Why type on such a small device when you can just talk? Then somebody started doing SMS and now it is one of the few things that make mobile telco's rich. The disadvantages? Message length is limited, there is no certain delivery of messages, and you cannot extend it to include pictures etc. That's why you need MMS as well. This is just what I've picked up through the years, so if it's wrong, start shooting.
Simple, there is too little entropy in the password. It's pretty much a given that a password tool will find it after a while (checking words and doing some basic substitutions). Hell, you can be pretty sure that T1me Out is in the default dictionary tested by the tools, it sounds like a password that will be used pretty much by (dumb) sysops. For this, the tools should have unlimited access to the FTP server. If some sort of timeout is introduced or if a limited amount of passwords can be guessed, it will be much harder.
"YwMCU07D" has too little entropy in it as well (~47 bits if well distributed, and if I am not mistaken). I use really hard to guess passwords for those passwords that can be guessed off-line, or unrestricted online. My PGP key is pretty well protected, for instance. Many computer accounts and things like that have introduced timeouts or maximum number of tries (blocking). That's why a PIN may only be 4 digits: you only have 3 tries (or 5 or 6 if you have a chip in it, saved me once). Of course, less sensitive data may be protected less well, but you must remember that there is no true password protection, just a small deterrent.
According to their site, they use free running oscillators. The output of these oscillators is then whitened, and become the random number. The random number generation is quite fast. I've got one of these processors here and it should be able to perform SHA1 & 2 hashing, AES and have a montgommery multiplier that speeds up RSA (and probably DSA and Elliptic curve, if programmed correctly).
Interesting. They should sign them as well including date, name and sequence number. Then you can say that you've got login name , sequence number 5, and work with next consecutive numbers - you would be able to distribute the number so you can show that you are not cheating.
I'm posting this using a VIA C7 x86 compatible processor which has a nice whitened true random generator build in. It wasn't that costly. Most smart cards have RNG's build in, to give you an idea of the costs. Having a rng online is kind of defeating the purpose. I would like to see more processors include random number generators (and other cryptographic primitives). They do not rely on outside data (a keyboard or HDD will not be part of my flash based, headless server), provide good randoms at great speeds, and they are not that difficult to implement. The randomness of these generators is good enough for 99% of the tasks - and even then I would primarily use it as a seed for a software based pseudo RNG, such as/dev/urandom.
"the resolution and control still isn't very good"
Looks like a glass vial to me. With a single magnet in the middle. So, yeah, resolution seems to be 1:1 and they are showing off all the colors in the vial, not trying to make it a single color. And I *do* see most colors you would need, so that's a plus.
As for liquid paper: it can be made flexible, I suppose it uses little energy and it uses reflexion as well. Couple this with high dpi and this would qualify it for digital paper in my view. Actually, for me, it would even be viable for electronic paper even without the flexible bit. I have no issue bringing a light A4/letter slab with me if it can bring up all my paperwork on request.
"The properties of diamonds have nothing to do with the technology in this article. So why was that added to the summary of an article that doesn't mention it?!?"
To give it this nice, shiny feel to it? To make it extra hard for the editor to refuse the article? So it will last forever? To attract girls? To give it a clean, sharp edge? To make it worthwhile? So people can make carbon-copies of it? To karat-whore?
"If you wanna throw another stick between the malware's feet, run the VM on a non-i386 architecture. If someone manages to break out of THAT and manages to hijack my machine, he really earned it and should get it."
I don't see what kind of difference this makes. It's pretty easy to compile stuff to run on multiple platforms. I don't see how it is any more difficult to break out of a virtual box running xxx and infect yyy than it is to break out of xxx and infect xxx. Much of the same VM code - including bugs and flaws - would be in both xxx and yyy, and recompiling is - well - easy.
"If they really wanted to add real security they'd hand out RSA key fobs to everyone instead of adding layers of stuff that makes it look more secure but actually isn't."
Bah, all banks in the Netherlands, and most of Europe, do this. Either that or they rely on mobile devices or one time codes to do secure login and transaction authentication. If they didn't, I would switch banks. Although the security devices here are delivered by a company named Vasco. The devices are not connected to the PC as you indeed mention in a reply on a reply. Time for the US banks to catch up.
"So, I agree that this is broken, but it's not to due to bad threading but due to the fact that the seemingly simple operation you try to perform is actually one of the most complex ones the UI can do at all."
Yes. Well. I call that broken. If anything needs to go full-screen to work, something is seriously wrong. If it needs to completely restart the GUI manager for this, doubly so. Then again, as you said, it's probably not the multi-threading that is broken.
Only if I can also name them. I've heard that people are already buying stars. So additionally I would like to own, say, 20% of the stars within the galaxy after determining the type. Of course, I am willing to go to 10% if it is a really big galaxy.
/** Look, ma, no literals */ public class Hello_World { public static void main(String... args) { System.out.println(Hello_World.class.getSimpleName ()); } }
Yes, but none of these are build out of stone. Although these are the 7 *new* world wonders, we would like to keep some kind of continuity, thank you. It's a big surprise that the piramids were not choosen to be the first world wonder. The amount of stone in those things is really amazing. If you go for stone, go pyramid!
Of course there is a lot of math involved in many parts of computer *science*. Not so much in computer related jobs in the industry, but certainly in science. Where things go wrong is when this math is educated as a standalone subject. I can still remember the horror of math in the first year of the study. Come on guys, if we were interested in pure math, we would have studied something else.
What was important is -eg- statistics, logic and a bit of number theory. That was indeed present, but then you had "theoretical computer science", "calculus" and a whole bunch of other courses that for some reason were mandatory. Those could be important for further studies, but for some reason they went into these subjects way to deep.
Fortunately, at the Vrije Universiteit, the amount of math in computer science has been significantly diminished over the years. And that's good because I suspect that only a few remember much of the "calculus" of the first year. I'm pretty good in actually remembering the things I've studied, but almost everything about the real mathematical side of things has gone from memory.
So my opinion is: teach it, but only if necessary for the subject, and only if the subject has been choosen as a master or something by the student. And explain *why* it's needed if you teach it - students are not a bunch of drones that have some kind of photographic memory. I do think that computer science relies on algorithms a lot, but just teaching the algorithms without any context is just plain dumb. Algorithms are fine, but looking at computer science from a pure mathematical view point is something else entirely.
Other than this, there is way to little in the article to talk about. A full book review would be much more helpfull. Unfortunately, I could not find any using Google. Either the book is not read, or more likely, it's too new.
A good idea would be a site where you can submit any idea and it will be time stamped. There are a few free time stamping services out there, even run by governments. It would be technically quite a challenge to make the time stamping of the idea dubious. This would remove a simple out of jail for free card for IP squaters (is that even an existing term? I quite like it). Or has this idea been patented already?
Slashdot Mirror
Not likely, I was about to post the same. This is definately a good way to get people to give you money: make sure that you are seen as a cheap but trustworthy (Medion does not have a bad name in Europe) system manufacturer. Medion creates its own laptops as well, most of the time for quality brands, but they also sell under their own name. "Medison" uses this as one of their reasons why they can sell cheap. Medion machines are not really bad machines, and their support seems to be pretty good, but if you buy a laptop from them, expect desktop parts in them (they are portable in the sense that they are easy to put in a car). I've got a 30 euro TV card from Medion that works very reasonable under Linux.
"It's more that the western world is years ahead of everyone else in this regards."
Fixed it for you.
Well, they did that by now. Maybe their website was not the first of their concerns. Anyway it shouldn't be, and I think the first poster was distasteful as hell.
"While I'm sure case modders and extreme performance enthusiasts don't care about this point, the rest of us like lower power consumption and quieter computers, while still being very fast."
I've been looking for such systems for a while now, and I finally got something that is getting close to it. It's a fanless VIA EPIA system at 1.2 GHz. It's running from an ultra-quiet notebook WD drive using a laptop like PSU. I'm posting from it now (Ubuntu/Firefox). Of course, the thing lacking from it is CPU, GPU and hard drive performance. That said, Office applications run fine, and I am about to attach a very fast flash drive to it to 1) make it even more silent as my first computer (an MSX, you could just hear the PSU on those things) and 2) make it faster and 3) make it use even less energy.
With very low powered Xscale CPU's from Intel and Geodes from AMD, I am still waiting on their first true fan-less systems with a bit of raw (64 bit?) performance. But it seems that performance is still considered to be top priority. I would be much more interested in a low powered system on a chip myself (maybe with an external GPU and memory for performance).
Doesn't look like it has been really taken. But you could try the song instead.
Unless you are using something different than Visual Studio in your company. Then you are stuck using the client software directly or paying through the nose for integration. E.g. Eclipse (Java) integration with Team Builder currently costs about $500 per seat. That's pretty steep in my opinion. Also, in my company, they think Team Builder is a mixed bag, and there definitely seem to be problems with it. Of course, as another poster already commented, nothing even comes close to Source Safe in terms of crappy version management system, so that's a given.
.net for my next software application.
But hey, I'll give Team Foundation Server a try if I am stuck on
No, it doesn't. If it does, then *you* are on the wrong side.
I've always understood that SMS is transmitted through the control channel of mobile phones. Initially phone companies did not see much in text messaging, since they thought that just giving people a call would be much more likely. Why type on such a small device when you can just talk? Then somebody started doing SMS and now it is one of the few things that make mobile telco's rich. The disadvantages? Message length is limited, there is no certain delivery of messages, and you cannot extend it to include pictures etc. That's why you need MMS as well. This is just what I've picked up through the years, so if it's wrong, start shooting.
"what's wrong with the 'T1me Out' password"
Simple, there is too little entropy in the password. It's pretty much a given that a password tool will find it after a while (checking words and doing some basic substitutions). Hell, you can be pretty sure that T1me Out is in the default dictionary tested by the tools, it sounds like a password that will be used pretty much by (dumb) sysops. For this, the tools should have unlimited access to the FTP server. If some sort of timeout is introduced or if a limited amount of passwords can be guessed, it will be much harder.
"YwMCU07D" has too little entropy in it as well (~47 bits if well distributed, and if I am not mistaken). I use really hard to guess passwords for those passwords that can be guessed off-line, or unrestricted online. My PGP key is pretty well protected, for instance. Many computer accounts and things like that have introduced timeouts or maximum number of tries (blocking). That's why a PIN may only be 4 digits: you only have 3 tries (or 5 or 6 if you have a chip in it, saved me once). Of course, less sensitive data may be protected less well, but you must remember that there is no true password protection, just a small deterrent.
According to their site, they use free running oscillators. The output of these oscillators is then whitened, and become the random number. The random number generation is quite fast. I've got one of these processors here and it should be able to perform SHA1 & 2 hashing, AES and have a montgommery multiplier that speeds up RSA (and probably DSA and Elliptic curve, if programmed correctly).
Interesting. They should sign them as well including date, name and sequence number. Then you can say that you've got login name , sequence number 5, and work with next consecutive numbers - you would be able to distribute the number so you can show that you are not cheating.
Ok, this seems to be a good litmus test, so let me be the first one to respond (text typed to avoid lameness filter) 1
I'm posting this using a VIA C7 x86 compatible processor which has a nice whitened true random generator build in. It wasn't that costly. Most smart cards have RNG's build in, to give you an idea of the costs. Having a rng online is kind of defeating the purpose. I would like to see more processors include random number generators (and other cryptographic primitives). They do not rely on outside data (a keyboard or HDD will not be part of my flash based, headless server), provide good randoms at great speeds, and they are not that difficult to implement. The randomness of these generators is good enough for 99% of the tasks - and even then I would primarily use it as a seed for a software based pseudo RNG, such as /dev/urandom.
"the resolution and control still isn't very good"
Looks like a glass vial to me. With a single magnet in the middle. So, yeah, resolution seems to be 1:1 and they are showing off all the colors in the vial, not trying to make it a single color. And I *do* see most colors you would need, so that's a plus.
As for liquid paper: it can be made flexible, I suppose it uses little energy and it uses reflexion as well. Couple this with high dpi and this would qualify it for digital paper in my view. Actually, for me, it would even be viable for electronic paper even without the flexible bit. I have no issue bringing a light A4/letter slab with me if it can bring up all my paperwork on request.
"The properties of diamonds have nothing to do with the technology in this article. So why was that added to the summary of an article that doesn't mention it?!?"
To give it this nice, shiny feel to it? To make it extra hard for the editor to refuse the article? So it will last forever? To attract girls? To give it a clean, sharp edge? To make it worthwhile? So people can make carbon-copies of it? To karat-whore?
"If you wanna throw another stick between the malware's feet, run the VM on a non-i386 architecture. If someone manages to break out of THAT and manages to hijack my machine, he really earned it and should get it."
I don't see what kind of difference this makes. It's pretty easy to compile stuff to run on multiple platforms. I don't see how it is any more difficult to break out of a virtual box running xxx and infect yyy than it is to break out of xxx and infect xxx. Much of the same VM code - including bugs and flaws - would be in both xxx and yyy, and recompiling is - well - easy.
"If they really wanted to add real security they'd hand out RSA key fobs to everyone instead of adding layers of stuff that makes it look more secure but actually isn't."
Bah, all banks in the Netherlands, and most of Europe, do this. Either that or they rely on mobile devices or one time codes to do secure login and transaction authentication. If they didn't, I would switch banks. Although the security devices here are delivered by a company named Vasco. The devices are not connected to the PC as you indeed mention in a reply on a reply. Time for the US banks to catch up.
Yeah, well, duh. This is Intel and their new top notch desktop CPU. I would be very surprised if it did not cost $999 to the dollar. They always do.
"So, I agree that this is broken, but it's not to due to bad threading but due to the fact that the seemingly simple operation you try to perform is actually one of the most complex ones the UI can do at all."
Yes. Well. I call that broken. If anything needs to go full-screen to work, something is seriously wrong. If it needs to completely restart the GUI manager for this, doubly so. Then again, as you said, it's probably not the multi-threading that is broken.
Only if I can also name them. I've heard that people are already buying stars. So additionally I would like to own, say, 20% of the stars within the galaxy after determining the type. Of course, I am willing to go to 10% if it is a really big galaxy.
/** Look, ma, no literals */ ... args) {e ());
public class Hello_World {
public static void main(String
System.out.println(Hello_World.class.getSimpleNam
}
}
Yes, but none of these are build out of stone. Although these are the 7 *new* world wonders, we would like to keep some kind of continuity, thank you. It's a big surprise that the piramids were not choosen to be the first world wonder. The amount of stone in those things is really amazing. If you go for stone, go pyramid!
Of course there is a lot of math involved in many parts of computer *science*. Not so much in computer related jobs in the industry, but certainly in science. Where things go wrong is when this math is educated as a standalone subject. I can still remember the horror of math in the first year of the study. Come on guys, if we were interested in pure math, we would have studied something else.
What was important is -eg- statistics, logic and a bit of number theory. That was indeed present, but then you had "theoretical computer science", "calculus" and a whole bunch of other courses that for some reason were mandatory. Those could be important for further studies, but for some reason they went into these subjects way to deep.
Fortunately, at the Vrije Universiteit, the amount of math in computer science has been significantly diminished over the years. And that's good because I suspect that only a few remember much of the "calculus" of the first year. I'm pretty good in actually remembering the things I've studied, but almost everything about the real mathematical side of things has gone from memory.
So my opinion is: teach it, but only if necessary for the subject, and only if the subject has been choosen as a master or something by the student. And explain *why* it's needed if you teach it - students are not a bunch of drones that have some kind of photographic memory. I do think that computer science relies on algorithms a lot, but just teaching the algorithms without any context is just plain dumb. Algorithms are fine, but looking at computer science from a pure mathematical view point is something else entirely.
Other than this, there is way to little in the article to talk about. A full book review would be much more helpfull. Unfortunately, I could not find any using Google. Either the book is not read, or more likely, it's too new.
A good idea would be a site where you can submit any idea and it will be time stamped. There are a few free time stamping services out there, even run by governments. It would be technically quite a challenge to make the time stamping of the idea dubious. This would remove a simple out of jail for free card for IP squaters (is that even an existing term? I quite like it). Or has this idea been patented already?
"I doubt it. People were afraid of all things nuclear in the 70s and 80s as well."
Only those without direct access to kitchen tables.