What was annoying me about CRT technology is that parts of the screen are illuminated at different times. Its really obvious its flickering if you wag your finger in front of it.
But the problem is not my wagging finger, its my roving eye... as I scan from area to area as I read different points on the screen. I can't say exactly whats going on, but something is quite disorienting to me when I try to study something on a CRT which requires me to scan different areas on the face of the tube, as when I read or trace lines on a drawing.
Kinda like trying to read a book on a moving train under fluorescent lighting. Some sort of strobe effect I can't quite put my finger on, but it does cause me to become disoriented and nauseous after a few minutes of it. The finer the detail, the worse it gets.
If its only one area of the screen, no problem, its when I go from area to area rapidly, like one does when skimming a book. That's when it hits me on some sort of subliminal level.
I wish I could be a bit more definitive here and say exactly what it is, but I can only speculate its that somehow I get accustomed to the flicker - even at imperceptible rates - at one area of the screen, then I get abrupt phase changes of the flicker when I go to other areas of the screen.
This affects me on static displays where the information is not in motion. If its a case such as television, where the scene is already in motion, and I am not concentrating on a small area of the screen, but looking at the screen as a whole, the motion of the whole screen image seems to swamp out this effect.
The LCD, on the other hand, seems completely static, like an image on paper. I quite quickly noted the absence of this effect on me when reading text and studying CAD images on LCD's.
One more thing on the LCD's... on my PCB programs driving it, the precise pixel alignments exaggerate the "jaggies" of not-quite-square PCB traces. Made a world of difference in my quickly looking at my work and seeing if I had any traces not quite aligned.
I saw the writing on the wall years ago when Microsoft first started pushing Windows, and not publicizing its inner workings as they did their DOS product. To me, it was kinda obvious that I was watching the construction of a gigantic animal trap.
My feeling about my machine is exactly as you stated - I just wanted a consumer appliance that just works. Yes, I still run DOS for schematic capture, circuit analysis, C++ DSP experimentation, and PCB layout. I know all the file formats. Using my computer is like using my hand - I know exactly what I want it to do and know how to tell it to do so. Everything has user-definable libraries and models, so as I get new parts to work with, I add them in.
Yes, I do have the 'business' types telling me to get current, join the 20'th century, all that kind of talk, yet its obvious to me he has no idea that the stuff I need done is quite easily handled by 1990 technology. Paid for. Understood. ALL my productivity using this setup is pure PROFIT!
I have to realize this concept of "marginal benefit". The highly-paid guy is apt to buy a car based on showroom appeal, whereas I buy a car almost purely on technical matters. I won't part with my old 1977 toyota either. Its old school technology. Uses points. Yes, all I have to do to get the engine to run is get fuel to it and power to the coil. The points degrade gracefully, and even if they do go out completely, its really hard for the mechanism to fail in such a way I can't simply bend the contact area in such a manner it will work for another several thousand miles or so.
I am running up close to 400,000 miles on that guy, and he's shown little signs of wear, other than brake shoes and the rubber trim is deteriorating. But then, I bought the car in the first place to get me moved from one location to another. I did not buy it to impress others on how much money I had to squander on show.
I can understand how once one gets "trapped in the cage", egress can be very difficult, so its been my intention to be like that wiry stray cat in my neighborhood and stay out of confining cages, as I know what they are. This cat will recognize structures made of steel wire, just as I recognize structures of EULA's, legal restrictions, 'security authentications', and legal mandates.
If businesses get themselves snarled into these traps, they traveled in on their own paws. We are trying like hell to keep them safe, but sometimes trying to persuade a businessman from getting himself trapped is like my trying to persuade my cat not to visit the neighbor's yard when I know the neighbor does not like cats, and is actively trapping them and taking them to the pound.
I know your feeling about trying to deal with some people. The people who have lots of money are the worst - as they feel that their money and authority, not the laws of physics - or man, give them extraordinary powers. The rich man has his money, just as my cat has muscles and claws, and if my cat insists on visiting my neighbor's yard, I just have to prepare myself for the loss of my cat. A technical guy can try to keep his company out of trouble, but as any parent can tell you, trying to help a corporate entity can be like trying to help a teenager, who will probably never understand the ramifications of certain behaviours until they have personally experienced the results of doing so.
It got so bad for me, working in a large aerospace corporation, that it was obvious we had such a difference of opinion that I had to go. Ranked as not being a 'team player'. You may find smaller businesses, especially businesses still heavily in the initial growth phase, very receptive to techniques which generate profit from no investment. Tools already paid for. Knowledge already in place.
I am the type that once I put something in place, I expect it to work until I decommission it. I pour concrete foundations. Use lots of rebar. By golly, it takes a lot of work to build something. Build it well so y
If nothing else, this scenario would have been an ideal "Star Trek" episode where their Time-Travel buddy had to intervene to save Earth from its own inhabitants
Wouldn't it be scary if we found other civilizations which existed just long enough to start experimenting with nuclear energies, only to create stable black holes - not knowing what they had done, only setting the stage for their own destruction, much like children in the house playing with matches?
Nightmares - the kind I have - are spawned from concepts such as this. I don't have many nightmares, because as as a techie, I know how most things work, hence I have no fear of it. My nightmares center on having my house broke into, or a barber that ruins years of effort growing my hair, but this - I have a great fear of... as I know what it is, yet do not have the slightest inkling of what to do with one if I somehow made one.
Lots of nice high-voltage capacitors. High voltage transistors. At least one, usually two, high power switching transistors. Various inductors which can be quite easily modified for whatever inductance I want. A flyback transformer, good for all sorts of high voltage tinkerings. And a good healthy assortment of resistors, high voltage fast switching diodes, and plain old signal transistors.
There are usually several pots and switches, and a few LED's. Connectors. And hookup wire.
Just the kind of stuff I love to have laying around when I am tinkering with high power ultrasonics and designing switching power supplies.
Having a few old monitor circuit boards laying around has saved me many a trip to the local parts retailer. Its not the money - its the time I save by just having a part I can experiment with in my hand right now - for getting empirical data on how changes in a component or topology will affect circuit behaviour.
The CRT and case were most likely destroyed by the drop, but I betcha most of the parts I would have wanted survived.
That was also the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this topic.
Talking about a pandora's box!
If we ever succeed in making a stable black hole, then find ourselves incapable of destroying it, what do we do with it???
If we ever lose containment of it, it should do exactly as Larry predicted, with the gravitation of the Earth pulling it straight to the core of the earth, while it eats everything in its path like an insatiable termite, growing exponentially as it consumes the mass of the earth itself.
To me, this is a very scary scenario, and whats more scary is that it may be do-able!!!
I have used integrity checking , homebrew batch files since the days of DOS and CRCHECK.EXE , to see if anything got tampered with, and in those days, DOS was simple enough that it was pretty trivial to do a quickie scan of anything I loaded upon boot, so I could be pretty assured everything at least came up clean.
One of the reasons I have been so loathe to give up my WIN95 system is that I always come up in DOS, and being I can boot DOS from a trusted floppy, I can use trusted code on the floppy to verify the integrity of suspect code on the hard drive - like see if core.dll's and initialization files have changed.. ( detecting registry changes seems futile, as even moving a window in a lot of programs will trip off changes in their registry entry.).
I completely fail to see why a corporation the size of Microsoft is having problems scanning themselves to make sure they are clean.
Even if nothing else, being Microsoft products are so identical by their very nature, why does not Microsoft code up an integrity checker and give it away on their website so anyone with a Microsoft system can download a "trusted" copy of the checker and use it to verify at least their core system files ( especially internet winsock interfaces ) have not been corrupted - offering explanation of discrepancies.
I'd trust them a helluva lot more if I knew their product could recognize I had a mangled copy of their code, and offer me to recover from them a pristine replacement - exact version I am supposed to have so everything else I have running doesn't get versioning problems. They are supposedly a big company - they should have on file everything they released... c'mon - if they can't do this, how can they even think of competing with Google?
If Microsoft did this right, their software could prepare a text file which could be emailed to their customer service department detailing specifically the nature of the intrusion, which files were altered, and where. If I could verify in a text editor that the data I was sending was *all* I was sending, I would probably co-operate and send it. ( Right now, I don't trust that company far as I can spit because of all their secretive proprietary stuff... kinda like I don't trust cashing those odd "checks" that appear in my mailbox, as cashing them often incurrs a legal liability for something else onto me.)
My latest incarnation is a homebrew MD5 analyzer, but the problem is Microsoft has so many files, and I do not know which files do what, that I have to check so many files the whole mess is completely unwieldy and cumbersome. I only wish I knew which files were really important to check.
I note the
AVG Free offered by Grisoft maintains a file in each disk partition which appears to be related to a "tripwire" style integrity monitor.
Somehow, software that can not detect when its core files have been tampered with... ehhh damn!! thay call that "trusted" computing???
Maybe when we reverse-engineer the DNA of the Electric Eel, we will get a better answer.
Fireflies can teach us how to make light.
Bombardier Beetles may teach us a thing or two about making repeatable exothermic chemical reactions by biological means.
And thats just the gravy.
There is a lot of examples out there of things we can do with biology if we look for them. I get the idea machines are mostly the prototype phase...like a laboratory mock-up. When we really get serious, I feel we will code whatever we want to make in DNA and let it fly. Geez, code it right and it will build itself!
Thanks too for not chewing me out after I posted. I should never post when under the influence of emotion when I felt so powerless. Basically I went through a diatribe just to say they likely didn't set the security bit for the same reason I couldn't set it - and how much trouble for their company this little lack of understanding cost them.
When I read the article on how this was hacked, I could only relate to their designer and the pressure he was under to generate and release the design - and my own frustration over my failure to get my system to work the way I want it to.
Having their PR department bragging about "unbreakable security", didn't help matters one bit. There are mountain climbers out there, and they *will* climb any mountain, regardless of effort. I am sure their designer knew of the security bit - the standard AVR studio software supplied by ATMEL very obviously displays the status of the lock bits... but what isn't obvious at all is how to change them using their software.
It looks like a standard "check box" type form, but clicking on the box ( on my system ) does nothing. So the "check boxes" appear to only display, not change, the state the lock bits and other "fuses" are set to during the programming step.
I could not see any reason not to set the lock bit. Only thing the lock bit means is the channel to read the flash back is disabled. It does not ruin the device against future reuse, it just means the only way to get the device to accept new programming is to clear the whole flash area and reload. I thought ATMEL's hardware designers did a super job on this, as it looked like I could develop really secure apps on this chip, without hindering in the least my ability to upgrade using the 10-pin ISP connector ( albeit I would probably use a slightly different design just to frustrate hacking - but anyone understanding how the MOSI and MISO signals worked would probably fish right through it.)
I would love to follow some of the above AC's advice, but I got burned really bad once when I specified proprietary software for a client once and the software became unsupported - and he had to re-do the whole thing. Neither my ex-client nor I ever forgot that painful and expensive lesson. Many of the things I set up end up being in production and support for many years - such as some industrial motor controllers I did using the 68000, which were designed 15 years ago. My client still supports this product. I can still go in and do custom tweaks, and so can anybody else. I don't see longevity of design and support with software designed around ephemeral standards requiring certain versions of OS configured certain ways to run.
I am quite sure the designer, as the result of this experience, will become as persnikety as I am over the importance of robust design. Here he went and designed this fancy software lock, then delivered it unlocked.
Kinda sobering what some of the AC's mentioned about me to quit whining and just do whatever I am told to do. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
I have been developing some test applications on the AVR 2313 and MEGA16 using the STK500 development kit. I have their Studio 3.56 and latest Studio 4.whatever software. It turns out the 3.56 was the only one of the softwares I could get to work in my machine. Even then I had to go find weird versions of some Microsoft DLL's of the same name as the one I had by random download off the net before I found one that would work with their code. ( and then using that one broke yet more existing apps. But I keep both versions and give the version I need at the moment the proper name. Yeh, I have to drop to DOS, change the names of the MFC42.dll files around, then reboot Windows to change apps, but I consider such as part of the joys of running a Microsoft box.)
Their Studio 4.whatever stuff insists that IE be present on the machine. And apparently connected to the web as well.
Trouble is, where I work, I have my machine completely under my control as a development engineer with the strict understanding that I will NOT connect to the net!!! The system administrator flat does not want responsibility for all the problems I can cause by running unknown softwares. I do not blame him. I am quite aware of how much problems I can cause with an experimental machine on the net, especially on our side of the firewall. My ass is on the line here, fellas. If I violate his trust, do you have any idea of how much hell I will catch? Decisions on which products to use may have completely different outcomes depending on who is responsible for the problems.
When I was having my problems using their tools, I contacted ATMEL advising them of my problems and could they consider developing their software on anything OTHER than the very LATEST Microsoft stuff... as anything developed on the latest Microsoft tools likely won't run on anything other than the latest Microsoft OS.
They returned me a nice email thanking me for my input but also reassuring me that such a change would be unlikely.
Geez. Here I am, a soldier in the field, trying to win sockets for them, and I am telling the commanding generals that the bullets they are giving me don't fit the gun... and I get letters of condolence. I know this kind of thinking is gonna cost them sockets. But how do we little guys get across to the big-time executive decision-makers when they insulate themselves from realities of the field with an insulative layer of hired "tech support" people?
I never had that much trouble with MPLAB (Microchip PIC software).
I really like the hardware, as I think ATMEL has a winner with the level of system integration they got on a chip... and the guys who did the documentation are super. But how can you get the guys to consider that there are those of us out there which may be under the gun because of security issues with Microsoft products that we can not connect to the net with experimental systems?
I have yet to be able to program the "fuses" ( including lock bits ) with my STK500 using the software I have. Yeh, I will go ahead and develop my application using this software, but I would be quite leery of releasing anything which the company's future depended on keeping it secure using this software. I get the idea "Call-A-Bike" had the same problems, and just decided - like me - to go on despite not being able to program the fuse bits which select things like security levels. The MEGA-16 project is on indefinite hold because it defaults to an onboard RC oscillator, and I need to switch it to external crystal, as I have some DSP work for it.. but all their tech support can tell me is I gotta load IE and their latest software, and hope it works. Geez, I can't even LOAD their Studio4.something software without IE! So, if the chip is not shipped with the default fuses blown in the correct state, I can't use it. I simply can not afford the time to keep trying to find out why my tools no longer work after bei
There are many heat-generating items on a PC backplane and power supply.
The most intense sources of heat *require* some sort of heat-sink/fan help, as the ambient air flow alone is not enough.
But for the other components, the forced air cooling provided by the fans alone was sufficient.
What I am leery of is that if I tamper with the airflow which the original equipment manufacturer designed for, I may end up with all sorts of thermal related failures from parts which normally did not require heat sinking. Things like secondary processors and interface chips. Maybe even inductors or electrolytic caps.
Messing around with thermal design without having the proper equipment ( infrared thermal camera ) around to verify your tinkering did not leave a hot spot can be a very expensive hobby.
From what I saw, back in the 60's and 70's, NASA and the aerospace contracting community was a helluva neat and challenging place to work. Geek heaven.
Yes, we weren't the most efficient people when it came to dollar measurement, but the way we saw it, we were pioneers, blazing new paths into the unknown. No one had done the things we were trying to do before, and generally, we succeeded.
But it took a lot of time to understand how to do this, especially when human lives were involved. Much time ( read man-hours ) were invested by many of us developing models and what-if scenerios.
In the late 80's, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US, as a nation, seemed to completely lose its technological drive. Economics seemed the ultimate goal now. Dan Goldin took the reins of NASA. Everything now micromanaged. Spin-Doctoring. "Faster, Better, Cheaper". And lots of layoffs. Yes, lots of layoffs.
We lost millions of man-hours worth of knowledge because it was economically less expensive to give our workers their walking papers than to keep them around and use their experience. Most people I knew from my aerospace experiences did not retire. They were told they were no longer wanted and their managers had the security force escort them to the door.
The stuff we learned on the job is not in any textbook, and not taught in any college I know of.
My guess is the new guys the managers brought in will have to learn the same way we did - by making mistakes.
In my case, I got mixed up in the layoffs too because of a "lack of flexibility". Over many years, I had accumulated many mathematical models of the phenomena I worked with. These were synthesized from empirical data, as the nature of the models was so complex I could not find any clean mathematical formulas that were a sure fire thing. Most were curve fits and statistics.
Managers transferred me into another division which used another CAD system and thought they could just order me to use it. Sure, I could use it - but would it give me the correct results? The new CAD system was all laced with proprietary models, software, and rights protection crap which literally rendered the whole thing useless to me, as I had identical copies of my old DOS based analyzers running on machines at work and at home, and had the source code - so I knew exactly what my analyzer was telling me. I had not the foggiest idea how the new analyzer I was mandated to use worked.
It took me over ten years to get my DOS models running to any degree of accuracy, even given I knew the source codes and exactly how the simulator worked.. how the hell was I gonna even start with a system I was to be blindfolded with? To me, asking an engineer to use a DRM-encumbered system would almost be akin to putting blinders on a surgeon and still expecting the same level of surgical expertise demonstrated on the previous patient.
So, who do you think the top executives of the nation's leading aerospace corporations take seriously - an old engineer fart whining about being coerced into using something he is not allowed to understand, or a sharp executive manager's reports detailing insubordination and employee's failures to "become a team player"?
Just relieve me of the responsibility of having the thing work, and I will do it any which way you tell me to do it. If I am mixing concrete for you, and you want 1 part concrete to 50 parts sand, fine! Just don't hold me responsible for the bridge holding up!
My favorite technique for passwords is one has to use a phrase.
What my end does is take the phrase, convert all to lower case, and strip out everything but alphanumerics... then run an MD5 on it so in the end I get a clean fixed-length password.
In my case, I wanted 'lost password' recoverability, so I will also allow logon with the direct MD5, as I am willing to take the security hit in exchange for being able to recover. However, in light of recent events of being able to recover colliding MD5 input streams ( strings of alphanumerics that also produce identical MD5 hashes ), I will probably delete that capability, and in the event of lost password, I will run the MD5 through the collision synthesizer and tell them to logon with this "special password", then have them immediately change their passphrase to something more memorable.
The idea is to spare humans from having to memorize whether or not they put spaces in the phrase or capitalized certain letters.
I get the idea that "bob's dog chucked a hairball under my couch", which is just as good as "Bobsdog chucked a hair ball under m ycouch", would still be very hard for anyone to crack, yet very easy for someone to remember. Its those little persnikety things that annoy the living shit out of us humans.
Unfortunately, the whole world knows what happened to Ken.
The tax man knows, and has authority to pester him with threatening papers.
Every charity knows... you can bet he's gonna be the recipient of every cry letter out there.
Every con man knows. You can be sure he is gonna be swamped with "offers".
And worst of all, all the relatives know. Here come all the guilt trips that he should "share". His good fortune will be seen by many as a Gift from God, and now he's in a position of damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.
I don't really know if I envy the man for his winnings - as my guess is he probably raked in as many problems having to deal with everybody wanting a piece of his pie, as he raked in as dollars.
German for "flying day", during the Flugtag event, people build all sorts of human powered flying machines and parade them out, usually for the amusement of watching them try to fly, but inevitably ending up "in the drink" - as they launch their crafts over a large body of water.
I love reading posts like yours. There is nothing like the "tales from the trenches" to illustrate troubleshooting techniques.
Unfortunately, your post illustrates a problem that we techies are really ill-equipped to solve - trying to get all the bits of the "and-gate" formed by all the layers of hierarchical management to all go to "1" at the same time.
I found there was nothing more frustrating in the world than knowing how to do something, knowing the inevitable result of continuing on the present course, and being unable to do a damn thing about it. Its like being the only one on an express train who knows the bridge ahead is washed out, while the people in charge just dismiss me as a lunatic holding up their show. Yeh, cute little Dilbert cartoons and poems about running the train help, but having the knowledge of the inevitable outcome is painful. I have often heard others lament about the burden of knowledge as well.
Often, I have wondered if ignorance is indeed, bliss.
Yeh, and that "review". I can read your post and know what you did. It makes perfect sense to me. Only someone who knows what they are doing could author such a post. I get so frustrated with these "big-picture" men who seem to have no idea of the criticality of the 'little stuff' and think of it as of little significance. Just one little thing, like you had the skills to find, can and will bring an entire company down, just like the malfunction of one little gene will bring an entire living organism down.
Those are nice memories of a technical accomplishment requiring a full understanding in order to solve the puzzle - and come out with a 100% solution. I only wish others besides other techies in a tech group had an appreciation for the skills involved. This was more than a touchdown - stuff like this is what saves a company, and the jobs of all the other people employed in it.
A helluva lot more important than a touchdown in any football game in my book.
Yeh, I know your thoughts about employers constantly wanting to use the extreme high-tech stuff that NOBODY knows. While simultaneously ignoring a sea of talent that is already trained in existing technology. The terrible thing is often the new technology does not offer any increased performance, and often times seems far more cumbersome and unreliable than the simpler stuff.
I face it with companies a lot. I think the trick is to go into business for yourself and capitalize on your knowledge of how to do things the way you know how to do things, and let big companies eat the cost of pie-in-the-sky approaches. Economically, they can't compete with you. You can do things in the thousands of dollar range because just about everything coming in is just your salary and benefits. A company has to cover enormous salaries for the executives, returns to stockholders, buildings fluff, and all sorts of things not related to production before they ever get to the point of actually producing anything.
Just keep it low enough and you can probably work out of your house, and you also "slip below the radar" of the troublemakers who see someone making a buck and use extortionary techniques to wrest the fruit of your labors from you.
Make something you can reproduce easily, and sell it on Ebay. And don't get too big. Diseconomies of scale really start mounting as soon as too many people get involved.
You should be able to get enough to feed your family, but you sure don't wanna get mentioned in the business section of your paper, unless you are prepared for the barrages of sharks who also read the business section and see fresh chum for the taking. Invest in yourself. You are the only employee you can hire who knows what he is doing, and is always going to do his best. Everytime you involve anybody else, well, be prepared for problems that have nothing to do with getting your product out the door. Problems which consume much resources but produce no return. Large companies have the profits to support such behaviour. You don't. And you don't have to. Remember, when the lake starts drying up, the little minnows have a lot more chance finding food than the big bass. It just doesn't take that much to feed a minnow.
And if we do have any sort of economic collapse ( such as the Soviet Union had to go through ), businesses which are based on standard programming protocols and techniques have a much better chance of being supported by independent software engineers than companies whose computing infrastructure is supported by proprietary technologies. The decision to use standard off-the-shelf "commodity" technologies such as open source versus closed source which very few understand is a function of how expendable that company considers its computing infrastructure to be.
An example is how well-to-do executives may choose to buy cars that are very difficult and expensive to maintain, whereas the lower paid employees, who by necessity must be more efficient, consider more heavily how maintainable the car is. I bought my old Toyota Corolla 25 years ago based on this... and it still gets me back and forth to work with no further investments.
Re:i don't think therefore I am not
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Killer Ozone?
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Quite an informative link. Thanks for posting it.
I repeat your link below but clickable for the convenience of those yet to see this.
And, didn't God state that we were supposed to be his stewards of the Earth? Would you be pleased if you came back home to discover your babysitter had a party and let your baby starve? I get the idea God is gonna be pissed. Really pissed.
Right here, look at the effort being squandered on what will be a very unpopular tax if implemented. What are the chances of this thing actually going into effect?
I would save money, right here, right now, by promptly terminating this group. Private business does this all the time. Let these people who have come up with this work go find someone else to work for... as a taxpayer, I DO NOT WANT THESE GUYS ON THE PUBLIC PAYROLL!
If we could find some way of terminating public jobs as easy as private jobs are terminated, public officials would be much more careful of how they do their jobs, just as the rest of us have to be.
We all have to "design to cost", and if they can't do this, we need to open these positions up to those who can.
I always felt better knowing my important work had two, maybe three backups. I have my work backed up on not only the company's machine, but I have it at home as well, as well as occasionally burning everything so far off to a CDROM, which I often make two of... one I leave at work, and one I take home. That way I know its extremely improbable that anything - fire, thief, natural disaster, whatever, is likely to destroy them all.
Yes, I often encrypt them. Just because I leave them in less than absolutely secure locations does not mean the data itself is insecure. As for passwords, I find the easiest way I had of making them was take some known date - say my girlfriend's birthday, then perform some mathematical operations on it, you know like taking the log, then the sin, then the cosine, etc... then entering whats on the calculator display. So, yes, I may have a scrap of paper somewhere with my seed hint on it. But what I do with it is strictly between my calculator and me. Yes, I am aware that different calculators may give me slightly different answers... thats why I have three identical calculators! I figure that thats just another level of security, as even if someone somehow figured out the sequence of operations I pulled off, if they didn't have a calculator chip that had the identical roundoff mechanisms in place, they still would not arrive at the same digits as I.
Well, anyway, that's my favorite method of password obfuscation if I feel I have good reason to don the tinfoil hat.
The instant you make it possible to recover from a "lost" or "stolen" key, you also make it possible to "recover" anyone elses legit and unstolen key.
So if you lose your access to data in a totally secure system, you cannot expect anyone else to have even the remotest capability of helping you recover.
The instant anyone ever gets in a position to give you your data back, he's also in a position to give your data to anyone else.
How many people here have lost your stuff in a blowfish? I've lost a few. If you've lost your access code, you might as well forget about ever seeing your stuff again. Really secure, but unfriendly as hell if you mess up.
Do we have any way of knowing if the universe as a whole is rotating? Or if it is, in what plane and how fast?
( I consider your "angular momentum" to be the same as my "rotational inertia" )
This study of cosmology is extremely interesting, yet so much a cliffhanger as we seek yet more and more data... much like a drug addiction. Every time we think we have an answer, it seems to reveal another box of questions.
I know in the end its just gotta be simple. So far things always have seemed to work that way, but in the interim, its like a magic show where the physics behind the illusion are not known.
One thing that has been puzzling the hell out of me...
If the "big bang" theory is correct, and the entire universe emanated from a point -
Where did all this rotational inertia come from???
I guess the primordial point we supposedly came from was spinning?
Is it likely that "black holes" can be spun up so much from ingesting incoming rotational inertia that they become unstable and sling themselves apart... aka, the "big bang"?
I am not a cosmologist, or even a cosmetician as far as that goes, but I often ponder on why everything I see seems to be spinning.
Funny you mention using older hardware being cooler.
I was taking a class in Data Structures. We had our usual assortment of objects, linked lists, binary search trees, mazes, and graphs to do. I did mine on an old 386SX I had laying around. Borland Turbo C version 3 for DOS.
There was great mirth in the classroom when the first assignment was due. I was working alongside people with Pentium 3's and thousands of dollars worth of cutting edge software, against just me and a computer I pulled out of the dumper, and a copy of a compiler that showed up in a discarded magazine CD. I wanted to do this just for fun.
You see, I think *anyone* can throw lots of money at any problem, and eventually overcome it. I find solving the problem using just what I have on hand to be the real challenge.
Especially, if the problem came nowhere near requiring the resources of such exquisite equipment.
I had no trouble submitting the entire coursework for the entire sequence of classes using only that old 386SX, which I lated donated to a needy student ( with my programs still on its old 40-megabyte MFM disk ).
I often wonder why so many businesses these days wanna kill a fly by running it over with a Mack Truck, as the flyswatter lays unused. Too much money floating around?
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But the problem is not my wagging finger, its my roving eye... as I scan from area to area as I read different points on the screen. I can't say exactly whats going on, but something is quite disorienting to me when I try to study something on a CRT which requires me to scan different areas on the face of the tube, as when I read or trace lines on a drawing.
Kinda like trying to read a book on a moving train under fluorescent lighting. Some sort of strobe effect I can't quite put my finger on, but it does cause me to become disoriented and nauseous after a few minutes of it. The finer the detail, the worse it gets.
If its only one area of the screen, no problem, its when I go from area to area rapidly, like one does when skimming a book. That's when it hits me on some sort of subliminal level.
I wish I could be a bit more definitive here and say exactly what it is, but I can only speculate its that somehow I get accustomed to the flicker - even at imperceptible rates - at one area of the screen, then I get abrupt phase changes of the flicker when I go to other areas of the screen.
This affects me on static displays where the information is not in motion. If its a case such as television, where the scene is already in motion, and I am not concentrating on a small area of the screen, but looking at the screen as a whole, the motion of the whole screen image seems to swamp out this effect.
The LCD, on the other hand, seems completely static, like an image on paper. I quite quickly noted the absence of this effect on me when reading text and studying CAD images on LCD's.
One more thing on the LCD's... on my PCB programs driving it, the precise pixel alignments exaggerate the "jaggies" of not-quite-square PCB traces. Made a world of difference in my quickly looking at my work and seeing if I had any traces not quite aligned.
My feeling about my machine is exactly as you stated - I just wanted a consumer appliance that just works. Yes, I still run DOS for schematic capture, circuit analysis, C++ DSP experimentation, and PCB layout. I know all the file formats. Using my computer is like using my hand - I know exactly what I want it to do and know how to tell it to do so. Everything has user-definable libraries and models, so as I get new parts to work with, I add them in.
Yes, I do have the 'business' types telling me to get current, join the 20'th century, all that kind of talk, yet its obvious to me he has no idea that the stuff I need done is quite easily handled by 1990 technology. Paid for. Understood. ALL my productivity using this setup is pure PROFIT!
I have to realize this concept of "marginal benefit". The highly-paid guy is apt to buy a car based on showroom appeal, whereas I buy a car almost purely on technical matters. I won't part with my old 1977 toyota either. Its old school technology. Uses points. Yes, all I have to do to get the engine to run is get fuel to it and power to the coil. The points degrade gracefully, and even if they do go out completely, its really hard for the mechanism to fail in such a way I can't simply bend the contact area in such a manner it will work for another several thousand miles or so.
I am running up close to 400,000 miles on that guy, and he's shown little signs of wear, other than brake shoes and the rubber trim is deteriorating. But then, I bought the car in the first place to get me moved from one location to another. I did not buy it to impress others on how much money I had to squander on show.
I can understand how once one gets "trapped in the cage", egress can be very difficult, so its been my intention to be like that wiry stray cat in my neighborhood and stay out of confining cages, as I know what they are. This cat will recognize structures made of steel wire, just as I recognize structures of EULA's, legal restrictions, 'security authentications', and legal mandates.
If businesses get themselves snarled into these traps, they traveled in on their own paws. We are trying like hell to keep them safe, but sometimes trying to persuade a businessman from getting himself trapped is like my trying to persuade my cat not to visit the neighbor's yard when I know the neighbor does not like cats, and is actively trapping them and taking them to the pound.
I know your feeling about trying to deal with some people. The people who have lots of money are the worst - as they feel that their money and authority, not the laws of physics - or man, give them extraordinary powers. The rich man has his money, just as my cat has muscles and claws, and if my cat insists on visiting my neighbor's yard, I just have to prepare myself for the loss of my cat. A technical guy can try to keep his company out of trouble, but as any parent can tell you, trying to help a corporate entity can be like trying to help a teenager, who will probably never understand the ramifications of certain behaviours until they have personally experienced the results of doing so.
It got so bad for me, working in a large aerospace corporation, that it was obvious we had such a difference of opinion that I had to go. Ranked as not being a 'team player'. You may find smaller businesses, especially businesses still heavily in the initial growth phase, very receptive to techniques which generate profit from no investment. Tools already paid for. Knowledge already in place.
I am the type that once I put something in place, I expect it to work until I decommission it. I pour concrete foundations. Use lots of rebar. By golly, it takes a lot of work to build something. Build it well so y
Wouldn't it be scary if we found other civilizations which existed just long enough to start experimenting with nuclear energies, only to create stable black holes - not knowing what they had done, only setting the stage for their own destruction, much like children in the house playing with matches?
Nightmares - the kind I have - are spawned from concepts such as this. I don't have many nightmares, because as as a techie, I know how most things work, hence I have no fear of it. My nightmares center on having my house broke into, or a barber that ruins years of effort growing my hair, but this - I have a great fear of... as I know what it is, yet do not have the slightest inkling of what to do with one if I somehow made one.
There is a helluva lot of goodies in a monitor!
Lots of nice high-voltage capacitors. High voltage transistors. At least one, usually two, high power switching transistors. Various inductors which can be quite easily modified for whatever inductance I want. A flyback transformer, good for all sorts of high voltage tinkerings. And a good healthy assortment of resistors, high voltage fast switching diodes, and plain old signal transistors.
There are usually several pots and switches, and a few LED's. Connectors. And hookup wire.
Just the kind of stuff I love to have laying around when I am tinkering with high power ultrasonics and designing switching power supplies.
Having a few old monitor circuit boards laying around has saved me many a trip to the local parts retailer. Its not the money - its the time I save by just having a part I can experiment with in my hand right now - for getting empirical data on how changes in a component or topology will affect circuit behaviour.
The CRT and case were most likely destroyed by the drop, but I betcha most of the parts I would have wanted survived.
Talking about a pandora's box!
If we ever succeed in making a stable black hole, then find ourselves incapable of destroying it, what do we do with it???
If we ever lose containment of it, it should do exactly as Larry predicted, with the gravitation of the Earth pulling it straight to the core of the earth, while it eats everything in its path like an insatiable termite, growing exponentially as it consumes the mass of the earth itself.
To me, this is a very scary scenario, and whats more scary is that it may be do-able!!!
I have used integrity checking , homebrew batch files since the days of DOS and CRCHECK.EXE , to see if anything got tampered with, and in those days, DOS was simple enough that it was pretty trivial to do a quickie scan of anything I loaded upon boot, so I could be pretty assured everything at least came up clean.
One of the reasons I have been so loathe to give up my WIN95 system is that I always come up in DOS, and being I can boot DOS from a trusted floppy, I can use trusted code on the floppy to verify the integrity of suspect code on the hard drive - like see if core .dll's and initialization files have changed.. ( detecting registry changes seems futile, as even moving a window in a lot of programs will trip off changes in their registry entry.).
I completely fail to see why a corporation the size of Microsoft is having problems scanning themselves to make sure they are clean.
Even if nothing else, being Microsoft products are so identical by their very nature, why does not Microsoft code up an integrity checker and give it away on their website so anyone with a Microsoft system can download a "trusted" copy of the checker and use it to verify at least their core system files ( especially internet winsock interfaces ) have not been corrupted - offering explanation of discrepancies.
I'd trust them a helluva lot more if I knew their product could recognize I had a mangled copy of their code, and offer me to recover from them a pristine replacement - exact version I am supposed to have so everything else I have running doesn't get versioning problems. They are supposedly a big company - they should have on file everything they released... c'mon - if they can't do this, how can they even think of competing with Google?
If Microsoft did this right, their software could prepare a text file which could be emailed to their customer service department detailing specifically the nature of the intrusion, which files were altered, and where. If I could verify in a text editor that the data I was sending was *all* I was sending, I would probably co-operate and send it. ( Right now, I don't trust that company far as I can spit because of all their secretive proprietary stuff... kinda like I don't trust cashing those odd "checks" that appear in my mailbox, as cashing them often incurrs a legal liability for something else onto me.)
My latest incarnation is a homebrew MD5 analyzer, but the problem is Microsoft has so many files, and I do not know which files do what, that I have to check so many files the whole mess is completely unwieldy and cumbersome. I only wish I knew which files were really important to check.
I note the AVG Free offered by Grisoft maintains a file in each disk partition which appears to be related to a "tripwire" style integrity monitor.
Somehow, software that can not detect when its core files have been tampered with ... ehhh damn!! thay call that "trusted" computing???
I have seen sites in the past where they appeared to serve an informative function, and were moderated appropriately.
Then the site suddenly became obscene... with it rated favorably.
At the time I type this, the link was pointing to a pagefull of obscene ascii "art".
It may well have been pointing to something useful when you saw it.
There are people out there who get their jollies off making some of us look like an a**.
Lesson: Be very careful moderating AC posts containing links.
Those links may change after you have moderated it, leaving your moderation in place and your credibility in the can.
Fireflies can teach us how to make light.
Bombardier Beetles may teach us a thing or two about making repeatable exothermic chemical reactions by biological means.
And thats just the gravy.
There is a lot of examples out there of things we can do with biology if we look for them. I get the idea machines are mostly the prototype phase...like a laboratory mock-up. When we really get serious, I feel we will code whatever we want to make in DNA and let it fly. Geez, code it right and it will build itself!
Thanks too for not chewing me out after I posted. I should never post when under the influence of emotion when I felt so powerless. Basically I went through a diatribe just to say they likely didn't set the security bit for the same reason I couldn't set it - and how much trouble for their company this little lack of understanding cost them.
When I read the article on how this was hacked, I could only relate to their designer and the pressure he was under to generate and release the design - and my own frustration over my failure to get my system to work the way I want it to.
Having their PR department bragging about "unbreakable security", didn't help matters one bit. There are mountain climbers out there, and they *will* climb any mountain, regardless of effort. I am sure their designer knew of the security bit - the standard AVR studio software supplied by ATMEL very obviously displays the status of the lock bits... but what isn't obvious at all is how to change them using their software. It looks like a standard "check box" type form, but clicking on the box ( on my system ) does nothing. So the "check boxes" appear to only display, not change, the state the lock bits and other "fuses" are set to during the programming step.
I could not see any reason not to set the lock bit. Only thing the lock bit means is the channel to read the flash back is disabled. It does not ruin the device against future reuse, it just means the only way to get the device to accept new programming is to clear the whole flash area and reload. I thought ATMEL's hardware designers did a super job on this, as it looked like I could develop really secure apps on this chip, without hindering in the least my ability to upgrade using the 10-pin ISP connector ( albeit I would probably use a slightly different design just to frustrate hacking - but anyone understanding how the MOSI and MISO signals worked would probably fish right through it.)
I would love to follow some of the above AC's advice, but I got burned really bad once when I specified proprietary software for a client once and the software became unsupported - and he had to re-do the whole thing. Neither my ex-client nor I ever forgot that painful and expensive lesson. Many of the things I set up end up being in production and support for many years - such as some industrial motor controllers I did using the 68000, which were designed 15 years ago. My client still supports this product. I can still go in and do custom tweaks, and so can anybody else. I don't see longevity of design and support with software designed around ephemeral standards requiring certain versions of OS configured certain ways to run.
I am quite sure the designer, as the result of this experience, will become as persnikety as I am over the importance of robust design. Here he went and designed this fancy software lock, then delivered it unlocked.
Kinda sobering what some of the AC's mentioned about me to quit whining and just do whatever I am told to do. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
I have been developing some test applications on the AVR 2313 and MEGA16 using the STK500 development kit. I have their Studio 3.56 and latest Studio 4.whatever software. It turns out the 3.56 was the only one of the softwares I could get to work in my machine. Even then I had to go find weird versions of some Microsoft DLL's of the same name as the one I had by random download off the net before I found one that would work with their code. ( and then using that one broke yet more existing apps. But I keep both versions and give the version I need at the moment the proper name. Yeh, I have to drop to DOS, change the names of the MFC42.dll files around, then reboot Windows to change apps, but I consider such as part of the joys of running a Microsoft box.)
Their Studio 4.whatever stuff insists that IE be present on the machine. And apparently connected to the web as well.
Trouble is, where I work, I have my machine completely under my control as a development engineer with the strict understanding that I will NOT connect to the net!!! The system administrator flat does not want responsibility for all the problems I can cause by running unknown softwares. I do not blame him. I am quite aware of how much problems I can cause with an experimental machine on the net, especially on our side of the firewall. My ass is on the line here, fellas. If I violate his trust, do you have any idea of how much hell I will catch? Decisions on which products to use may have completely different outcomes depending on who is responsible for the problems.
When I was having my problems using their tools, I contacted ATMEL advising them of my problems and could they consider developing their software on anything OTHER than the very LATEST Microsoft stuff... as anything developed on the latest Microsoft tools likely won't run on anything other than the latest Microsoft OS.
They returned me a nice email thanking me for my input but also reassuring me that such a change would be unlikely.
Geez. Here I am, a soldier in the field, trying to win sockets for them, and I am telling the commanding generals that the bullets they are giving me don't fit the gun ... and I get letters of condolence. I know this kind of thinking is gonna cost them sockets. But how do we little guys get across to the big-time executive decision-makers when they insulate themselves from realities of the field with an insulative layer of hired "tech support" people?
I never had that much trouble with MPLAB (Microchip PIC software).
I really like the hardware, as I think ATMEL has a winner with the level of system integration they got on a chip... and the guys who did the documentation are super. But how can you get the guys to consider that there are those of us out there which may be under the gun because of security issues with Microsoft products that we can not connect to the net with experimental systems?
I have yet to be able to program the "fuses" ( including lock bits ) with my STK500 using the software I have. Yeh, I will go ahead and develop my application using this software, but I would be quite leery of releasing anything which the company's future depended on keeping it secure using this software. I get the idea "Call-A-Bike" had the same problems, and just decided - like me - to go on despite not being able to program the fuse bits which select things like security levels. The MEGA-16 project is on indefinite hold because it defaults to an onboard RC oscillator, and I need to switch it to external crystal, as I have some DSP work for it.. but all their tech support can tell me is I gotta load IE and their latest software, and hope it works. Geez, I can't even LOAD their Studio4.something software without IE! So, if the chip is not shipped with the default fuses blown in the correct state, I can't use it. I simply can not afford the time to keep trying to find out why my tools no longer work after bei
The most intense sources of heat *require* some sort of heat-sink/fan help, as the ambient air flow alone is not enough.
But for the other components, the forced air cooling provided by the fans alone was sufficient.
What I am leery of is that if I tamper with the airflow which the original equipment manufacturer designed for, I may end up with all sorts of thermal related failures from parts which normally did not require heat sinking. Things like secondary processors and interface chips. Maybe even inductors or electrolytic caps.
Messing around with thermal design without having the proper equipment ( infrared thermal camera ) around to verify your tinkering did not leave a hot spot can be a very expensive hobby.
From what I saw, back in the 60's and 70's, NASA and the aerospace contracting community was a helluva neat and challenging place to work. Geek heaven.
Yes, we weren't the most efficient people when it came to dollar measurement, but the way we saw it, we were pioneers, blazing new paths into the unknown. No one had done the things we were trying to do before, and generally, we succeeded.
But it took a lot of time to understand how to do this, especially when human lives were involved. Much time ( read man-hours ) were invested by many of us developing models and what-if scenerios.
In the late 80's, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US, as a nation, seemed to completely lose its technological drive. Economics seemed the ultimate goal now. Dan Goldin took the reins of NASA. Everything now micromanaged. Spin-Doctoring. "Faster, Better, Cheaper". And lots of layoffs. Yes, lots of layoffs.
We lost millions of man-hours worth of knowledge because it was economically less expensive to give our workers their walking papers than to keep them around and use their experience. Most people I knew from my aerospace experiences did not retire. They were told they were no longer wanted and their managers had the security force escort them to the door.
The stuff we learned on the job is not in any textbook, and not taught in any college I know of.
My guess is the new guys the managers brought in will have to learn the same way we did - by making mistakes.
In my case, I got mixed up in the layoffs too because of a "lack of flexibility". Over many years, I had accumulated many mathematical models of the phenomena I worked with. These were synthesized from empirical data, as the nature of the models was so complex I could not find any clean mathematical formulas that were a sure fire thing. Most were curve fits and statistics.
Managers transferred me into another division which used another CAD system and thought they could just order me to use it. Sure, I could use it - but would it give me the correct results? The new CAD system was all laced with proprietary models, software, and rights protection crap which literally rendered the whole thing useless to me, as I had identical copies of my old DOS based analyzers running on machines at work and at home, and had the source code - so I knew exactly what my analyzer was telling me. I had not the foggiest idea how the new analyzer I was mandated to use worked.
It took me over ten years to get my DOS models running to any degree of accuracy, even given I knew the source codes and exactly how the simulator worked.. how the hell was I gonna even start with a system I was to be blindfolded with? To me, asking an engineer to use a DRM-encumbered system would almost be akin to putting blinders on a surgeon and still expecting the same level of surgical expertise demonstrated on the previous patient.
So, who do you think the top executives of the nation's leading aerospace corporations take seriously - an old engineer fart whining about being coerced into using something he is not allowed to understand, or a sharp executive manager's reports detailing insubordination and employee's failures to "become a team player"?
Just relieve me of the responsibility of having the thing work, and I will do it any which way you tell me to do it. If I am mixing concrete for you, and you want 1 part concrete to 50 parts sand, fine! Just don't hold me responsible for the bridge holding up!
What my end does is take the phrase, convert all to lower case, and strip out everything but alphanumerics... then run an MD5 on it so in the end I get a clean fixed-length password.
In my case, I wanted 'lost password' recoverability, so I will also allow logon with the direct MD5, as I am willing to take the security hit in exchange for being able to recover. However, in light of recent events of being able to recover colliding MD5 input streams ( strings of alphanumerics that also produce identical MD5 hashes ), I will probably delete that capability, and in the event of lost password, I will run the MD5 through the collision synthesizer and tell them to logon with this "special password", then have them immediately change their passphrase to something more memorable.
The idea is to spare humans from having to memorize whether or not they put spaces in the phrase or capitalized certain letters.
I get the idea that "bob's dog chucked a hairball under my couch", which is just as good as "Bobsdog chucked a hair ball under m ycouch", would still be very hard for anyone to crack, yet very easy for someone to remember. Its those little persnikety things that annoy the living shit out of us humans.
The tax man knows, and has authority to pester him with threatening papers.
Every charity knows... you can bet he's gonna be the recipient of every cry letter out there.
Every con man knows. You can be sure he is gonna be swamped with "offers".
And worst of all, all the relatives know. Here come all the guilt trips that he should "share". His good fortune will be seen by many as a Gift from God, and now he's in a position of damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.
I don't really know if I envy the man for his winnings - as my guess is he probably raked in as many problems having to deal with everybody wanting a piece of his pie, as he raked in as dollars.
German for "flying day", during the Flugtag event, people build all sorts of human powered flying machines and parade them out, usually for the amusement of watching them try to fly, but inevitably ending up "in the drink" - as they launch their crafts over a large body of water.
Unfortunately, your post illustrates a problem that we techies are really ill-equipped to solve - trying to get all the bits of the "and-gate" formed by all the layers of hierarchical management to all go to "1" at the same time.
I found there was nothing more frustrating in the world than knowing how to do something, knowing the inevitable result of continuing on the present course, and being unable to do a damn thing about it. Its like being the only one on an express train who knows the bridge ahead is washed out, while the people in charge just dismiss me as a lunatic holding up their show. Yeh, cute little Dilbert cartoons and poems about running the train help, but having the knowledge of the inevitable outcome is painful. I have often heard others lament about the burden of knowledge as well.
Often, I have wondered if ignorance is indeed, bliss.
Yeh, and that "review". I can read your post and know what you did. It makes perfect sense to me. Only someone who knows what they are doing could author such a post. I get so frustrated with these "big-picture" men who seem to have no idea of the criticality of the 'little stuff' and think of it as of little significance. Just one little thing, like you had the skills to find, can and will bring an entire company down, just like the malfunction of one little gene will bring an entire living organism down.
Those are nice memories of a technical accomplishment requiring a full understanding in order to solve the puzzle - and come out with a 100% solution. I only wish others besides other techies in a tech group had an appreciation for the skills involved. This was more than a touchdown - stuff like this is what saves a company, and the jobs of all the other people employed in it.
A helluva lot more important than a touchdown in any football game in my book.
I face it with companies a lot. I think the trick is to go into business for yourself and capitalize on your knowledge of how to do things the way you know how to do things, and let big companies eat the cost of pie-in-the-sky approaches. Economically, they can't compete with you. You can do things in the thousands of dollar range because just about everything coming in is just your salary and benefits. A company has to cover enormous salaries for the executives, returns to stockholders, buildings fluff, and all sorts of things not related to production before they ever get to the point of actually producing anything.
Just keep it low enough and you can probably work out of your house, and you also "slip below the radar" of the troublemakers who see someone making a buck and use extortionary techniques to wrest the fruit of your labors from you.
Make something you can reproduce easily, and sell it on Ebay. And don't get too big. Diseconomies of scale really start mounting as soon as too many people get involved.
You should be able to get enough to feed your family, but you sure don't wanna get mentioned in the business section of your paper, unless you are prepared for the barrages of sharks who also read the business section and see fresh chum for the taking. Invest in yourself. You are the only employee you can hire who knows what he is doing, and is always going to do his best. Everytime you involve anybody else, well, be prepared for problems that have nothing to do with getting your product out the door. Problems which consume much resources but produce no return. Large companies have the profits to support such behaviour. You don't. And you don't have to. Remember, when the lake starts drying up, the little minnows have a lot more chance finding food than the big bass. It just doesn't take that much to feed a minnow.
And if we do have any sort of economic collapse ( such as the Soviet Union had to go through ), businesses which are based on standard programming protocols and techniques have a much better chance of being supported by independent software engineers than companies whose computing infrastructure is supported by proprietary technologies. The decision to use standard off-the-shelf "commodity" technologies such as open source versus closed source which very few understand is a function of how expendable that company considers its computing infrastructure to be.
An example is how well-to-do executives may choose to buy cars that are very difficult and expensive to maintain, whereas the lower paid employees, who by necessity must be more efficient, consider more heavily how maintainable the car is. I bought my old Toyota Corolla 25 years ago based on this... and it still gets me back and forth to work with no further investments.
I repeat your link below but clickable for the convenience of those yet to see this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4013719.stm
And, didn't God state that we were supposed to be his stewards of the Earth? Would you be pleased if you came back home to discover your babysitter had a party and let your baby starve? I get the idea God is gonna be pissed. Really pissed.
Its as if they were "marketing" a gas tax hike.
Incidentally, you know what marketing skills are all about - its how to make the customer think he's getting laid, when he's really getting screwed.
Right here, look at the effort being squandered on what will be a very unpopular tax if implemented. What are the chances of this thing actually going into effect?
I would save money, right here, right now, by promptly terminating this group. Private business does this all the time. Let these people who have come up with this work go find someone else to work for... as a taxpayer, I DO NOT WANT THESE GUYS ON THE PUBLIC PAYROLL!
If we could find some way of terminating public jobs as easy as private jobs are terminated, public officials would be much more careful of how they do their jobs, just as the rest of us have to be.
We all have to "design to cost", and if they can't do this, we need to open these positions up to those who can.
I always felt better knowing my important work had two, maybe three backups. I have my work backed up on not only the company's machine, but I have it at home as well, as well as occasionally burning everything so far off to a CDROM, which I often make two of... one I leave at work, and one I take home. That way I know its extremely improbable that anything - fire, thief, natural disaster, whatever, is likely to destroy them all.
Yes, I often encrypt them. Just because I leave them in less than absolutely secure locations does not mean the data itself is insecure. As for passwords, I find the easiest way I had of making them was take some known date - say my girlfriend's birthday, then perform some mathematical operations on it, you know like taking the log, then the sin, then the cosine, etc... then entering whats on the calculator display. So, yes, I may have a scrap of paper somewhere with my seed hint on it. But what I do with it is strictly between my calculator and me. Yes, I am aware that different calculators may give me slightly different answers... thats why I have three identical calculators! I figure that thats just another level of security, as even if someone somehow figured out the sequence of operations I pulled off, if they didn't have a calculator chip that had the identical roundoff mechanisms in place, they still would not arrive at the same digits as I.
Well, anyway, that's my favorite method of password obfuscation if I feel I have good reason to don the tinfoil hat.
The instant you make it possible to recover from a "lost" or "stolen" key, you also make it possible to "recover" anyone elses legit and unstolen key.
So if you lose your access to data in a totally secure system, you cannot expect anyone else to have even the remotest capability of helping you recover.
The instant anyone ever gets in a position to give you your data back, he's also in a position to give your data to anyone else.
How many people here have lost your stuff in a blowfish? I've lost a few. If you've lost your access code, you might as well forget about ever seeing your stuff again. Really secure, but unfriendly as hell if you mess up.
( I consider your "angular momentum" to be the same as my "rotational inertia" )
This study of cosmology is extremely interesting, yet so much a cliffhanger as we seek yet more and more data... much like a drug addiction. Every time we think we have an answer, it seems to reveal another box of questions.
I know in the end its just gotta be simple. So far things always have seemed to work that way, but in the interim, its like a magic show where the physics behind the illusion are not known.
If the "big bang" theory is correct, and the entire universe emanated from a point -
Where did all this rotational inertia come from???
I guess the primordial point we supposedly came from was spinning?
Is it likely that "black holes" can be spun up so much from ingesting incoming rotational inertia that they become unstable and sling themselves apart... aka, the "big bang"?
I am not a cosmologist, or even a cosmetician as far as that goes, but I often ponder on why everything I see seems to be spinning.
I was taking a class in Data Structures. We had our usual assortment of objects, linked lists, binary search trees, mazes, and graphs to do. I did mine on an old 386SX I had laying around. Borland Turbo C version 3 for DOS.
There was great mirth in the classroom when the first assignment was due. I was working alongside people with Pentium 3's and thousands of dollars worth of cutting edge software, against just me and a computer I pulled out of the dumper, and a copy of a compiler that showed up in a discarded magazine CD. I wanted to do this just for fun.
You see, I think *anyone* can throw lots of money at any problem, and eventually overcome it. I find solving the problem using just what I have on hand to be the real challenge.
Especially, if the problem came nowhere near requiring the resources of such exquisite equipment.
I had no trouble submitting the entire coursework for the entire sequence of classes using only that old 386SX, which I lated donated to a needy student ( with my programs still on its old 40-megabyte MFM disk ).
I often wonder why so many businesses these days wanna kill a fly by running it over with a Mack Truck, as the flyswatter lays unused. Too much money floating around?