We poor bastards have to work ridiculous hours, crawl around under and behind peoples desks, fuck around under server room floors, sometimes even do shit around dusty cable runs. It gets bloody uncomfortable. We even cut ourselves on bloody computers for our thankless companies and staff. Hello? We BLEED for those bastards! My mother always complained about how much *I* made her bleed during my birth. Well damn it, we bleed too and want some recognition for it! You know that saying? BLOOD, sweat and tears? It was a skinny nerd with thick black framed glasses, held together with a bandage that coined that phrase. I'm sure one day he just got sick of wrecking business shirts with blood and ink stains from the pens in his BROKEN pocket protector and decided, "To hell with pocket protectors, to hell with my own pens and to hell with uncomfortable business shirts! From now on it's t shirts, no more pocket protectors and fuck it, I'm just going to use whatever pen I find in this damn war zone".
Actually, I don't know what's worse. Getting blood on a $70 business shirt or getting blood on one of my most excellent and beloved OpenBSD t's.
Hmm, I wonder how many OpenBSD t's I could buy if I claim workers comp?
I never said DPI didn't matter. I said that the dpi figure that manufacterers of these printers use, is not meaningful like the traditional dpi value is. Of course smaller and more dither dots are better, but not anywhere near as important as the real dpi. Which apparently now should be ppi.
A good tip I heard from a printer designer was to ignore the DPI figure, as long as it's more than about 600. It (usually) means how precisely the printer can place dots.
There is another issue, with so called photo printers. I don't know if this still holds true, so it would be good if someone could confirm this.
With older technology printers, dots per inch is actually meaningful. It literally accounted for the number of non overlapping dots, each of which could be considered a pixel. However with these new bubble jet and ink jet type printers, they need to spit many very small ink dots into the area which makes up a printed pixel, so as to build up a single pixel of varying colour through the use of dithering.
Fair enough right? Whatever needs to be done to make those images look great?
Well unfortunately, these photo printer makers are using deceptive marketing. Because a "dot" in their definition of dpi DOES NOT equate in a meaningful manner to a pixel, instead their "dot" refers to each of the smaller dither dots.
This is why for a long time, ink and bubble jets of 600dpi looked like crap against a 300dpi laser print out, where edge smoothness and text mattered.
9600dpi, 2400dpi, whatever. Don't bother telling me because it is now a meaningless figure. You could make a printer with a real dpi of 150, but made up of 9600dpi dither dots and it is still going to look like a 150dpi print out. But the brochure says 9600dpi, not 150dpi. This is an exageration btw, to make the point. The best thing to do is look at actual print outs and decide on quality with your own eyes, because manufacturer quoted numbers in this regard are pretty much useless when the most important metric is undisclosed and remains so because it would hurt sales.
I am the proud owner of an old Toshiba Sat Pro;) which was beginning to get bad cracking around the catch, I found it quite easy to take out the screen, drill out the crack tips(to stop them propagating) with a small drillbit then laid up fibreglass over the outside of the case to strengthen the area.
Interesting. I have been contemplating gluing some flat plastic to the top (when closed) of my girlfriends TP, to get some more life out of it for her.
I wonder if I should make a mold of my Sony's base so that I may be able to copy it in fibreglass some day when I need to? Have you ever worked with carbon fibre? Any ideas if a hobbiest could work with it on the cheap?
Maybe I should cut my losses and sell my Sony when the new x86 Powerbooks come out. Assuming they will be equal to my criteria for buying this Sony, 1920x1200 LCD, 2GB DDR2, quick Pentium M (~2.13GHz).
You can't go to Walmart for quality. I have never seen quality at Walmart. You want a quality DVD player?
Lots of DOA is not poor quality, it is completely unacceptable.
You want a quality laptop? Buy an IBM Thinkpad. The things are bricks.
I love the Thinkpad keyboards and they may be better than average. But I would not say they are built like bricks. My girlfriends Thinkpad started falling apart after a few years of very good care. There are cracks ALL OVER the case, to the point where she has to leave it open at all times, for fear of that final break ending it all. Conversely, my iBook and friends Powerbooks (Ti, not Au) which are older, have stood up very well.
Your jab at Japanese cars is off base too.... Try that on your "painted steel" car's from the 60's and 70's.
Wow, talk about apples to oranges. It was just a little jab, I did not bitch and moan. I was comparing to the fact that a VERY VERY expensive laptop is a bit too plastic. For that cost a cast metal base at the very least would have been nice.
All your examples were mentioning brands or stores that are well known to sacrifice quality for price.
Of the brands I mentioned (Sun, DEC, AWA, Sony, Apple), I would not consider ANY of them to be "known to sacrifice quality for price". AWA does, now in my book. But I did not expect a $5,000 Sony notebook, to "sacrifice quality for price". Now I am wondering about Sony. Thinking that I maybe should have waited for a new x86 Powerbook.
Those stores I mentioned certainly do sacrifice quality, but that is part of my point.
It sounds to me like you are just not doing any research before buying. You can still buy quality, you just have to know where to look.
Actually, I am the kind of guy who will spend 3 months researching large purchases, putting details into spreadsheets and reading forums well after the product has been on sale. And then sometimes... not even make a purchase because I am tentative based on what I learn. I am very cautious for large purchases.
However, when you buy a DVD player, you expect it to... WORK. Regardless of how little it costs. Especially considering that whether you buy a bigger name brand or the cheapest there is, the core components tend to be THE SAME amongst a group of commonly used components. Same drive mechanism, same decoder silicon, etc can be found between units which can differ in price by 10 times. Poor quality is no longer just found in the cheap stuff.
Nah, it wasn't because of that; it was because your Aussie electricity supply was effectively phase-shifted by 180 degrees (i.e. it was upside down);-)
Ha ha. I guess this is why we hang out at the beach so much and love our gas bar-bies.
This nonprofit company will then offer royalty-free licenses to companies and individuals that agreed not to assert their own patents.
Actually, it seems a bit silly to me. I assume they mean, "agreed not to assert their own patents based on our patent". If so, is that not absurd, since you probably should not get a patent granted when it is based off of someone elses patent anyway?
Isn't this almost a good idea which falls short when it comes to the final method of defence (you can't patent a derived idea)? Wouldn't it be better that the idea just simply be patented full stop and then carefully granted? Why not use patents for the way they were designed in the first place? Then perhaps an optional added agreement to use the patent be that it can be used for free in OSS or with royalties which came back to OSS for use in commercial software.
It just seems to me that a demand is being made for something you would get out of the patent system anyway. Why not extend it with something worthwhile?
people always think I'm dumb for going cheap (second hand, bottom-tier, whatever) on cars and computers and electronics
I love trawling through ebay for certain older Sun's, DEC's, etc.
Whenever I buy something here is Australia from a department store, especially from one like Big-W, Target or K-Mart, I am left thinking on the way home, "is it going to work when I get it out of the box? If it does, for how long?"
I bought a DVD player just recently from Big-W. I think it was rebadged to AWA. The model was on display, which at the time was being used to run a PSP promotional DVD which was displaying in only shades of purple on the cheapo flat screen TV it was hooked up to. I asked the lady if the TV or the DVD player was broken and she said they were fine, it was the promotional DVD which was done all in shades of purple (in my head I heard Dr. Evil say, riiiigh-T). I asked if they ever got returns on that model DVD player and she said she knew of none.
I should have realised, that she would not know. She is in sales, she is not at the huge returns desk near the front with the long line of less than happy customers with various "goods", hmmm okay "items" for return. I asked the nice young girl behind the counter about this model of DVD player which I was returning (because it would not recognise ANY DVD, not even the two I had just recently purchased with zero scratches) as to how many returns she had seen and she told me that she had seen lots of those units come back.
I also noticed this time what looked like the same PSP promotional DVD playing, except in full colour!
This is the third component DVD player I have had fail.
price hasn't equaled quality since your grandpa's day when everything was built out of painted steel and machined parts.
Reminds me of something I have been saying for a few years...
"You rarely get what you pay for, but you usually pay for what you get."
I recently spent $5,000 Aussie on a Sony notebook. Admittedly the display is spectacular and I expected the Sony to be a decent product. It mostly is, however it is a little flimsy. After only a few months of use the paint on the palm rests is wearing off. For one third to one quarter the cost of a decent small brand new Japanese car (did I say decent? Sorry, my expectations must be slowly sliding down in this new World), it would have been nice for this machine to at least have a metal top and bottom. I am fearful of moving it for the wear from flexing the chassis. My girlfriends Thinkpad has also broken all around the screen where the hinges are.
I like the look and feel of Powerbooks, but even they have issues, since their metal is just thin enough to cause permanent apparent warping in some cases, so I have heard.
I want quality and I am willing to pay for it! But I can't find it! It seems that I would need to, as you suggest with the industrial comment, purchase a hardened computer designed mostly for the US military if I want any decent level of sturdiness. But then I'd be paying 4-6 times the price of the consumer equivalent for a very heavy and strange looking machine. Fair enough, I expect that stuff to be super expensive due to the added hardness and limited economies of scale, but surely with the economies of scale which the consumer gear manufacturers can leverage, they could at least give us something acceptable.
(And don't forget they are polarised. Putting them in backwards will make them explode)
The best looking cap explosion I ever saw, was a tantalum which I accidentally soldered in the wrong way, while building a digital frequency meter.
Once it came time to test... a small bit of the top popped off and a silver molten stream of what looked like beads of mercury came gushing out and off that stream came lots of smoke. It looked so cool I half did not want to switch it off. ; )
I'd think if there was a market for a motherboard with yellow PCI slots and a purple PCB that this would be a much more attractive option.
It gets even more ridiculous than that. Remember that AOpen motherboard with the vacume tube amplified built-in sound card? Yeah, that's what I need! Bugger the high quality core components! I need extra harmonics! Warm sound!
This all comes down to marketting. Most people don't know what they need or should wan't, so what they want is dictated to them by the companies who have an interest is SALES. Put together some crap, say it's fine Belgian dark chocolate and people not only will buy it, but they'll rave about it in forums and even refer to it as part of their "kit" or "rig" in their signatures.
If it's consumer level, regardless of how much you paid for it, it is probably mutton dressed up as lamb.
*chuckles evilly* I got to see a room full of people hit the floor when a Cap blew up in a machine located at the front of a lab. They thought someone was shooting at them.
About 16 years ago in one of my electronics classes, a student from the previous period had switched one of the oscilloscopes power supply from 240V to 110V. When the student with the sabotaged CRO switched it on, it was expecting 110V but got our Aussie 240V.
Paper, foil, smoke and students went everywhere. ; )
This is all made up and that's the point - even without knowing the details of any particular card, it's trivial to imagine why complete RLD is unrealistic for hardware such as 3d graphics which is so intensely competitive right now.
I don't and never have expected complete in-house RLD. I know it is not required to do the full job as the device is advertised as supporting. What I want is enough RLD to make the product work, with pertinent "revealing" comments or buggy register implementations removed if need be.
Consumers pay money for these products, they have a right to know the state of play. I will never purchase the garbage that Adaptec sells again, simply because I know how buggy their products can be while they just simply hide it to continue making money. Bear in mind that this is NOT a valid arguement supporting your arguement, this is rather a company which makes garbage and then tries to hide that fact. The fault ultimately lies with Adaptec, not their open or closed stance. It is absolutely unacceptable and dishonest. Also consider that there are some companies out there which make good products which they are willing the stand behind with RLD. Those companies should be rewarded, not companies which have terrible secrets to hide.
Would you argue that consumers should be left in the dark about a product they own WHICH IS DEFECTIVE? We should expect better, as does Theo de Raadt. His efforts in this regard draw out the GOOD from the BAD and have been good for OSS in general.
I'll leave you with this to ponder... "Where would we be today, if all CPU's did not come with register level documentation?"
That is what is trivial to understand. Complete lack of RLD for devices we all pay for is completely unacceptable. Especially when a working subset can be given. If a working subset cannot be given, then the device is broken, as are the companies morals. Because they are willing to take your money while knowingly selling you defective products.
How about, just give us register level documentation so that we can write our own drivers and maintain them ourselves?
How much in the way of intellectual property are you going to risk by telling us stuff like, "write a 1 to this register to manually initiate a disk parity check" and "read this register to get the state of heath of the array", etc?
Really, how many companies are there which we know of, which make pretty decent hardware, but crap software? How can open PROGRAMMING documentation be anything but a win-win?
That's PROGRAMMING documentation, not VLSI CAD files, firmware source code or microcode, but PROGRAMMING documentation. What buttons do we push and where do we look for the flashing lights? Thats all.
Allowing API's for drivers would be us giving up a part of the fight for open source. What good is an open source operating system if we let go of a key area where stability, performance and security can be severely impacted? If we give in to them on this, then it opens us up in the future for them to provide crap drivers, no more documentation for hardware which we PAY for and then ultimately a "sorry, we don't officially support non Microsoft systems any more". There will also be the problem of staff turnaround causing delays on the vendor side, less priority put on the open systems and smaller groups of people "in the know" becoming a bottleneck. Less eyes and communication problems where we don't know what they're doing and they don't know our side as well as we do. This could also cause an avalanche effect whereby other less used open source operating systems get completely left out in the cold and die off. Systems which have been giving back one way or another to Linux.
Documentation is a long term investment for all parties involved. API's will be a long term problem which will never get fixed. Look at the state of 3D acceleration! It sucks!
We are not going to figure out how those 100 million transistors are wired based on a handful of registers.
Personally I never imagined integrating a PCI Express controller in a CPU. If this trend of intregation continues, what would be the next logical step?
And I do agree selectively targeting the noise in a file (be it image or video - those would most likely have the most) would be the best way.
I would like to research this a little. See if I can disperse uniform white noise amongst non-uniform noise without changing the characteristics of the original noise enough to be detected.
Stego is adding signal. Even when that signal is encrypted, and thus very line-noise-like, it's easy to detect mathematically that it's been added.
This is too generalized. This does not happen using all methods to all file types. Stego can be adding signal (silly), replacing signal (silly), adding noise (less than optimum) or replacing noise (nice). There are probably others I am not aware of.
You could add it to noise to begin with, but then you find a guy with huge files of white noise on his disk, and you just assume that they're encrypted anyway.
No, you replace some of the noise component of files which have a natural noise floor. Those files are not just noise. The noise is just a component and you can replace some of it with the typically very noise-like ciphertext, without altering the noise shape too much if you distribute it while allowing the original noise to dominate.
He said "Secure stegangraphy is truly undetectable".
I believe this is possible.
A statistical analysis of the hue frequency of the bmp, jpg, tiff, etc... would show a high likelihood of whether a message was embedded in an image. I had a training class earlier in the year, and we spent a couple hours on just this detection technique.
Yes, that works for some insecure types of steganography.
Some of the stego tools require a different type of analysis alogotihtm to detect them, but it all boils down to the fact that a message embedded into a non-random collection of information can be detected.
Ah, but what you are forgetting, is that many files DO have an element of randomness or a noise floor as a part of the signal. If you keep your embedded data within and under that noise floor and try to retain any "shape" that original noise floor has (if it is not white noise) by distributing the embedded white noise message pseudo randomly amongst the original noise (which should dominate the noise component), then you can have an undetectable steganographic message.
Now, you actually have to be looking for it, but they can be detected. It's still a fairly secure way to pass messages in a medium where images are moving at a high volume such as a news group. It would be next to impossible to analyze every image for embedded info, let alone trying to decipher that image.
Especially when your message looks just like the expected noise of the original file which nobody should have ever seen.
The message may be as unbreakable as modorn crypto is, but since stego isn't doing the crypto work anyway... All stego does is embed a message. If you want it to be encrypted, you'd have to do that before hand.
That's why he said "Secure stegangraphy". As far as I am concerned, steganography is a general term of various processes of hiding data in other data. A secure method is to use encryption as a part of the process. The reason I say this, is because the apparent noise of ciphertext, lends itself so well to a form of steganography where the noise component of a file is replaced and nothing more. Replacing noise with plaintext is silly, when ciphertext can fit in so well.
If I get two different image files, and swap a portion of their noise floors using steganography to extract and insert into the other, do you think you could detect that when I have remained under the noise floor? Maybe. What if that same noise where selectively replaced with ciphertext which does not look much different from the original noise, but then is dispersed amongst the real noise with the real noise dominating?
That isn't the situation I was talkig about. No messages, just big chunks of encrypted filesystem on a hard disk, encrypted by the person under duress.
You could have a DVDR full of real noise, used as an OTP for encrypting some desired data on disk. As long as you kept regular and frequent backups, even if the machine were stolen you could at a later date create a new DVDR OTP which could be used to decrypt that data to believable yet bogus files.
The fact that OTP's should only be used once, is less of a concern here, since the channel of communication is not public (assuming a secure setup), being between the hard disk, CPU and DVD drive. However if this machine were imaged more than once between file changes by an enemy, you'd be stuffed if you re-use any parts of the OTP.
One-time pad is impractical in this situation, I think.
I agree. I just wanted to point out the possibility of creating a completely legible yet bogus plain text from the exact same cipher text.
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We poor bastards have to work ridiculous hours, crawl around under and behind peoples desks, fuck around under server room floors, sometimes even do shit around dusty cable runs. It gets bloody uncomfortable. We even cut ourselves on bloody computers for our thankless companies and staff. Hello? We BLEED for those bastards! My mother always complained about how much *I* made her bleed during my birth. Well damn it, we bleed too and want some recognition for it! You know that saying? BLOOD, sweat and tears? It was a skinny nerd with thick black framed glasses, held together with a bandage that coined that phrase. I'm sure one day he just got sick of wrecking business shirts with blood and ink stains from the pens in his BROKEN pocket protector and decided, "To hell with pocket protectors, to hell with my own pens and to hell with uncomfortable business shirts! From now on it's t shirts, no more pocket protectors and fuck it, I'm just going to use whatever pen I find in this damn war zone".
Actually, I don't know what's worse. Getting blood on a $70 business shirt or getting blood on one of my most excellent and beloved OpenBSD t's.
Hmm, I wonder how many OpenBSD t's I could buy if I claim workers comp?
DPI don't matter I guess.
I never said DPI didn't matter. I said that the dpi figure that manufacterers of these printers use, is not meaningful like the traditional dpi value is. Of course smaller and more dither dots are better, but not anywhere near as important as the real dpi. Which apparently now should be ppi.
A good tip I heard from a printer designer was to ignore the DPI figure, as long as it's more than about 600. It (usually) means how precisely the printer can place dots.
There is another issue, with so called photo printers. I don't know if this still holds true, so it would be good if someone could confirm this.
With older technology printers, dots per inch is actually meaningful. It literally accounted for the number of non overlapping dots, each of which could be considered a pixel. However with these new bubble jet and ink jet type printers, they need to spit many very small ink dots into the area which makes up a printed pixel, so as to build up a single pixel of varying colour through the use of dithering.
Fair enough right? Whatever needs to be done to make those images look great?
Well unfortunately, these photo printer makers are using deceptive marketing. Because a "dot" in their definition of dpi DOES NOT equate in a meaningful manner to a pixel, instead their "dot" refers to each of the smaller dither dots.
This is why for a long time, ink and bubble jets of 600dpi looked like crap against a 300dpi laser print out, where edge smoothness and text mattered.
9600dpi, 2400dpi, whatever. Don't bother telling me because it is now a meaningless figure. You could make a printer with a real dpi of 150, but made up of 9600dpi dither dots and it is still going to look like a 150dpi print out. But the brochure says 9600dpi, not 150dpi. This is an exageration btw, to make the point. The best thing to do is look at actual print outs and decide on quality with your own eyes, because manufacturer quoted numbers in this regard are pretty much useless when the most important metric is undisclosed and remains so because it would hurt sales.
Okay, sorry for snapping. You may just be a great guy afterall.
; )
I am sick of seeing all those uninformed posts made by people thinking that MD5 is only used in "login systems" to "hash passwords".
I am sick of people who see a small statement and then assume a bunch of crap beyond what was really said.
I am the proud owner of an old Toshiba Sat Pro ;) which was beginning to get bad cracking around the catch, I found it quite easy to take out the screen, drill out the crack tips(to stop them propagating) with a small drillbit then laid up fibreglass over the outside of the case to strengthen the area.
Interesting. I have been contemplating gluing some flat plastic to the top (when closed) of my girlfriends TP, to get some more life out of it for her.
I wonder if I should make a mold of my Sony's base so that I may be able to copy it in fibreglass some day when I need to? Have you ever worked with carbon fibre? Any ideas if a hobbiest could work with it on the cheap?
Maybe I should cut my losses and sell my Sony when the new x86 Powerbooks come out. Assuming they will be equal to my criteria for buying this Sony, 1920x1200 LCD, 2GB DDR2, quick Pentium M (~2.13GHz).
You can't go to Walmart for quality. I have never seen quality at Walmart. You want a quality DVD player?
... Try that on your "painted steel" car's from the 60's and 70's.
Lots of DOA is not poor quality, it is completely unacceptable.
You want a quality laptop? Buy an IBM Thinkpad. The things are bricks.
I love the Thinkpad keyboards and they may be better than average. But I would not say they are built like bricks. My girlfriends Thinkpad started falling apart after a few years of very good care. There are cracks ALL OVER the case, to the point where she has to leave it open at all times, for fear of that final break ending it all. Conversely, my iBook and friends Powerbooks (Ti, not Au) which are older, have stood up very well.
Your jab at Japanese cars is off base too.
Wow, talk about apples to oranges. It was just a little jab, I did not bitch and moan. I was comparing to the fact that a VERY VERY expensive laptop is a bit too plastic. For that cost a cast metal base at the very least would have been nice.
All your examples were mentioning brands or stores that are well known to sacrifice quality for price.
Of the brands I mentioned (Sun, DEC, AWA, Sony, Apple), I would not consider ANY of them to be "known to sacrifice quality for price". AWA does, now in my book. But I did not expect a $5,000 Sony notebook, to "sacrifice quality for price". Now I am wondering about Sony. Thinking that I maybe should have waited for a new x86 Powerbook.
Those stores I mentioned certainly do sacrifice quality, but that is part of my point.
It sounds to me like you are just not doing any research before buying. You can still buy quality, you just have to know where to look.
Actually, I am the kind of guy who will spend 3 months researching large purchases, putting details into spreadsheets and reading forums well after the product has been on sale. And then sometimes... not even make a purchase because I am tentative based on what I learn. I am very cautious for large purchases.
However, when you buy a DVD player, you expect it to... WORK. Regardless of how little it costs. Especially considering that whether you buy a bigger name brand or the cheapest there is, the core components tend to be THE SAME amongst a group of commonly used components. Same drive mechanism, same decoder silicon, etc can be found between units which can differ in price by 10 times. Poor quality is no longer just found in the cheap stuff.
Nah, it wasn't because of that; it was because your Aussie electricity supply was effectively phase-shifted by 180 degrees (i.e. it was upside down) ;-)
Ha ha. I guess this is why we hang out at the beach so much and love our gas bar-bies.
(although you would probably pop your circuit breaker before the cap)
Yes, this massive cap might not actually give all that great a show, since it appears to have a soft rubbery safety blow off valve.
It might just go fizz.
This is for DEFENSE.
This nonprofit company will then offer royalty-free licenses to companies and individuals that agreed not to assert their own patents.
Actually, it seems a bit silly to me. I assume they mean, "agreed not to assert their own patents based on our patent". If so, is that not absurd, since you probably should not get a patent granted when it is based off of someone elses patent anyway?
Isn't this almost a good idea which falls short when it comes to the final method of defence (you can't patent a derived idea)? Wouldn't it be better that the idea just simply be patented full stop and then carefully granted? Why not use patents for the way they were designed in the first place? Then perhaps an optional added agreement to use the patent be that it can be used for free in OSS or with royalties which came back to OSS for use in commercial software.
It just seems to me that a demand is being made for something you would get out of the patent system anyway. Why not extend it with something worthwhile?
Or am I missing something here?
people always think I'm dumb for going cheap (second hand, bottom-tier, whatever) on cars and computers and electronics
I love trawling through ebay for certain older Sun's, DEC's, etc.
Whenever I buy something here is Australia from a department store, especially from one like Big-W, Target or K-Mart, I am left thinking on the way home, "is it going to work when I get it out of the box? If it does, for how long?"
I bought a DVD player just recently from Big-W. I think it was rebadged to AWA. The model was on display, which at the time was being used to run a PSP promotional DVD which was displaying in only shades of purple on the cheapo flat screen TV it was hooked up to. I asked the lady if the TV or the DVD player was broken and she said they were fine, it was the promotional DVD which was done all in shades of purple (in my head I heard Dr. Evil say, riiiigh-T). I asked if they ever got returns on that model DVD player and she said she knew of none.
I should have realised, that she would not know. She is in sales, she is not at the huge returns desk near the front with the long line of less than happy customers with various "goods", hmmm okay "items" for return. I asked the nice young girl behind the counter about this model of DVD player which I was returning (because it would not recognise ANY DVD, not even the two I had just recently purchased with zero scratches) as to how many returns she had seen and she told me that she had seen lots of those units come back.
I also noticed this time what looked like the same PSP promotional DVD playing, except in full colour!
This is the third component DVD player I have had fail.
price hasn't equaled quality since your grandpa's day when everything was built out of painted steel and machined parts.
Reminds me of something I have been saying for a few years...
"You rarely get what you pay for, but you usually pay for what you get."
I recently spent $5,000 Aussie on a Sony notebook. Admittedly the display is spectacular and I expected the Sony to be a decent product. It mostly is, however it is a little flimsy. After only a few months of use the paint on the palm rests is wearing off. For one third to one quarter the cost of a decent small brand new Japanese car (did I say decent? Sorry, my expectations must be slowly sliding down in this new World), it would have been nice for this machine to at least have a metal top and bottom. I am fearful of moving it for the wear from flexing the chassis. My girlfriends Thinkpad has also broken all around the screen where the hinges are.
I like the look and feel of Powerbooks, but even they have issues, since their metal is just thin enough to cause permanent apparent warping in some cases, so I have heard.
I want quality and I am willing to pay for it! But I can't find it! It seems that I would need to, as you suggest with the industrial comment, purchase a hardened computer designed mostly for the US military if I want any decent level of sturdiness. But then I'd be paying 4-6 times the price of the consumer equivalent for a very heavy and strange looking machine. Fair enough, I expect that stuff to be super expensive due to the added hardness and limited economies of scale, but surely with the economies of scale which the consumer gear manufacturers can leverage, they could at least give us something acceptable.
labnet you're giving me ideas.
I have a 50,000 uF 50V electrolytic which is absolutely huge. Hmmmm...
The special police might kick my door down!
(And don't forget they are polarised. Putting them in backwards will make them explode)
The best looking cap explosion I ever saw, was a tantalum which I accidentally soldered in the wrong way, while building a digital frequency meter.
Once it came time to test... a small bit of the top popped off and a silver molten stream of what looked like beads of mercury came gushing out and off that stream came lots of smoke. It looked so cool I half did not want to switch it off. ; )
I don't get these modern jokes... I just can't stay current.
Don't let it dampen your mood.
I'd think if there was a market for a motherboard with yellow PCI slots and a purple PCB that this would be a much more attractive option.
It gets even more ridiculous than that. Remember that AOpen motherboard with the vacume tube amplified built-in sound card? Yeah, that's what I need! Bugger the high quality core components! I need extra harmonics! Warm sound!
This all comes down to marketting. Most people don't know what they need or should wan't, so what they want is dictated to them by the companies who have an interest is SALES. Put together some crap, say it's fine Belgian dark chocolate and people not only will buy it, but they'll rave about it in forums and even refer to it as part of their "kit" or "rig" in their signatures.
If it's consumer level, regardless of how much you paid for it, it is probably mutton dressed up as lamb.
*chuckles evilly* I got to see a room full of people hit the floor when a Cap blew up in a machine located at the front of a lab. They thought someone was shooting at them.
About 16 years ago in one of my electronics classes, a student from the previous period had switched one of the oscilloscopes power supply from 240V to 110V. When the student with the sabotaged CRO switched it on, it was expecting 110V but got our Aussie 240V.
Paper, foil, smoke and students went everywhere. ; )
This is all made up and that's the point - even without knowing the details of any particular card, it's trivial to imagine why complete RLD is unrealistic for hardware such as 3d graphics which is so intensely competitive right now.
I don't and never have expected complete in-house RLD. I know it is not required to do the full job as the device is advertised as supporting. What I want is enough RLD to make the product work, with pertinent "revealing" comments or buggy register implementations removed if need be.
Consumers pay money for these products, they have a right to know the state of play. I will never purchase the garbage that Adaptec sells again, simply because I know how buggy their products can be while they just simply hide it to continue making money. Bear in mind that this is NOT a valid arguement supporting your arguement, this is rather a company which makes garbage and then tries to hide that fact. The fault ultimately lies with Adaptec, not their open or closed stance. It is absolutely unacceptable and dishonest. Also consider that there are some companies out there which make good products which they are willing the stand behind with RLD. Those companies should be rewarded, not companies which have terrible secrets to hide.
Would you argue that consumers should be left in the dark about a product they own WHICH IS DEFECTIVE? We should expect better, as does Theo de Raadt. His efforts in this regard draw out the GOOD from the BAD and have been good for OSS in general.
I'll leave you with this to ponder... "Where would we be today, if all CPU's did not come with register level documentation?"
That is what is trivial to understand. Complete lack of RLD for devices we all pay for is completely unacceptable. Especially when a working subset can be given. If a working subset cannot be given, then the device is broken, as are the companies morals. Because they are willing to take your money while knowingly selling you defective products.
How would it be illegal for a hardware manufacturer to write their own closed source driver to interface to a Linux kernel API?
They would not have to extend GPL code, merely communicate with it in a standardized manner.
(Bear in mind that I am dead-set against this.)
Should Linux Slowly Back Out of Open Source?
How about, just give us register level documentation so that we can write our own drivers and maintain them ourselves?
How much in the way of intellectual property are you going to risk by telling us stuff like, "write a 1 to this register to manually initiate a disk parity check" and "read this register to get the state of heath of the array", etc?
Really, how many companies are there which we know of, which make pretty decent hardware, but crap software? How can open PROGRAMMING documentation be anything but a win-win?
That's PROGRAMMING documentation, not VLSI CAD files, firmware source code or microcode, but PROGRAMMING documentation. What buttons do we push and where do we look for the flashing lights? Thats all.
Allowing API's for drivers would be us giving up a part of the fight for open source. What good is an open source operating system if we let go of a key area where stability, performance and security can be severely impacted? If we give in to them on this, then it opens us up in the future for them to provide crap drivers, no more documentation for hardware which we PAY for and then ultimately a "sorry, we don't officially support non Microsoft systems any more". There will also be the problem of staff turnaround causing delays on the vendor side, less priority put on the open systems and smaller groups of people "in the know" becoming a bottleneck. Less eyes and communication problems where we don't know what they're doing and they don't know our side as well as we do. This could also cause an avalanche effect whereby other less used open source operating systems get completely left out in the cold and die off. Systems which have been giving back one way or another to Linux.
Documentation is a long term investment for all parties involved. API's will be a long term problem which will never get fixed. Look at the state of 3D acceleration! It sucks!
We are not going to figure out how those 100 million transistors are wired based on a handful of registers.
Personally I never imagined integrating a PCI Express controller in a CPU. If this trend of intregation continues, what would be the next logical step?
The display, keyboard and mouse.
GPL licenced Open Source Software is the only kind there is.
[sigh]
Microsoft knows full well of BSD licenced software. They just prefer not to mention it since it would make their bullshit clearly that.
I guess while Microsoft slogs it out with "Linux", Sun and Apple, this will make BSD the "meek"?
And I do agree selectively targeting the noise in a file (be it image or video - those would most likely have the most) would be the best way.
I would like to research this a little. See if I can disperse uniform white noise amongst non-uniform noise without changing the characteristics of the original noise enough to be detected.
Stego is adding signal. Even when that signal is encrypted, and thus very line-noise-like, it's easy to detect mathematically that it's been added.
This is too generalized. This does not happen using all methods to all file types. Stego can be adding signal (silly), replacing signal (silly), adding noise (less than optimum) or replacing noise (nice). There are probably others I am not aware of.
You could add it to noise to begin with, but then you find a guy with huge files of white noise on his disk, and you just assume that they're encrypted anyway.
No, you replace some of the noise component of files which have a natural noise floor. Those files are not just noise. The noise is just a component and you can replace some of it with the typically very noise-like ciphertext, without altering the noise shape too much if you distribute it while allowing the original noise to dominate.
Secure stegangraphy is truly undetectable.
No it's not.
He said "Secure stegangraphy is truly undetectable".
I believe this is possible.
A statistical analysis of the hue frequency of the bmp, jpg, tiff, etc... would show a high likelihood of whether a message was embedded in an image. I had a training class earlier in the year, and we spent a couple hours on just this detection technique.
Yes, that works for some insecure types of steganography.
Some of the stego tools require a different type of analysis alogotihtm to detect them, but it all boils down to the fact that a message embedded into a non-random collection of information can be detected.
Ah, but what you are forgetting, is that many files DO have an element of randomness or a noise floor as a part of the signal. If you keep your embedded data within and under that noise floor and try to retain any "shape" that original noise floor has (if it is not white noise) by distributing the embedded white noise message pseudo randomly amongst the original noise (which should dominate the noise component), then you can have an undetectable steganographic message.
Now, you actually have to be looking for it, but they can be detected. It's still a fairly secure way to pass messages in a medium where images are moving at a high volume such as a news group. It would be next to impossible to analyze every image for embedded info, let alone trying to decipher that image.
Especially when your message looks just like the expected noise of the original file which nobody should have ever seen.
The message may be as unbreakable as modorn crypto is, but since stego isn't doing the crypto work anyway... All stego does is embed a message. If you want it to be encrypted, you'd have to do that before hand.
That's why he said "Secure stegangraphy". As far as I am concerned, steganography is a general term of various processes of hiding data in other data. A secure method is to use encryption as a part of the process. The reason I say this, is because the apparent noise of ciphertext, lends itself so well to a form of steganography where the noise component of a file is replaced and nothing more. Replacing noise with plaintext is silly, when ciphertext can fit in so well.
If I get two different image files, and swap a portion of their noise floors using steganography to extract and insert into the other, do you think you could detect that when I have remained under the noise floor? Maybe. What if that same noise where selectively replaced with ciphertext which does not look much different from the original noise, but then is dispersed amongst the real noise with the real noise dominating?
Good luck detecting it.
That isn't the situation I was talkig about. No messages, just big chunks of encrypted filesystem on a hard disk, encrypted by the person under duress.
You could have a DVDR full of real noise, used as an OTP for encrypting some desired data on disk. As long as you kept regular and frequent backups, even if the machine were stolen you could at a later date create a new DVDR OTP which could be used to decrypt that data to believable yet bogus files.
The fact that OTP's should only be used once, is less of a concern here, since the channel of communication is not public (assuming a secure setup), being between the hard disk, CPU and DVD drive. However if this machine were imaged more than once between file changes by an enemy, you'd be stuffed if you re-use any parts of the OTP.
One-time pad is impractical in this situation, I think.
I agree. I just wanted to point out the possibility of creating a completely legible yet bogus plain text from the exact same cipher text.