At first it's slightly easier to read than an LCD but if you want to sit down for a few hours to read it it'll save you one hell of a headache.
What is wrong with you slashdotters? Not so much you individually, but in general? Every week we have the required slashvertisement for e-ink based displays, and the astroturfers come out and post unbelievable claims about humans eyes being physically unable to gaze upon LCDs, like they're a medusa's head made of silicon.
It would be laughable if read on time.com or something, but its even worse here. Come on, this is slashdot. Supposedly we all spend 16 hours a day gazing into our L C D computer screens doing programming or sysadmining or WOW or Pr0n or slashdot or whatever. I have spent 40 hours a week at work gazing into my "horrible LCD" since the early 2000s, and prior to that I spent at least a decade or so gazing into CRTs. It doesn't hurt. At all. Its actually kind of nice.
What does hurt, is holding a Sony e-ink reader and being able to read the tiny little page faster than it refreshes, while I squint at gray on gray color scheme and no proper backlight so its always got weird distracting shadows. Its about as appealing as reading a book in a cave with the worlds slowest robot arm turning the pages. I'm sorry if it ruins the slashvertisement, but the product just sucks. It may be useful as a marketing bullet point, after all, the public is trained that if its more expensive, it must be better, look at automotive SUV vs car or pretty much anything else. Marketing wants me to buy e-ink, and there is no other compelling reason to buy e-ink, that's why I bought a LCD based ebook reader. I simply don't care if I have to charge it every second week instead of every fourth week, it looks great, works fast, and its cheap.
If your eyes hurt, see an eye doctor, like TODAY. Spending more on display technology that is heavily marketed is not a good long term solution if you're currently losing your eyesight due to untreated illness. And if its just slashvertising, stop the campaign, its reached annoyance stage.
They show that older people can multitask less, possibly because they are older
can multitask less, possibly because they are too wise to do it, or are successful enough (by whatever definition) to no longer feel the desperate need to multitask. Inner driven rather than outer driven.
Also I thought it odd that they claim "seven tasks" but only list four. I assume the other three are "inappropriate for general public discussion" activities like Pr0n, drug use, and... what else?
So, if this "old dog can learn new tricks" and my friends have as well... I doubt there is any real divide as indicated by the article. But I could be wrong... most of my friends are very tech savvy - but even so, I doubt the "divide" is anything to speak of. Even my mom text messages and such.
I don't think the article implies any deep seated psychological difference, or has anything to do with the consumers being marketing to at all. The article is about shrinking the width of generational MARKETING. Consider music which has long since been compressed to only a couple years. In my generation, us midwestern kids pretended we rebelled by conforming to our imaginative idea of angsty Seattle grungers, or maybe surfers, despite being about 1500 miles from the coasts. Two years later, my sister's generation of rich pasty white suburban kids pretended they rebelled by conforming to their imaginative idea of urban afro-american rap. Music is as ridiculous as technology.
In light of the article, your post reads like the musical equivalent of those folks whom claim they listened to so and so before they were cool, and now everyone listens to them "Even my mom" as you say.
Networks that used to have interesting programming has shifted to more crap. Discovery is more about blowing stuff up than explaining science, the History channel seems to be nothing more than WWII and explosions.
How could you have missed the rotting carcass that is now rebranded sifi or whatever, but may as well be called the Ghosts -n- Wrasslin Channel? Also, isn't History the "Jesus" channel now, with about half the documentaries being "biblically inspired" like true stories of the prophets, etc? No, I'm not talking about EWTNor daystar, I mean Disc or TLC or Hist or one of those which seem to be filled with "christian documentaries" some weekdays.
There is an internet related reason for the decline of quality TV... First, anyone intelligent enough to read wikipedia, or search google, does so instead of watching TV, which explains the ever declining intellectual level of TV, they have to aim at whats left of their audience, primarily fans of the "ow my balls" program. Secondly, all modern documentaries must alternate copying and hating the internet, for example in copying we have horrendous artificial "shakey cam" footage to "make it feel urban and gritty like youtube" alternating with expensive yet useless dramatic historical reenactments because thankfully wikipedia doesn't include much if any video footage.
Door A only opens when the airlock is empty and door B is closed. Door B only opens when door A is closed and people are in the airlock. Various cheap sensors determine whether the airlock has items in it. Human observer is a fall-back.
Little kid sitting in there having temper tantrum while mommie behind Door A is freaking out and a thousand person line behind mommie is getting angry.
If sensors detected anyone going the wrong way, the speed of the belt could be adjusted (increased) to keep them out.
Why not leave it cranked up all the time? I suppose to prevent four-minute-mile terrorists, you'd need to run above 15 MPH, but with enough safety barriers that might be kind of cool to ride...
It'll need to be on the UPS, else "they" will just cut the power.
And it will be impossible to install an "emergency stop button" or "they" will press it, which might make it a little dangerous, but in the spirit of "we had to destroy the village to save the village" it could still work.
I don't know what the answer is, but "terrorists" could have a field day with this.
Yeah, but not like you were thinking
Terrorists love concentrated targets right?
There is not much traffic thru the doors on average so they're not much of a target, right?
But your accomplices just "forced" the authorities to shove the entire freaking contents of the airport thru the out doors as fast as they can because of the "threat" that got past security?
And the out doors and your OTHER accomplices are way outside the security perimeter?
Shots ring out, kaboom, mayhem, etc, then stampede panic leading to even more deaths...
Yeah, I think they could have a field day with this.
This is why there's a wait before the first person is let in. The staff in an airport are trained to look under every seat, etc.
Unless, of course, his accomplice was one of the staff. How hard is it to get a job as a baggage handler, a flight attendant, a contracted guard, or those check in people? Probably not too hard. Or, someone else sneaks in with fake uniform and ID, then F around while holding the goods while everyone else in uniform is "searching the zone" then hand "it" back once regular travelers are returned and sneak back out, thus eliminating the job interview/background check/hiring phase.
Also assumes they didn't sneak a screwdriver in to unscrew the.. whatever.. and hide something inside or behind the.. whatever.., and leave the screw loose enough to remove by hand. Like an air duct, or an electrical outlet, or plumbing access panel, or computer thingy...
And you can't seriously tell me that every boxed item in the gift shop was opened and searched. Or even more sneaky, buy an item from the shop, take it home, stuff what you want in the item, someone else sneaks it back into the store (reverse shoplift), you buy the same item again, now with extra something. Or really special bottled water. Etc.
1. Performance is sacrificed since your PC CPU needs to perform all security operations in software, rather than on the hardware of the flash drive.
You're assuming your short production run / limited power / simple architecture / limited heat dissipation hardware is faster than running it in software on a commodity processor, which RAID card manufacturers have falsely been pushing for years (decades now?). Think about it, it implies a USB sized and USB powered gadget runs faster than the PC its plugged into.
Also assumes the limiter to overall system speed is processing the data. Feeding "a couple megs" to a multicore processor running "several gigs" is not going to saturate it... The processor is going to spend most of its time doing something else.
Not to say HW encryption isn't a good idea from a security standpoint.
Or if, in some crazy world, the drive is attached to something that is actually lower powered than the flash drive (maybe a data logger appliance or something) then it makes sense.
Or, if the add on device has a special ATX connector so it can suck down almost as much power as the CPU, like modern video cards, and is hyper parallelizable like a modern video card, then "doing it in dedicated HW" makes sense.
But in general, always a bad idea to replicate what the main processor already does, but badly or more slowly.
Oh, bad of me to reply to one of my own posts, but maybe they need to poison the market for encrypted USB drives because they're about to release a different kind of competing product, like maybe a USB hub that encrypts the traffic flowing thru it to any brand or model of USB drive. Or maybe coincidentally only works with same manufacturers drives.
Maybe they may want to ruin the sub market of encrypted USB drives because contract terms are getting unfavorable for them in that sub market, and coincidentally they plan to release a different kind of encrypted storage product.
The cloud encryptor. The combined USB hub/encryptor. Some expensive SW thing. Who knows.
But still - why do something like try to reinvent crypto, when there's an open format? The license for Truecrypt even allows for commercial use.
Certain corporations want to "poison the well" of encrypted USB drives. Doesn't really matter why and thats not the point of this post. The end result of this incident is every clueless PHB now "knows" that its "impossible" to make a properly encrypted USB drive, and somehow the corps that are intentionally poisoning the well believe they will profit off that incorrect belief. Maybe they want to drive (bad pun) a competitor out, maybe they lack the patents their competitors have, who knows. Maybe they are just don't want to expand the product line to include "secure" devices and want to stick to insecure only.
I could imagine a situation where a drive manufacturer could not be a profitable concern as long as the competitors can get the high profit of selling secure drives. So, eliminate their ability to sell the profitable ones, by poisoning the whole market.
This makes it very easy for them to charge $large_chunk_of_money for "data recovery services" in the event you forget your password.
Far more likely: makes it very easy for them to charge $large_chunk_of_money for "data recovery services" in the event law enforcement/military/courts would like to see whats on your drive.
Look, if it's that easy to detect the heat coming off of a grow-op, then the growers should be out there detecting and stopping the leaks before the police do.
Congratulations, you've just discovered that cops primarily only catch the stupid criminals, plus or minus simple luck.
That is a semi-useful argument about the use of thermal imagers, if they only catch the sub-100 IQ crowd, is that discrimination good or bad in itself as an activity with possibly racial overtones, and aside from that is the effect of that discrimination good or bad?
The linked item is not an imager, it's a glorified thermometer. I wish you could get a thermal imager for cheap -- last I checked, they still started in the $3-4K range.
Maybe, after ten layers of journalists and editors, he really said they cost about $50-$100 per day. Because they do. Or at least that's the going rate at flir.com (no kidding).
One of my many long term plans has been to rent one locally, and scientifically evaluate which of the ancient walls and windows of my house are REALLY the most in need of insulation. Every other method is either vaguely guessing or relies on the honesty of a salesman (and I'm not that stupid).
$100 to just goof around with a weird camera for a day is a bit extreme, but in the context of spending four figures on insulation and windows and doors, its really a drop in the bucket. And I can still goof around with it after doing the day's "real work".
In a single day, 20 some odd yahoos cost the US economy several hundred billions of dollars.
Our own bankers caused much more damage. No problem there, because the bankers pay our "leaders". The solution is obvious. The terrorists should start paying our "leaders", then they won't be a problem anymore. Brilliant!
Your rant was actually doing pretty good until there. Check the mars mission failure rate... If Europa were say, a hundred times more difficult, then the odds of total mysterious failure in Europa currently approach 100%. But if we can improve our reliability by trying stuff in easier mars missions, maybe someday a Europa mission wouldn't be a guaranteed failure, and might even work, maybe.
Oh, theres a refresh "rate" alright, its about two seconds aka about zero point five Hz. That's why I specifically purchased a LCD based ebook reader.
I got to try a sony eink product, it was so slow, the first time I tried to change pages I had enough time to think it had crashed, or perhaps it was a static demo page that can't change, and the next couple times I switched pages I thought it was about to crash, memory leak slowing it to a crawl or the battery was nearly dead or something. I intellectually knew the UI was horribly slow, but I hadn't internalized it as possibly being the slowest UI I'd ever used.
What appeals to me about Kindle or Nook is that it is backed by a huge retailer. I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future. I know they will have a huge library of titles in their format. I feel strongly that they stand a chance to become the dominant standard.
Sounds exactly like Circuit City's DIVX disks.... How'd that work out?
Slashdot Mirror
At first it's slightly easier to read than an LCD but if you want to sit down for a few hours to read it it'll save you one hell of a headache.
What is wrong with you slashdotters? Not so much you individually, but in general? Every week we have the required slashvertisement for e-ink based displays, and the astroturfers come out and post unbelievable claims about humans eyes being physically unable to gaze upon LCDs, like they're a medusa's head made of silicon.
It would be laughable if read on time.com or something, but its even worse here. Come on, this is slashdot. Supposedly we all spend 16 hours a day gazing into our L C D computer screens doing programming or sysadmining or WOW or Pr0n or slashdot or whatever. I have spent 40 hours a week at work gazing into my "horrible LCD" since the early 2000s, and prior to that I spent at least a decade or so gazing into CRTs. It doesn't hurt. At all. Its actually kind of nice.
What does hurt, is holding a Sony e-ink reader and being able to read the tiny little page faster than it refreshes, while I squint at gray on gray color scheme and no proper backlight so its always got weird distracting shadows. Its about as appealing as reading a book in a cave with the worlds slowest robot arm turning the pages. I'm sorry if it ruins the slashvertisement, but the product just sucks. It may be useful as a marketing bullet point, after all, the public is trained that if its more expensive, it must be better, look at automotive SUV vs car or pretty much anything else. Marketing wants me to buy e-ink, and there is no other compelling reason to buy e-ink, that's why I bought a LCD based ebook reader. I simply don't care if I have to charge it every second week instead of every fourth week, it looks great, works fast, and its cheap.
If your eyes hurt, see an eye doctor, like TODAY. Spending more on display technology that is heavily marketed is not a good long term solution if you're currently losing your eyesight due to untreated illness. And if its just slashvertising, stop the campaign, its reached annoyance stage.
They show that older people can multitask less, possibly because they are older
can multitask less, possibly because they are too wise to do it, or are successful enough (by whatever definition) to no longer feel the desperate need to multitask. Inner driven rather than outer driven.
Also I thought it odd that they claim "seven tasks" but only list four. I assume the other three are "inappropriate for general public discussion" activities like Pr0n, drug use, and ... what else?
I suspect their expectations will change once they start communicating about things that can't be answered with OMG LOL.
I think you meant to say
I suspect their expectations will change IF they start communicating about things that can't be answered with OMG LOL.
... A text message is probably cheaper than a voice call ...
Well, I can tell you're not in the USA.
So, if this "old dog can learn new tricks" and my friends have as well... I doubt there is any real divide as indicated by the article. But I could be wrong... most of my friends are very tech savvy - but even so, I doubt the "divide" is anything to speak of. Even my mom text messages and such.
I don't think the article implies any deep seated psychological difference, or has anything to do with the consumers being marketing to at all. The article is about shrinking the width of generational MARKETING. Consider music which has long since been compressed to only a couple years. In my generation, us midwestern kids pretended we rebelled by conforming to our imaginative idea of angsty Seattle grungers, or maybe surfers, despite being about 1500 miles from the coasts. Two years later, my sister's generation of rich pasty white suburban kids pretended they rebelled by conforming to their imaginative idea of urban afro-american rap. Music is as ridiculous as technology.
In light of the article, your post reads like the musical equivalent of those folks whom claim they listened to so and so before they were cool, and now everyone listens to them "Even my mom" as you say.
Networks that used to have interesting programming has shifted to more crap. Discovery is more about blowing stuff up than explaining science, the History channel seems to be nothing more than WWII and explosions.
How could you have missed the rotting carcass that is now rebranded sifi or whatever, but may as well be called the Ghosts -n- Wrasslin Channel? Also, isn't History the "Jesus" channel now, with about half the documentaries being "biblically inspired" like true stories of the prophets, etc? No, I'm not talking about EWTNor daystar, I mean Disc or TLC or Hist or one of those which seem to be filled with "christian documentaries" some weekdays.
There is an internet related reason for the decline of quality TV... First, anyone intelligent enough to read wikipedia, or search google, does so instead of watching TV, which explains the ever declining intellectual level of TV, they have to aim at whats left of their audience, primarily fans of the "ow my balls" program. Secondly, all modern documentaries must alternate copying and hating the internet, for example in copying we have horrendous artificial "shakey cam" footage to "make it feel urban and gritty like youtube" alternating with expensive yet useless dramatic historical reenactments because thankfully wikipedia doesn't include much if any video footage.
Cool, instead of screwing up the simple task of validating inputs, we'll simply screw up the complicated task of sandboxing. Awesomeness!
Having a single Exit (as is common at most European airports)
What do you do when there's a fire? Die? If you add fire exits, people will get in.
Passengers... program their flight into RFID tags. Passengers enter the airport naked... Great -- so where am I supposed to carry my RFID tags?
Hanging from mandatory piercings...
Door A only opens when the airlock is empty and door B is closed. Door B only opens when door A is closed and people are in the airlock. Various cheap sensors determine whether the airlock has items in it. Human observer is a fall-back.
Little kid sitting in there having temper tantrum while mommie behind Door A is freaking out and a thousand person line behind mommie is getting angry.
If sensors detected anyone going the wrong way, the speed of the belt could be adjusted (increased) to keep them out.
Why not leave it cranked up all the time? I suppose to prevent four-minute-mile terrorists, you'd need to run above 15 MPH, but with enough safety barriers that might be kind of cool to ride...
It'll need to be on the UPS, else "they" will just cut the power.
And it will be impossible to install an "emergency stop button" or "they" will press it, which might make it a little dangerous, but in the spirit of "we had to destroy the village to save the village" it could still work.
I don't know what the answer is, but "terrorists" could have a field day with this.
Yeah, but not like you were thinking
Terrorists love concentrated targets right?
There is not much traffic thru the doors on average so they're not much of a target, right?
But your accomplices just "forced" the authorities to shove the entire freaking contents of the airport thru the out doors as fast as they can because of the "threat" that got past security?
And the out doors and your OTHER accomplices are way outside the security perimeter?
Shots ring out, kaboom, mayhem, etc, then stampede panic leading to even more deaths...
Yeah, I think they could have a field day with this.
This is why there's a wait before the first person is let in. The staff in an airport are trained to look under every seat, etc.
Unless, of course, his accomplice was one of the staff. How hard is it to get a job as a baggage handler, a flight attendant, a contracted guard, or those check in people? Probably not too hard. Or, someone else sneaks in with fake uniform and ID, then F around while holding the goods while everyone else in uniform is "searching the zone" then hand "it" back once regular travelers are returned and sneak back out, thus eliminating the job interview/background check/hiring phase.
Also assumes they didn't sneak a screwdriver in to unscrew the .. whatever .. and hide something inside or behind the .. whatever .., and leave the screw loose enough to remove by hand. Like an air duct, or an electrical outlet, or plumbing access panel, or computer thingy...
And you can't seriously tell me that every boxed item in the gift shop was opened and searched. Or even more sneaky, buy an item from the shop, take it home, stuff what you want in the item, someone else sneaks it back into the store (reverse shoplift), you buy the same item again, now with extra something. Or really special bottled water. Etc.
If it's not yet that obvious, let me sum up the definition of "regardless of what password was entered" in two words: Big Brother.
Perhaps this is the fine print part of "FIPS" certification we never heard about...the master key.
Yeah, thats the good news, we know about Big Brother's master key in these software encrypted drives..
The bad news is we don't know about Big Brother's master key in the OTHER drives.
1. Performance is sacrificed since your PC CPU needs to perform all security operations in software, rather than on the hardware of the flash drive.
You're assuming your short production run / limited power / simple architecture / limited heat dissipation hardware is faster than running it in software on a commodity processor, which RAID card manufacturers have falsely been pushing for years (decades now?). Think about it, it implies a USB sized and USB powered gadget runs faster than the PC its plugged into.
Also assumes the limiter to overall system speed is processing the data. Feeding "a couple megs" to a multicore processor running "several gigs" is not going to saturate it... The processor is going to spend most of its time doing something else.
Not to say HW encryption isn't a good idea from a security standpoint.
Or if, in some crazy world, the drive is attached to something that is actually lower powered than the flash drive (maybe a data logger appliance or something) then it makes sense.
Or, if the add on device has a special ATX connector so it can suck down almost as much power as the CPU, like modern video cards, and is hyper parallelizable like a modern video card, then "doing it in dedicated HW" makes sense.
But in general, always a bad idea to replicate what the main processor already does, but badly or more slowly.
Oh, bad of me to reply to one of my own posts, but maybe they need to poison the market for encrypted USB drives because they're about to release a different kind of competing product, like maybe a USB hub that encrypts the traffic flowing thru it to any brand or model of USB drive. Or maybe coincidentally only works with same manufacturers drives.
Maybe they may want to ruin the sub market of encrypted USB drives because contract terms are getting unfavorable for them in that sub market, and coincidentally they plan to release a different kind of encrypted storage product.
The cloud encryptor. The combined USB hub/encryptor. Some expensive SW thing. Who knows.
But still - why do something like try to reinvent crypto, when there's an open format? The license for Truecrypt even allows for commercial use.
Certain corporations want to "poison the well" of encrypted USB drives. Doesn't really matter why and thats not the point of this post. The end result of this incident is every clueless PHB now "knows" that its "impossible" to make a properly encrypted USB drive, and somehow the corps that are intentionally poisoning the well believe they will profit off that incorrect belief. Maybe they want to drive (bad pun) a competitor out, maybe they lack the patents their competitors have, who knows. Maybe they are just don't want to expand the product line to include "secure" devices and want to stick to insecure only.
I could imagine a situation where a drive manufacturer could not be a profitable concern as long as the competitors can get the high profit of selling secure drives. So, eliminate their ability to sell the profitable ones, by poisoning the whole market.
This makes it very easy for them to charge $large_chunk_of_money for "data recovery services" in the event you forget your password.
Far more likely: makes it very easy for them to charge $large_chunk_of_money for "data recovery services" in the event law enforcement/military/courts would like to see whats on your drive.
Look, if it's that easy to detect the heat coming off of a grow-op, then the growers should be out there detecting and stopping the leaks before the police do.
Congratulations, you've just discovered that cops primarily only catch the stupid criminals, plus or minus simple luck.
That is a semi-useful argument about the use of thermal imagers, if they only catch the sub-100 IQ crowd, is that discrimination good or bad in itself as an activity with possibly racial overtones, and aside from that is the effect of that discrimination good or bad?
The linked item is not an imager, it's a glorified thermometer. I wish you could get a thermal imager for cheap -- last I checked, they still started in the $3-4K range.
Maybe, after ten layers of journalists and editors, he really said they cost about $50-$100 per day. Because they do. Or at least that's the going rate at flir.com (no kidding).
One of my many long term plans has been to rent one locally, and scientifically evaluate which of the ancient walls and windows of my house are REALLY the most in need of insulation. Every other method is either vaguely guessing or relies on the honesty of a salesman (and I'm not that stupid).
$100 to just goof around with a weird camera for a day is a bit extreme, but in the context of spending four figures on insulation and windows and doors, its really a drop in the bucket. And I can still goof around with it after doing the day's "real work".
In a single day, 20 some odd yahoos cost the US economy several hundred billions of dollars.
Our own bankers caused much more damage. No problem there, because the bankers pay our "leaders". The solution is obvious. The terrorists should start paying our "leaders", then they won't be a problem anymore. Brilliant!
Mars is just too easy
Your rant was actually doing pretty good until there. Check the mars mission failure rate... If Europa were say, a hundred times more difficult, then the odds of total mysterious failure in Europa currently approach 100%. But if we can improve our reliability by trying stuff in easier mars missions, maybe someday a Europa mission wouldn't be a guaranteed failure, and might even work, maybe.
It has large error bars, but it's the best we have until we can send radiometric dating to these areas. [Crater Counting]
If you'd like a somewhat more detailed explanation, try Dr. Hartmann and Herres six year old explanation at:
http://www.psi.edu/projects/mgs/cratering.html
as there is no refresh rate on the Kindle.
Oh, theres a refresh "rate" alright, its about two seconds aka about zero point five Hz. That's why I specifically purchased a LCD based ebook reader.
I got to try a sony eink product, it was so slow, the first time I tried to change pages I had enough time to think it had crashed, or perhaps it was a static demo page that can't change, and the next couple times I switched pages I thought it was about to crash, memory leak slowing it to a crawl or the battery was nearly dead or something. I intellectually knew the UI was horribly slow, but I hadn't internalized it as possibly being the slowest UI I'd ever used.
What appeals to me about Kindle or Nook is that it is backed by a huge retailer. I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future. I know they will have a huge library of titles in their format. I feel strongly that they stand a chance to become the dominant standard.
Sounds exactly like Circuit City's DIVX disks.... How'd that work out?