I love how Nokia beat Apple at their own game. They made a form-over-function phone, using something Apple is known for (the touch wheel), and with Scandinavian coolness in place of Apple pretentiousness.
The Nova story is an urban legend. As someone else (I don't remember where) put it, it's like claiming that a dining set called "Notable" implies that it doesn't include a table.
A funnier and more accurate example is the Mitsubishi Pajero. "Pajero" is Spanish for "wanker". This is why it's called the Montero in every market with a large Spanish-speaking population.
It's a good idea but impractical. What if the binary you selected is patched or updated?
This could work to your advantage. Stick the binary on a USB key and recompile the one on your HDD with trivial changes (a patch that just changes one error message, a minor change to $CFLAGS, etc.).
Then you still have a damn big passphrase with lots of unprintable characters.
This wouldn't work for whole drive encryption either because accessing your passphrase would require decrypting the drive and your passphrase.
True, but it'll work for encrypting/home/you/personal_shit
Imagine if the passphrase to your key was the contents of a large binary on your system. Anyone trying to break it would just see a prompt asking for a passphrase; they'd never expect to have to do something like 'cat/usr/bin/mplayer | decrypt somefile'. No, they'd just run 'decrypt somefile' and try to type something in when prompted 'Enter your passphrase: '. And good luck brute-forcing it; you it'll take forever to brute-force a passphrase that size (/usr/bin/mplayer on my system is 8195KB...good luck brute-forcing that).
Take you laptop's hard drive out and put it in another bag. You can claim that your laptop's broken when they try to boot it and can't. Or just stick a small hard drive in with a fresh installation of the OS and no personal data whatsoever.
Sure, you'll be down a laptop when they take it, but I'm sure border guards are too stupid to recognize a hard drive in another bag, so you can just stick your drive in a spare machine until you get your laptop back (if you get it back).
I have refused to fly for several years due to increasing security regulations (the last time I was on a plane was in 1999). This is just more of the same.
I don't want to take the chance my employer will try to make me fly somewhere. Is there somewhere I can apply to have myself irrevocably added to the no-fly list?
Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out.
Further proof of how much the Wikimedia Foundation is out of touch with reality.
The level of free-content zealotry that has infected the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing but drive contributors away and remove useful content from their projects. They're a bunch of idiots shooting themselves in the foot.
Piracy will always be prevalent as long as the MPAA follows the antiquated, anachronistic practice of releasing movies exclusively in theatres for their first several months.
You'd see piracy go down a lot if all new movies were released straight to DVD.
I don't know if things have changed in newer models, but I really, really hate using the touchpad on my roommate's 17" PowerBook G4. When I'm using that machine, I use the keyboard as much as possible.
From what I see around majority of people simply hate touchpads/use mouse if they can (going sometimes to absurd levels: trying to use a mouse on a smooth surface next to touchpad with laptop on their lap/outside; yes, I witnessed it)
I know. I even see some people use those horrible little travel mice because they hate their touchpads so much. Sheez--as much as I hate touchpads, I think those travel mice are worse. My hands are too big for them...
I have a soft spot for those mini-trackballs with trigger grips, though. I use a Logitech trackball with my desktop at home, so I bought one of those trigger trackballs to use with laptops.
Because trackpads are annoying and make laptops a chore to use.
I love trackpoints. My old Toshiba Tecra M3 (RIP 2005-2007) had both a trackpoint and a trackpad. I used the Synaptic/ALPS drivers to configure the trackpad as a circular scroll wheel (a la iPod) and mapped middle-click to one of the corners. Scrolling and middle-click were the only things I used the trackpad for. For everything else, I used the trackpoint (bet you thought I was going to say MasterCard).
The trackpoint is the perfect pointing device. I could keep my hand almost entirely still while using it. I splayed out my hand, laying my index finger on the trackpoint and my thumb over the buttons. In order to move the cursor, all I had to do was twitch my index finger ever so slightly. No wrist movement at all. I loved it.
Why do you assume bigger is better? I'd rather have a 13" laptop than a 15" laptop.
My perfect laptop form factor would be a 12" non-widescreen with nVidia discrete graphics. Oh, and it would be even more awesome if it were a tablet and doubly awesome if I could rotate it into portrait mode.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia already did that. Check out the Nokia 7380.
I love how Nokia beat Apple at their own game. They made a form-over-function phone, using something Apple is known for (the touch wheel), and with Scandinavian coolness in place of Apple pretentiousness.
Also: iPhone Rotary. Think Nokia 7380 with an extra dose of pretentiousness.
Or how, on the Jeffersons, they had a white supremacist saying "I won't kiss anything that's been kissed by a nigger".
You'd never see that today.
Yeah, but that was a deliberate pun.
Nothing sucks like a VAX, too. I'll leave it up to you to decide which VAX I'm talking about.
The Nova story is an urban legend. As someone else (I don't remember where) put it, it's like claiming that a dining set called "Notable" implies that it doesn't include a table.
A funnier and more accurate example is the Mitsubishi Pajero. "Pajero" is Spanish for "wanker". This is why it's called the Montero in every market with a large Spanish-speaking population.
You can call me Clint Flicker.
^D
Login: root
Password:
# rm -rf ~you/*history*
^D
Awesome.
I almost burst out laughing in the office after reading your post.
It's a good idea but impractical. What if the binary you selected is patched or updated?
This could work to your advantage. Stick the binary on a USB key and recompile the one on your HDD with trivial changes (a patch that just changes one error message, a minor change to $CFLAGS, etc.).
Then you still have a damn big passphrase with lots of unprintable characters.
This wouldn't work for whole drive encryption either because accessing your passphrase would require decrypting the drive and your passphrase.
True, but it'll work for encrypting /home/you/personal_shit
Oh, good fuck.
My desktop has an 8500GT, which is a G86 according to Wikipedia.
Well, if the chips were fabbed in Red China, they probably used lead instead of silicon.
Y'know, this might be an interesting idea...
Imagine if the passphrase to your key was the contents of a large binary on your system. Anyone trying to break it would just see a prompt asking for a passphrase; they'd never expect to have to do something like 'cat /usr/bin/mplayer | decrypt somefile'. No, they'd just run 'decrypt somefile' and try to type something in when prompted 'Enter your passphrase: '. And good luck brute-forcing it; you it'll take forever to brute-force a passphrase that size (/usr/bin/mplayer on my system is 8195KB...good luck brute-forcing that).
Take you laptop's hard drive out and put it in another bag. You can claim that your laptop's broken when they try to boot it and can't. Or just stick a small hard drive in with a fresh installation of the OS and no personal data whatsoever.
Sure, you'll be down a laptop when they take it, but I'm sure border guards are too stupid to recognize a hard drive in another bag, so you can just stick your drive in a spare machine until you get your laptop back (if you get it back).
I have refused to fly for several years due to increasing security regulations (the last time I was on a plane was in 1999). This is just more of the same.
I don't want to take the chance my employer will try to make me fly somewhere. Is there somewhere I can apply to have myself irrevocably added to the no-fly list?
penii
Penes.
Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out.
Further proof of how much the Wikimedia Foundation is out of touch with reality.
The level of free-content zealotry that has infected the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing but drive contributors away and remove useful content from their projects. They're a bunch of idiots shooting themselves in the foot.
Piracy will always be prevalent as long as the MPAA follows the antiquated, anachronistic practice of releasing movies exclusively in theatres for their first several months.
You'd see piracy go down a lot if all new movies were released straight to DVD.
I don't know if things have changed in newer models, but I really, really hate using the touchpad on my roommate's 17" PowerBook G4. When I'm using that machine, I use the keyboard as much as possible.
From what I see around majority of people simply hate touchpads/use mouse if they can (going sometimes to absurd levels: trying to use a mouse on a smooth surface next to touchpad with laptop on their lap/outside; yes, I witnessed it)
I know. I even see some people use those horrible little travel mice because they hate their touchpads so much. Sheez--as much as I hate touchpads, I think those travel mice are worse. My hands are too big for them...
I have a soft spot for those mini-trackballs with trigger grips, though. I use a Logitech trackball with my desktop at home, so I bought one of those trigger trackballs to use with laptops.
%$#@&*(@%$#
_Now_, over an hour after I post, I see the capitalization error. ARGH.
Because trackpads are annoying and make laptops a chore to use.
I love trackpoints. My old Toshiba Tecra M3 (RIP 2005-2007) had both a trackpoint and a trackpad. I used the Synaptic/ALPS drivers to configure the trackpad as a circular scroll wheel (a la iPod) and mapped middle-click to one of the corners. Scrolling and middle-click were the only things I used the trackpad for. For everything else, I used the trackpoint (bet you thought I was going to say MasterCard).
The trackpoint is the perfect pointing device. I could keep my hand almost entirely still while using it. I splayed out my hand, laying my index finger on the trackpoint and my thumb over the buttons. In order to move the cursor, all I had to do was twitch my index finger ever so slightly. No wrist movement at all. I loved it.
I don't care about high-end games, I care about memory usage.
Integrated graphics don't have their own memory. They work by eating system memory. I run without swap, so I need as much memory as I can get.
By the way, the Thinkpad X61 (a 12" non-widescreen notebook) does not require a ULV processor. It can come with anything up to a T8300.
You can thank your sig for inspiring this:
Why do you assume bigger is better? I'd rather have a 13" laptop than a 15" laptop.
My perfect laptop form factor would be a 12" non-widescreen with nVidia discrete graphics. Oh, and it would be even more awesome if it were a tablet and doubly awesome if I could rotate it into portrait mode.
Too bad the ThinkPad X61 only has GMA...
If Apple wanted to be cool, they'd dump the trackpad entirely and add a trackpoint.
Yes, that's right. They should switch to the nub. The pencil eraser. The clit mouse. The keyboard clit.
C'mon, it'd be awesome.