For what it's worth, the whole Electrical Engineering department at my university uses HP/Agilent scopes as part of the lab stations. The scopes are now all have the Agilent brand on them; though the voltage sources and other boxes have the same design, stack together well, look like they are meant to go together, even are part of the same daisychained cable to/from the computers, and about half still say HP.
Even if the data was encrypted, do you really think that the key wouldn't also be on the hard drive?
If encrypted data is shared by multiple in a company such as this, everyone that has access also will need to have the key. Making every employee memorize an encryption key is not feasible right now (at least when there are non-technical people that need the access), so chances are really good that the laptop user would have the password saved somewhere. If the key was contained on a usb fob, chances are good that the user would keep it in the same laptop bag if not still connected - most people aren't security minded.
Realistically, the only sort of protection that the data could have even if it was encrypted is the strength of the user's windows password, which isn't that hard to break if you already have physical access.
Let's worry about the US gov't taps on any data going through the backbones they have access to, which is any traffic through North America. If anyone sends any sort of sensitive data, anywhere in the world, it should be encrypted.
If someone did, that would actually be good. The whole basis of reCaptcha is that the words are unreadable by all the OCR programs that have been tried, and they are words that people want to figure out.
Of course it can be broken by the sweatshop or free porn approach, but that's just paying people and not making software to do it.
Try taking notes on a computer when you're in an engineering class, if you can actually get all the formulas written down as fast as they go on the board I would be extremely impressed. At my university it's rare to see a laptop open during a lecture anywhere in an engineering class, and everyone is writing in their notebooks. Though when I have to take a class over in the humanities or social sciences, it's the opposite. And yes, there is wireless internet in every classroom.
That seems to be the idea behind this spec - a network interface that is as fast as a drive interface on a local machine, which would allow for nearly transparent remote drives, or even striped and mirrored raid across multiple machines to make it really fast. It really would be nice to see that.
I am extremely happy with my Turtle Beach card that I got 5 years ago instead of Creative. It sounds considerably better and has a low enough signal to noise ratio that I can plug my electric bass into the mic port, enable mic boost, and use the card as an amp for 0-80% volume (higher gives distortion).
My other (more recent) computer has a mobo with integrated sound (VIA chipset), and it's good enough for my Sennheiser HD280 headphones./An example of someone not buying Creative products
To me, and this is probably the engineer in me speaking, the arbitrary designation of the end of the year as a time to make life adjustments is very odd. If there is a problem in your life or something that needs changing, it seems like you should work to correct that whenever you discover it. The big push for resolutions around new years seems counterproductive in that many people may wait to make changes until "the new year".
Exactly!
The engineer in me also has a hard time with making wish lists for Christmas and birthdays because I just get what I need when I need it. So I ended up replacing an old computer the week before Christmas, and really had no idea what to ask for even before that, since the computer didn't show signs of dying until a week before I got the new one.
Jan 1 is just another day. I did make a resolution though, and it was to finish writing a bit of code that I was working on, a resolution that I've made and broken every day since the beginning of December. It wasn't related to the new year.:)
Those are also used by rock climbers, and is commonly referred to as 'flaking' the rope. When you get to the bottom of the face, you open the rope bag and can just pull on one end. When you're done, just pull the sheet out of the bag, tie one end to a loop in the rope bag, then throw the rest on to the sheet an arm's length at a time. Most good rope bags come with two different loops to tie to that are easily distinguished, so you know which end is the 'top' of the pile.
Then you just take the sheet, roll it into the bag, and you've got a rope completely free of tangles that is also rolled in a waterproof bag on all sides, even under the bag's zipper. Can't get much easier than that.
An interesting discovery you will make with such a device is that nearly anything that is painted will show up as having titanium in it. That's because titanium is used to create the white base for most paint. Of course black won't have it. I have seen this demonstrated by a professor who has one of the X-ray things, pointed it at a textbook and came up with 'mostly titanium' because the paint and ink on the cover was the only part that was metallic, and since titanium makes up most of the metal in paint, it shows up as that. The dangerous part about those is that it will tell you the composition of a metal, you just have to be careful which metal you're pointing it at, since it has very shallow penetration. On a solid block, it will give you the composition of the coating and not the inside.
Wow, a class in materials for a MechE degree will actually teach something?!?
I've looked at the mechanical systems in New York, and I will confidently say that I trust them to accurately tally the votes of more of the population than paper ballots. When you vote for a candidate, you pull down one lever in the row and it clicks, and the mechanical workings prevent the other levers from even being pulled, unless you retract the first vote. The vote count is tallied mechanically through levers and gears, which either work perfectly or break. When they break, it is immediately known and another machine is swapped in. Paper ballots are problematic for the elderly, unless you print them in huge type and leave a 2" circle for them to scribble somewhere inside. You can also lose one piece of paper and not notice it, but with a machine you either lose nothing or everything, and that cannot go unnoticed. If anything is lost, there are backups at the polling place, either another machine or paper ballots.
I trust the NY machines as much if not more than paper tallies.
The New York voting machines are the nice, reliable, sturdy, and easy to count mechanical things. I've used them many times, from local elections to using old machines for school votes (Wasn't 18 at the time of the last presidential election). They mechanically count each vote based on lever pulls, and have a nice number on the back to read out at the end of the day, all the election worker has to do is read the number and report it. The only error in the system is human error.
In short, They Work.
Tell me why we need to change from a tested, reliable, working system to a new-fangled system with huge concerns as to the accuracy and security?
Governments are not interested in computer crime. They don't investigate it, they don't prosecute it (unless it's against them directly). They seem to be very interested when the crime is copyright infringement. I know that it's entirely from the pressure from big corporate lobby groups, but when the FBI can confiscate servers for torrent trackers, I don't see why they can't go after the major botnet controllers especially when they've been identified.
Unfortunately it does not work. I just tried it, and still get access denied when trying rmdir SecuROM in my Application Data dir. My linux install is on another machine, so I'll have to use a livecd sometime on this one to get rid of it.
The possibility for misuse on the ISP side is enormous. Do you really want an ISP to be able to arbitrarily block any websites? What if they decide that some perfectly legal politically charged website shouldn't be viewed? I'd rather have unlimited access and have to worry about the results myself, thankyouverymuch. Censorship is almost never a good thing.
I'd also include 'lack of support for old games' but just saying EA covers that pretty well. (C&C Generals is what, 4 years old? They don't even have a section on their website for it anymore FFS!)
Example: A friend of mine sets up a DC++ hub on our college campus to get around the off-campus bandwidth caps. Entirely through word of mouth, we have 20TB and 200 people at any given time logged in. (out of 3500 students). Everyone who shares any decent amount and/or can call themselves a geek is on it.
The new content is provided by those of us with accounts on private sources, such as newsgroups, ftp, or private torrent sites. It's also provided by the incoming freshman class each year that has new things to share. We've provided for at least 80% of the campus' filesharing needs.
There will always be ways around any specific source that gets nerfed.
"You won't find new music through file-sharing because it's mostly "popular music" [item 10]"
Erm, no. I download music through illegal means because that way I can find stuff that isn't the mainstream crap. True, that doesn't exist on the more common p2p places, but if you get access to some of the more niche communities you can find everything from lossless live recordings to rips of old vinyl. All of which is posted by people who like it and recommend it to others. They pay for their own bandwidth to send it to others because they think it's good enough. It is an excellent way to find groups that aren't new per se, but they are new to you.
And before everyone tries to say that I'm taking money from labels... well, I guess I am. But I have bought more CDs in the past year than I'd ever gotten, most of which were just legal copies of things I'd downloaded earlier and wanted to support that group. Quite a few have been albums that I'd never heard before, but I had downloaded other things from the group. I go to concerts when I really like a band and they are in the area, and I know the corporations won't believe this but I've spent more money on music since I've started downloading illegally. (But nothing on mainstream crap, so they consider me a loss)
Maybe it doesn't mean anything, but I got a CD in the mail today that I ordered from Amazon, only because none of the stores near me carry it, I guess it's not popular enough. It has already been ripped to mp3 and onto my portable player, and is in the process of going to.flac to distribute to my friends. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them like it enough and then buy it themselves. Shareware works people, if you make a product good enough that people want to pay what you're asking.
That isn't really apple's fault that your skin oils discolor their plastic.
Have you ever seen a well used mouse where there is a buildup of brownish stuff above where your fingers usually rest? That's dead skin. Ever looked at a well used keyboard and seen brownish residue, or yellowish stains on the edges of keys? My 5 year old HP white keyboard has what almost looks like mcdonalds arches across the top of the spacebar and a halo around the arrow keys - it's where the skin gets rubbed off to, but isn't a place where I continually rub against with my fingers to keep it clean looking.
At least XFCE4 is minimalist enough that it isn't fugly, but have you looked through all the themes that come with GNOME and X? Ugh! It's like they were designed by people that like more gooey junk than window content. From the simple point of view that I use the *least annoying* window theme to me, I agree that they all need at least some sort of other touch, be it women's or graphic designer's...
Try a nice little PC-104 based system - with a soldering iron and some cheap radioshack stuff I've made one run off a 7.2v rc car battery - CF card HD and all. They are a bit more expensive though, and 500mhz isn't what you're looking for (though its quite enough for a mp3/video player). Need more capabilities? Add another component to the stack!
Was screwing around with the lego mindstorms, making a boat for my friend's pool. It worked for a while with soda bottle floats, then one came off and the thing sunk.
Fished it out, took it apart and dried it, and it still works fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but that old trackball works perfectly anywhere, and has a tiny footprint!
For what it's worth, the whole Electrical Engineering department at my university uses HP/Agilent scopes as part of the lab stations. The scopes are now all have the Agilent brand on them; though the voltage sources and other boxes have the same design, stack together well, look like they are meant to go together, even are part of the same daisychained cable to/from the computers, and about half still say HP.
Even if the data was encrypted, do you really think that the key wouldn't also be on the hard drive?
If encrypted data is shared by multiple in a company such as this, everyone that has access also will need to have the key. Making every employee memorize an encryption key is not feasible right now (at least when there are non-technical people that need the access), so chances are really good that the laptop user would have the password saved somewhere.
If the key was contained on a usb fob, chances are good that the user would keep it in the same laptop bag if not still connected - most people aren't security minded.
Realistically, the only sort of protection that the data could have even if it was encrypted is the strength of the user's windows password, which isn't that hard to break if you already have physical access.
Let's worry about the US gov't taps on any data going through the backbones they have access to, which is any traffic through North America.
If anyone sends any sort of sensitive data, anywhere in the world, it should be encrypted.
If someone did, that would actually be good. The whole basis of reCaptcha is that the words are unreadable by all the OCR programs that have been tried, and they are words that people want to figure out. Of course it can be broken by the sweatshop or free porn approach, but that's just paying people and not making software to do it.
Try taking notes on a computer when you're in an engineering class, if you can actually get all the formulas written down as fast as they go on the board I would be extremely impressed.
At my university it's rare to see a laptop open during a lecture anywhere in an engineering class, and everyone is writing in their notebooks. Though when I have to take a class over in the humanities or social sciences, it's the opposite. And yes, there is wireless internet in every classroom.
That seems to be the idea behind this spec - a network interface that is as fast as a drive interface on a local machine, which would allow for nearly transparent remote drives, or even striped and mirrored raid across multiple machines to make it really fast. It really would be nice to see that.
I am extremely happy with my Turtle Beach card that I got 5 years ago instead of Creative. It sounds considerably better and has a low enough signal to noise ratio that I can plug my electric bass into the mic port, enable mic boost, and use the card as an amp for 0-80% volume (higher gives distortion).
/An example of someone not buying Creative products
My other (more recent) computer has a mobo with integrated sound (VIA chipset), and it's good enough for my Sennheiser HD280 headphones.
To me, and this is probably the engineer in me speaking, the arbitrary designation of the end of the year as a time to make life adjustments is very odd. If there is a problem in your life or something that needs changing, it seems like you should work to correct that whenever you discover it. The big push for resolutions around new years seems counterproductive in that many people may wait to make changes until "the new year".
Exactly!
The engineer in me also has a hard time with making wish lists for Christmas and birthdays because I just get what I need when I need it. So I ended up replacing an old computer the week before Christmas, and really had no idea what to ask for even before that, since the computer didn't show signs of dying until a week before I got the new one.
Jan 1 is just another day. I did make a resolution though, and it was to finish writing a bit of code that I was working on, a resolution that I've made and broken every day since the beginning of December. It wasn't related to the new year. :)
Those are also used by rock climbers, and is commonly referred to as 'flaking' the rope. When you get to the bottom of the face, you open the rope bag and can just pull on one end. When you're done, just pull the sheet out of the bag, tie one end to a loop in the rope bag, then throw the rest on to the sheet an arm's length at a time. Most good rope bags come with two different loops to tie to that are easily distinguished, so you know which end is the 'top' of the pile.
Then you just take the sheet, roll it into the bag, and you've got a rope completely free of tangles that is also rolled in a waterproof bag on all sides, even under the bag's zipper. Can't get much easier than that.
Metolius Rope BagAn interesting discovery you will make with such a device is that nearly anything that is painted will show up as having titanium in it. That's because titanium is used to create the white base for most paint. Of course black won't have it.
I have seen this demonstrated by a professor who has one of the X-ray things, pointed it at a textbook and came up with 'mostly titanium' because the paint and ink on the cover was the only part that was metallic, and since titanium makes up most of the metal in paint, it shows up as that. The dangerous part about those is that it will tell you the composition of a metal, you just have to be careful which metal you're pointing it at, since it has very shallow penetration. On a solid block, it will give you the composition of the coating and not the inside.
Wow, a class in materials for a MechE degree will actually teach something?!?
I've looked at the mechanical systems in New York, and I will confidently say that I trust them to accurately tally the votes of more of the population than paper ballots. When you vote for a candidate, you pull down one lever in the row and it clicks, and the mechanical workings prevent the other levers from even being pulled, unless you retract the first vote. The vote count is tallied mechanically through levers and gears, which either work perfectly or break. When they break, it is immediately known and another machine is swapped in.
Paper ballots are problematic for the elderly, unless you print them in huge type and leave a 2" circle for them to scribble somewhere inside. You can also lose one piece of paper and not notice it, but with a machine you either lose nothing or everything, and that cannot go unnoticed. If anything is lost, there are backups at the polling place, either another machine or paper ballots.
I trust the NY machines as much if not more than paper tallies.
The New York voting machines are the nice, reliable, sturdy, and easy to count mechanical things. I've used them many times, from local elections to using old machines for school votes (Wasn't 18 at the time of the last presidential election). They mechanically count each vote based on lever pulls, and have a nice number on the back to read out at the end of the day, all the election worker has to do is read the number and report it. The only error in the system is human error.
In short, They Work.
Tell me why we need to change from a tested, reliable, working system to a new-fangled system with huge concerns as to the accuracy and security?
Unfortunately it does not work. I just tried it, and still get access denied when trying rmdir SecuROM in my Application Data dir.
My linux install is on another machine, so I'll have to use a livecd sometime on this one to get rid of it.
The possibility for misuse on the ISP side is enormous. Do you really want an ISP to be able to arbitrarily block any websites?
What if they decide that some perfectly legal politically charged website shouldn't be viewed? I'd rather have unlimited access and have to worry about the results myself, thankyouverymuch. Censorship is almost never a good thing.
You forgot another one:
EA
I'd also include 'lack of support for old games' but just saying EA covers that pretty well.
(C&C Generals is what, 4 years old? They don't even have a section on their website for it anymore FFS!)
Example: A friend of mine sets up a DC++ hub on our college campus to get around the off-campus bandwidth caps. Entirely through word of mouth, we have 20TB and 200 people at any given time logged in. (out of 3500 students). Everyone who shares any decent amount and/or can call themselves a geek is on it.
The new content is provided by those of us with accounts on private sources, such as newsgroups, ftp, or private torrent sites. It's also provided by the incoming freshman class each year that has new things to share. We've provided for at least 80% of the campus' filesharing needs.
There will always be ways around any specific source that gets nerfed.
"You won't find new music through file-sharing because it's mostly "popular music" [item 10]"
.flac to distribute to my friends. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them like it enough and then buy it themselves. Shareware works people, if you make a product good enough that people want to pay what you're asking.
Erm, no. I download music through illegal means because that way I can find stuff that isn't the mainstream crap. True, that doesn't exist on the more common p2p places, but if you get access to some of the more niche communities you can find everything from lossless live recordings to rips of old vinyl. All of which is posted by people who like it and recommend it to others. They pay for their own bandwidth to send it to others because they think it's good enough. It is an excellent way to find groups that aren't new per se, but they are new to you.
And before everyone tries to say that I'm taking money from labels... well, I guess I am. But I have bought more CDs in the past year than I'd ever gotten, most of which were just legal copies of things I'd downloaded earlier and wanted to support that group. Quite a few have been albums that I'd never heard before, but I had downloaded other things from the group. I go to concerts when I really like a band and they are in the area, and I know the corporations won't believe this but I've spent more money on music since I've started downloading illegally. (But nothing on mainstream crap, so they consider me a loss)
Maybe it doesn't mean anything, but I got a CD in the mail today that I ordered from Amazon, only because none of the stores near me carry it, I guess it's not popular enough. It has already been ripped to mp3 and onto my portable player, and is in the process of going to
That isn't really apple's fault that your skin oils discolor their plastic.
Have you ever seen a well used mouse where there is a buildup of brownish stuff above where your fingers usually rest? That's dead skin.
Ever looked at a well used keyboard and seen brownish residue, or yellowish stains on the edges of keys? My 5 year old HP white keyboard has what almost looks like mcdonalds arches across the top of the spacebar and a halo around the arrow keys - it's where the skin gets rubbed off to, but isn't a place where I continually rub against with my fingers to keep it clean looking.
Just have to get used to it.
At least XFCE4 is minimalist enough that it isn't fugly, but have you looked through all the themes that come with GNOME and X? Ugh! It's like they were designed by people that like more gooey junk than window content.
From the simple point of view that I use the *least annoying* window theme to me, I agree that they all need at least some sort of other touch, be it women's or graphic designer's...
Try a nice little PC-104 based system - with a soldering iron and some cheap radioshack stuff I've made one run off a 7.2v rc car battery - CF card HD and all. They are a bit more expensive though, and 500mhz isn't what you're looking for (though its quite enough for a mp3/video player). Need more capabilities? Add another component to the stack!
Was screwing around with the lego mindstorms, making a boat for my friend's pool. It worked for a while with soda bottle floats, then one came off and the thing sunk.
Fished it out, took it apart and dried it, and it still works fine.
Actually, I clicked the link in Firebird, and 'save as'.
It saved a completely blank 0-byte length file.
I then tried again with 'open with MozillaHTML' and it opened a empty htm doc (html and body tags, nothing else)
So, I would say that Firebird is safe.
But you have to realize that all the /. users who get worked up will be those 50,000 people who vote against the candidate.
And, How can you not have anything against spam? It is wasting everyones resources, filling up mailboxes and eating otherwise usefull bandwidth.