This is one idea that I really don't understand. Why would the security firms want to hire someone who has hacked into computers? Homicide detectives don't hire murderers, the SEC doesn't hire fraudsters, the ATF doesn't hire drunk smokers w/ unregistered firearm violations....
I wouldn't hire this kid simply because he would open me up to lawsuits from my stockholders.
The concept of hiring convicted hackers for security jobs is largely an urban myth at this point. It happened in a few well publicized cases years ago, and now the idea perpetuates itself.
It would be horribly damaging to a security company to make a policy of hiring convicted criminals...pretty self-evident.
From the Oxford dictionary, via Dictionary.app:
innovate - verb [ intrans. ] make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products
Seems to me innovation includes taking something established and making changes/improvements to it. And, yes, making something falling-off-a-log easy to use counts.
Who claims that Apple invented portable digital music players? No one. But who would claim that the iPod was not in some degree innovative? I suppose only those who care only about feature lists and not about ease of use, attractive design, etc.
From the American Heritage Dictionary, via Dictionary.com:
innovate - To begin or introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time.
v. intr.
To begin or introduce something new.
Since we speak "American" in the US and not "English", you can twiddle your OED around all you like, and you'll frequently be wrong. Were we in England, I might agree, but you already know full well exactly how the word "innovate" is used in tech discussions, so this is already a meaningless point.
I actually have heard several people profess the honest belief that Apple invented portable players, simply out of ignorance that things exist before they might have heard of them. But that wasn't the point I was making. That being that Slashdot is brimming with people who fawn over everything Apple does and claim that they are the only company who "innovates" and everyone else simply copies them. Then a total pass is given to things that Apple clearly copies from others. In the case of the iPod the color and decent marketing was the only particulary "new" thing about it, even the scroll wheel was just a different metaphor on existing interfaces.
There were lots of words in the above paragraph if you want to look them up in your OED also.
although it seems clear enough that a video iPod is on the way. If you didn't believe it before, you should definitely believe it now.
The article seems to be suggesting that Apple is planning to steal the already existing idea of a portable video player and incorporate it into the iPod.
But Apple never steals others ideas...they only brilliantly and uniquely innovate right?
Seems like the bulk of these can be changed with an extension.
I expect that is going to be a common reaction to his annoyances, since that was my first thought as well. But to be fair, he's reviewing annoyances with Firefox, not the plethora of plugins available for it. Just as people here compain about issues with IE that could be fixed/changed with an add-on.
Oh, that's rich. What was the last thing MS innovated again? Clippy?
Why does this keep coming back to MS? we're talking about industry history that's almost 15 years old, before MS was even a serious player in the NOS market.
Novell pissed away their market share all on their own, there WAS no competition until they created the void that demanded it. Ask anyone who was a CNE/CNA in 1990 (I was), they'll tell you all about how crappy Netware was and how Novell simply didn't care to do anything about it.
Guess that's why MS whines about the "TCO" of Linux so much.
I think we can all be honest here and agree that ridiculous theories like "TCO" are indistinguishable from "whining"
exactly, I have to do the same thing. I have well over 100GB of music, so it's not ALL going to fit anywhere. If I already have to swap music every X amount of time, why would I want to carry a huge HD based player, when I could carry a flash based one that still holds hundreds of CD's.
Personally I think the HD based players are only good until you outgrow the capacity, then it's less capacity/size that you want, not more.
Well, you're correct that Netware didn't win vs. the Microsoft stack, but then you'd also be forgetting that TCP/IP and internet protocols trumped everyone.
Stack?? I'm talking about network operating systems, you know the thing that Novell built their company on? The thing they had an ironclad lock on the market with? The product they sat on their asses and let mold on the vine while MS built out Windows bit by bit and ate their lunch?
Novell has actually been doing quite well in a completely fixed game, and the fact that they are still around while MANY other good companies have disappeared discredits everything in your post.
Whine all you like about "fixed" games, but in this industry you innovate or die. Novell didn't innovate, that is a FACT, and now they're a shadow of their former selves. If you've been involved in, or even paid attention to this industry for more than the last 5 years, you know it's true.
I don't know why you take this so personally, it's not like anything I've said is anything other than objective fact. Innovate or die, whining is for losers.
Yes, Novell is EXACTLY who I'd go to about predictions for the future of the computer industry. They sat on their asses and let MS chip away a virtual monopoly in networking technologies to the point where when people hear the name "Novell" these days they say "they're still around?".
This reads like one of those "Hey, just reminding you we're still here" press releases.
I also see a lot of complaining that the nano is worse than the mini because it doesn't have the same GB/$ ratio. I know it's unnerdy and wrong, but I would rather have the nano, which I can wear on a lanyard, and the durability of the flash over the hard drive. I'm seriously thinking of selling my 3G 20GB and picking one of these up.
My personal theory is that the hard drive based models are only even slightly attractive to people whose entire music collection fits on it. If you've got over 40GB of music, why would you want a player that can only hold a large percentage of what you own? You might as well go with a MUCH smaller unit that holds a small percentage. It takes a long freakin time to sort through enough music to fill a 4GB mini, imagine having to do that with 30GB out of a 60GB collection.
You're just better off with a smaller player that you load up with a weeks worth of listening at a time. Unless of course everything you own fits, then stuff it and go.
Famed Apple designer Jonathan Ives spent months on the tiniest of details, like the laser-etching of the logo and the roughness of the clickwheel compared to the smoothness of the rest of the exterior
After all this time of wishing I knew who to blame for the clickwheel being such a dirt and filth magnet, now I finally have a name to curse.
Here's a clue Mr "I design inside an aesthetic bubble", in the real world things people touch with their hands gets DIRTY. If you make it from something that doesn't wipe clean, it stays dirty forever.
Something as simple as a single pass overwrite with a single digit isn't going to phase a professional at all.
I AM a professional, and it's not possible. Look, I'm too tired to type it all again, so just go here. I added a pretty good cite in one of the child posts, too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162112&cid=135 51345
So you're either lying, or you don't know what you're talking about.
You seem to get some kind of pleasure out of calling people liars, please try to keep the discussion civil if you want people to participate.
Now, having said that, I've had exactly this discussion with two bonafied data recovery specialists, not random anonymous people on internet messageboards. Both have claimed that a multiple pass random wipe is required to prevent data recovery and explained the process of employing techniques that read the magnetic structure of the drives, not sectors/blocks/etc, and made my eyes glaze over and nod like I knew what the hell they were talking about.
Now it's entirely possible that they were both lying, it's possible that it's trivial and you're lying about knowing differently, or it's possible that it's theoretically possible but simply not practical. I don't know, it's not my field of expertise.
ALL of that being said, I DID say that I thought the DOD spec is a little excessive, but I would not count on a single pass of zeros to be trustworthy. Especially not when it's so easy to do random.
DoD wipes, eh? You do, of course, know that that is so broad as to be without meaning. So a few questions.
1. What kind of media?
2. What kind of data?
3. Clear or Sanitize?
Well, if you're familiar with the DOD spec, then you'd know those questions are covered. So why exactly are you asking me this, just to show you know what we're talking about?
well said. I've personally had to engage data recovery specialists to get data back from corrupted drives. Something as simple as a single pass overwrite with a single digit isn't going to phase a professional at all. That's like day one in data recovery school.
DOD level wipes are the other end of the spectrum, a little overboard, but pretty damn sure the data is gone. Smashing with a hammer is pretty effective too. The data is still there, but if the platters aren't flat any more, they'd play holy hell gettign the data off.
I just don't get this, I mean this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me. If cellphones with MP3 support take off, and Apples got the first shot at it... what's the problem? Instead of selling iPod's, they'll sell phonePod's... but at least they'll sell the same number of devices- maybe more
The problem is though that Apple doesn't get "first shot at it", Motorola does. All Apple gets is the slice of the software licensing pie, which as Bill Gates has shown us is only good enough to make you $54 Billion.
This is where Apple has failed consistantly over the years. The refusal to keep to closed architectures and refusal to license products to others has kept them in a niche market. They've finally got a runaway hit with the iPod, and they're scared to death to infringe on it.
But now that you have all you want, what are you going to connect your electricity to? An air conditioner? A refrigerator? An electric ice maker? How much do those cost?
I admit there's an assumption that the same person who would deliver the "Votex Icebox 3000" could also be the one to deliver "Kenmore Icemaker", and could probably do so with a far better return on the money invested because you can buy the Kenmore anywhere, where the Vortex has to be assembled as one-off prototypes because nobody else is going to want one.
How complicated are they to repair? Are you going to drop one off in a village with some magic crystals and say 'This all works great, but you're on your own when the compressor fails, because that's going to mean $300 and a trip into The City..."
Depends on if you know how to repair one I suppose. But I'll bet if you had to find spare parts, even in the far reaches of the Kenyan Outback (deliberate juxtaposition) you've got about one million times better hope of finding spare parts for a Kenmore than a Vortex cooler. In fact, I might be a little more comfortable depending on items that were engineered with 50+ years of research and development behind it, depending on the actual choices of course.
This thing is just a tube, that when you blow air into it colder air comes out. No infrastructure, no wiring, no ball-bearings, nothing to fail. It's a cool little thing waiting for someone to hack a solution to the inbound pressure problem. It's not the solution to everything, it is a small potential solution to a specific problem. If you find or design a range of gas pressure sources that fit its use, that are simpler and/or cheaper and/or just better suited than a generator and a refrigerator, even if it isn't as efficient, then you've made a step forward.
You're oversimplifying to the extreme. You've taken one component of the device, and used it to describe the entire makeup of the unit. And to be perfectly honest, I think you're overstating the complexity and unreliabiilty of off the shelf electrical generation equipment and refridgeration units.
Nothing is going to change the fact that we're talking about a method of producing cold air that by this guys own numbers is 35 times less efficient, a number I still find a little optomistic. Being able to produce 35 times as much ice has GOT to be worth something to peopel who need ice badly enough to use the least efficient method on the planet of producing it.
I have a very, very strong suspicion that somewhere this guy is reading this article and is fuming mad, pissed as hell that some reporter he talked to for 5 minutes took him WAY out of context and made him look like a perpetual motion freak.
Anyone who works for an organization like Engineers without Borders obviously isn't in the same catagory as people selling "water energizers" on the Internet. I just seriously doubt that he really thinks of this as having practical applications.
I'm pretty skeptical of this thing too, but it's not quite true that the device needs to be more efficient than generating electricity and refrigerating the old-fashioned way. There is an advantage (especially in a low-tech environment) to a simple device with few moving mechanical parts to wear out.
That is true, "simplicity" is as real a factor to be considered as much as "efficiency". However, this entire idea pretty much ignores the second law of thermodynamics and violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the first one (which in laymans terms = There Aint No Free Lunch).
The second law of thermodynamics can be defined as: efficiency = work out/work in
If you start with an engine with a known efficiency that is extremely low, as in the case of vortex tube effect cooling, to get a useful amount of work output, the input MUST (in this universe) be extremely large. In this case it means that a very large amount of work goes into the compressing of air going into the engine.
So unless this idea is starting from the assumption of a nearly free source of compressed gasses, Newton is going to have a problem with it. If such a source DOES exist, I'd suggest immediately harnassing it for a large variety of purposes, of which ice could certainly be one.
If either one of you had bothered to look into this device for even a moment, oh I don't know, maybe here for example, you'd know that they aren't spinning anything at a million RPM.... It's the vortex inside that can reach a million RPM.
Since you took the time to accuse me of "talking out my ass", I'll take the time to respond to you. First you say "aren't spinning anything", then you say "the vortex reaches a million RPM". Maybe we use different definitions of "spin" and "vortex", but it doesn't change the fact that if you can generate ANYTHING at a million RPM, you can generate electricity from it. Hell, you might even have to step it down significantly to keep from trashing your generator turbines.
If you can find a way (and this, I assume, is what he's still working on) to get enough air through it then you can get the cold stream very cold indeed, which is useful.
Sure, cold air can be very useful. I myself employ it in the generation of cold beer from room temperature beer. However, the energy expended into generating the cold air MUST be less than the energy required to generate electricity and refrigerate the old fashioned way to make this subject even slightly more interesting than "zero point energy" discussions.
Perhaps it's wind, or volcanic gases, or storing composting gas, or simply the hot air generated by your armchair engineering, the point is that he's looking into it to try to help people, and you didn't look into it and are helping no one.
Your position seems to be that any crackpot idea that involves "helping people" is automatically beyond reproach, and even suggesting that we discuss otherwise makes me a horrible person. You don't have to be very skeptical at all to understand that if you (i.e. the engineer in question) are going to make bold statements that have obvious flaws, it's YOUR responsibility to account for your plan for dealing with those flaws, or suffer scrutiny of people asking obvious questions.
If you can spin something at 1,000,000 RPM why not spin a copper coil inside a magnetic field and make electricity instead? Quite useful stuff I've heard.
BINGO!!! We have a winner of the "Find the Logic Hole in the Seemingly Reasonable Idea" game!
There's a reson why electicity is a freakin' universal component of modern societies people. It's EASY to produce, so easy that's it's just about goddamn trivial since there's dozens of different ways to go about it, and NONE of them involve ridiculously ineffcient and complex methods like "ice without electricity" does.
Hell, why not work on "masturbation without enjoyment" too, that should be just as useful.
More often than not very well-trained and experienced scientists get it completely wrong. That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles.
This is exactly what I see as the biggest problem in journalism today, and it's caused a very large percentage of the population to utterly lose faith in news as it's reported.
I assume the problem originates in journalism schools, where they faill miserably to teach students that reporting inaccurately, or incompletely, represents as utter a failure of their profession as an incompetant doctor who kills his patients. But what we actually have is a profession that these days not only feels no obligation to report news accurately, but also considers themselves exempt from liability resulting from their own incompetance under the 1st amendment umbrella.
It's arrogance plain and simple. A writer/reporter/editorializer/etc won't hesitate to walk into an area they know jack squat about, and think they're a subject matter expert in a matter or minutes, or worse, don't see any need to be a subject matter expert at all. The obvious problem with that is something that techies experience every day when talking to non-techies. The simplest of explainations or directions are misinterpreted horribly because of a lack of base understanding (i.e. "ok, right click on that...no, RIGHT click..., no the OTHER right button").
That's why we used to have things like "science reporters" or financial, etc. Hell, about the only jouralistic specialty left that gets any credibility is sports.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be horribly damaging to a security company to make a policy of hiring convicted criminals...pretty self-evident.
innovate - To begin or introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time.
v. intr. To begin or introduce something new.
Since we speak "American" in the US and not "English", you can twiddle your OED around all you like, and you'll frequently be wrong. Were we in England, I might agree, but you already know full well exactly how the word "innovate" is used in tech discussions, so this is already a meaningless point.
I actually have heard several people profess the honest belief that Apple invented portable players, simply out of ignorance that things exist before they might have heard of them. But that wasn't the point I was making. That being that Slashdot is brimming with people who fawn over everything Apple does and claim that they are the only company who "innovates" and everyone else simply copies them. Then a total pass is given to things that Apple clearly copies from others. In the case of the iPod the color and decent marketing was the only particulary "new" thing about it, even the scroll wheel was just a different metaphor on existing interfaces.
There were lots of words in the above paragraph if you want to look them up in your OED also.
But Apple never steals others ideas...they only brilliantly and uniquely innovate right?
Might I suggest a finger gesture instead?
so it will take a miracle.
Novell pissed away their market share all on their own, there WAS no competition until they created the void that demanded it. Ask anyone who was a CNE/CNA in 1990 (I was), they'll tell you all about how crappy Netware was and how Novell simply didn't care to do anything about it.
I think we can all be honest here and agree that ridiculous theories like "TCO" are indistinguishable from "whining"Personally I think the HD based players are only good until you outgrow the capacity, then it's less capacity/size that you want, not more.
waiting for it...
I don't know why you take this so personally, it's not like anything I've said is anything other than objective fact. Innovate or die, whining is for losers.
This reads like one of those "Hey, just reminding you we're still here" press releases.
You're just better off with a smaller player that you load up with a weeks worth of listening at a time. Unless of course everything you own fits, then stuff it and go.
Here's a clue Mr "I design inside an aesthetic bubble", in the real world things people touch with their hands gets DIRTY. If you make it from something that doesn't wipe clean, it stays dirty forever.
Now, having said that, I've had exactly this discussion with two bonafied data recovery specialists, not random anonymous people on internet messageboards. Both have claimed that a multiple pass random wipe is required to prevent data recovery and explained the process of employing techniques that read the magnetic structure of the drives, not sectors/blocks/etc, and made my eyes glaze over and nod like I knew what the hell they were talking about.
Now it's entirely possible that they were both lying, it's possible that it's trivial and you're lying about knowing differently, or it's possible that it's theoretically possible but simply not practical. I don't know, it's not my field of expertise.
ALL of that being said, I DID say that I thought the DOD spec is a little excessive, but I would not count on a single pass of zeros to be trustworthy. Especially not when it's so easy to do random.
DOD level wipes are the other end of the spectrum, a little overboard, but pretty damn sure the data is gone. Smashing with a hammer is pretty effective too. The data is still there, but if the platters aren't flat any more, they'd play holy hell gettign the data off.
How was that even remotely hilarious? Sarcastic for sure, but I guess I have higher standards for "hilarity" than this.
This is where Apple has failed consistantly over the years. The refusal to keep to closed architectures and refusal to license products to others has kept them in a niche market. They've finally got a runaway hit with the iPod, and they're scared to death to infringe on it.
Nothing is going to change the fact that we're talking about a method of producing cold air that by this guys own numbers is 35 times less efficient, a number I still find a little optomistic. Being able to produce 35 times as much ice has GOT to be worth something to peopel who need ice badly enough to use the least efficient method on the planet of producing it.
I have a very, very strong suspicion that somewhere this guy is reading this article and is fuming mad, pissed as hell that some reporter he talked to for 5 minutes took him WAY out of context and made him look like a perpetual motion freak.
Anyone who works for an organization like Engineers without Borders obviously isn't in the same catagory as people selling "water energizers" on the Internet. I just seriously doubt that he really thinks of this as having practical applications.
The second law of thermodynamics can be defined as: efficiency = work out/work in
If you start with an engine with a known efficiency that is extremely low, as in the case of vortex tube effect cooling, to get a useful amount of work output, the input MUST (in this universe) be extremely large. In this case it means that a very large amount of work goes into the compressing of air going into the engine.
So unless this idea is starting from the assumption of a nearly free source of compressed gasses, Newton is going to have a problem with it. If such a source DOES exist, I'd suggest immediately harnassing it for a large variety of purposes, of which ice could certainly be one.
I prefer the elegant simplicity of two grossly different sized gears.
There's a reson why electicity is a freakin' universal component of modern societies people. It's EASY to produce, so easy that's it's just about goddamn trivial since there's dozens of different ways to go about it, and NONE of them involve ridiculously ineffcient and complex methods like "ice without electricity" does.
Hell, why not work on "masturbation without enjoyment" too, that should be just as useful.
I assume the problem originates in journalism schools, where they faill miserably to teach students that reporting inaccurately, or incompletely, represents as utter a failure of their profession as an incompetant doctor who kills his patients. But what we actually have is a profession that these days not only feels no obligation to report news accurately, but also considers themselves exempt from liability resulting from their own incompetance under the 1st amendment umbrella.
It's arrogance plain and simple. A writer/reporter/editorializer/etc won't hesitate to walk into an area they know jack squat about, and think they're a subject matter expert in a matter or minutes, or worse, don't see any need to be a subject matter expert at all. The obvious problem with that is something that techies experience every day when talking to non-techies. The simplest of explainations or directions are misinterpreted horribly because of a lack of base understanding (i.e. "ok, right click on that...no, RIGHT click..., no the OTHER right button").
That's why we used to have things like "science reporters" or financial, etc. Hell, about the only jouralistic specialty left that gets any credibility is sports.