Seems like this method of delivery would be great for dealing drugs, or smuggling drugs across international borders. This is exactly why we need to keep very strict regulation on these things - way too much potential for abuse and illegal activity.
For that price and that payload, I'm pretty sure these are already being used. After all, if they're using autonomous submarines, these would be significantly cheaper, simpler, and less of a hit should one be intercepted. Strict regulations are only effective for people operating within the law (not above or below it).
This. These three are what you need; you can then script a wrapper around them if you need to, but they'll provide you with everything you need as far as actual manipulation and display goes. Poppler keeps it simple, pdftk can handle most manipulation needs, and ghostscript is there to covere any esoteric issues that still fall under postscript/pdf/EPS.
Might want to also include imagemagick, for import/export/optimization of most image formats you might be bursting/adding in PDF.
Actually, if you follow strict English rules, it should be "a software" or "softwares" -- the fact that we've nounized "software" doesn't make it right. Kind of like math vs maths -- maths is correct, but US English chooses math instead, as the abbreviation has been nounized.
Just like riding lawn mowers, you should be able to get up and have it cut the power. Or in this case, it should detect no one is sitting in the driver's seat, and safely slow to a halt.
...thereby being a sitting target for the next car behind it, as these systems don't handle stationary vehicles on the road very well, and don't identify them.
Halting on a freeway is never a safe option. What the car needs to do is find the nearest exit, pull off, and then pull onto the shoulder. But to do that, it needs to be a lot more autonomous than these cars are.
Believable, but considering that the CIA said that nobody had access to the senate's subnet, and then it turned out that common IT workers had access AND USED IT -- and Snowden was in a similar position -- and I'd take anything said by NSA leadership with a grain of salt. Often at that level, "he didn't have access to" really means "the policies stated he shouldn't access that." It doesn't mean that it wasn't possible, just that it was outside accepted policies and procedures, and that at some point, someone SHOULD have airgapped it and added in the appropriate ACLs such that it wouldn't be possible.
But I'd believe more that Snowden was the one who escaped with the data, but there are actually a number of people who were involved in obtaining it in the first place. And now that Snowden has opened things up but prevented himself from providing other leaks, the rest have found an alternate route that didn't involve a courier in the same manner.
The thing is, if they can leak like this, that means it's just as easy for other actors to be leaking to people who might want the information but who won't tell about it. This shows that access control at the NSA is still thoroughly broken, no matter who the leak was.
http://www.sublimetext.com/for... gives you a good start. But really; the best way to find out is to fire Sublime up and see; it's pretty self-explanatory for much of it (although having the vi mode plugin disabled by default can be a bit jarring until you figure out how the plugin system works).
I predate emacs (esc alt meta key) and it is on all unix systems. emacs is still spotty and sometimes you need to install it--vi is always there.
mqh
Not true -- I've been in many situations where 'which vi' has returned nothing.
Now ed is always there -- any environment that doesn't contain ed is not worth being in. It's been the default since 1971, unlike newcomers such as vi that didn't show up until 1976.
Nano is the notepad of the POSIX world -- it eats line endings, messes up indentation, and makes a mess of config files -- just like pico did back in the day.
I still remember using elm with pico integration; it was great for writing an email, horrible for coding. I used emacs for that, until it started getting too unwieldy.
Now if I'm in a lightweight environment, I'll use ed. If I'm in a graphical environment, I'll use Sublime. If I'm in a terminal, I'll use vim....so the GP can get off MY lawn.
I use Sublime with vim bindings turned on. It has features I use every day that vi/vim doesn't have, and doesn't get in the way of my vim muscle memory. It also doesn't get in the way of my ed muscle memory, nor my Mac muscle memory. In fact, pretty much whatever legacy text editor my muscle memory thinks I'm using, Sublime will interpret the commands correctly and let me get the job done.
I've used all the listed editors, and eventually settled on the vim/Sublime combo, as they accomplish everything the others do, and then some.
And to think that 20 years ago, I was a diehard emacs user. I liked my macros, but Sublime can do all that too; it just prefers python over LISP.
Indeed -- and it's also the issue of short-term gain vs. long-term gain. People will hand over their Facebook passwords in exchange for chocolate. Just because an individual is short sighted shouldn't mean that their entire social community has to suffer in the long term because of it.
I'd disagree to your first part: there's not much difference between one President and another when you come right down to it; they are heavily restricted in their actions by policy makers. Plus, your municipal vote for the president has almost no effect on the result, compared to municipal elections where one interest group can sway the entire outcome. Mayors and aldermen have huge amounts of leeway, and their decisions affect your life directly.
I'd rather someone discovers a president was fraudulently elected than a mayor. But I'd rather that they found out the mayor too, if there was fraud involved. This is much easier to do with offline voting than with online voting.
I hate it when people try to vote against something that makes life easier, out of privacy concern and security... If you have viruses on your machine, that's your own darn fault, why penalize everybody for your stupidity?
The second half has already been responded to, so I'll tackle this bit.
If you have malware on your machine, that's likely your own fault (most likely through ignorance). Unfortunately, everyone on your network, on your social network, and on the malware's distribution chain is penalized for your stupidity.
So let's back up one level...
Online voting makes life easier, agreed.
Unfortunately, abuse of online voting doesn't just affect the person not using it to vote, but also affects everyone in the municipality.
You can't have it both ways: either the upstream has to think of the privacy and security concerns, or the end operator (citizen) does.
As "online" implies global, it means that unlike mail-in, where abuse is likely limited to people who are actually a part of the municipality plus a few external interested parties, suddenly abuse is open to the entire world, where statistics indicate that a 0.001% of the 7 billion population = 70,000 actors likely to attempt to abuse the system for reason X instead of the 0.15 of a person who is likely to abuse the system for reason X locally.
The main way to ensure best security is to limit scope: only expose a function to the actors that need to access it. "On the Internet" does the inverse.
And that's just one reason it's a bad idea; there are plenty of others. All of them have solutions, but all the solutions are going to run afoul of statistics when you move a system that's been exposed to 15,000 people into an arena where it's exposed to 7 billion people.
Actually, that's not how it has always been. The "magic number" at one point was 13 years old; in recent history (past 50 years) it tended to be 21 years old. Over the past decade or so, it has creeped up to 30. This goes for all the things mentioned; cars, jobs, marriage, kids.
The reason? Should be obvious: baby boomers. They're keeping their money as they retire, and are often spending it in out-of-area places. As a result, the job shortage that still exists is filled by temps because it's the only way the companies can afford to sell things to the boomers at the prices they expect. If they raise prices and hire full-time employees, the boomers will go elsewhere to spend their disproportionate amount of money.
Once the boomers start to die off, we'll start to see the pendulum shift the other way, as local demand rises, job vacancies rise, and the value of local skilled labor finally rises. Of course, that's another 15 years off, by which point the millennials will be the establishment and it'll be the next generation that gets the benefit of having an earlier workforce transition.
in Canada, self-service checkouts have the impulse items surrounding the lineup area to get to the kiosks, similar to how they're positioned for the lineups to get to actual cashiers.
I'm no millennial, but I almost always use a self-service checkout at stores who have functioning* kiosks. I've spent my time as a kid doing those sorts of jobs, and tend to be better/faster at using the scanners than a checkout clerk -- so why spend 5 minutes waiting in line and an interminable time waiting for the clerk to process all my items, when I could breeze through a kiosk with no lineup in 30 seconds? I still talk to the store staff on the way out, but no longer have to deal with a lost 20 minutes in my day.
However, in Canada, there are still plenty of stores with buggy kiosks -- one of the common scenarios is kiosks running Windows Embedded with a small HD; the transaction logs have to be manually collected/cleared, and the longer they're left without doing that, the slower the interface becomes until it eventually goes unresponsive.
The other issue is places that haven't calibrated their scale response time correctly, so the kiosk keeps flagging up errors if you're not quick enough to drop your item (whether it be an over-sized item or a carton of eggs) onto the scale.
One of my local vendors also recently underwent ownership change, and the new owner's policy was that every credit card signature required employee verification -- so if you use an American Express at one of their kiosks, the thing starts blaring out its alarm as soon as you sign the pad, and then you have to stand and wait until some clerk has the time to go to the main kiosk console and hit "accept" (they never visually inspect, as they have no reason to -- if your signature doesn't match, there's no step 2; they can't decline the purchase under local laws and cardholder agreements).
But as I said; I still opt for the kiosk when possible -- if it's a small purchase, I can be in and out of the store in a matter of minutes; if it's a large purchase, I save the difference in time it takes me to process the items vs a worn out cashier.
The only people that don't benefit here are the extra staff that act as storage help and double as checkout overflow help when things get busy. But there are other jobs to do these days that pay better for the same skill set.
I used to have an account on DEC's Alpha test servers, and remember testing out VAX/VMS back in the day.
Seeing OpenVMS being pushed for Itanium products though... that's running one doomed OS on another doomed and believed extinct platform.
I don't really see where they're going to make a profit on this, at least enough to survive until they can port it over to a modern x86 architecture.
After they do THAT, I can see it being viable, especially if they provide legacy binary support. There's still a lot of iron running VMS, and most of it, while necessary infrastructure, is running on hardware that I can't imagine can last much longer.
But they'd better get the port and compatibility layer rock solid before they try selling it, or we're in for some painful times (brownouts, water service outages, etc).
Considering the guy moved from QuickTime to Kinoma Player to JavaScript-enabled Internet Thing authoring, you'd think we could at least expect the video in some JS-powered format available to all. Instead we get... Flash? Really?
QuickTime was actually an excellent multimedia container platform that integrated what Apple had learned from HyperCard with a multimedia delivery stack. It was technologically way more advanced than Shockwave and the other competitors of the time.
Unfortunately, the bastard child that was delivered to most Windows web browsers was actually Sorenson codec video in a QuickTime wrapper, pushed through a QuickTime Plugin. This plugin is what everyone has a deep loathing for -- to make QuickTime work on Windows, Apple had to port a major portion of the Mac OS API, as QuickTime integrated deeply into the system calls of the OS. So what Apple did was created a stripped-down Mac OS that ran inside a plugin for your browser. So every time you loaded a page that required the QuickTime plugin, your web browser booted Mac OS, which then loaded the QuickTime component handlers, which then grabbed the container and loaded the data stream. This was run through the codec handler, which then passed the result back to the OS, which used the QuickDraw renderer to blit the result to a virtual screen and audio device. THEN, the virtual screen was passed back to the plugin handler code and from there to DirectX, as was the audio.
So you ended up with a combination of the worst aspects of Windows, the worst aspects of browser plugin architecture, and the worst aspects of the Mac OS (inclduing bad memory management and cooperative multitasking) all being experienced in one place. No single point of failure here; it had so many potential points of failure that you generally hit at least one with each loaded instance of the plugin.
Actually, Quicktime was used at the Battle of Hastings; it's why the Harrold's defenders were broken -- the Normans ordered a Quicktime retreat, and after the English broke formation, the Normans regrouped and overwhelmed them.
the solder joints that were melting weren't on the PCB side; my statement was a bit misleading; it was the solder joints on the CRT lead side that melted, leaving the connection just being a slide clip. The problem was, they used the whole setup like a chimney, which meant that the left side of the CRT (from the front) which contained lots of shielding already, was used as one side of the chimney. Unfortunately, that's precisely where they had one of the interconnects for the ground plane (IIRC).
There were a number of aftermarket fan solutions created after this issue was discovered; this was one of the situations where The Steve stated "there must not be any fans in the case!" and people made it so, but then had to deal with the aftermath of using cold solder on a component in an area subject to heat buildup.
Oh yeah; and placing a large textbook on the top of a Plus, covering up the vents, could cause the plastic case to melt within a matter of hours.
Computer design really has come a long way since then.
Oh, the other irony: that video I linked to is a takeapart of a Mac Plus whose monitor stopped working. Three guesses as to the problem and fix? I don't think anyone ever told the guy though; his monitor could have been fixed years ago with a soldering gun and some modern RoHS solder.
Bought a no-moving-parts power supply back in... oh, I don't know, 2003 or something. Sold as "cooled by heatpipes", pretty much the same principle - silent, no moving parts, passively cooled, no fans, huge surface areas.
They also did kits for the processor itself but I've also bought P2-era motherboards that were designed to be passively cooled too (same thing, huge heatsink, no fan).
So this is certainly not "the first" in the PC world (unless we're talking about "the first" to use some particular technology that just about replicates what I bought over 10 years ago). Not even close. In fact, it's over a decade out. And going outside the PC world, passively cooled chips are pretty common - you have a tablet or smartphone without a huge stonking fan, no?
The PSU is still working 10 years on if you'd like me to dig it out. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to butcher it to do the same job to the processor, especially if you can safely have it clock itself down to prevent heat being generated in the first place.
But it didn't use foam; just rudimentary heat sinks and a well-planned ducting system. Oh yes, and the heat it generated melted the solder used to connect the monitor to the motherboard in the first few batches that came off the line, until they started using higher tolerance solder.
If this were the 1990s, this would be the perfect answer. Back then, the idea was that you use a firewall as a perimeter defense in a defense-in-depth strategy.
But this isn't the 1990s, this is 2014. Nowadays, you have to assume that at least one endpoint on your local network is compromised in some way, whether that be via malware infection, clueless intern, corporate espionage, disgruntled employee, etc.
These days, any decent firewall does a lot more than prevent access to ports -- most actively monitor the traffic passing through any open port, and when configured correctly (in this case for a DB server), they'll lock anything down and flag that doesn't look like a SQL transaction, and then check for common SQL exploits, for connections to network points that should not have access to that port, for binary objects being passed in the SQL queries, and more.
What this means is that if you consider a firewall to be enabling the Windows Firewall on your MSSQL Server/Windows Server 2008 box, it's probably a good idea just because those boxes are usually not locked down correctly, and someone could be browsing facebook in IE on that box unless the firewall prevents it. But this isn't really the sort of firewall you should be applying to a transaction server that may one day have to be PCI DSS compliant.
Slashdot Mirror
With 25cm resolution, they'll have problems doing anything but blurring everyone's face.
Seems like this method of delivery would be great for dealing drugs, or smuggling drugs across international borders. This is exactly why we need to keep very strict regulation on these things - way too much potential for abuse and illegal activity.
For that price and that payload, I'm pretty sure these are already being used. After all, if they're using autonomous submarines, these would be significantly cheaper, simpler, and less of a hit should one be intercepted. Strict regulations are only effective for people operating within the law (not above or below it).
This. These three are what you need; you can then script a wrapper around them if you need to, but they'll provide you with everything you need as far as actual manipulation and display goes. Poppler keeps it simple, pdftk can handle most manipulation needs, and ghostscript is there to covere any esoteric issues that still fall under postscript/pdf/EPS.
Might want to also include imagemagick, for import/export/optimization of most image formats you might be bursting/adding in PDF.
Actually, if you follow strict English rules, it should be "a software" or "softwares" -- the fact that we've nounized "software" doesn't make it right. Kind of like math vs maths -- maths is correct, but US English chooses math instead, as the abbreviation has been nounized.
Just like riding lawn mowers, you should be able to get up and have it cut the power. Or in this case, it should detect no one is sitting in the driver's seat, and safely slow to a halt.
...thereby being a sitting target for the next car behind it, as these systems don't handle stationary vehicles on the road very well, and don't identify them.
Halting on a freeway is never a safe option. What the car needs to do is find the nearest exit, pull off, and then pull onto the shoulder. But to do that, it needs to be a lot more autonomous than these cars are.
Believable, but considering that the CIA said that nobody had access to the senate's subnet, and then it turned out that common IT workers had access AND USED IT -- and Snowden was in a similar position -- and I'd take anything said by NSA leadership with a grain of salt. Often at that level, "he didn't have access to" really means "the policies stated he shouldn't access that." It doesn't mean that it wasn't possible, just that it was outside accepted policies and procedures, and that at some point, someone SHOULD have airgapped it and added in the appropriate ACLs such that it wouldn't be possible.
But I'd believe more that Snowden was the one who escaped with the data, but there are actually a number of people who were involved in obtaining it in the first place. And now that Snowden has opened things up but prevented himself from providing other leaks, the rest have found an alternate route that didn't involve a courier in the same manner.
The thing is, if they can leak like this, that means it's just as easy for other actors to be leaking to people who might want the information but who won't tell about it. This shows that access control at the NSA is still thoroughly broken, no matter who the leak was.
http://www.sublimetext.com/for... gives you a good start. But really; the best way to find out is to fire Sublime up and see; it's pretty self-explanatory for much of it (although having the vi mode plugin disabled by default can be a bit jarring until you figure out how the plugin system works).
Why not just use ed? It should already be there....
vi aka vi
I predate emacs (esc alt meta key) and it is on all unix systems. emacs is still spotty and sometimes you need to install it--vi is always there.
mqh
Not true -- I've been in many situations where 'which vi' has returned nothing.
Now ed is always there -- any environment that doesn't contain ed is not worth being in. It's been the default since 1971, unlike newcomers such as vi that didn't show up until 1976.
Off his lawn?!?!?
He said nano -- the bastard child of pico.
Nano is the notepad of the POSIX world -- it eats line endings, messes up indentation, and makes a mess of config files -- just like pico did back in the day.
I still remember using elm with pico integration; it was great for writing an email, horrible for coding. I used emacs for that, until it started getting too unwieldy.
Now if I'm in a lightweight environment, I'll use ed. If I'm in a graphical environment, I'll use Sublime. If I'm in a terminal, I'll use vim. ...so the GP can get off MY lawn.
I use Sublime with vim bindings turned on. It has features I use every day that vi/vim doesn't have, and doesn't get in the way of my vim muscle memory. It also doesn't get in the way of my ed muscle memory, nor my Mac muscle memory. In fact, pretty much whatever legacy text editor my muscle memory thinks I'm using, Sublime will interpret the commands correctly and let me get the job done.
I've used all the listed editors, and eventually settled on the vim/Sublime combo, as they accomplish everything the others do, and then some.
And to think that 20 years ago, I was a diehard emacs user. I liked my macros, but Sublime can do all that too; it just prefers python over LISP.
Indeed -- and it's also the issue of short-term gain vs. long-term gain. People will hand over their Facebook passwords in exchange for chocolate. Just because an individual is short sighted shouldn't mean that their entire social community has to suffer in the long term because of it.
I'd disagree to your first part: there's not much difference between one President and another when you come right down to it; they are heavily restricted in their actions by policy makers. Plus, your municipal vote for the president has almost no effect on the result, compared to municipal elections where one interest group can sway the entire outcome. Mayors and aldermen have huge amounts of leeway, and their decisions affect your life directly.
I'd rather someone discovers a president was fraudulently elected than a mayor. But I'd rather that they found out the mayor too, if there was fraud involved. This is much easier to do with offline voting than with online voting.
I hate it when people try to vote against something that makes life easier, out of privacy concern and security...
If you have viruses on your machine, that's your own darn fault, why penalize everybody for your stupidity?
The second half has already been responded to, so I'll tackle this bit.
If you have malware on your machine, that's likely your own fault (most likely through ignorance). Unfortunately, everyone on your network, on your social network, and on the malware's distribution chain is penalized for your stupidity.
So let's back up one level...
Online voting makes life easier, agreed.
Unfortunately, abuse of online voting doesn't just affect the person not using it to vote, but also affects everyone in the municipality.
You can't have it both ways: either the upstream has to think of the privacy and security concerns, or the end operator (citizen) does.
As "online" implies global, it means that unlike mail-in, where abuse is likely limited to people who are actually a part of the municipality plus a few external interested parties, suddenly abuse is open to the entire world, where statistics indicate that a 0.001% of the 7 billion population = 70,000 actors likely to attempt to abuse the system for reason X instead of the 0.15 of a person who is likely to abuse the system for reason X locally.
The main way to ensure best security is to limit scope: only expose a function to the actors that need to access it. "On the Internet" does the inverse.
And that's just one reason it's a bad idea; there are plenty of others. All of them have solutions, but all the solutions are going to run afoul of statistics when you move a system that's been exposed to 15,000 people into an arena where it's exposed to 7 billion people.
You forgot -pulling off to the side of the road to let emergency vehicles pass
In most parts of the world, that first one could mean that they deliver the lobsters to the room in a live state.
Actually, that's not how it has always been. The "magic number" at one point was 13 years old; in recent history (past 50 years) it tended to be 21 years old. Over the past decade or so, it has creeped up to 30. This goes for all the things mentioned; cars, jobs, marriage, kids.
The reason? Should be obvious: baby boomers. They're keeping their money as they retire, and are often spending it in out-of-area places. As a result, the job shortage that still exists is filled by temps because it's the only way the companies can afford to sell things to the boomers at the prices they expect. If they raise prices and hire full-time employees, the boomers will go elsewhere to spend their disproportionate amount of money.
Once the boomers start to die off, we'll start to see the pendulum shift the other way, as local demand rises, job vacancies rise, and the value of local skilled labor finally rises. Of course, that's another 15 years off, by which point the millennials will be the establishment and it'll be the next generation that gets the benefit of having an earlier workforce transition.
in Canada, self-service checkouts have the impulse items surrounding the lineup area to get to the kiosks, similar to how they're positioned for the lineups to get to actual cashiers.
I'm no millennial, but I almost always use a self-service checkout at stores who have functioning* kiosks. I've spent my time as a kid doing those sorts of jobs, and tend to be better/faster at using the scanners than a checkout clerk -- so why spend 5 minutes waiting in line and an interminable time waiting for the clerk to process all my items, when I could breeze through a kiosk with no lineup in 30 seconds? I still talk to the store staff on the way out, but no longer have to deal with a lost 20 minutes in my day.
However, in Canada, there are still plenty of stores with buggy kiosks -- one of the common scenarios is kiosks running Windows Embedded with a small HD; the transaction logs have to be manually collected/cleared, and the longer they're left without doing that, the slower the interface becomes until it eventually goes unresponsive.
The other issue is places that haven't calibrated their scale response time correctly, so the kiosk keeps flagging up errors if you're not quick enough to drop your item (whether it be an over-sized item or a carton of eggs) onto the scale.
One of my local vendors also recently underwent ownership change, and the new owner's policy was that every credit card signature required employee verification -- so if you use an American Express at one of their kiosks, the thing starts blaring out its alarm as soon as you sign the pad, and then you have to stand and wait until some clerk has the time to go to the main kiosk console and hit "accept" (they never visually inspect, as they have no reason to -- if your signature doesn't match, there's no step 2; they can't decline the purchase under local laws and cardholder agreements).
But as I said; I still opt for the kiosk when possible -- if it's a small purchase, I can be in and out of the store in a matter of minutes; if it's a large purchase, I save the difference in time it takes me to process the items vs a worn out cashier.
The only people that don't benefit here are the extra staff that act as storage help and double as checkout overflow help when things get busy. But there are other jobs to do these days that pay better for the same skill set.
I used to have an account on DEC's Alpha test servers, and remember testing out VAX/VMS back in the day.
Seeing OpenVMS being pushed for Itanium products though... that's running one doomed OS on another doomed and believed extinct platform.
I don't really see where they're going to make a profit on this, at least enough to survive until they can port it over to a modern x86 architecture.
After they do THAT, I can see it being viable, especially if they provide legacy binary support. There's still a lot of iron running VMS, and most of it, while necessary infrastructure, is running on hardware that I can't imagine can last much longer.
But they'd better get the port and compatibility layer rock solid before they try selling it, or we're in for some painful times (brownouts, water service outages, etc).
Considering the guy moved from QuickTime to Kinoma Player to JavaScript-enabled Internet Thing authoring, you'd think we could at least expect the video in some JS-powered format available to all. Instead we get... Flash? Really?
QuickTime was actually an excellent multimedia container platform that integrated what Apple had learned from HyperCard with a multimedia delivery stack. It was technologically way more advanced than Shockwave and the other competitors of the time.
Unfortunately, the bastard child that was delivered to most Windows web browsers was actually Sorenson codec video in a QuickTime wrapper, pushed through a QuickTime Plugin. This plugin is what everyone has a deep loathing for -- to make QuickTime work on Windows, Apple had to port a major portion of the Mac OS API, as QuickTime integrated deeply into the system calls of the OS. So what Apple did was created a stripped-down Mac OS that ran inside a plugin for your browser. So every time you loaded a page that required the QuickTime plugin, your web browser booted Mac OS, which then loaded the QuickTime component handlers, which then grabbed the container and loaded the data stream. This was run through the codec handler, which then passed the result back to the OS, which used the QuickDraw renderer to blit the result to a virtual screen and audio device. THEN, the virtual screen was passed back to the plugin handler code and from there to DirectX, as was the audio.
So you ended up with a combination of the worst aspects of Windows, the worst aspects of browser plugin architecture, and the worst aspects of the Mac OS (inclduing bad memory management and cooperative multitasking) all being experienced in one place. No single point of failure here; it had so many potential points of failure that you generally hit at least one with each loaded instance of the plugin.
Actually, Quicktime was used at the Battle of Hastings; it's why the Harrold's defenders were broken -- the Normans ordered a Quicktime retreat, and after the English broke formation, the Normans regrouped and overwhelmed them.
the solder joints that were melting weren't on the PCB side; my statement was a bit misleading; it was the solder joints on the CRT lead side that melted, leaving the connection just being a slide clip. The problem was, they used the whole setup like a chimney, which meant that the left side of the CRT (from the front) which contained lots of shielding already, was used as one side of the chimney. Unfortunately, that's precisely where they had one of the interconnects for the ground plane (IIRC).
See the silver circle with the red triangle in https://www.youtube.com/watch?... at 2:32.
There were a number of aftermarket fan solutions created after this issue was discovered; this was one of the situations where The Steve stated "there must not be any fans in the case!" and people made it so, but then had to deal with the aftermath of using cold solder on a component in an area subject to heat buildup.
Oh yeah; and placing a large textbook on the top of a Plus, covering up the vents, could cause the plastic case to melt within a matter of hours.
Computer design really has come a long way since then.
Oh, the other irony: that video I linked to is a takeapart of a Mac Plus whose monitor stopped working. Three guesses as to the problem and fix? I don't think anyone ever told the guy though; his monitor could have been fixed years ago with a soldering gun and some modern RoHS solder.
Bought a no-moving-parts power supply back in... oh, I don't know, 2003 or something. Sold as "cooled by heatpipes", pretty much the same principle - silent, no moving parts, passively cooled, no fans, huge surface areas.
They also did kits for the processor itself but I've also bought P2-era motherboards that were designed to be passively cooled too (same thing, huge heatsink, no fan).
So this is certainly not "the first" in the PC world (unless we're talking about "the first" to use some particular technology that just about replicates what I bought over 10 years ago). Not even close. In fact, it's over a decade out. And going outside the PC world, passively cooled chips are pretty common - you have a tablet or smartphone without a huge stonking fan, no?
The PSU is still working 10 years on if you'd like me to dig it out. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to butcher it to do the same job to the processor, especially if you can safely have it clock itself down to prevent heat being generated in the first place.
I can do you one better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was a fanless high-end PC back in 1986.
But it didn't use foam; just rudimentary heat sinks and a well-planned ducting system. Oh yes, and the heat it generated melted the solder used to connect the monitor to the motherboard in the first few batches that came off the line, until they started using higher tolerance solder.
If this were the 1990s, this would be the perfect answer. Back then, the idea was that you use a firewall as a perimeter defense in a defense-in-depth strategy.
But this isn't the 1990s, this is 2014. Nowadays, you have to assume that at least one endpoint on your local network is compromised in some way, whether that be via malware infection, clueless intern, corporate espionage, disgruntled employee, etc.
These days, any decent firewall does a lot more than prevent access to ports -- most actively monitor the traffic passing through any open port, and when configured correctly (in this case for a DB server), they'll lock anything down and flag that doesn't look like a SQL transaction, and then check for common SQL exploits, for connections to network points that should not have access to that port, for binary objects being passed in the SQL queries, and more.
What this means is that if you consider a firewall to be enabling the Windows Firewall on your MSSQL Server/Windows Server 2008 box, it's probably a good idea just because those boxes are usually not locked down correctly, and someone could be browsing facebook in IE on that box unless the firewall prevents it. But this isn't really the sort of firewall you should be applying to a transaction server that may one day have to be PCI DSS compliant.
See https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c... for one case study of how things can go horribly wrong incrementally.