This is just some kind of spread-spectrum technology, nothing new... The signal consists of pseudo-noise. If the receiver knows the key to this pseudo-noise and can synchronize to it, he can decipher the message. This idea and this technology have been around for years.
For me, the trick is to type in a made-up language: type a Z wherever I want to type a W, type a Q wherever I want to type an A, switch the M and the ","... This trick would probably not work to make the switch between QWERTY and DVORAK.
<day er frg m.abZ Cy-o.aof yr yfl. cb ydco nabigai.! Rrlow urpiry yr o.y mf t.fxrape yr EKRPATvvv S)
A key property of any good encryption scheme is that even if everyone knows how it works, it's still unfeasible to crack a message encrypted with it, if you don't have the encryption key. Any encryption scheme based on obfuscation of the algorithm is inherently bad. One day or another, somebody will find out how it works and then it becomes useless. If the security is only dependant on the security of the key, the algorithm will only become useless when cracking the key becomes feasible in a reasonable time.
DRM, however, is not a classic form of encryption. So I don't know how well the paradigm of key security holds here. Maybe the inherently bad approach of obfuscation is inevitable for something inherently bad like DRM -- just face it: only 1/10000 people on earth want it. All the rest hates it.
Yep, but the core problem with most people is that they fail to understand that reading an article about remixing, however enthousiastic it may be written, does not mean that everyone from now on will only be making bland remixes without making anything substantially new.
Digital anything is very malleable and stagnation sucks.
Yeah, but digital anything is also very identically copyable. Before the 'digital age', people were forced to make their own interpretation of something they wanted to 'copy', often causing them to adapt it anyway. Now, anyone can simply clone anything without adding anything of him/herself, and this is happening a lot, especially in music. Trying to play a similar riff from another song on your own guitar is not the same as pushing 3 buttons to sample a 'hook' from an old monster hit and repeating it endlessly (or just copying the whole song) with a drum machine underneath. Anyone can do that and you simply know that if this remix has success, it's only because of the success of the old hit and not because of the 'creativity' contained in the remix minus the sample. Heck, one could even write a program which spits out such 'remixes' faster than real-time.
I guess this article and/or the way people interpret it, again suffers from the "X is new, therefore it's cool and it will replace everything we know" syndrome. Just face it, without people actually making new stuff regularly, this would be a very boring world.
Why don't all those (fill in favourite insult(s) here) terrorists just put themselves in a large bus and blow themselves up. Ah wait, then they wouldn't kill any innocent people, which for some reason seems to be their ultimate goal somehow...
Of course the people who were spammed lost weight. They were simply more stressed, reducing their appetite, and had to use more muscles to hit their delete buttons and bang their frustrated heads against their monitors!
Hmm, what about the isNot operator? (link 2)
And as far as I can remember, someone managed to patent the wheel somewhere (just to prove how ridiculous the patent systems in some countries are).
I really liked Myst. That was truly an innovative game. The only thing the manual explained was how to install the game. Finding out what the goal was and even how to play it, was part of the game. At least this was the case with the original Mac version. It wouldn't surprise me if they screwed this up when the game became really popular.
Hit glass and the glass will shatter and suck everything out of it.
Do you really believe there is any glass in an airplane except for the ones used for beverages? The windows are double-wall plexi and are very solid. A bullet hole won't cause the window to shatter and multiple well-placed shots would be needed to cause the window to tear.
And even if someone would manage to rip out an entire passenger window, people wouldn't get sucked out like in the movies. Airplanes have air valves which continuously let air in and out (see here). If air would start flowing out of the cabin elsewhere, the valves will adjust and the net flow of air would stay the same. It requires a pretty large hole to exceed the capacity of these valves.
I often use Print screen in Gnome. Surely beats looking for some program in the application menu or wasting valuable space with an extra icon in the toolbar.
Gentoo supports Scroll lock in the terminal and it can be pretty handy if you see something suspicious scrolling by during a compilation or whatever. Unfortunately not many programs support scroll lock, although it would be handy if programs like irssi could lock the chat log while I'm away.
... unless you have a 'geek-proof' keyboard with the characters melted into the keys as differently colored plastic. But most manufacturers nowadays seem to go the cheap way of printing stuff on the keys instead.
I'm not aware of any 7200rpm 2.5" drives, and if there were any, they still wouldn't keep up with high performance 8MB cache designs such as those offered by Western Digital and others.
There simply isn't enough room nor heat disipation capacity in the 2.5" form factor for desktop level performance.
You may be right, the smaller disk diameter will cause the linear speed to be lower than with a 3.5" disk at the same rpm. If everything scales linearly, the factor would be 0.71, so a 3.5" disk would get 1.4 times the performance of a 2.5" disk with the same rpm and design, when testing sustained data transfer rate.
Why then was it so common to have a magic nephew -- or should I say wizard -- somewhere in the family who wrote all those post-its with cryptic commands -- or should I say recipies -- on them which told how to start your favourite game, your word processor,... And who was to be phoned as soon as something unusual like "Could not read from drive A. Abort, retry, fail?" happened?
Maybe, but whoever can trick a large computer manufacturer into bundling their PCs with your OS, and asking a small license fee for every copy sold, also owns the market.
That's why the test was always performed inside a special ventilated glass cabin. Or did you think we all just gathered around a bucked of water on the table, and took bets on in whose face the lithium bits would spatter?
Maybe all warnings should be replaced with a single "Warning: stupid behaviour may cause death or injury. Please notify Darwin Awards committee before attempting anything stupid."
Re:The kid pierced the Li Ion battery with a screw
on
iPod Dangerous When Wet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The combination of Lithium with water is also a very bad idea. It simply explodes -- that's why throwing pieces of lithium into water was one of my chemistry teacher's favourite experiments.
Maybe either the machine washing treatment caused water to get inside the battery, or more likely, the iPod was still wet inside when the kid was opening it. If he then damaged the battery and water got inside, it was only logical that the battery exploded. Even humid air is enough to cause the Lithium to react!
Actually the tolerance for elcos is asymmetric: the tolerance below the indicated value is tighter than above it. This is because in the applications they're used for (power circuits), it's often better to have too much capacitance than too little.
The products advertised for in spam mails are either non-existant or overpriced junk. Saying that advertising for them is useful, is like saying that it's useful to walk around in a crowded market place with a megaphone, shouting "BUY OGOBOGOWBOLGO!" But if you really want to, go ahead and buy your 'online meds' which may either have exactly the same effect as school chalk, or turn your bowels inside out. I however, prefer buying real stuff from real people who respect my privacy and actually pay for their advertising.
Hmm, never heard of this guy until now. It was interesting to read. However, it's almost certain that this is a hoax, albeit done by an intelligent and talented man. What he did was trying to turn insightful predictions into something that people would actually be interested in. Time travel speaks to the imagination of many people, insightful predictions don't. He just used the time travel story as a vehicle to try to make people aware of what is going wrong in our current world. Most of his predictions are based on things that were known somewhere at the moment he made them. It was just a matter of finding that information. It's not because something hasn't been published widely yet, that it's not 'known' yet... Other predictions are just based on plausible extrapolations of current events.
Of course many people don't buy the time travel story, hence don't believe anything of it. But at least he has managed to address some people. And for the others it was just entertaining:)
So if I get it right, this is just a drive with a very large, albeit slow, memory cache. They expect the users to address their data in separate chunks of 128MB. As soon as you go outside of this chunk you'll have to spin up the drive to read the file -- which will, of course, reduce the responsiveness of the system. Moreover, drives don't only wear out due to the disk spinning. Every spin-up and spin-down cycle causes additional wear, so I doubt this idea will reduce the failure rate for laptop disks. Actually this article looks more like publicity for Longhorn...
Slashdot Mirror
This is just some kind of spread-spectrum technology, nothing new... The signal consists of pseudo-noise. If the receiver knows the key to this pseudo-noise and can synchronize to it, he can decipher the message. This idea and this technology have been around for years.
OK, my mistake, it should have been: ;dk mt vdtnsaoh ks H>SOAVeee Z)
<jak hs tsf mdal{ Gkq; da;t ks ktrd gl kjg; palufaud! Ssr;w ysousk ks
A key property of any good encryption scheme is that even if everyone knows how it works, it's still unfeasible to crack a message encrypted with it, if you don't have the encryption key. Any encryption scheme based on obfuscation of the algorithm is inherently bad. One day or another, somebody will find out how it works and then it becomes useless. If the security is only dependant on the security of the key, the algorithm will only become useless when cracking the key becomes feasible in a reasonable time.
DRM, however, is not a classic form of encryption. So I don't know how well the paradigm of key security holds here. Maybe the inherently bad approach of obfuscation is inevitable for something inherently bad like DRM -- just face it: only 1/10000 people on earth want it. All the rest hates it.
Yep, but the core problem with most people is that they fail to understand that reading an article about remixing, however enthousiastic it may be written, does not mean that everyone from now on will only be making bland remixes without making anything substantially new.
I guess this article and/or the way people interpret it, again suffers from the "X is new, therefore it's cool and it will replace everything we know" syndrome. Just face it, without people actually making new stuff regularly, this would be a very boring world.
Why don't all those (fill in favourite insult(s) here) terrorists just put themselves in a large bus and blow themselves up. Ah wait, then they wouldn't kill any innocent people, which for some reason seems to be their ultimate goal somehow...
Of course the people who were spammed lost weight. They were simply more stressed, reducing their appetite, and had to use more muscles to hit their delete buttons and bang their frustrated heads against their monitors!
And as far as I can remember, someone managed to patent the wheel somewhere (just to prove how ridiculous the patent systems in some countries are).
I would use a spork instead of a simple spoon.
I really liked Myst. That was truly an innovative game. The only thing the manual explained was how to install the game. Finding out what the goal was and even how to play it, was part of the game. At least this was the case with the original Mac version. It wouldn't surprise me if they screwed this up when the game became really popular.
And even if someone would manage to rip out an entire passenger window, people wouldn't get sucked out like in the movies. Airplanes have air valves which continuously let air in and out (see here). If air would start flowing out of the cabin elsewhere, the valves will adjust and the net flow of air would stay the same. It requires a pretty large hole to exceed the capacity of these valves.
Gentoo supports Scroll lock in the terminal and it can be pretty handy if you see something suspicious scrolling by during a compilation or whatever. Unfortunately not many programs support scroll lock, although it would be handy if programs like irssi could lock the chat log while I'm away.
... unless you have a 'geek-proof' keyboard with the characters melted into the keys as differently colored plastic. But most manufacturers nowadays seem to go the cheap way of printing stuff on the keys instead.
Maybe, but whoever can trick a large computer manufacturer into bundling their PCs with your OS, and asking a small license fee for every copy sold, also owns the market.
That's why the test was always performed inside a special ventilated glass cabin. Or did you think we all just gathered around a bucked of water on the table, and took bets on in whose face the lithium bits would spatter?
Maybe all warnings should be replaced with a single "Warning: stupid behaviour may cause death or injury. Please notify Darwin Awards committee before attempting anything stupid."
The combination of Lithium with water is also a very bad idea. It simply explodes -- that's why throwing pieces of lithium into water was one of my chemistry teacher's favourite experiments.
Maybe either the machine washing treatment caused water to get inside the battery, or more likely, the iPod was still wet inside when the kid was opening it. If he then damaged the battery and water got inside, it was only logical that the battery exploded. Even humid air is enough to cause the Lithium to react!
Actually the tolerance for elcos is asymmetric: the tolerance below the indicated value is tighter than above it. This is because in the applications they're used for (power circuits), it's often better to have too much capacitance than too little.
The products advertised for in spam mails are either non-existant or overpriced junk. Saying that advertising for them is useful, is like saying that it's useful to walk around in a crowded market place with a megaphone, shouting "BUY OGOBOGOWBOLGO!" But if you really want to, go ahead and buy your 'online meds' which may either have exactly the same effect as school chalk, or turn your bowels inside out. I however, prefer buying real stuff from real people who respect my privacy and actually pay for their advertising.
Hmm, never heard of this guy until now. It was interesting to read. However, it's almost certain that this is a hoax, albeit done by an intelligent and talented man. What he did was trying to turn insightful predictions into something that people would actually be interested in. Time travel speaks to the imagination of many people, insightful predictions don't. He just used the time travel story as a vehicle to try to make people aware of what is going wrong in our current world. Most of his predictions are based on things that were known somewhere at the moment he made them. It was just a matter of finding that information. It's not because something hasn't been published widely yet, that it's not 'known' yet... Other predictions are just based on plausible extrapolations of current events. :)
Of course many people don't buy the time travel story, hence don't believe anything of it. But at least he has managed to address some people. And for the others it was just entertaining
So if I get it right, this is just a drive with a very large, albeit slow, memory cache. They expect the users to address their data in separate chunks of 128MB. As soon as you go outside of this chunk you'll have to spin up the drive to read the file -- which will, of course, reduce the responsiveness of the system. Moreover, drives don't only wear out due to the disk spinning. Every spin-up and spin-down cycle causes additional wear, so I doubt this idea will reduce the failure rate for laptop disks. Actually this article looks more like publicity for Longhorn...