An easy option is to just hold down the power button until the machine powers off. This is usually controlled by the power microcontroller and cannot be disabled by the OS.
Of course, while in MacOS, you should be able to hit Command+Option+Esc to force quit any frozen application.
Assume for sake of discussion that game companies using DirectX is a bad thing.
If they ignore the xbox segment, they lose a lot of customers, so the game companies (EA, I'm looking at you) just _have_ to write for xbox. So then they're already coding to DirectX, so they just port it over to Windows. So then I can't play their games unless I have Windows Vista Extreme Ultimate Gamer Edition Fatal1ty Server (MSRP $9,999 per seat).
Oh, and now DirectX goes to 11.
I know that OpenGL isn't always the easiest API to write for. But if you want to sway the game companies, chuck your xbox.
What AC->DC transformer? LEDs sink a lot of current when they are over voltage, but they are diodes. Hook them up in series if you must -- half of them in one polarity and half in the opposite and the diode in them automatically rectifies things.
You might add a rectifier (four diodes) and a high frequency oscillator and treat it like a DC-DC problem and charge up an inductor to step down the voltage. But then you have to hook them all up in parallel. Just do it christmas lights fashion and forget the expensive DC-DC converter.
The only problem with LED lights is the high manufacturing cost, so they can't show up on the WalMart shelves for $5. But with a 200k hour lifespan, they are worth more than that. CFL ballasts I agree with you.
Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.
It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about drills.
The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.
During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder.
I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufact
You obviously don't fit those requirements. Real Photoshop, FCP, and Avid users aren't concerned about swap, they're concerned about Disk I/O speeds, and they don't want Windows swapping things to disk.
As an admin for a video editing shop, we turned off swap long ago. The programs we use know how much ram and how much disk ("cache") to use already, and they don't want anyone getting in their way.
Especially not swapping, which thrashes the seek time.
You mistake the interplay between truth (is there any?), theory, hypothesis, and observation.
Both science and faith can exist in this gray area.
Science generates incremental, provable (observable, repeatable) hypotheses. If these are generally believed (faith!), they are called a theory. There is no generally accepted absolute truth available to a scientist.
I refer you to Albert Einstein's quote, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," and so religion at least can co-exist with science. You certainly don't have to accept either one!
Faith in the scientific method and in the majority of your scientific peers is essential, unless you intend to resolve everything you believe in through exhaustive observations -- and then you would only have it down to a small probability that you are deceived. Scientists must consider their peers and teachers trustworthy, or our collected knowledge could not be accepted and those who found it out would die faster than those who could prove it to themselves.
Faith in absolute truths accepted by a large population at some point gets called a "religion."Pascal's wager -- since the majority of the humans alive today are religious, you are safer to accept the hypothesis that religion is not a hoax, than you are to accept the hypothesis that religion is a hoax -- implies that science provides support of faith.
So in other words, science (about faith) proves that faith is a reasonable assumption -- as much as science can prove anything. Faith (in science) is a necessary assumption to prevent the loss of scientific knowledge, and faith as a general quality allows scientists to work together.
Science often suffers from "groupthink." Faith often also gets lost in "myth." All in pursuit of truth, something that men can't ever really capture.
You argue that any bit of faith makes a person blind, but you've taken that as a premise to your argument: "religion by definition requires blind faith." What definition are you going by? Religion is a very complex subject, but appealing to Wikipedia just to simplify things still leaves you with this:
A religion is a set of tenets and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and religious experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.
In the frame of western religious thought, religions present a common quality, the "hallmark of patriarchal religious thought": the division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane. Religion is often described as a communal system for the coherence of belief focusing on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth. Moral codes, practices, values, institutions, tradition, rituals, and scriptures are often traditionally associated with the core belief, and these may have some overlap with concepts in secular philosophy. Religion is also often described as a "way of life" or a life stance.
The development of religion has taken many forms in various cultures. "Organized religion" generally refers to an organization of people supporting the exercise of some religion with a prescribed set of beliefs, often taking the form of a legal entity (see religion-supporting organization). Other religions believe in personal revelation. "Religion" is sometimes used interchangeably with "faith" or "belief system," but is more socially defined than that of personal convictions.
You might prove to a believer that their belief is false (impossible, since religion is not falsifiable - it is "personal faith and religious experience").
Or you will have to demonstrate the exact rational nature of religion, which is impossible as long as religion escapes out through "division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane."
So if you swear off all religion, Mr. Einstein says you're in bad shape. But as long as you don't swear off all science, the two ought to coexist, according to him.
I completely agree with your analysis. What if the conclusion is a little more nuanced, though?
What if Apple understood what the customer wanted well enough to make their DRM unobtrusive enough to be successful enough (compare, say, to PlaysForSure) that the music industry feared them enough that the execs decided they needed to regain their freedom from DRM.
It's not very often that you see poetic justice like this. Pause for a sec and appreciate the irony: music executives hate Apple DRM because it prevents them from doing something they love. Specifically it prevents them from bilking customers by raising prices on popular tracks while lowering prices on tracks nobody buys.
And Apple says, no way. Customers don't want complicated variable pricing. And the music execs have to accept Apple's DRM or reduce their sales in the only rapid growth sector to nil (see PlaysForSure).
If that wasn't ironic enough, the only other option an iPod supports is unencrypted. Yes, it allows a user to move their songs to other players, but the music execs don't want that either! They want to charge once for your PC, once for your iPod, and once each for your Rio, your Nokia, and your next male child.
Apple didn't kill DRM -- the music execs are so apoplectic that they can't even spit straight -- and customers are killing DRM while the music industry impotently foams at the mouth.
Or, when is the last time you listened to Napster?
Just a quick note, though. The audio that has already been put through your work's phone system will pick up a significant delay going through a Digium card.
The latency can introduce noticeable echoes (probably only on your speaker, not the other end) and make the call quality unacceptable.
This is a transcript of MS Legal discussing a new name: (ok, it's a joke. laugh.)
SBalmer: Developers! We need a new chair, I mean a new name for the Vista code. It can't start with a V -- people already think virus with that. And it should go to eleven.
BSmith: Why don't we call it Door?
SBalmer: That's a good idea. But a web service should start with "my."
BSmith: Then call it MyDoor.
SBalmer: Web 2.0 starts with an 'i.' How do we add an 'i' to it?
BSmith: MiDoorI?
Assistant Paralegal to BSmith: Sir, that name is already trademarked.
At that point, slashdot and schneier.com are just trolling. Read the whole email I quote above:
We went through this discussion a couple of weeks ago, and I had absolutely zero interest in explaining it again.
I personally don't like embargoes. I don't think they work. That means
that I want to fix things asap. But that also means that there is never a
time when you can "let people know", except when it's not an issue any
more, at which point there is no _point_ in letting people know any more.
So I personally consider security bugs to be just "normal bugs". I don't
cover them up, but I also don't have any reason what-so-ever to think it's
a good idea to track them and announce them as something special.
So there is no "policy". Nor is it likely to change.
It's a flamebait email thread. Linus has harsh words for BSD. Nobody ever said Linus doesn't do that -- but this is not security through obscurity.
His take on security issues is simply: they're bugs. Deal with it.
It really works! (ob. disclaimer: satisfied customer)
Our company forwards email to google (MX record in the DNS), where it runs through the spam filter and then a forwarding rule (an anything-but-spam rule) sends it on to our mailboxes.
In other words, let's not have more laws that we selectively discriminate with. No, let's enforce the good laws that we have and get rid of all the rest of the junk that has piled up in lawbooks.
So I am going to avoid talking about the specific reasoning of specific laws (arguments pro and con, protection of minorities, tragedy of the commons... the list is a long one). Let's see how far I can get on generalities.;-)
Thomas Jefferson was careful to separate "just powers" and "unjust oppression." It is possible, just barely, that some of the things the USA Federal Government does are not only just, but useful. So the laws instituting these government services wouldn't fall under the category of "prohibiting a specific wrong action."
But even talking about restrictive laws, the purpose of the laws is to establish the consensus. Once that consensus is established, individuals must weigh the cost/benefit of just following the law or working to get it changed. If enough people are sympathetic to the plight of the 2am crowd in need of entertainment, they will come up with something.
My guess is that the people who would cause trouble at 2am fall under the tasks the people have assigned to State Governments, not the Federal Government.
The rights of individuals do not stem from the Constitution. The Constitution (well, Bill of Rights) specifically lists some rights that are protected, and shall not be infringed, to limit the powers of the government.
If owning a gun made sense in 1776, well, that's great. Let's just leave it in there and not ban it.
If there are new protections which we must add, to further limit the government, such as the protection of privacy (unreasonable search and seizure?), perhaps we need a new amendment.
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
--Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:429
In case you don't see the connection, I'll spell it out: "Oh judge, what good are your laws?" They represent the consensus of the governed. The bad man will not follow them but the government will enforce them. This will always be true.
The good man absolutely does need laws, as the laws spell out what the consensus is, and as long as the rule of law exists, where laws are applied equally and fairly to all the governed, then the good man will accept them if they are acceptable, and will work through legitimate channels if they must be changed.
Or would it make sense to say, "Oh Grocery Store, what good are your prices? The shoplifter will not follow them, and the good shopper does not read them." -- no, of course not.
You would be right, mostly. The bandwidth on the HDMI signal is high enough that it's expensive just to capture it, so I'm guessing the approach right now is to grab the compressed video before it is decoded.
You could probably create an HDMI capture solution by designing a custom digital circuit. But the data would be encrypted.
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought and enjoyed your album. Thanks!
The most stringent reset process is the Parameter Reset (the equivalent of taking out the CMOS/NVRAM battery) - Command+Option+P+R
Safe Mode is activated by holding down shift.
An easy option is to just hold down the power button until the machine powers off. This is usually controlled by the power microcontroller and cannot be disabled by the OS.
Of course, while in MacOS, you should be able to hit Command+Option+Esc to force quit any frozen application.
This article summarizes your options.
Some Mac DHCP implementations (OS X 10.5 comes to mind) time out instead of succeeding after 30 seconds.
You have to renew to get an IP address.
Assume for sake of discussion that game companies using DirectX is a bad thing.
If they ignore the xbox segment, they lose a lot of customers, so the game companies (EA, I'm looking at you) just _have_ to write for xbox. So then they're already coding to DirectX, so they just port it over to Windows. So then I can't play their games unless I have Windows Vista Extreme Ultimate Gamer Edition Fatal1ty Server (MSRP $9,999 per seat).
Oh, and now DirectX goes to 11.
I know that OpenGL isn't always the easiest API to write for. But if you want to sway the game companies, chuck your xbox.
I'll get modded down in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...
What AC->DC transformer? LEDs sink a lot of current when they are over voltage, but they are diodes. Hook them up in series if you must -- half of them in one polarity and half in the opposite and the diode in them automatically rectifies things.
You might add a rectifier (four diodes) and a high frequency oscillator and treat it like a DC-DC problem and charge up an inductor to step down the voltage. But then you have to hook them all up in parallel. Just do it christmas lights fashion and forget the expensive DC-DC converter.
The only problem with LED lights is the high manufacturing cost, so they can't show up on the WalMart shelves for $5. But with a 200k hour lifespan, they are worth more than that. CFL ballasts I agree with you.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
You obviously don't fit those requirements. Real Photoshop, FCP, and Avid users aren't concerned about swap, they're concerned about Disk I/O speeds, and they don't want Windows swapping things to disk.
As an admin for a video editing shop, we turned off swap long ago. The programs we use know how much ram and how much disk ("cache") to use already, and they don't want anyone getting in their way.
Especially not swapping, which thrashes the seek time.
What about TTL (a.k.a. Hop Limit)?
I am not saying that it gives perfect network-locality. But it's way, way better than random.
I wonder if the gmail admins are trying to ID mail sender IPs based on the noticeable traffic pattern of the last few weeks...
You mistake the interplay between truth (is there any?), theory, hypothesis, and observation.
Both science and faith can exist in this gray area.
Science generates incremental, provable (observable, repeatable) hypotheses. If these are generally believed (faith!), they are called a theory. There is no generally accepted absolute truth available to a scientist.
I refer you to Albert Einstein's quote, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," and so religion at least can co-exist with science. You certainly don't have to accept either one!
Faith in the scientific method and in the majority of your scientific peers is essential, unless you intend to resolve everything you believe in through exhaustive observations -- and then you would only have it down to a small probability that you are deceived. Scientists must consider their peers and teachers trustworthy, or our collected knowledge could not be accepted and those who found it out would die faster than those who could prove it to themselves.
Faith in absolute truths accepted by a large population at some point gets called a "religion." Pascal's wager -- since the majority of the humans alive today are religious, you are safer to accept the hypothesis that religion is not a hoax, than you are to accept the hypothesis that religion is a hoax -- implies that science provides support of faith.
So in other words, science (about faith) proves that faith is a reasonable assumption -- as much as science can prove anything. Faith (in science) is a necessary assumption to prevent the loss of scientific knowledge, and faith as a general quality allows scientists to work together.
Science often suffers from "groupthink." Faith often also gets lost in "myth." All in pursuit of truth, something that men can't ever really capture.
Good luck!
You might prove to a believer that their belief is false (impossible, since religion is not falsifiable - it is "personal faith and religious experience").
Or you will have to demonstrate the exact rational nature of religion, which is impossible as long as religion escapes out through "division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane."
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. - Albert Einstein (1941)
So if you swear off all religion, Mr. Einstein says you're in bad shape. But as long as you don't swear off all science, the two ought to coexist, according to him.
Not even close. Even if I had a 125 mile commute one way and needed 53 KWh each night, at my current rates (with fees) it would cost me $14.59.
If gas is $3.50/gal, I would have to be getting 60 MPG to be able to drive 250 mi and only spend $14.59.
I completely agree with your analysis. What if the conclusion is a little more nuanced, though?
What if Apple understood what the customer wanted well enough to make their DRM unobtrusive enough to be successful enough (compare, say, to PlaysForSure) that the music industry feared them enough that the execs decided they needed to regain their freedom from DRM.
It's not very often that you see poetic justice like this. Pause for a sec and appreciate the irony: music executives hate Apple DRM because it prevents them from doing something they love. Specifically it prevents them from bilking customers by raising prices on popular tracks while lowering prices on tracks nobody buys.
And Apple says, no way. Customers don't want complicated variable pricing. And the music execs have to accept Apple's DRM or reduce their sales in the only rapid growth sector to nil (see PlaysForSure).
If that wasn't ironic enough, the only other option an iPod supports is unencrypted. Yes, it allows a user to move their songs to other players, but the music execs don't want that either! They want to charge once for your PC, once for your iPod, and once each for your Rio, your Nokia, and your next male child.
Apple didn't kill DRM -- the music execs are so apoplectic that they can't even spit straight -- and customers are killing DRM while the music industry impotently foams at the mouth.
Or, when is the last time you listened to Napster?
Just a quick note, though. The audio that has already been put through your work's phone system will pick up a significant delay going through a Digium card.
The latency can introduce noticeable echoes (probably only on your speaker, not the other end) and make the call quality unacceptable.
YMMV
This is a transcript of MS Legal discussing a new name: (ok, it's a joke. laugh.)
SBalmer: Developers! We need a new chair, I mean a new name for the Vista code. It can't start with a V -- people already think virus with that. And it should go to eleven.
BSmith: Why don't we call it Door?
SBalmer: That's a good idea. But a web service should start with "my."
BSmith: Then call it MyDoor.
SBalmer: Web 2.0 starts with an 'i.' How do we add an 'i' to it?
BSmith: MiDoorI?
Assistant Paralegal to BSmith: Sir, that name is already trademarked.
SBalmer: Buy 'em out, boys.
At that point, slashdot and schneier.com are just trolling. Read the whole email I quote above:
It's a flamebait email thread. Linus has harsh words for BSD. Nobody ever said Linus doesn't do that -- but this is not security through obscurity.
His take on security issues is simply: they're bugs. Deal with it.
It really works! (ob. disclaimer: satisfied customer)
:-)
Our company forwards email to google (MX record in the DNS), where it runs through the spam filter and then a forwarding rule (an anything-but-spam rule) sends it on to our mailboxes.
For free...
An election is certainly a job interview. But it isn't a "lawmaker" job in my book. I think it's a job to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, among other things.
In other words, let's not have more laws that we selectively discriminate with. No, let's enforce the good laws that we have and get rid of all the rest of the junk that has piled up in lawbooks.
A summary of Blackswift's project status:
DARPA project overview of HTV-3X: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MhtLWB0dJ8
Register article on the hydrocarbon-burning scramject (DCR): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/11/darpa_hypersonic_blackswift_details_released/ and how Congress cut its funding in June
NASA test of X-43A (operation in Mach 6 regime): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFHbjpc_dJ4
IMHO it's real, it's being tested at NASA, and it's probably going to burn through $1 billion before the end of 2009... unfortunately...
So I am going to avoid talking about the specific reasoning of specific laws (arguments pro and con, protection of minorities, tragedy of the commons ... the list is a long one). Let's see how far I can get on generalities. ;-)
Thomas Jefferson was careful to separate "just powers" and "unjust oppression." It is possible, just barely, that some of the things the USA Federal Government does are not only just, but useful. So the laws instituting these government services wouldn't fall under the category of "prohibiting a specific wrong action."
But even talking about restrictive laws, the purpose of the laws is to establish the consensus. Once that consensus is established, individuals must weigh the cost/benefit of just following the law or working to get it changed. If enough people are sympathetic to the plight of the 2am crowd in need of entertainment, they will come up with something.
My guess is that the people who would cause trouble at 2am fall under the tasks the people have assigned to State Governments, not the Federal Government.
The rights of individuals do not stem from the Constitution. The Constitution (well, Bill of Rights) specifically lists some rights that are protected, and shall not be infringed, to limit the powers of the government.
If owning a gun made sense in 1776, well, that's great. Let's just leave it in there and not ban it.
If there are new protections which we must add, to further limit the government, such as the protection of privacy (unreasonable search and seizure?), perhaps we need a new amendment.
In case you don't see the connection, I'll spell it out: "Oh judge, what good are your laws?" They represent the consensus of the governed. The bad man will not follow them but the government will enforce them. This will always be true.
The good man absolutely does need laws, as the laws spell out what the consensus is, and as long as the rule of law exists, where laws are applied equally and fairly to all the governed, then the good man will accept them if they are acceptable, and will work through legitimate channels if they must be changed.
Or would it make sense to say, "Oh Grocery Store, what good are your prices? The shoplifter will not follow them, and the good shopper does not read them." -- no, of course not.
You would be right, mostly. The bandwidth on the HDMI signal is high enough that it's expensive just to capture it, so I'm guessing the approach right now is to grab the compressed video before it is decoded.
You could probably create an HDMI capture solution by designing a custom digital circuit. But the data would be encrypted.
Thanks for the insights.