They will still detect IR even with the blocking filter in place. I have one of the old Sony camcorders with the original NightShot. One of the things that the NightShot switch did was to pull the IR blocking filter out of the way. With it in place, you can still easily see an IR emitter like a remote control if pointed right at the camera, and in a dark room a TV remote will act like a very weak flashlight, producing a small lighted area on a piece of paper for a few inches. With the IR blocking filter out of the way, an IR remote can light up a whole room.
At the intensity that I'm assuming that these things emit to get the light to see it, I'm sure that any camcorder would be able to see it as well.
I believe that this is a result of design. If you have a well designed system, then a vulnerability is probably a result of a simple programming flaw. Fixing such problems is usually just a matter of changing a few lines of code, or at most perhaps adding a layer of error checking.
If you have a system designed like a Big Ball of Mud, then a vulnerability is likely to be the result of unanticipated interactions between different modules. When you try to fix that, then you are just changing to a different set of unanticipated interactions. Fixing such systems often involves making sweeping changes across all of the modules that you can think of that interact with the problem module.
It's not surprising that "fixing" something in such a system breaks other things. All you can hope for is that you break less than you fix, and the breaks won't be discovered for a while.
I just whipped up a spreadsheet. 2^128 is enough IP addresses to give 2.68*10^15 addresses to every square millimeter of surface area of every planet in the solar system, plus the moon, Charon, and the Galilean Jovian satellites.
That should last a while. But I'm all for overkill. I was glad when Maxtor finally punted and made BigDrive able to address a BIG ASSED address space; if you're redefining a standard, no point in just doubling it or even *16; go big!
X10.com is not really related in any way to the x10 protocol or x10 devices
Well, other than they're the X10 that INVENTED the X10 protocol and MAKES the X10 devices.
x10.com seems to sell webcams mostly to people who hope to catch hot chicks on camera
I'm thinking about suing them; I bought a camera and I haven't cap'd a single bikini chick smiling into it yet! Their ad practically guarantees hot candid action!
I was at a friend's desk the other day, he mistyped a URL, and had about a dozen pop-unders to kill. I asked him when he was going to stop running shit-ware on his machine, he just said "Yeah, I know, I know. I'm just too lazy." Seems like running Mozilla IS the lazy thing to do; manually killing pop-up/unders is the wasteful, time consuming thing to do.
If you take this logic to its end, then nobody should be able to patent anything run on a computer; they're just using the programmable digital calculation machine to do things. No computer patents are valid!
At the very least, if you're saying that anything written in Javascript wouldn't be patentable because it's the Javascript that enabled it, then the same could be true of any language.
If you're just talking about embedding language in an application (like a web browser) then no technology developed on any kind of a plug-in architecture would be patentable.
I'm not saying they SHOULD be patented, just that I don't think this is a good argument.
Exactly; we need reprocessing. We don't do it because everyone's terrified that someone will make a bomb using it, but the reality is that we pay huge amounts of money to throw away stuff that could be recycled into fuel if we built reactors that would accomplish it.
"most radioactive in the world" - do you have a cite for that? That could mean anything. How many thousands of gallons of it a day would you have to drink to increase your cancer risk 1%?
I'm not talking about allowing dangerous designs. I'm talking about making the bureaucracy so thick that it's impossible to build a plant.
I had a cousin who worked for the contractor building a nuclear plant in Michigan. At one point, the plant was 95% complete. When the project was finally abandoned, it was about 70% complete.
Why? Because they kept changing the laws. They'd finish a section, get it inspected and OK'd, then a few months later the government would come back to them and say "OK, that section that you completed, and we OK'd as being done and safe? The laws have changed, you'll have to rip out the whole thing and start over."
This is just stupidity. Not allowing the idiotic and unsafe design of Chernobyl is another thing entirely. Look at Three Mile Island; yes, it was a bad deal, but it was caused by human operator error, and EVEN with all that operator error, it still was a pretty minor problem, especially compared to Chernobyl, which caused massive injury to civilians, is still glowing and will be for a long time.
I bet coal fired plants kill more people every year than all the nuke plants ever did. Coal plants release both toxins and radioactive materials. Extend that to coal mining and supporting industries and it's way worse.
cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the world with solar cells
Using desert area to make electricity is a great idea, but solar cells would be a completely idiotic way to do it. Solar cells cost way too much per watt, and their efficiency is too low.
What you want is steered mirrors boiling water in a tower, running a turbine. Much cheaper per watt, much more scalable, and it's actually pretty doable right now; in fact there have been test sites for decades.
Of course, one other consideration is that transporting power is a non-trivial problem. Much of the world (including where I live) is hundreds of miles from anywhere that solar makes sense in large quantities, or wind, or geothermal. There are some small wind, solar, and hydro projects around here (southeast Michigan) but they couldn't provide a significant fraction of what is used.
Of course, IMHO we're way underutilizing nuclear, due to irrational fear and the resultant ridiculous over-regulation of nuclear plants. I mean, in a social climate where NMR had to be renamed because people were afraid of the "Nuclear" part, what can you expect?
OK, editing that list so that it only answers the actual question (different from Mozilla):
# Automatic Popup Blocking, right out of the box # Simplified Privacy Controls # Integrated Search Bar # Smart Form Fill # Automatic Downloading # Extensions # Bookmark Panels # Configurable Toolbars
OK, so take Mozilla, turn on the popup blocking, and you're nearly there. I'm not sure about some of these features. I actively dislike smart form fill so I turn that off whenever possible. I have the "prefbar" installed in Mozilla so I have a configurable toolbar. I'll have to try Firebird and see what the rest of these are, but it looks like the difference is pretty small.
I tried Firebird once a couple of months ago. It was missing some configuration stuff that I didn't feel I could live without so I went back to Mozilla. Hopefully if they're stopping development on Mozilla, whatever replaces it as a browser will have ALL of Mozilla's features in addition to its own features.
No, there are nightly snapshots for two weeks, weekly snapshots for two months, and offsite tape backups taken every weekend that are retained forever.
The snapshots are nice because I can directly access them instead of having to request a data recovery, but the tapes are there in case of a real problem.
Im sorry but I do not get the IE is an inferior product. It does what it is SUPPOSED to do, render web pages.
The problem is not what it doesn't do, the problem is what it does. Sure, it renders web pages. The problem is that it has proven itself time and again to be a crawling heap of security holes.
Yes, it renders web pages. It also has the added bonus that it lets black hats attack your computer in many ways.
Car analogy: it's not enough that a car move you and your stuff around. It also must not give you carbon monoxide poisoning, not burst into flames in your garage starting your house on fire, and must not have a bug where someone can come up to it in a parking lot and tap on the windshield three times, causing it to unlock the doors and letting people steal your stuff from inside.
Such a car would still be fulfilling the primary role of a car, but nobody would use it. And any car company that didn't fix these problems would be in court pretty damn pronto.
OTOH, if Microsoft were selling cars, they'd try to put a seal on the door that you'd have to break before getting in the first time that says "we don't guarantee ANYTHING, even that this thing will start up and move. You must waive all expectations of performance in order to gain access to the car you just bought.
BTW, I also had Mozilla crash; in like version 0.9. I haven't seen it crash in about a year now, and I use it exclusively and rather heavily.
IOW, some providers have crappy service, and feel that holding their phone number hostage is the only way to keep their customers? That's a pretty sad commentary on their own companies.
No kidding. None of my family have been in one. I'd be very surprised if > 50% of randomly choosen people had been in one. This is a far cry from "very few." (FWIW, I live in the U.S.)
That would have worked back in the day, when drives used stepper motors. In fact, I have done it. However, these days with voice coil, servo-controlled stepping, etc, there's almost no chance that it will work on a modern drive.
We make constant backups; we have two disk arrays that are mirrored in real time between two sites in concrete bunkers 1/2 mile apart. All of our servers for mission critical stuff are set up this way. Development servers, however, are only backed up every 24 hours. However, if something's changed in the last 24 hours, it's a near certainty that some programmer has the latest version of the file on his machine. So we have kind of a distributed backup, it just takes an email to "all" saying "Please see if you have a newer version on your machine than what's in this directory."
Dude, Norton Utilities would have found the partitions and restored them in about 3 minutes. Or at least, older versions of it would have. Newer versions seem to be junk. But I've recovered deleted partitions in seconds with NU.
Actually, I've been copying a lot of my DVDs to cut out the crap (making movie-only copies). I find that once you cut out the extras and multiple soundtracks (I don't need the French soundtrack, for instance) at least half of the movies I burn WILL fit without reencoding, and even if I do have to reencode, it's only a little, like dropping 5.2 to 4.7 GB. The movies look fine.
Movie-only is a FEATURE with Disney, Fox, and some other studios. Nothing like being treated to a steaming plate of SPAM when you put your disc in. At least Disney enabled the Menu button during their commercials; their early discs FORCED you to watch them.
I make movie-only copies of discs that I own so I won't have to put up with this crap.
There is a standard, and it's DVD-R. This is the standard ratified by the DVD Forum.
I bought a dual-mode drive, but if I was going to do it again, I'd buy a -R drive. The media is cheaper and that's all I care about.
Besides, all new drives can at least READ both +R and -R. I think it's silly trying to hedge bets. It's not like there is going to be a press release some day saying "OK, +R has won" and that afternoon you won't be able to buy -R media anymore. The media will be in production for at least a couple of years after that. Will your drive even last that long, and will you care? By then you'll be able to buy a new recorder for $50 so who cares?
I have a 4x drive, and it's never had a piece of 4x media in it. I buy 1x because it's cheap. I don't care that it takes an hour to record a disc; it takes me several hours to assemble the data to put on the disc. The first one is burned LONG before the next one is ready to start.
Once the discs are burned, it doesn't matter what speed they were recorded at.
I have a dual mode drive (sony 500A), but I have never bought a +R disc. I'm only interested in getting the cheapest possible discs, and that means -R; I'm paying 80 cents a disc. I don't care how fast they are, 1x is fine.
Also, I haven't yet seen why either format is superior. They both store 4.7GB of data, and that's really all I give a damn about. My usage is 100% "write a full disc, never touch it again." If I want rewritability, I'll buy another hard drive.
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They will still detect IR even with the blocking filter in place. I have one of the old Sony camcorders with the original NightShot. One of the things that the NightShot switch did was to pull the IR blocking filter out of the way. With it in place, you can still easily see an IR emitter like a remote control if pointed right at the camera, and in a dark room a TV remote will act like a very weak flashlight, producing a small lighted area on a piece of paper for a few inches. With the IR blocking filter out of the way, an IR remote can light up a whole room.
At the intensity that I'm assuming that these things emit to get the light to see it, I'm sure that any camcorder would be able to see it as well.
I believe that this is a result of design. If you have a well designed system, then a vulnerability is probably a result of a simple programming flaw. Fixing such problems is usually just a matter of changing a few lines of code, or at most perhaps adding a layer of error checking.
If you have a system designed like a Big Ball of Mud, then a vulnerability is likely to be the result of unanticipated interactions between different modules. When you try to fix that, then you are just changing to a different set of unanticipated interactions. Fixing such systems often involves making sweeping changes across all of the modules that you can think of that interact with the problem module.
It's not surprising that "fixing" something in such a system breaks other things. All you can hope for is that you break less than you fix, and the breaks won't be discovered for a while.
I just whipped up a spreadsheet.
2^128 is enough IP addresses to give 2.68*10^15 addresses to every square millimeter of surface area of every planet in the solar system, plus the moon, Charon, and the Galilean Jovian satellites.
That should last a while. But I'm all for overkill. I was glad when Maxtor finally punted and made BigDrive able to address a BIG ASSED address space; if you're redefining a standard, no point in just doubling it or even *16; go big!
X10.com is not really related in any way to the x10 protocol or x10 devices
Well, other than they're the X10 that INVENTED the X10 protocol and MAKES the X10 devices.
x10.com seems to sell webcams mostly to people who hope to catch hot chicks on camera
I'm thinking about suing them; I bought a camera and I haven't cap'd a single bikini chick smiling into it yet! Their ad practically guarantees hot candid action!
I was at a friend's desk the other day, he mistyped a URL, and had about a dozen pop-unders to kill. I asked him when he was going to stop running shit-ware on his machine, he just said "Yeah, I know, I know. I'm just too lazy." Seems like running Mozilla IS the lazy thing to do; manually killing pop-up/unders is the wasteful, time consuming thing to do.
If you take this logic to its end, then nobody should be able to patent anything run on a computer; they're just using the programmable digital calculation machine to do things. No computer patents are valid!
At the very least, if you're saying that anything written in Javascript wouldn't be patentable because it's the Javascript that enabled it, then the same could be true of any language.
If you're just talking about embedding language in an application (like a web browser) then no technology developed on any kind of a plug-in architecture would be patentable.
I'm not saying they SHOULD be patented, just that I don't think this is a good argument.
Exactly; we need reprocessing. We don't do it because everyone's terrified that someone will make a bomb using it, but the reality is that we pay huge amounts of money to throw away stuff that could be recycled into fuel if we built reactors that would accomplish it.
"most radioactive in the world" - do you have a cite for that? That could mean anything. How many thousands of gallons of it a day would you have to drink to increase your cancer risk 1%?
I'm not talking about allowing dangerous designs. I'm talking about making the bureaucracy so thick that it's impossible to build a plant.
I had a cousin who worked for the contractor building a nuclear plant in Michigan. At one point, the plant was 95% complete. When the project was finally abandoned, it was about 70% complete.
Why? Because they kept changing the laws. They'd finish a section, get it inspected and OK'd, then a few months later the government would come back to them and say "OK, that section that you completed, and we OK'd as being done and safe? The laws have changed, you'll have to rip out the whole thing and start over."
This is just stupidity. Not allowing the idiotic and unsafe design of Chernobyl is another thing entirely. Look at Three Mile Island; yes, it was a bad deal, but it was caused by human operator error, and EVEN with all that operator error, it still was a pretty minor problem, especially compared to Chernobyl, which caused massive injury to civilians, is still glowing and will be for a long time.
I bet coal fired plants kill more people every year than all the nuke plants ever did. Coal plants release both toxins and radioactive materials. Extend that to coal mining and supporting industries and it's way worse.
cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the world with solar cells
Using desert area to make electricity is a great idea, but solar cells would be a completely idiotic way to do it. Solar cells cost way too much per watt, and their efficiency is too low.
What you want is steered mirrors boiling water in a tower, running a turbine. Much cheaper per watt, much more scalable, and it's actually pretty doable right now; in fact there have been test sites for decades.
Of course, one other consideration is that transporting power is a non-trivial problem. Much of the world (including where I live) is hundreds of miles from anywhere that solar makes sense in large quantities, or wind, or geothermal. There are some small wind, solar, and hydro projects around here (southeast Michigan) but they couldn't provide a significant fraction of what is used.
Of course, IMHO we're way underutilizing nuclear, due to irrational fear and the resultant ridiculous over-regulation of nuclear plants. I mean, in a social climate where NMR had to be renamed because people were afraid of the "Nuclear" part, what can you expect?
How about a Colt Vista? Nah, let's hold out for a Gremlin.
OK, editing that list so that it only answers the actual question (different from Mozilla):
# Automatic Popup Blocking, right out of the box
# Simplified Privacy Controls
# Integrated Search Bar
# Smart Form Fill
# Automatic Downloading
# Extensions
# Bookmark Panels
# Configurable Toolbars
OK, so take Mozilla, turn on the popup blocking, and you're nearly there. I'm not sure about some of these features. I actively dislike smart form fill so I turn that off whenever possible. I have the "prefbar" installed in Mozilla so I have a configurable toolbar. I'll have to try Firebird and see what the rest of these are, but it looks like the difference is pretty small.
I tried Firebird once a couple of months ago. It was missing some configuration stuff that I didn't feel I could live without so I went back to Mozilla. Hopefully if they're stopping development on Mozilla, whatever replaces it as a browser will have ALL of Mozilla's features in addition to its own features.
No, there are nightly snapshots for two weeks, weekly snapshots for two months, and offsite tape backups taken every weekend that are retained forever.
The snapshots are nice because I can directly access them instead of having to request a data recovery, but the tapes are there in case of a real problem.
Im sorry but I do not get the IE is an inferior product. It does what it is SUPPOSED to do, render web pages.
The problem is not what it doesn't do, the problem is what it does. Sure, it renders web pages. The problem is that it has proven itself time and again to be a crawling heap of security holes.
Yes, it renders web pages. It also has the added bonus that it lets black hats attack your computer in many ways.
Car analogy: it's not enough that a car move you and your stuff around. It also must not give you carbon monoxide poisoning, not burst into flames in your garage starting your house on fire, and must not have a bug where someone can come up to it in a parking lot and tap on the windshield three times, causing it to unlock the doors and letting people steal your stuff from inside.
Such a car would still be fulfilling the primary role of a car, but nobody would use it. And any car company that didn't fix these problems would be in court pretty damn pronto.
OTOH, if Microsoft were selling cars, they'd try to put a seal on the door that you'd have to break before getting in the first time that says "we don't guarantee ANYTHING, even that this thing will start up and move. You must waive all expectations of performance in order to gain access to the car you just bought.
BTW, I also had Mozilla crash; in like version 0.9. I haven't seen it crash in about a year now, and I use it exclusively and rather heavily.
IOW, some providers have crappy service, and feel that holding their phone number hostage is the only way to keep their customers? That's a pretty sad commentary on their own companies.
No kidding. None of my family have been in one. I'd be very surprised if > 50% of randomly choosen people had been in one. This is a far cry from "very few." (FWIW, I live in the U.S.)
That would have worked back in the day, when drives used stepper motors. In fact, I have done it. However, these days with voice coil, servo-controlled stepping, etc, there's almost no chance that it will work on a modern drive.
Check into a program called "GetDataBack" - there are FAT and NTFS versions. It works very well.
We make constant backups; we have two disk arrays that are mirrored in real time between two sites in concrete bunkers 1/2 mile apart.
All of our servers for mission critical stuff are set up this way.
Development servers, however, are only backed up every 24 hours. However, if something's changed in the last 24 hours, it's a near certainty that some programmer has the latest version of the file on his machine. So we have kind of a distributed backup, it just takes an email to "all" saying "Please see if you have a newer version on your machine than what's in this directory."
Dude, Norton Utilities would have found the partitions and restored them in about 3 minutes. Or at least, older versions of it would have. Newer versions seem to be junk. But I've recovered deleted partitions in seconds with NU.
Actually, I've been copying a lot of my DVDs to cut out the crap (making movie-only copies). I find that once you cut out the extras and multiple soundtracks (I don't need the French soundtrack, for instance) at least half of the movies I burn WILL fit without reencoding, and even if I do have to reencode, it's only a little, like dropping 5.2 to 4.7 GB. The movies look fine.
Movie-only is a FEATURE with Disney, Fox, and some other studios. Nothing like being treated to a steaming plate of SPAM when you put your disc in. At least Disney enabled the Menu button during their commercials; their early discs FORCED you to watch them.
I make movie-only copies of discs that I own so I won't have to put up with this crap.
There is a standard, and it's DVD-R. This is the standard ratified by the DVD Forum.
I bought a dual-mode drive, but if I was going to do it again, I'd buy a -R drive. The media is cheaper and that's all I care about.
Besides, all new drives can at least READ both +R and -R. I think it's silly trying to hedge bets. It's not like there is going to be a press release some day saying "OK, +R has won" and that afternoon you won't be able to buy -R media anymore. The media will be in production for at least a couple of years after that. Will your drive even last that long, and will you care? By then you'll be able to buy a new recorder for $50 so who cares?
I have a 4x drive, and it's never had a piece of 4x media in it. I buy 1x because it's cheap. I don't care that it takes an hour to record a disc; it takes me several hours to assemble the data to put on the disc. The first one is burned LONG before the next one is ready to start.
Once the discs are burned, it doesn't matter what speed they were recorded at.
I have a dual mode drive (sony 500A), but I have never bought a +R disc. I'm only interested in getting the cheapest possible discs, and that means -R; I'm paying 80 cents a disc. I don't care how fast they are, 1x is fine.
Also, I haven't yet seen why either format is superior. They both store 4.7GB of data, and that's really all I give a damn about. My usage is 100% "write a full disc, never touch it again." If I want rewritability, I'll buy another hard drive.
I sure do. I've got both of his tapes (10 classics in 10 minutes, and 10 minute university). They're pretty funny.