...Except for that they basically would have to say "Hey MS, your code is broken, so broken that we need free licenses in order to show the world how broken it is". While it is a great idea and would benefit them, all MS can see is bad press, and they want to avoid that.
I'm pretty sure that the notion of windows being susceptible to malware and viruses is probably something Microsoft has come to terms with, i really can't imagine anyone getting terribly upset. Viruses exist, someone wants to do some research, it shouldn't be that offensive of an idea. -Taylor
I understand using WINE to avoid license fees, but wouldn't that potentially hinder the results of the experiment? I suppose that if they knew what functionality was needed by the botnet, they could be sure WINE provided what they needed, but it also seems like they might be able to work out a deal with MS to get a free site license for use in this test only, since it betters the computing world in general, which ultimately benefits microsoft?
Seems like a few phone calls might go a long way, if they get a hold of the right people. -Taylor
This is pretty awesome for the "toy" laser market too! Green lasers have always been pricey - I wanted to get a laser from Wicked Lasers but you can easily spend a few hundred dollars or more if you are tempted by the high powered ones. Better efficiency means its easier to make higher power, and no doped crystals means less concerns with complex alignment and cooling (the crystals get very hot!). I'd love to have a cheap high powered green laser!
In fact, here's a diagram of a typical green laser module with all the lenses and crystals aligned.
There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.
Actually that's exactly what they call it. They don't call it Parmigiano-Reggiano, but they do call it Parmesan.
Of course it's almost nothing like good Parmigiano-Reggiano, but if we're being pedantic, you are wrong in saying there is no "Kraft Parmesan", even if they are wrong in calling it that.
I look at the My Passport Essential SE specs and see length of 3.1 inches. I look at the WD Scorpio Blue and see 2.75 inches. Nowhere on their site do I see 2.5 inches. Unless they're doing some horrible rounding.
I think that is platter diameter inside the drive. -Taylor
I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???
I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!
Yeah, I was just thinking of that last week. If you read the Wikipedia Entries on Petabytes and Exabytes, and Zettabytes it really starts to make you wonder what we will be using all that space for. On 50 meg drives it was more space for documents, then a couple of gigs and you had just enough space for all your music. On Terabyte drives you can store lots and lots of BluRay rips, something we didn't even think about ten years ago. A good movie collection might still be a few TB though. Beyond that though, what kind of media will we come up with? We always seem to come up with something. Fully Immersive 3D environments a la holodeck? Full copies of human memories?
Wikipedia mentions some research that says "all words ever spoken by human beings could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data" if stored in text format. That's freaking amazing. ALL WORDS EVER SPOKEN is an insane concept and thinking that we have technology capable of storing something like that just blows my mind. -Taylor
elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.
Really? Really....? You really think they say it works best with THEIR drives for any reason other than to make you think you should buy their drives? It's just marketing fluff, like when Kraft Mac and Cheese says it tastes great with Kraft Parmesan cheese on top, as if any other Parmesan cheese isn't going to provide the same taste sensation. -Taylor
I just updated my Pre too. Scares me though. While Apple is selling DRM free music, dost it really stop them from their software only syncing up to properly signed iPods? I mean I like my iPod, but if its going to be a device that needs a secure encrypted channel to transfer file for me to just use normally, I am not sure I would want to use an iPod again.
DVD Jon started some software that is like iTunes, but open, and made for any device. It looks pretty cool, though I haven't tried it yet. it's called DoubleTwist, look it up. -Taylor
Sure, Apple could release iTunes 8.2.2 a week from now, but who's going to update to it? Most people don't bother to update their software when patches are released semi-monthly, let alone weekly.
Yeah, especially if you own a Pre! There is really no harm in keeping a slightly older version of itunes, they never start locking you out of anything till you're a few releases back. And although most techy Pre owners probably waited to upgrade itunes the last time anyway, and are therefore unharmed, this release will have even the non-techy owners waiting to update, after having been bitten the first time. I would bet that most people apple screwed with the last update aren't going to do it again, so Palm has effectively saved many of their customers, by giving them one chance to learn.
Hell, palm may even have known exactly how apple was going to do this, just to see how it would play out, so they would have at least one guaranteed fix of the situation.
Theres only so much though that Apple can do short of killing compatibility with older iPods.
Do you know this for a fact? If the security is tight and Palm is only squeaking through by finding the equivalent of buffer overflows or undocumented functions, I think Apple could very well win this one.
Not that I'm necessarily taking Apple's side here. It's just that Palm seems to have stumbled upon a particularly stupid and capricious business plan that counts on Apple falling asleep on the job. This back-and-forth only has to happen a few times before potential buyers will get scared away.
Apple hasn't been able to protect its own iPhone from jailbreakers, what makes you think they can secure iTunes any better?
And on a more direct note, if palm needs to they could probably go so far as to completely emulate an old iPod - they do have the guy who made them working for them now - though that may be illegal, or at least lawsuit bait. Not that Palm seems worried.
More than anything I just love that this whole scenario is happening - someone is finally challenging Apple on their own turf! I'm all for open hardware an apple has always been against it, so it's nice to see a big player finally get messy with this.:) -Taylor
I often wonder why they build them with a single-stem trunk? Surely a triple- or quadruple-stem trunk could give added stability with a lower materials cost, and greater ease of transportation, if greater assembly time.
For that matter, why not have two (or, of course, more) propellar sets one above the other? Harness not too much less than double the amount of power without needing larger individual propellar blades.
I'm sure there are fundamental reasons why these wouldn't work, but I'm not an engineer.
Tubes are extremely strong, so you don't really need multiples. Plus, all of these turbines have the capability to rotate, as far as I know, and rotating one turbine around one tube is a lot easier than rotating a gang of them around without their blades hitting something.
They're just keeping it simple. Some of the generator bodies are the size of a small bus, they just don't look like it from far away.
Isn't "full disclosure" really just meant to say "Hey, FYI I might be biased"? Not, "Hey, I might be biased, now let me promote myself!".
No. In fact, your point is self contradictory. If it means the former, it necessarily includes the latter. It's not possible for the first thing you said it meant to be true while the second is false. Rather like it's impossible for a basket that contains five apples to not contain three apples. Just because you include more than the first thing doesn't mean you no longer include the first thing. If "full disclosure" means including a notice of how you might be biased, including that notice and saying something else as well does not mean you failed to include the notice, so it's still "full disclosure".
First of all, holy crap could you make that any more confusing? And thanks for explaining to me that a basket with 5 apples can't not have 3 apples in it - when you think someone is that wrong, maybe you should consider the possibility that you misunderstood them? People are rarely that dim.
And it doesn't matter anyway, you completely missed my point. I never said what he did wasn't full disclosure, i was just suggesting that that the self promotion was unnecessary.
"What would I use salmon for!? What do you think!? I'm going to mix salmon DNA with two types of dye, then pump the solution from a fine needle while a voltage is applied between the needle tip and a grounded copper plate covered with a glass slide. As the liquid jet comes out, it will dry and form long nanofibers that are deposited on the glass slide as a mat. I will then spin this nanofiber mat directly on the surface of an ultraviolet LED to make a white-light emitter. DUH!"
... created the new material by mixing salmon DNA with two types of dye, then pumping the solution from a fine needle while a voltage is applied between the needle tip and a grounded copper plate covered with a glass slide. As the liquid jet comes out, it dries and forms long nanofibers that are deposited on the glass slide as a mat. The researchers then spin this nanofiber mat directly on the surface of an ultraviolet LED to make a white-light emitter.
I did this by accident once, while trying to make breakfast.
Haha, yeah. That exact quote just got me thinking:
If the decryption key is ever available to the browser, a modified version of the tool could store it and decode the document forever.
Well, I was thinking about this, and the real idea is to prevent people who never originally saw the message from reading it down the road. If i send you a message, and then it scrambles, no one hacking into your e-mail later will be able to read it (barring cracking the scrambling system itself, obviously). It's not to prevent YOU from copying the message, it's to prevent new people from reading it after the 8 hour window is up. -Taylor
Maybe they've improved them a bit. Honestly with a proper desk arrangement I haven't had the cord get in the way of my work in years. Last time I used one if you hadn't touched it in five minute you had to wiggle it around a bit to get it to wake up first, and it wasn't a cheap model.
I do love a nice wireless trackball for my home entertainment system, though. And I can definitely see the point of the little micro wireless mice for notebooks, as cords are much more of a problem when you're picking up and moving the computer around all the time.
Yeah cords aren't really a problem for me, but you can't really get high-end mice with them, so I've always been wireless. And yeah you used to need to wake them up, and i think the Bluetooth ones still do that out of necessity (power-hungry protocol), but the proprietary ones are great! If there is a wakeup period with mine I don't notice it. -Taylor
I never want to have to worry about replacing batteries, recharging, or waiting for the mouse to make up from sleep on anything as core to my workflow as a mouse.
Personally I think that any good gaming mouse works well for coding. You've got your extra buttons (which mostly just give you an extra forward/back in your browser) and good accuracy. I'm a fan of my Razer Diamondback, although by this point the grippy paint they put on it is coming off so it looks a bit shabby.
I would say with 100 certainty that your keyboard is ten times more important than your mouse for programming. The mouse just has to not get in your way.
Lots of people are hating on wireless, but as long as you don't go bluetooth, you shouldn't have those annoying sleep issues. As far as dying, my home mouse is rechargeable and has a nice base to rest it one once a month or so, and my work mouse just uses AA batteries so I got a $10 charger for my desk and when the batteries die about once a month, I just swap them into the charger for the fresh set, it's pretty painless.
I do CAD all day so I use my mouse non-stop, and i don't have any of the issues that people are complaining about when it comes to wireless. I'm using logitech laser mouses for the record. -Taylor
First of all, I'd suggest not wireless if you are worried about it 'moving' around with you not looking. Almost any wireless mouse I've used does that sometimes, with the exception of Gyration. (Microsoft, Logitech, and several off brands)...
Maybe you should try a new mouse... I haven't had that happen to me in years, and that was a $10 mouse. If you spend more than $30 on a mouse it probably won't do that. I use wireless logitech laser mouses as my device of choice at both home and work, and they work great. I do a lot of CAD work so I use the mouse a lot, so quality matters, but I never see that drifting they used to do. -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
...Except for that they basically would have to say "Hey MS, your code is broken, so broken that we need free licenses in order to show the world how broken it is". While it is a great idea and would benefit them, all MS can see is bad press, and they want to avoid that.
I'm pretty sure that the notion of windows being susceptible to malware and viruses is probably something Microsoft has come to terms with, i really can't imagine anyone getting terribly upset. Viruses exist, someone wants to do some research, it shouldn't be that offensive of an idea.
-Taylor
I understand using WINE to avoid license fees, but wouldn't that potentially hinder the results of the experiment? I suppose that if they knew what functionality was needed by the botnet, they could be sure WINE provided what they needed, but it also seems like they might be able to work out a deal with MS to get a free site license for use in this test only, since it betters the computing world in general, which ultimately benefits microsoft?
Seems like a few phone calls might go a long way, if they get a hold of the right people.
-Taylor
This is pretty awesome for the "toy" laser market too! Green lasers have always been pricey - I wanted to get a laser from Wicked Lasers but you can easily spend a few hundred dollars or more if you are tempted by the high powered ones. Better efficiency means its easier to make higher power, and no doped crystals means less concerns with complex alignment and cooling (the crystals get very hot!). I'd love to have a cheap high powered green laser!
In fact, here's a diagram of a typical green laser module with all the lenses and crystals aligned.
http://www.walshcomptech.com/repairfaq/sam/l54-101.gif
It's complex, to say the least!
-Taylor
There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.
Actually that's exactly what they call it. They don't call it Parmigiano-Reggiano, but they do call it Parmesan.
http://www.indojin.com/shop-online/catalog/images/kraft-parmesan.gif
Of course it's almost nothing like good Parmigiano-Reggiano, but if we're being pedantic, you are wrong in saying there is no "Kraft Parmesan", even if they are wrong in calling it that.
-Taylor
I look at the My Passport Essential SE specs and see length of 3.1 inches. I look at the WD Scorpio Blue and see 2.75 inches. Nowhere on their site do I see 2.5 inches. Unless they're doing some horrible rounding.
I think that is platter diameter inside the drive.
-Taylor
I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???
I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!
Yeah, I was just thinking of that last week. If you read the Wikipedia Entries on Petabytes and Exabytes, and Zettabytes it really starts to make you wonder what we will be using all that space for. On 50 meg drives it was more space for documents, then a couple of gigs and you had just enough space for all your music. On Terabyte drives you can store lots and lots of BluRay rips, something we didn't even think about ten years ago. A good movie collection might still be a few TB though. Beyond that though, what kind of media will we come up with? We always seem to come up with something. Fully Immersive 3D environments a la holodeck? Full copies of human memories?
Wikipedia mentions some research that says "all words ever spoken by human beings could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data" if stored in text format. That's freaking amazing. ALL WORDS EVER SPOKEN is an insane concept and thinking that we have technology capable of storing something like that just blows my mind.
-Taylor
elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.
Really? Really....? You really think they say it works best with THEIR drives for any reason other than to make you think you should buy their drives? It's just marketing fluff, like when Kraft Mac and Cheese says it tastes great with Kraft Parmesan cheese on top, as if any other Parmesan cheese isn't going to provide the same taste sensation.
-Taylor
I just updated my Pre too. Scares me though. While Apple is selling DRM free music, dost it really stop them from their software only syncing up to properly signed iPods? I mean I like my iPod, but if its going to be a device that needs a secure encrypted channel to transfer file for me to just use normally, I am not sure I would want to use an iPod again.
DVD Jon started some software that is like iTunes, but open, and made for any device. It looks pretty cool, though I haven't tried it yet.
it's called DoubleTwist, look it up.
-Taylor
Sure, Apple could release iTunes 8.2.2 a week from now, but who's going to update to it? Most people don't bother to update their software when patches are released semi-monthly, let alone weekly.
Yeah, especially if you own a Pre! There is really no harm in keeping a slightly older version of itunes, they never start locking you out of anything till you're a few releases back. And although most techy Pre owners probably waited to upgrade itunes the last time anyway, and are therefore unharmed, this release will have even the non-techy owners waiting to update, after having been bitten the first time. I would bet that most people apple screwed with the last update aren't going to do it again, so Palm has effectively saved many of their customers, by giving them one chance to learn.
Hell, palm may even have known exactly how apple was going to do this, just to see how it would play out, so they would have at least one guaranteed fix of the situation.
-Taylor
Theres only so much though that Apple can do short of killing compatibility with older iPods.
Do you know this for a fact? If the security is tight and Palm is only squeaking through by finding the equivalent of buffer overflows or undocumented functions, I think Apple could very well win this one.
Not that I'm necessarily taking Apple's side here. It's just that Palm seems to have stumbled upon a particularly stupid and capricious business plan that counts on Apple falling asleep on the job. This back-and-forth only has to happen a few times before potential buyers will get scared away.
Apple hasn't been able to protect its own iPhone from jailbreakers, what makes you think they can secure iTunes any better?
And on a more direct note, if palm needs to they could probably go so far as to completely emulate an old iPod - they do have the guy who made them working for them now - though that may be illegal, or at least lawsuit bait. Not that Palm seems worried.
More than anything I just love that this whole scenario is happening - someone is finally challenging Apple on their own turf! I'm all for open hardware an apple has always been against it, so it's nice to see a big player finally get messy with this. :)
-Taylor
I often wonder why they build them with a single-stem trunk? Surely a triple- or quadruple-stem trunk could give added stability with a lower materials cost, and greater ease of transportation, if greater assembly time.
For that matter, why not have two (or, of course, more) propellar sets one above the other? Harness not too much less than double the amount of power without needing larger individual propellar blades.
I'm sure there are fundamental reasons why these wouldn't work, but I'm not an engineer.
Tubes are extremely strong, so you don't really need multiples. Plus, all of these turbines have the capability to rotate, as far as I know, and rotating one turbine around one tube is a lot easier than rotating a gang of them around without their blades hitting something.
They're just keeping it simple. Some of the generator bodies are the size of a small bus, they just don't look like it from far away.
-Taylor
strap on batteries and wings and just fly them.
Your strap-on has batteries? Lucky you!
-Taylor
Isn't "full disclosure" really just meant to say "Hey, FYI I might be biased"? Not, "Hey, I might be biased, now let me promote myself!".
No. In fact, your point is self contradictory. If it means the former, it necessarily includes the latter. It's not possible for the first thing you said it meant to be true while the second is false. Rather like it's impossible for a basket that contains five apples to not contain three apples. Just because you include more than the first thing doesn't mean you no longer include the first thing. If "full disclosure" means including a notice of how you might be biased, including that notice and saying something else as well does not mean you failed to include the notice, so it's still "full disclosure".
First of all, holy crap could you make that any more confusing? And thanks for explaining to me that a basket with 5 apples can't not have 3 apples in it - when you think someone is that wrong, maybe you should consider the possibility that you misunderstood them? People are rarely that dim.
And it doesn't matter anyway, you completely missed my point. I never said what he did wasn't full disclosure, i was just suggesting that that the self promotion was unnecessary.
-Taylor
Isn't "full disclosure" really just meant to say "Hey, FYI I might be biased"? Not, "Hey, I might be biased, now let me promote myself!".
-Taylor
Some day, someone will figure out how to store data in *actual* clouds, and this whole thing is gonna get *really* confusing.
-Taylor
We'll eat your eggs by the spoonful, with Vodka. And your very DNA will be used as a fluorescent dye.
(I admit, I stole the idea for the joke from Louis CK. Genius comedian, that guy.)
Haha, I recognized that right away! I love Lois CK. ..barrel of duck vaginas... heh.
-Taylor
You should have told her:
"What would I use salmon for!? What do you think!? I'm going to mix salmon DNA with two types of dye, then pump the solution from a fine needle while a voltage is applied between the needle tip and a grounded copper plate covered with a glass slide. As the liquid jet comes out, it will dry and form long nanofibers that are deposited on the glass slide as a mat. I will then spin this nanofiber mat directly on the surface of an ultraviolet LED to make a white-light emitter. DUH!"
-Taylor
I did this by accident once, while trying to make breakfast.
Haha, yeah. That exact quote just got me thinking:
Jesus Christ, science is insane.
-Taylor
If the decryption key is ever available to the browser, a modified version of the tool could store it and decode the document forever.
Well, I was thinking about this, and the real idea is to prevent people who never originally saw the message from reading it down the road. If i send you a message, and then it scrambles, no one hacking into your e-mail later will be able to read it (barring cracking the scrambling system itself, obviously). It's not to prevent YOU from copying the message, it's to prevent new people from reading it after the 8 hour window is up.
-Taylor
I, too, want to advertise for free on Slashdot. Who do I contact?
-Taylor
Personally, I'm more impressed with the 13 foot monitor. I'm assuming its some sort of front projection device. Wonder what the resolution is? :)
Yeah, I thought that was pretty impressive!
Makes my 25.5" WUXGA monitor look like crap in comparison!
-Taylor
Maybe they've improved them a bit. Honestly with a proper desk arrangement I haven't had the cord get in the way of my work in years. Last time I used one if you hadn't touched it in five minute you had to wiggle it around a bit to get it to wake up first, and it wasn't a cheap model.
I do love a nice wireless trackball for my home entertainment system, though. And I can definitely see the point of the little micro wireless mice for notebooks, as cords are much more of a problem when you're picking up and moving the computer around all the time.
Yeah cords aren't really a problem for me, but you can't really get high-end mice with them, so I've always been wireless. And yeah you used to need to wake them up, and i think the Bluetooth ones still do that out of necessity (power-hungry protocol), but the proprietary ones are great! If there is a wakeup period with mine I don't notice it.
-Taylor
I never want to have to worry about replacing batteries, recharging, or waiting for the mouse to make up from sleep on anything as core to my workflow as a mouse.
Personally I think that any good gaming mouse works well for coding. You've got your extra buttons (which mostly just give you an extra forward/back in your browser) and good accuracy. I'm a fan of my Razer Diamondback, although by this point the grippy paint they put on it is coming off so it looks a bit shabby.
I would say with 100 certainty that your keyboard is ten times more important than your mouse for programming. The mouse just has to not get in your way.
Lots of people are hating on wireless, but as long as you don't go bluetooth, you shouldn't have those annoying sleep issues. As far as dying, my home mouse is rechargeable and has a nice base to rest it one once a month or so, and my work mouse just uses AA batteries so I got a $10 charger for my desk and when the batteries die about once a month, I just swap them into the charger for the fresh set, it's pretty painless.
I do CAD all day so I use my mouse non-stop, and i don't have any of the issues that people are complaining about when it comes to wireless. I'm using logitech laser mouses for the record.
-Taylor
First of all, I'd suggest not wireless if you are worried about it 'moving' around with you not looking. Almost any wireless mouse I've used does that sometimes, with the exception of Gyration. (Microsoft, Logitech, and several off brands)...
Maybe you should try a new mouse... I haven't had that happen to me in years, and that was a $10 mouse. If you spend more than $30 on a mouse it probably won't do that. I use wireless logitech laser mouses as my device of choice at both home and work, and they work great. I do a lot of CAD work so I use the mouse a lot, so quality matters, but I never see that drifting they used to do.
-Taylor
Either one could be given a bowling ball in an empty room...and 5 minutes later come out with a bucket full of pieces.
The truly amazing thing isn't that they can destroy a bowling ball in under 5 minutes. It's that they were able to craft a bucket using the pieces.
Hahahaha, win.
-Taylor