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Comment TTIs (heh) (Score 2) 68

There are already time-temperature indicators, which are low-cost, (usually) non-electronic devices affixed to perishable products to check whether they've remained in the appropriate range, and how long they were out of that range. Those are what this new tech is competing with, not the temperature-sensitive LCD strips you see on aquariums.

Comment ugh (Score 5, Insightful) 479

Yes, let's enumerate all the structural untidinesses of Word. Let's blame that application -- which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp) but because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do -- for the inelegance of its data model. Let's compare it to SGML, which is so much nicer and easier and so much more elegant if you're a programmer and can appreciate that sort of elegance, and if you're not a programmer, well then for god's sake why are you touching a computer?

If you want SGML, you know where to download it.

Comment Re:Traffic analysis; diverse double compiling (Score 1) 319

00 FF AA 55 and AA FF 55 00 are both serialized data, but are not the same. You are confusing the idea that data will exist on disk as a serial stream with the idea that two sets of data written to disk in parallel will somehow have the same order.

Erm. How do you think compilers work?

Comment Yay (Score 1) 130

I'm... kind of okay with this? Modern operating systems are hella-good at maintaining usability under high CPU loads, and the extra electricity consumed by the increased load wouldn't make much of a difference to me. If this is how they want to monetize web content, I'll take it over click-to-mute popunders any day. The "crooks" thing seems like it's just thrown in to increase the shock factor. Why wouldn't the site owners do this?

Technology

Super Bowl Blackout Caused By Defective Protective Relay 210

New submitter wilby writes "Power company Entergy New Orleans says the Super Bowl blackout was caused by device designed to prevent power outages. A device designed to improve the Superdome electrical system reliability instead caused it to shut down dramatically during Super Bowl 47. [The company] said testing traced the source of the problem to an 'electrical relay device' it had installed in December to protect Superdome equipment in case a cable failure occurred between the company's switchgear and the stadium."
Linux

Linux Foundation's Secure Boot Pre-Bootloader Released 178

hypnosec writes "The Linux Foundation's UEFI Secure Boot pre-bootloader for independent Linux distros and software developers has finally been released. Announcing the release of the secure boot system James Bottomley noted that the signed pre-bootloader was delivered by Microsoft on February 6th. Bottomley has released two validated files: PreLoader.efi and HashTool.efi. Bottomley has also created a bootable mini-USB image that provides 'an EFI shell where the kernel should be and uses Gummiboot to boot.' Just last week the pre-bootloader had to be rewritten to accommodate booting of all versions of Linux."

Comment Re:useless for strong passwords (Score 1) 61

I'm not sure I've seen any independent study which investigates such questions satisfactorily. (You may interpret that as [citation needed].)

Bessner and Davelaar, 1982. "Basic processes in reading: Two phonological codes."

And looking in from the opposite direction, I've also yet to see someone build a 4-simple-english-word rainbow table to directly attack the claim of security.

You don't need to count to 10^5^4 to know that it's a big number, far greater than the search spaces currently achievable with rainbow tables. Barring a monumental flaw in the hash function, the decreased per-character entropy shouldn't make a difference. (Though I guess it depends on how many "simple english words" you consider there to be.)

Certainly, in the field of memory, I am prepared to believe I am far from the norm. I have an exceptionally poor memory for almost everything. During my academic career I could never remember high level theories or identities, and had to repeatedly derive them from basic principles before using them.

With you on that one.

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