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Comment Horrible Slashvertisement (Score 1) 91

First of all this article is nothing more than a giant slashvertisement.

Second of all, essentially every SSD on the market self-encrypts, because it is how the secure wipe feature of SSDs functions. Any SSD that is locked with a password is encrypted and unreadable. This is not a new or novel feature at all, and whoever decided this was newsworthy should not be posting articles to slashdot.

Comment Ignoring important factors (Score 1) 92

This guy is ignoring two very important factors here involved in purchasing of IT hardware in any enterprise.

- Hardware is a capital cost whose depreciation can be written off every year on your corporate income tax. After 4 years or so, your hardware actually now has near zero actual capital value to the company. Thus, as long as a company believes they will be around to see the depreciation of the asset fully written down, it is of little advantage to sacrifice performance in order to save some inconsequential amount on the hardware. This is why companies always buy the latest and greatest.

- The money you spend on the system is just the one-time capital cost. The on-going costs - the electricity used, the maintenance costs, the costs of extending the warranty - these will all be substantially higher per unit computed with older systems than newer systems.

Comment This is the problem with having a two party system (Score 4, Insightful) 533

The idea that economic policy and social policy are tied at the hip in the two mainstream parties is ridiculous. Someone who supports conservative economic policy but liberal social policies, in any other country, has a mainstream party to get behind. In the US, they're essentially an outcast who has to decide which is more important to them, their personal values or what they think is the best direction for the economy, because voting for third parties is viewed as a lost vote.

Politics in the US needs drastic reform away from the two party system.

Comment Much better board layout (Score 5, Informative) 202

The model B has a lot more thought into the board layout. Having the power, and HDMI all on the same side of the board and the optional I/O also all on one other side, makes so much more sense and will allow much cleaner looking enclosures. Although.. I still wish they had done even MORE thought and out the I/O on the OPPOSITE side of the board where they have all the GPIO pins.

Comment Just ran into this (Score 1) 753

When Arthur came up here (Atlantic Canada), it took out the power for a few days.. heck some were without power for a week. While without power, all the big box stores were closed. However, small mom & pop shops stayed open, using a hand ledger and accepting cash. I was actually in one store buying supplies that was operating by candlelight.

Comment It looks more eye candy than useful to me (Score 1) 60

- It sits high on a wall in some common area, far from the cubicle of anyone who would want to use the thing for actual testing

- Many of devices are mounted so high you wouldn't even see them without a stepstool let alone be able to interact with them (see hilarious video http://tv.slashdot.org/video/?...)

- Almost all the devices are Google Play edition devices or Nexus devices and they're all using Chrome for testing, none using stock Browser or Firefox or Dolphin or any other browser. Hardly a good cross-section of devices or browsers for compatibility testing! It seems more like a PR stunt to increase Google device visibility. In fact they even say this outright! "We picked our devices mostly from Google Play Edition devices, and picked a few other fun and shiney net devices that would look cool on the wall"

Comment Re:No it makes no sense at all (Score 4, Insightful) 702

"Now, a successful terrorist must spend an extra $100 on parts and 100 hours on hardware modifications, while still spending the time and money to jump through every other hurdle in the way."

"... the point is to raise the difficulty high enough that the attack isn't worth the hassle."

If you stop and think about these statements you will see how stupid they are. Such statements make sense when the motive is financial and the prospect of fines or incarceration is a deterrent. Or when such people are not extremely well financed. None of these things apply here. If you are an extremest who plans to kill yourself while blowing up an airplane, there is no point at which you stop and say "awww screw this, it's not worth the hassle". And most of these guys are backed by people will millions in the bank.

Comment No it makes no sense at all (Score 1) 702

Just because you can power a device up does not mean it has not been modified.

Anyone with even moderate skills could EASILY take an off the shelf business class laptop, remove 3/4 of the guts of it, replace it with a tiny SOC, fill the case with explosive, and the laptop would boot and display and work just fine. The only way to know it was modified would be to look in detail* at the system specs and compare to an online DB - do you honestly think that TSA is going to do this? Replace all of above with phone / tablet, it is the same story.

* Oh, other than XRay the damn thing, which is what the TSA does anyway do they not? I honestly do not get what this "powering on of electronics" is supposed to achieve. Only the most idiotic of plots would be foiled by this.

Comment Sad, sad times... (Score 5, Interesting) 333

At first I assumed that the people were stuck n a room for hours upon hours with nothing to do. Then I read...


"The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.

Is it just me or is it a very poor reflection on today's society if people can not just sit and think for 15 minutes?

For the record I would have ZERO problem doing this at all... in fact I could think for hours... although having a pencil and paper to keep track of ideas and plans would be helpful.

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