Actually, Quicktime was used at the Battle of Hastings; it's why the Harrold's defenders were broken -- the Normans ordered a Quicktime retreat, and after the English broke formation, the Normans regrouped and overwhelmed them.

the solder joints that were melting weren't on the PCB side; my statement was a bit misleading; it was the solder joints on the CRT lead side that melted, leaving the connection just being a slide clip. The problem was, they used the whole setup like a chimney, which meant that the left side of the CRT (from the front) which contained lots of shielding already, was used as one side of the chimney. Unfortunately, that's precisely where they had one of the interconnects for the ground plane (IIRC).

See the silver circle with the red triangle in https://www.youtube.com/watch?... at 2:32.

There were a number of aftermarket fan solutions created after this issue was discovered; this was one of the situations where The Steve stated "there must not be any fans in the case!" and people made it so, but then had to deal with the aftermath of using cold solder on a component in an area subject to heat buildup.

Oh yeah; and placing a large textbook on the top of a Plus, covering up the vents, could cause the plastic case to melt within a matter of hours.

Computer design really has come a long way since then.

Oh, the other irony: that video I linked to is a takeapart of a Mac Plus whose monitor stopped working. Three guesses as to the problem and fix? I don't think anyone ever told the guy though; his monitor could have been fixed years ago with a soldering gun and some modern RoHS solder.

I can do you one better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It was a fanless high-end PC back in 1986.

But it didn't use foam; just rudimentary heat sinks and a well-planned ducting system. Oh yes, and the heat it generated melted the solder used to connect the monitor to the motherboard in the first few batches that came off the line, until they started using higher tolerance solder.

If this were the 1990s, this would be the perfect answer. Back then, the idea was that you use a firewall as a perimeter defense in a defense-in-depth strategy.

But this isn't the 1990s, this is 2014. Nowadays, you have to assume that at least one endpoint on your local network is compromised in some way, whether that be via malware infection, clueless intern, corporate espionage, disgruntled employee, etc.

These days, any decent firewall does a lot more than prevent access to ports -- most actively monitor the traffic passing through any open port, and when configured correctly (in this case for a DB server), they'll lock anything down and flag that doesn't look like a SQL transaction, and then check for common SQL exploits, for connections to network points that should not have access to that port, for binary objects being passed in the SQL queries, and more.

What this means is that if you consider a firewall to be enabling the Windows Firewall on your MSSQL Server/Windows Server 2008 box, it's probably a good idea just because those boxes are usually not locked down correctly, and someone could be browsing facebook in IE on that box unless the firewall prevents it. But this isn't really the sort of firewall you should be applying to a transaction server that may one day have to be PCI DSS compliant.

See https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c... for one case study of how things can go horribly wrong incrementally.

Interestingly, a few years ago I had an iOS device that got dropped in water and no longer functioned. I took it apart and pulverized the electronics, as I figured there was no way I could guarantee the data on there was inaccessible.

I took the baggie of pulverized parts to the local cell phone drop for recycling; got a few odd looks as I dropped it in.

Then I took the case backing (the bit with the serial number engraved into it) to Apple for a $50 store credit. The same credit they would have given me had I given them the entire device. That's probably as good a deal as I would have got from anywhere, even if I had kept everything intact.

The best part? I kept the LCD screen, as it still worked just fine.

This is probably the biggest reason. Asia is the new big market for phones; any design made has to support multiple Asian character formats.

However, I have another question. The submitter stated he'd pay an extra $100-200 for a slide-out, and that he doesn't mind a bit of extra bulk.

So: why isn't someone making a *phone case* with a built-in Bluetooth or USB keyboard? It'd be aftermarket, but you could slap it on any phone of a specific form factor; you could even make it a snap-in for a line of cases, so the single keypad would work across multiple lines of phones. As an added benefit, you could do multiple international phones for the areas with the highest demand; and your coverage would be larger than any specific carrier/device.

So... anyone have any examples of this? Anyone want to kickstart it?

I really see no reason for using MS Office if you're a small company.

However, for large companies, collaboration tools, internationalization of documents, corporate-wide style hints, advanced spreadsheet macros, shareable diagram objects, integrated calendars, meeting room tracking, distribution policy enforcement, etc. are important, and just aren't quite there on most of the alternatives. Google Docs does a reasonable job at some of that, but not all.

Whoosh....

I disagree. As I stated, polygraph machines are NOT lie detectors; the fact that they've been popularized in this way is beside the point.

No; that's the way that polygraphs are usually used by government and law enforcement to get the answer they want. Polygraphs actually WORK by measuring your vitals and recording the information change over time. There's a huge difference there.

And pretty soon, those health bands everyone's starting to wear will be indistinguishable from polygraphs; the only real difference being application and interpretation.

I disagree here too -- it is totally eclipsed by the phrases "he was obstructing justice!" and "that DNA evidence proves it."

These days, polygraphs are much more abused by government on government employees than they are on civilians by law enforcement. But the LE abuses are the worse of the two I agree, as they're performed against people who have no choice.

Can't say for today, but my 4 year school I went through in 6 years (co-op programs spread things out); and near the end, most of my seminars were taught by either domain experts or people taking a sabbatical from their day job to teach what they had learned.

The theory courses were what has kept me employed since... there's a difference between a real CS degree (being able to do the math and work the concepts) and being a code jockey. The second has a much lower glass ceiling.

I'd love to fill a lower-level Rolls -- as it is, I have to settle for my compact....

What makes it even more confusing is that last night, I was reading about the new features being added to Firefox 32 which is currently available to testers.

I've heard of sprints, but this is getting a bit silly.

It wouldn't even reply with "'Tis but a flesh wound...."

Yes; we have learned much from the Daleks.

Eventually these hexapods will realize that they are sometimes more efficient when flying. Watch out.

This is a murky field. A polygraph does present useful information; it's just not necessarily whether the person is telling the truth. The major decision part of any polygraph system is the operator, and they need to have sp,e training in physical psychology to be predictably any good at using the equipment.

Seems to me that this new system falls into the same category. They'll be able to get some new data that would have been obscured before, but the interpretation of the data will still require an expert.

Personally, I think this is better than leaving it up to a human, as the human mind has known defects during the data acquisition phase -- these systems don't have those weaknesses, and while they can't draw any conclusions, they gather a different (and in some cases more complete) set of information than a human by themselves would gather.

The problem comes when people conflate the results of the tests with factual certainty -- both systems require interpretation, and as we all know, statistics lie 99.8% of the time.