Comment Re:Data haven (Score 1) 322
True. In the event of something happening that takes out both the Moon and the Earth, your data will be the least of your concerns.
Unless your data includes "How to build a new Earth." Then you'd want it!
True. In the event of something happening that takes out both the Moon and the Earth, your data will be the least of your concerns.
Unless your data includes "How to build a new Earth." Then you'd want it!
This is real Nerd news, but there are sometimes I wonder why? Shouldn't we have higher priorities to spend money on? Space elevator, far space travel, populate Mars (coz frankly we are getting too crowded on earth)? But beer in space? Just what we need, some drunk space pilot docking to the space station. This is why I have no hope for the human race. Sure, I could lighten up, but I'm ready for the younger generation to get off my earth lawn!
Umm, isn't this the same tired argument people use *every* time someone does something other than cure cancer?
"OMG, why are you playing baseball, there's cancer to be cured!"
"Why are you playing guitar, there are starving people in Africa!'
"Why are you studying journalism, you should be studying engineering and solving the energy crisis!"
No matter what you are doing, there is always something more noble to be done, but we can't all be doing noble things. There's nothing wrong with brewing beer for consumption in space, or making Justin Bieber lunchboxes for kids or making yet another iPad case. People should do whatever they're best at, or whatever makes them happy.
-Taylor
I can't confirm that Google has released OTA updates for the Nexus One anywhere.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/01/nexus-one-android-2-3-3-update-arrives-ota-breaks-google-voice/
Confirmed.
Whenever somebody says "it's our destiny" , I shiver. I'm conscious that any minute now they'll be waving a gun around and saying "God made me do it!" or "the voices in my head said it was my duty!".
Control your own future, my friend. Don't believe in destiny or any other crazy ideas that your future is mapped out and you have no free will. You don't have to base your life on the belief in Ancient Greek goddesses (though I suppose other people believe in other gods so who am I to say what your belief system should be based upon...)
Jesus christ man, chill the fuck out. I'm not some religious lunatic with a gun fetish. I'm not even religious. And I didn't mean its our destiny like "God has willed it unto us" or some shit. I just meant that it is the most likely outcome of the progression of human society. If I had to place a bet, I'd bet humans end up populating the solar system and beyond. I'm not here to debate the meaning of the word "destiny" as anything other than how things end up (regardless of how or why).
You've drunk your own kool-aid here, believing that you can simply assume people who suggest things you don't believe in are lunatics. But I'm not crazy. I mad a simple statement on where I believe we will end up, and you take me to be a gun waving lunatic. You can't look at everything like "You versus the crazies". There exist people with opinions that oppose yours who are in no way crazy. In fact, I suspect its a lot of people.
-Taylor
It should be a crime to be as naive as you, falling for the common Star Trek "Final Frontier" misconception that exploring the impossibly vast, empty, radiation-bombarded, vacuum of cold space is in any way analogous to exploring different parts of the planet earth.
As naive as, say, Carl Sagan? Who made that exact comparison in Pale Blue Dot?
It has always been our destiny to cover this earth, and it is certainly also our destiny to explore the cosmos. Compared to the skills and resources of their time, crossing the vast Atlantic ocean really isn't much different than modern humans landing on Mars. I understand the immense difficulties in doing so, but there were immense difficulties in crossing the Atlantic back then. And there were many deaths, as there well may be when we begin to send humans far from Earth. Space is vast and inhospitable, but to a shipwrecked sailor, so is the ocean. They may live a little longer before the sea takes them, but if a storm sunk their ship, they had nearly as little chance of surviving as a human in a damaged Space Ship. There's nothing to drink, nowhere to take refuge, and generally nothing to eat.
Space now and the oceans of our past are not nearly as different as you may think.
-Taylor
Or it could also be interesting that your 10 Mb/s speed is available never. How would that go over?
Reminds me of when I call places like my ISP and other companies. I always get the message "We're experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment, please bear with us."
Really, unusually high? Why does it *always* seem to be "unusually" high? I would love to set up some automated system to call these companies and see how often I get that message. I bet that even if you called every hour for weeks, you would always get that message. Seems to me that you can't call something unusual if its always the case.
As far as bandwidth - yeah, its normally a crock of shit. Though currently I've gotten a great connection. I think my plan is only 20 or 25 Mb/s but I usually get over 30 on speed tests. This is Comcast in Silicon Valley (Campbell).
-Taylor
I'm not sure what the motivation to ask the question "are they too expensive" comes from, when tablets (in generalities) are one of the hottest selling segments of the computing market right now. Can you imagine how long a marketing guy at Apple would have a job if he stood up in a board meeting and suggested that the iPad was too expensive...all while they're selling them by the millions.
Now if the question were different, like "is tablet 'x' too expensive", then it might be an interesting conversation. I've seen several new tablets poised for sale at costs HIGHER than the ipad...which seems like a ridiculously short sighted move. You don't enter a market with a "me too" product priced higher than the established leader (unless you're Apple), unless you have something markedly better to offer. And frankly, "it's android" doesn't rise to that level.
Well, the Xoom has two cameras, a bunch more RAM, a dual core processor, will get a free upgrade to 4G "when its ready", and is only $70 more than the equivalent iPad. Plus Android Honeycomb looks like a solid OS, so that should be fine.
Where that reasoning falls apart though is that Apple isn't going to sell the same iPad forever. They have got to have a new one coming out soon, and they will certainly either keep pricing the same or lower it.
Also, as you stated, Motorola is not Apple, and no matter how good your product is, you cannot compete on features alone with Apple. Most people don't care if they get something "better" than an iPad or iPhone. If they have the money for the apple product, they'll be totally happy with it. They'll only look at something else if its cheaper. Then they might be very happy with the purchase if its good. But I just think regular people don't bother trying to absolutely maximize their purchase. They go for good enough, which apple tends to satisfy safely. (note that i don't expect you all to be these "regular" people i speak of)
So I guess I agree with you. I think their pricing is dumb as hell. But I also think it makes sense from a value perspective. Its just that the market isn't operating on a pure value perspective (or they put lots of value in the "Apple" name).
-Taylor
I agree. I was beginning to doubt that until a particular friend of mine went out and bought one. When it first came out he was excited by it, but he said that he was going to wait for the "killer ap" to come out for it. Six months later he went out and bought one. I asked him what the "killer ap" was and he said, "Well, it does this and it does that." All things that fell into one of three classes. Either his laptop or his Iphone already did them in ways that totally suited his needs or it was a functionality that was purely for play. He bought one because his sense of "cool" could not stand being without one any longer.
I dunno, for me the killer app has always been the browser. I just want something thin and light and easy that I can browse the web on. My laptop is a big fast beast for CAD, and is pretty heavy. It also rests in my workshop downstairs most of the time. I do a *lot* of browsing on my phone, so I wish I just had a "bigger phone" more or less. Tablets seem to fill that niche.
I haven't got an iPad though. I've been waiting for Android tablet as that is my OS of choice. Luckily between LG, Moto and Samsung (with Honeycomb looking awesome), I have some good options. I'm not happy about Motorola's pricing, but I might go for the wifi model (my Nexus One has wifi tethering builtin for free). They haven't said when the wifi model comes out though, sadly.
They're all expensive and I'd much rather have them be $200-300, but they still satisfy a need (or want, whatever) that I have, so I might put up the money when the right one comes along.
-Taylor
Using wiping software designed for mechanical disks makes absolutely no sense and the results from this study are 100% predictable.
If people were never surprised by predictable things the entire news industry would take a nosedive and be reduced to a shadow of its current self. It'd fuck up the economy!
This just in: this morning a FLAMING BALL OF GAS OVER 1 MILLION TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH APPEARED OVER THE HORIZON! IT IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ENGULF THE EARTH IN FLAMES AND DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.*
*this is technically true.
What would be nice is to have the ATA erase command standardized, so this can be easily done.
Command gets handed to the drive controller, controller does the erasing the right way, where on a hard drive, it zeroes out sectors, even the ones on the bad sector relocation table, and sectors marked as bad. On a SSD, it zeroes out everything regardless of the status with regards to wear leveling.
Even better would be having the drive controller encrypt all data, storing the key as a value in NVRAM. Then when it gets handed an erase command, it replaces the key stored with one randomly generated.
Even better would be to have the drive controller to have its own free space bitmap. After being zeroed, if a sector is read without being written to, the controller returns just zeroes, regardless of the actual data present. If the sector was written to, the controller marks it as used in the bitmap and then returns the sector's data on subsequent writes. This way, an erase command can be almost immediate (flagging everything in the bitmap as free), and outside of yanking the controller and looking at the platters/cells, there is no way to retrieve the data that was erased. Bonus points if the controller zeroed out data in the background.
Better still might be to build flash memory chips with a built-in fuse that cannot be reset. Wipe the data (just in case) and then have some command that physically blows the fuse on every actual flash memory chip onboard. Then someone would have to dissolve the chip and somehow repair the fuse just to get to the data, which would have been erased anyway.
That could make one hell of a virus though if expensive SSD's could be destroyed from software alone. Maybe have it be a (clearly labeled!) jumper on the drive that does the fuse blowing.
-Taylor
Actually as someone pointed out above, the wear leveling algorithms in SSD's can cause problems for effective encryption.
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=wear-leveling
So as always, the answer is "Physically completely destroy the drive".
-Taylor
Trust should never be absolute.Trust is an analog scale, not a digital bit...
That's always been my problem. My trust was accidentally configured as a floating input.
Artistically speaking, freedom of expression is limited in the United States (and other countries, don't get me wrong) because of regulatory bodies that exist for the sole purpose of deciding what is appropriate content and what is not.
Which regulatory bodies are you referring to, specifically? The FCC? They don't regulate movies. The MPAA? They're a private outfit. They don't censor anything; they just attach a letter to most major studio releases so people can decide if they want to watch it or not. (Whether the letters themselves make sense is a separate question.) That movies like Watchmen are having a hard time getting financed these days has nothing to do with regulation--it has to do with Watchmen being an expensive film that did rather poorly at the box office.
As an aside, freedom of expression in the United States is at a higher point now than ever. There are more ways of expressing oneself, to a wider audience, and with less restriction, than at any other time in human history. Griping about some sort of repressive system, in 21st century America, doesn't make much sense.
Well... its a little more complicated than that, on the ratings system. The rating impacts money - for example no one wants to have an NC-17 movie because it won't even get distribution - and the ratings board has this arbitrary system with no transparency. Its not censorship outright, but it amounts to a very similar thing. If you're genuinely curious, you really should watch This Film is Not Yet Rated. Its really interesting.
Seconded. Seeing the movie Watchmen as excellent is in no way related to having a comic book reader intellect. It is well acted, explores interesting themes, and is not dumbed down or childishly saccharine.
Thirded. Never read a comic book in my life. Loved Watchmen. So did my girlfriend, and she's picky.
Well, I reasoned this out myself, so maybe I'm wrong, but basically superconducting cameras are able to register every photon that sees them, sending off ~18000 electrons per photon hit. CCDs, on the other hand, send off 1 electron for every photon hit (I read that a while ago but I think those are the numbers).
Since CCD sensors are so much less sensitive...
Actually, they are equally sensitive. They are both capable of telling us that 1 photon impact occurred. You can't get any more sensitive than that.
Well, while they both technically are capable, I don't think we're currently able to sense the one electron that came off of the CCD, are we? Don't we need many electrons before we can sense them?
Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
