1328059
submission
goombah99 writes:
What kinds of jobs are best in a recession? Is it better to be a freelance contractor or an employee? Are operations centric jobs (e.g. IT staff) more secure than coders? Are coders more secure than R&D and algorithm design jobs? I suspect that many computer industry giants (Apple, MS, Cisco, Amazon) have large cash reserves and probably see no reason to change strategies--in fact it's a time when cash reserves can give them a competitive advantage as competitors retract in R&D and manufacturers have excess capacity (e.g. if there's too little business, manufacturers might take ipod or Xbox or Router component contracts at slightly below costs just to be able to pay the long-term mortgages on their facilities). And then there's the venture capital markets. When stocks tank, and lending is scary, does that mean that there is going to be more money chasing ownership positions in Ventures or less? Without prospects for IPOs will investors be content with more long term horizons on their capital given the dismal ROI for other uses of it? How's it looking at your company?
799595
submission
goombah99 writes:
After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Macine. It can host 32 or 64 bit Linux, Windows XP vista and 98, openSolaris and DOS. It runs on mac, windows, and unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on macworld, showing HD movies playing inside widows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like it's competition it can run other OS's in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition here and here."
797775
submission
goombah99 writes:
After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source called. Among many OS it can host 32 or 64 bit Linux, Windows XP, openSolaris and DOS. It runs on mac, windows, and unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on macworld, showing HD movies playing inside widows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually comparable to VMware. Like it's competition it can run other OS's in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). It does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition here and here.
756175
submission
goombah99 writes:
A teenage boy has modified a laser-etching machine to burn robot and space invader designs into his skin. He was filmed being branded by the industrial machine and then uploaded the video — along with full instructions — to the internet.
671420
submission
goombah99 writes:
In a colossal design error, Vonage has debuted a new killer feature for its customers with cell phones called "simul-ring" that due to a logic error unintentionally prevents cell phone users from calling their own home phones. Unlike ordinary call forwarding, simul-ring, will ring the cell phone and Vonage land line simultaneously allowing the user to answer either phone without delay. Conceptually this simple tweak of call-forwarding is a killer application enabled at minimal cost Vonage because, cleverly, the call to the cell phone is handled by the smart home routers themselves not by a central system (just like vonage does with 3-way calling). But they failed to realize that a cascade of independent design choices left it with a fatal flaw. Here's the cascade: 1) Virtually all cell phone carriers require the accounts to have Voice mail as a feature that cannot be turned off. 2) Nearly all of these are rigged so that dialing your own number connects you to the cell service voice mail. 3) When you call home from your cell phone, the simul ring, re-directs makes a call back to the cell phone and designating the call origin as the cell-phone itself 4) the cell phone detects the incoming call as coming from itself, just like you had dialed your own number. 5) So instead of being diverted to call-waiting, the voice mail on the cell phone answers instantly and so the home phone never rings. Thus when simul-ring is on, you cannot call the home phone from the cell phone, defeating it's utility. This is clearly a design logic problem since the solution is conceptually trivial: the router should never call back to the phone number the call came from, or at least never back to the simul-ring handset.
oopsie!
647200
submission
goombah99 writes:
Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has had a series (1,2,3) of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting mahines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to have an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements doc for voting machines.
646432
submission
goombah99 writes:
Popular science reported that flat video screen were available in 1958, and apparently robust enough for avionic pilot displays. For a time RCA was set to license and produce the Flat Screen TVs, then they changed their minds. "Meeting for the final approval, somebody on the Board of Directors' of RCA said, "Wait a minute, we've forgotten something. How are we going to explain to our stockholders that we wasted millions of dollars on the wrong tube?" And there was silence. And that did it. They said, "No, we will not take a license." If you like that one then this 1954 vision of the future of transistors forecast things resembling VCRs, color Plasma TVs and solar cells. They forecast Video phones and cable TV but accurately anticipated these would be slow to come until enough bandwidth was possible.
639026
submission
goombah99 writes:
When on vacation sometimes I need to check my e-mail on a public terminal. What are techniques for avoiding key loggers? Here's some ideas that nominally work but have drawbacks. 1) Linux LiveCD can probably avoid software key loggers but requires an invasive takeover of the public terminal and thus generally not possible. 2) Kyps.net offers a free reverse proxy that will decode your password from a 1-time pad you carry around then enter it remotely. But of course you are giving them your passwords when you do this (yikes!). 3) You can run firefox off a usbstick with various plugins (e.g. RoboForm) that will autofill the page in some manner they claim to be invulnerable to key loggers. If that's true, and I can't evaluate its security, it's getting close to a solution. The problem here is keeping the password file up-to-date is mildly a nuisance. Moreover, since it will need to be a windows executable, it's not possible for people without a windows machine available to fill in their passwords ahead of time. 4) for my bussiness I have SecureID which makes 1-time passwords. Perhaps a perfect solution for bussinesses but not for personal accounts on things like gmail, etc..
So what solutions do you use, or how do you mitigate the defects of the above processes, particularly for people with mac or linux home computers?"
638736
submission
goombah99 writes:
Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has had a series (1,2,3) of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting mahines don't record the votes correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well printed) tapes that show an even more egregious kind of error. The vote totals the clerk posted match the ballot totals printed by the machine but don't match the vote totals printed by the machine. This appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since the two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to have an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements doc for voting machines.
630900
submission
goombah99 writes:
When on vacation sometimes I need to check my e-mail on a public terminal. What are techniques for avoiding key loggers? Here's some ideas that nominally work but have drawbacks. 1) Linux LiveCD can probably avoid software key loggers but requires an invasive takeover of the public terminal and thus generally not possible. 2) Kyps.net offers a free reverse proxy that will decode your password from a 1-time pad you carry around then enter it remotely. But of course you are giving them your passwords when you do this (yikes!). 3) You can run firefox off a usbstick with various plugins (e.g. RoboForm) that will autofill the page in some manner they claim to be invulnerable to key loggers. If that's true, and I can't evaluate its security, it's getting close to a solution. The problem here is keeping the password file up-to-date is mildly a nuisance. Moreover, since it will need to be a windows executable, it's not possible for people without a windows machine available to fill in their passwords ahead of time. 4) for my bussiness I have SecureID which makes 1-time passwords. Perhaps a perfect solution for bussinesses but not for personal accounts on things like gmail, etc..
So what solutions do you use, or how do you mitigate the defects of the above processes, particularly for people with mac or linux home computers?
626294
submission
goombah99 writes:
The psystar website is now back on line, changing the name of their OSX compatible to OpenComputer overnight and also announcing the OpenProComputer model.
It also shows clearer pricing info and component lists . The announced teaser rate of $399 included neither OS, firewire, wifi or blue tooth. A system with OS and firewire would sell for $605, more expensive than the entry level $600 mac mini but offering a slightly faster cpu, larger faster disk and a dvd burner while lacking wifi, bluetooth, optical sound connection or the sveltness of the macMini. More or less a tie in low-end price though considerably different in features, with size, silence, and software update being distinguishing features that cannot be retrofitted to the OpenComputer. The OpenPro is another story. It's larger power supply let's it support a quadcore and high end Nvidia 8800 graphics card. A nicely configured systems sporting a 750GB hard drive, 8800GT Graphics, 2.6Ghz quadcore, leopard and firewire would cost $1750 in a tower case. (Still missing wifi, bluetooth, keyboard, etc...) A comparable mac (with a faster 2.8ghz cpu) would run $2700. However, to be fair, the sweet-spot in the mac pricing ladder is not the 4 core but the 8 core which is $500 more: an 8 core is not available in the OpenPro.
585850
submission
goombah99 writes:
The Times reports an elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine. Notes left revealed that he had scoured the internet for plans before constructing his complex machine, which involved a jigsaw power tool and was connected to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets.
423403
submission
goombah99 writes:
Dell computer announced their foray into consumer touchscreen tablets using multitouch technology. And they are immediately sued in Texas by a company who's 1995 and 1997 patents cover "Portable computer with touch screen and computing system employing same". The claims seem to cover any touchscreen laptop or computing device. The Latitude XT's base price is $2,499, it has a 12.1-inch LED-backlit screen, a 1.06-gigahertz Intel Core 2 Solo processor, 1GB of memory, and a 40GB hard drive with Vista or XP. Battery life is said to be 5 hours and it weighs 3.5 pounds. The screen rotates from notebook with integral keyboard to tablet mode.
420855
submission
goombah99 writes:
Dell computer announced their foray into consumer touchscreen tablets using multitouch technology. And they are immediately sued in Texas by a company who's 1995 and 1997 patents cover "Portable computer with touch screen and computing system employing same". The claims seem to cover any toucscreen laptop or computing device. The Latitude XT's base price is $2,499, it has a 12.1-inch LED-backlit screen, a 1.06-gigahertz Intel Core 2 Solo processor, 1GB of memory, and a 40GB hard drive with Vista or XP. Battery life is said to be 5 hours and it weighs 3.5 pounds. The screen rotates from notebook with integral keyboard to tablet mode.
341671
submission
goombah99 writes:
The NY times reports that Apple's estimated computer market share rose 37% in the 2nd quarter reaching 8.1% of the unit-sales market share and 15.8% of the industry revenue market share. Of course revenue is not profits. It is now the thirds largest computer seller in unit sales. It should be noted that this is not a zero sum game since an increase in apple's unit sales did not mean a decrease in other computer maker's sales: the overall annual market expansion was 4.7% for the industry which is greater than the 2.2% share increase by apple.
