Duress code

I actually set that code up for my mom's home alarm. The trick in setting such a code is that it would be something inconspicuous, maybe even a code that they'd expect it to be (such as your birth date or something like that).

Re: So long, SAN

SAN is for consolidating storage. You'd have to read tech articles from the early 2000's when the concept was floated up.

Hell, even my makeshift home SAN did serve its purpose for a time. I was able to just plug in HDDs on my NSLU2, make that an iSCSI target and then just expose a couple of LUNs to my PCs. Instead of growing the PCs HDDs, I simply would expand the LUNs themselves and add more HDDs when needed on the NSLU2. Unfortunately, I also overclocked the NSLU2 and it died a horrible overheating death sometime around 2011. But while it was running, I did get a lot out of it, especially on the PCs that didn't cope with the larger, TB-range HDDs.

MS shills make Eadon sound right

Really. Even if MS ends up being "cheaper" ... what I know MS to be cheaper is on the support part of the contracts. "MS Support" consists in some Indian call center and remote support. RedHat at least will send you a local person for support issues, extra points with being someone I can actually understand!

Blu-Ray

Um... you do know that HD-DVD was the "renegade" format? Only supported by 2 manufacturers vs. the BD being supported by the rest? Not to mention it was the crappiest of the two, with lower storage space *and* hobbled by a fugly MS-backed menu system.

Sony and past, good AND bad @Bodhi

Sony did a lot of pretty good stuff in the past; in fact, my circa 1998 Walkman is still in working order, I used it yesterday. The three PS3's are pretty good as well; the Trinitron TVs (our 1981 Trinitron made it to the 21st century!) and same with my Sony stereo. Oh, my 2007 W300i is still seeing some use, now on its third owner in the family.

But one thing I won't do is call OtherOS "a feature used by 3 people". I was hit by that boneheaded decision; it left me at least a year off PSN, and I finally ended up "solving" the situation by buying another PS3. The irony is that the OtherOS nixing only hit the people who both used OtherOS *and* played games, that is, the segment that was actually giving Sony the $$$ for games. That said, Sony is a lesser evil vs. M$, who pimps off ki'box360 players on HDDs (selling overpriced HDDs to 'em, banning OTC HDDs) and charging for multiplayer. So I'll keep on giving Sony my gaming money, even if I disagree with their OtherOS stance.

@NumptyScrub

So I see someone has been playing Shadowrun... :)

@sisk

The way I was able to pull off a 120k population was pretty easy:

- Before starting, create the city with the terrain editor and flatten *all* terrain. Mountains and stuff will rob you from valuable building spaces. But you must have at least a river or something as a water source.

- Zone *everything* as dense. Dense residential, dense commercial, dense industrial.

These two tips should get you a 120k population city. :)

@boltar

"When was the last time your saw a right wing pressure group trying to prevent a guest speaker at a university from speaking?"

Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, Tec de Monterrey Campus León circa 2001? 2002? A teacher brought over a guest speaker explaining how the Guadalupe Virgin was actually made up by the Catholic Church using an Aztec goddess as a base model. Most of the people left the auditorium and the ultrarightist religious nutjob organizations *demanded* an apology from said teacher for daring to bring such blasphemous people to talk. And that's just the one case I know about; I'm pretty sure there are a lot of those cases in that particular Mexican state.

Extremes are extremes. They happen on both sides.

Re: JG Ballard?

I'm guessing that he's referring to High Rise, not Soylent Green.

Re: Stop using bloody Java

I'd be out of a job, then. It isn't like PHP, which can be replaced by other stuff, or Ruby on Rails (which has much more exploits every day, and of the serious, "server pwned" kind of exploits.) Lots of "enterprisey" stuff is built on top of Java, so it isn't something you can rip out. And even if you could, the only alternative to it is .NET, which is probably worse as you'd end up tied to the MS ecosystem. yeech!

variable capacity

While cassette tapes did have a fixed "capacity" rate, both vinyl and VHS/Betamax tapes had differing quality/capacity. vinyl: 33.3, 45 RPM. VHS had SP, LP, and "SLP". But besides that, the capacity would still be fixed.

Re: Introducing a new definition of "a few"

I also agree, the Walkman kept marching on for *decades*, not just a couple of years. In fact, it ended up being more portable than its CD counterpart, the Discman. I have a 1998 Walkman, it still works, and I still use it from time to time.

The place where cassette did get displaced was on the car stereo.

Re: It's such a shame it's x86

"AMD will be bankrupt before the year's out. Their hardware has almost always been inferior to Intel and it's too late for them to catch up now."

Both use x86 arch. Both are shit compared to pretty much anything else.

Re: What a shame! What a fraud! @Joerg

I tend to agree with your assessment of the hardware: x86 is a steaming turd that should've been excised from the computer industry *decades* ago. Unfortunately, it seems the lack of cheap RISC-based, cost-efficient alternatives have brought another casualty in the war. ARM might wrestle the PC market in the near future, but they just aren't there yet as to be seen for a next-gen console at this point.

That said, I'll probably cling to my PS3 for a bit longer. I still have a backup one with OtherOS, which I sometimes use to tap on the CellBE processor. :)

@AC on "xbox live is better"

Xbox live is a pre-internet model of "pay for the privilege of multiplay" which was wiped out by Quake and similar games that gave it away for free. It should eventually get wiped out again, which will probably be sooner if the PS4 "wins" the next console gen wars.

Return of the AC shills

So, the M$ shills are back, and they're still posting as AC's. Really?

Re: Are you for real? @Mookster

"There's very little protection on BB from malicious apps. For instance apps can even inject keypresses."

All those actions require the permissions to do so being granted by the user. You can actually block apps from doing such things by setting an explicit Deny on those ops, having a granular security model allows BB to do that.

iOS, as far as I remember, *doesn't* have that granular security, thus the iMob (?) apps were able to grab personal info and send it to the devs. Android might have those safeguards, being based on lookalike-Java; BB has that security model because of Java. I do wonder if they kept it for BB10, though...

Re: capacitor-based overwrite

IIRC higher security devices like HSMs do have something like this implemented. It doesn't just activate on power-down, it will also be triggered if someone opens the box; that's why those devices have a higher FIPS 140-2 cert than regular mobile devices.

But then HSMs are 1U rack devices, not sure if that mechanism is small enough to fit inside a phone...

Re: Are you for real?

iOS is broken, indeed.

But Blackberry (both OSen) actually have FIPS 140-2 certifications, something that none of the other OSen have achieved, not even Winbugs Phone 7/8.

FWIW I have never even seen BB jailbreaks being available...

Explicit Kill Switch

The engineer in me shouts that any design where you require an emergency kill switch should have a BIG, RED BUTTON called EMERGENCY STOP, easy to find (but not so easy to trip it during normal use) so that even the most stupid person can press it in an emergency.

Re: Pay for my own device, and have them lock it down??? @Will Godfrey

There's another article out there that mentions this. It even jokes that BYOD will eventually mean BUY your own device. And I agree.

The iTard mobs getting their company to let them use their iShiny stuff are going to inflict suffering on those who don't have the $$$ to buy expensive smartphones but will be forced by their employer to buy one, as they need it for work but the IT budget is no longer covering that, thanks to BYOD.

Heh.

That's the reason why I stopped caring as soon as I read "Retina".Especially given Apple's strange rules for "maximum RAM" on their stuff. My MBP supposedly has an 8Gb upper limit, yet I have 16GB RAM on this one.

Oh, so awesome ... my MBP just dropped $100 in its price tag. At least those of us who care about actual work being done & upgreadability are getting a better deal. Though I would've preferred to have that discount 2 months ago...

eek!

That's what Palm did, and look how they ended up...

Re: OS X has this built in (yeah for unix!)

They were going to use ZFS, which would've been awesome given how ZFS is both a volume manager *and* a filesystem. Unfortunately, Apple didn't go through with licensing ZFS (which would've been much easier in the pre-Oracle Sun) which I suspect has something to do with Jobs' dick-wavering.

Oh well, we *do* have MacZFS, so it can be used on Macs, just without it being the bootable FS. Or encrypted using FileVault...