Senior manager: "Yes, Sir, I'll handle it personally. No need to trouble the techs".
Isn't this what happened to the fictional HAL?
453 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
This was done openly with a court order and using the malware itself and it seems that only computers in the US were cleaned up. If they had also added software at the same time, they'd be taking a ridiculously large risk, especially when other branches of government can do so more covertly.
I have used a pivoted display for more years than I care to count, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. I last bought a monitor in 2021, and like the monitor it replaced, it has a 16:10 aspect ratio, but still only 1900x1200. I have never seen a better (squarer) ratio at a reasonable price or even the same ratio with 4K resolution at a reasonable price. I keep hoping that someone would compete with LG's DualUp, causing the price to drop, but that's not happened yet.
I have tried to convince other people that mainly look at documents or web pages on their computers to consider a pivoted display, but they just want more of what they're used to. Habits die hard, both good ones and bad.
Steve Gibson is a well-known guy who put a LOT of thought into this problem, and devised an excellent system to replace the way we currently use usernames and passwords. The major problem that the industry had, I think, is that SQRL is completely open, placed in the public domain and requires no third party to act between the user and web sites. So there is no way for any third party to control or limit its use and no way to directly monetize it. It also didn't help that it took Steve Gibson five years to finish and polish it, albeit with a lot of volunteer support. Plus FIDO, a system that can be used to make money, was being worked on in parallel, but which has also largely flopped.
For interested people, the system is described and defined at https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm . There is a two-hour video of a presentation given by Steve Gibson available on the main page.
I stopped buying WD after the WD Red scandal, where they quietly replaced CMR drives with SMR drives that weren't fit for NAS. At first they denied it, then admitted it but denied it was a problem. After that, I started buying Seagate, so I dodged the next scandal, again in NAS, where they triggered false drive failure warnings as soon as drives ran out of warranty.
How sensitive would this be to altitude? The closer you are to the ground, the slower time passes. Also, the rotation speed of the Earth varies slightly with the global weather. Would that be something that could measureably affect the rate at which time passes for such a clock?
Which is why there is increasing pressure on manufacturer's to build in failure. A decaying battery, a decaying screen (particularly OLED), and decaying security for lack of updates. They also want to build in information gathering, and eventually adverts, as a continuous source of income.
Anyone who is exposing the web interface on these devices to the public internet is asking for trouble anyway. From memory, I don't think modern browsers will tolerate connecting to it via https either. All this said, I don't think there is reason for panic if the interface is only available from the LAN. For many businesses, if the LAN is compromised, it's game over anyway.
If these adapters are replaced, don't buy the suggested Cisco alternative. Go with a different manufacturer that still has an interest in this market.
I think hydrogen is going to have a hard time competing with synthetic hydrocarbons because of the storage problems. Even liquid hydrogen requires much bigger storage tanks. Then you've got the weight and size of the insulation. If you don't liquify it, you've got to compress it, which again requires heavy tanks. Then you've got the much higher risks from leaks, especially during refueling.
Long distance flight must eventually become net-zero carbon, but I doubt that Rolls Royce would be doing this if EasyJet weren't paying for it, probably from their PR budget.
I'm of an age where I remember Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, so I can't resist the bait....
"There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. [The only thing that makes it look light is the sun]."
I assume the author means "far" side. He may have a bet on how quickly someone posts this...
If there were enough time, the moon would eventually become geostationary as the earth's rotation became tidally locked to the moon's orbit, and the system would stabilise, with no moving tides, just as has already happened to the moon. However, the Sun will reach the end of its normal life before then and likely swallow the remains of the Earth and moon as it swells.
There would seem to be an increasing need for chips and other components to be designed to operate at much higher temperatures. If they could operate 50C hotter, the cost of cooling would be much less, though you might have to provide humans with special suits to keep them cool while working near the servers.
We've long had ECC RAM available, but only really critical tasks have had CPU redundancy for detecting and removing errors. Maybe it's time for that to change. As chips have more and more cores added, perhaps we could usefully use an option to tie cores together in threes to do the same tasks with majority voting to determine the output.