Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. However, this has got to be a close second: a man gave up 60% of his liver to give his wife a transplant. Wow. Talk about love and faith combined.
Attention Kyocera 7135 owners
That would be, at a minimum, Julie and Mike. After seeing this post on SmartphoneSource, I ordered a headset, travel charger, car charger, and battery for the whopping sum of $62– that’s less than the battery alone from Verizon (if they had any, which they don’t.) Everything except the battery arrived yesterday, but I knew the battery was backordered, so no worries there. Everything I got is genuine Kyocera gear and works like it’s supposed to. I’m delighted, and I highly recommend Dan’s Cellular.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
You can have my TiVo…
either when a) you pry it from my cold, dead hands or b) when there’s a similarly capable product that can record and play back HD content. Gartenberg says it’s time to drop TiVo in favor of the Windows Media Center Edition. MCE has some undeniably cool features, but it’s still expensive relative to TiVos (although it can do some stuff that TiVo presently can’t). Something to look at as I consider whether to buy the new Dish PVR (which does HD and also acts as both a satellite and over-the-air HD decoder), the announced-but-still-vaporware HD-capable TiVo, MCE, or nothing at all.
In other TiVo-ish news, there’s a cool blog focusing on personal video recorders; lots of news if you’re interested in that sort of thing. (Hat tip: Gartenberg).
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Filed under Uncategorized
Teeny tiny WiFi card
I just found this review of a new SanDisk combination flash memory/wireless card. Must… resist… credit… card….
Actually, resisting isn’t so hard; from the manufacturer’s site, it looks like the card won’t ship until next week, and won’t have Palm OS drivers until the fall sometime.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Tablet PC blog
This guy has an interesting blog, but I’m a little concerned that he named his Tablet “Bonnie”.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Scoble on Tablet PCs
Scoble has some comments on tablets. He correctly points out that many customers are waiting for Centrino-based tablets from HP, IBM, and so on, instead of buying lesser-known brands like Acer. My Acer experience so far has been terrific: I bought a 9-month-old demo unit, sent it in for warranty service on Monday, and am expecting it back tomorrow (it’s already shipped) with everything fixed. That’s the same speed and accuracy of service I’ve gotten in the past from Apple and IBM. I do like the idea of a faster Centrino-based tablet, but so far the proc speed of the C102 has been acceptable, especially on a price/performance basis.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Beatallica!
If you’ve ever wondered what Beatles songs would sound like if performed by Metallica, wonder no more.
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Filed under Musings
Taking the tablet plunge
I’ve been idly considering buying a Tablet PC for a while. I went to Sams’ yesterday to look for toilet paper and paper towels, and I ended up with an Acer TravelMate C102 tablet. This is one of the original Tablet PCs; it has a Pentium-III 800 CPU, a 20 (or maybe 30, I forget) GB drive, and 256MB of RAM. It also had lots of scratches on the case and a little sign saying “last one– $1168”. At that price, and given Sams’ 6-month return policy, that seemed like a pretty good deal. (It turns out that the listed price of $1499 is actually more than what other Sams’ sell the same unit for $1387). Anyway, once I got it home, I was able to bring it right up, install the 27 security patches that WU recommended, and start tableting.
For now, it’s hard to tell whether I’ll keep it. Microsoft Reader is terrific (especially since MS is giving away three free full-length books each week). I love the size and form factor, realizing that this isn’t a replacement for my trusty ThinkPad. On the other hand… this unit is practically obsolete by tablet standards; for another $500 I could get a newer unit with a much faster CPU and more RAM (the C102 I have is limited to a max of 256MB). The keyboard has a terribly sticky space bar, and the rotating latch on which the screen pivots is very loose. Those should be fixable under warranty, though, so I’m going to keep this one for a month or so and see if I use it enough to justify keeping it. If so, then I’ll decide whether to keep it or buy a more powerful version.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
John, c’mon down
John, you’re invited to come watch the race.
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Crack passwords in seconds! Not.
C|Net (and others, but I’m picking on them because their reporter should know better), are breathlessly reporting an allegedly new approach to breaking Windows passwords. The article conveniently ignores the fact that trading space for time is a well-known technique for lots of applications, and it presents without comment the claim that this is a major vuln. It’s not. Here’s why:
- The attack depends on breaking the LM hash, which is known to be weak. You don’t have to store it (read up on the NoLMHash setting); even if you have Win9x clients, you can install the directory services client and use NTLMv2. In fact, if you follow MS’ recommendation of using >15-character passphrases for critical accounts, you’ll find that no LM hash is stored for those passphrases.
- The space/time tradeoff doesn’t scale. Even if you just use upper case, numbers, and symbols, you will get somewhere around 3.37134E+14 different 8-character passwords on a standard US keyboard– you’ll get more if you include Unicode characters, which MS has been recommending for a while. Storing the hashes for that many passwords takes about 5.4 petabytes of space. Even if you manage to store that many password hashes on a disk, it is pretty unlikely that you will find a system fast enough to compare that many passwords in a matter of seconds. The problem still boils down to weak passwords, not to the fact that you can crack weak passwords in 13.6 seconds instead of 1 minute and 41 seconds. Weak passwords are still weak, regardless of how fast you can crack them.
- The only way to mount this attack is to grab the password hashes.
- If you gain physical access to the box, the stored hashes are effectively salted by syskey, so they’re not directly vulnerable.
- If you mount an online attack, you must either be admin or be able to get admin privileges to get the hashes from the LSA so you can attack them. If an attacker can get admin privileges, you have bigger problems than weak passwords.
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Filed under Security
Breadmaker parts summary
My original post on bread machine (or breadmaker, if you prefer) parts keeps garnering comments, in two flavors: “I need a part for an XXX bread machine” or “I found a place to get parts for an XXX bread machine”. Herewith a list of the best links submitted in the comments; maybe this will help elevate this entry so that people can find what they’re looking for:
Filed under Musings
And swilling root beer
I’m sitting in a large room with about 120 computers and 200 Microsoft field sales and consulting staff, listening to a guy with a Ph.D. in computer science present a bunch of material that I wrote– and drinking an icy-cold diet Barq’s (note to self: find some Barq’s Floatz while I’m here). This sure beats working for a living. How did I get so lucky?
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How I got started
Kasia reminisced about how she got started in computing, and that got me to thinking. Back in 1978 or so, when I was 10, my dad owned a construction company, and he got a contract to build a new store for a local company. Through some magic involving upgrades to the appliance dealer’s office, Dad ended up with a spiffy top-loading RCA VCR and an attached camera. (I could go into lots of old-school technical detail, but I won’t). That in turn got transmuted into a TRS-80 Model I, with the Level II BASIC interpreter and the coveted expansion interface that gave me a whopping 48KB of RAM. Dad & I quickly got in the habit of swilling root beer and computing; we more or less learned BASIC programming at the same time. I quickly got bored with the simple examples that we were getting from Radio Shack’s line of private-label books, but a subscription to 80 Micro soon helped me start brushing up on my Z80 assembler. (I remember being terribly disappointed one Christmas when I got Visicalc instead of the macro assembler I’d really, really wanted).
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Oracle unbreakable? Not
Oracle has been loudly hyping the stability and security of their products with their “Unbreakable” campaign. Better people than I have already debunked the security aspects of their claims. Now this week, Orbitz suffered a major outage because of Oracle’s… (wait for it) clustering software. That’s right; the very software (called the Oracle Real Application Cluster package) that’s supposed to guarantee that their systems are 99.999% available caused a major outage. This eWeek article explores Orbitz’s solution (e.g. moving off RAC).
Fearless prediction: Orbitz is going to start looking for another database vendor. eBay dumped Oracle and Sun after their 1998 outage, and I fully expect to see it happen again. Since Orbitz’ new CIO started work on Monday, I bet this is suddenly very high on his to-do list.
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Filed under Security
Fascinating storage interview
ACM‘s got a terrific interview with a fellow named Jim Gray. Those of you without computer science backgrounds may not have heard of him (he helped develop the original TPC benchmarks for measuring how fast databases can operate), but you might still be interested in his interview. Imagine having a 20-terabyte disk attached to your computer– now imagine that, if you follow the current progress of disk access times, it would take you about a day to read or write the contents of that one disk, and that’s best-case. Fascinating stuff. (Hat tip: Jeremy).
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