I switched a couple years ago. I started my switch with hackintoshing my vostro laptop. I did buy a copy of snow-leopard, but even so, it was probably not strictly legal.
Being relatively early in the hackintosh scene, a few things didn't work. Mainly the graphics weren't accelerated so all the nice animations in OSX looked crappy. But it afforded me the opportunity to use it as my main OS for a while before commiting to anything expensive.
I rather liked the OS and had started iPhone developing. As my vostro laptop got long in the tooth, I chose to upgrade to a MacBook Pro.
Still using that laptop today, in spite of two or three newer generations of apple laptops coming out. It's been very nice, for 32 months, no hardware issues. Last week, I've had a weird glitch where it switches to optical output when I remove headphones, and this has been annoying. I'll take it into the genius bar this weekend maybe.
Probably the nicest thing about it is that it hasn't felt it's age. In my daily usage, I doubt the experience would be any better on newer hardware than mine is now. Gaming would probably be another matter, but I generally just do casual gaming.
However, the infamous Walled Garden has been encroaching on the OSX space. That is something to give serious consideration to. It gives me pause. I've been thinking about giving linux a go again. Ubuntu has been giving me grief in vmware, but I'm going to see about dual booting.
> However, the infamous Walled Garden has been encroaching on the OSX space. That is something to give serious consideration to. It gives me pause. I've been thinking about giving linux a go again. Ubuntu has been giving me grief in vmware, but I'm going to see about dual booting.
You can have the best of both worlds and run Linux on your MBP. You're in luck, too, since the new Fedora release supports EFI booting directly from both DVDs and USB disks. Since your MBP is 32 months old, all your hardware will most likely work out of the box with Linux.
Early this year I bought an MBP exclusively for running Arch. Things have been absolutely wonderful. Top notch Apple hardware + an amazing selection FOSS software. What else can a geek ask for?
Hard-copies endure. Digital, not so much. Checkout Jordan Mechner's recent archaeological expedition to retrieve some source code of his from 25 years ago (Prince of Persia). It was nearly lost, and that is only 25 years!
Atlanta is enjoying an exhibit ("Passages") of a very large collection of very rare Bibles. From fragments of early/original texts (ex.: Dead Sea Scrolls) to definitive works (first-run King James Bible) to remarkable renditions (illuminated works) to unusual associations (mother-of-pearl encrusted cover Bible given by (!) Yassir Arafat) to notable errors (Wicked Bible, named for the single typo "Thou shalt commit adultery"), the soon-ending exhibition is for this thread a testimony of the importance of physical copies.
Per that last example, consider that the "Nooked" War and Peace could be considered a "great typo" someday sought after by collectors - except that, being ephemera, the digital copy will either be lost or copies unverifiable due to ease of replication.
I certainly appreciate the benefits of e-books. At the same time, physical presence carries a lot of meaning beyond just content. Alas for those notable books lost in a sea of bits...
Source code is intentionally kept secret and is different from the widely-distributed version.
The book-equivalent of source code is the collection of discarded drafts and working notes of the author. These, too, are often lost, but that has little to do with whether they are digital or not.
It's expensive to properly store and maintain physical copies of things like books. I understand that archivists have some trepidation replacing a known system of storing physical books with a relatively unfamiliar and untested system of storing digital goods. But the bugs are already being worked out; if you want to make sure something lasts, make it digital and make sure lots of others can get to it.
Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.
>Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately.
Most, but not all of my experiences have been similar, although I actually suspect that in at least some cases I have not actually woken up, but have merely dreamt that I woke up. At one point I "woke up" from a lucid dream to find myself in bed in the middle of the night, went back to sleep, and then was awoken moments later by my alarm and found that the sun was fully risen. Not conclusive, as I may have just slept dreamlessly in the interim (although that's uncommon after waking from a dream and going back to sleep), but suspicious.
Another time, I woke up immediately after realizing I was dreaming, looked around my room, and found that my dream had persisted and was visually composited over the real world around me. This was, of course, extremely disconcerting, and my solution was to close my eyes and go back to sleep. But looking back, it seems far more likely that I dreamt that entire experience, including the waking up and looking around, than that my brain actually had that kind of catastrophic system failure.
In any case, losing your grasp on lucid dreams is a common and frustrating problem, and people have gathered a few tricks for holding on. One that has sometimes worked for me is, when I feel things beginning to slip, rather than panicking, to spin gently in place with my eyes closed (although closing your eyes in a dream is not always
> "(although closing your eyes in a dream is not always"
I've been lucid dreaming for a good many years now. Losing visual sensations in a dream typically leads me to waking up. I attribute this to me being a rather visual learner/thinker while awake. Early on I tried the spinning-around trick, but it led to confusing visual-blurs and often me unintentionally sensing my real-body's proprioceptive channel, all leading to waking up.
My best dream-stabilizing trick so far has been to look at my dream hands and use one to scratch the palm of the other. That ties my visual perceptions to my dream-body's tactile sensations. Once I get a dream stabilized like this, I can just keep one hand scratching its own palm all the time, serving as a good, constant reminder that I'm still dreaming.
Or, if I'm flying/hovering, I just crash into something or the ground (the harder the better), also linking the visual to the tactile.
Personally I don't like the idea of "image" based computing very much. I mean, it's fine in a lot of circumstances, but the file system provides a nice broadly compatible database that is consistent across programs.
I think the need for such a well defined and accepted user organizable data store isn't going away regardless of the underlying storage medium.
I like that my file system can be reasoned about in very concrete ways. I'm okay with using a tag based system like gmail, but I find it very flat and more difficult to organize vs traditional hierarchy of folders.
Flame is not remotely in the same category as stuxnet.
The news agencies are confusing capability with complexity. Stuxnet was very targeted with insider information on esoteric industrial systems. It was designed to fly under the radar, cause damage to physical systems in such a way that it would appear to be from "wear and tear."
As I recall, stuxnet used some compiler shenanigans to obfuscate stackframes and make it difficult to decompile (after having first decrypted the executable code).
Flame is written in Lua! A scripting language! So to say that somehow Flame is going to be hard to analyze is absurd.
It's a 20MB package of the Lua VM, the scripts, and modules like sqlite. It's about as vanilla of an application as you can get!
They claim this 20MB package size is going to make it super duper hard to analyze, and yet they have the source code to look at, and while it's a decent size at 3k lines, it's SOURCE CODE. Not obfuscated machine language.
Thanks for the securelist-link. It's indeed a better source for some technical details, also from a Kaspersky expert... But in the RT-interview the Kaspersky's chief malware expert says things that concur with what you share: "There is no reliable relation between Stuxnet and Flame as we call it…they are completely different. Because Stuxnet was a small application developed for a particular target with the specific objective to interact with industrial control systems and break them down. And Flame is a universal attacking tool kit used mostly for cyber espionage."
You misunderstand the word compromise in this context. It's not a negative. Compromise is:
> a position where everybody is genuinely happy.
It's not about splitting 50/50. People equate meeting someone half way with splitting things 50/50. That's far from it.
So, what you say is true. It's what I was saying, just with more words. =)
Now, please don't come back and be one of those people that argue semantics. I meant what I said, I said what I meant, and there was just some confusion. Hopefully, it's clearer now.
The ProAsic3 is a commercial FPGA. So no, it's not military. The military may use it, but that doesn't change that it is a commercial part built to commercial specifications.
It's ambiguous, not inaccurate. If the military used a certain COTS revolver as standard equipment, and the revolver had a eye-first camera with cellular upload to the public Internet, and that feature was not approved and known by the gun selection people, it is fair to say that "military revolvers upload battlefield images to the Internet, a serious security breach.
It's false, implies everything the military uses is military grade. By that reasoning I'm having military-grade coffe this morning.
The keyword you need is "defense-grade". Most fpga vendors sells "defense-grade" FPGAs, for example the Xilinx Virtex 6Q and Spartan 6Q (the 'Q' means defense-grade) a very different product line.
There's a difference between grade and use. Grade implies a certain standard of assurance for a specific market or environment. Use just means it's used by someone, or a group (in this case security).
Heck, people could (if they're nuts) call 44Con a military conference given that it's attended by various armed forces folk. I'd rather people didn't though, but if they want to look stupid while thinking they look smart, who am I to stop them?
I simply do not believe one could find a "back door" looking at a chip in a SEM. It sounds to me like you are describing destructive physical analysis whose purpose is to make sure requisite manufacturing practices are being followed.
There are companies that specialize in reverse engineering schematics from silicon. It's entirely possible (albeit relatively expensive and time-consuming compared to good old-fashioned industrial espionage) to recover schematics from silicon.
See the schematics? They've created those from scratch by deconstructing the chip. (I can say with certainty that this is the case because I'm familiar with the original schematics for this part. The ChipWorks ones are much neater!)
Doing this for a larger, all-digital chip is substantially the same. In that case you can probably step up from identifying individual transistors and identify the standard cells directly, since they tend to have distinctive-looking gate structures.
The way I read that is that they make the designs and look for circuitry that does not match the designs, which is presumed to be backdoors. I would think that defects and intentional backdoors would both be findable on an SEM. Do you think otherwise? I don't have a ton of experience with bare silicon, so I'd be interested to know if that's unreasonable.
Even then - the manufacturer could supply design documents that surreptitiously include backdoors... there's simply so much to look at when it comes to actual circuit schematics, I can't see how anyone would spot "backdoor" circuitry amongst everything else that is presumably legitimate. I don't know much about silicon, so maybe I'm wrong.
I do think it is unreasonable. With a SEM you only get to look at the surface of things, which is going to be either glass or metal or polysilicon. The only way to see a transistor in a sem is if you chemically remove all the top layers (which are the connections between transistors), or perform a cross section.
In the cross section case you are going to see a few dozen transistors out of the millions in a design of any complexity.
It would be remotely feasible to discover some sort of shenanigans if you knew the exact layout of the design, which would basically mean you are a foundry yourself. In that case you might get lucky and spot some difference between the mask you made, and the mask that was used to produce the part under inspection.
But the scales involved make this not believable to me. It would be roughly like scanning the whole of, say, America, and checking every street and intersection of every town, and comparing it against some known quantity to see if something changed in Springfield Missouri.
Maybe somebody could automate this, but the chemical processes for removing layers is less than perfect. Those strands of metal stretching across the ASIC have some built in tension, and if you remove the layer of glass above them, then tend to spring up and jumble. Good luck trying to do something with that.
Just to add... Any "advanced" backdoors take significant silicon and would be visible from the top of the device as a significant design change would be required to accomodate them. Subtle flaws in designs are another thing altogether.
Being relatively early in the hackintosh scene, a few things didn't work. Mainly the graphics weren't accelerated so all the nice animations in OSX looked crappy. But it afforded me the opportunity to use it as my main OS for a while before commiting to anything expensive.
I rather liked the OS and had started iPhone developing. As my vostro laptop got long in the tooth, I chose to upgrade to a MacBook Pro.
Still using that laptop today, in spite of two or three newer generations of apple laptops coming out. It's been very nice, for 32 months, no hardware issues. Last week, I've had a weird glitch where it switches to optical output when I remove headphones, and this has been annoying. I'll take it into the genius bar this weekend maybe.
Probably the nicest thing about it is that it hasn't felt it's age. In my daily usage, I doubt the experience would be any better on newer hardware than mine is now. Gaming would probably be another matter, but I generally just do casual gaming.
However, the infamous Walled Garden has been encroaching on the OSX space. That is something to give serious consideration to. It gives me pause. I've been thinking about giving linux a go again. Ubuntu has been giving me grief in vmware, but I'm going to see about dual booting.