Laptop Thermal Design, Convergence, and More Security Analysis

If you've ever used any laptop/netbook you'll realise a lot of compromises need to be made to achieve a balance of power, portability, durability, and longevity. One of the big issues is heat dissipation. For instance, running a fan can result in significantly higher power requirements. If you're curious one experiment I came across said that shifting more air via a larger fan was more efficient and quieter than a series of smaller fans.).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_sink

Recently, the thermal pad (it feels like a silicon/rubber compound) dried out on my Asus 1015 series EeePC which led to higher than average temperatures and ultimately permature shutdown. The interesting thing about the design is that the CPU is placed almost directly over RAM chip socket. Moreover, foil is then used as another supposed heat dissipation mechanism on the inside the RAM cover. The obvious issue is if the fan/heatsink combination on the CPU is not working properly this combination results in a 'heat sandwich'.

If you're curious, I've used copper shims, coins, and even foil in combination with standard thermal paste as a means of replacing thermal pads if I couldn't find a replacement. Be sure to cut to size if the material is somewhat malleable though particularly if there are components on top of the chip which may cause a short (can lead to non startup of your machine and can often be difficult to diagnose if you've been roaming around the whole board) or other problems.

One of the things I examined in the 'Convergence' report was pricing differences between local retailers and overseas options, the premium that people were willing to pay for locally purchased goods, and whether or not prices would eventually converge regionally/internationally. Clearly, there is some work with regards to suppliers/channels and a Federal Government enquiry as well. It's going to be interesting whether things will change and how long they will take given the smaller size of the Australian market.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/growing-consumer-outrage-at-information-technology-mark-ups-and-rip-offs/story-fndo1qgd-1226440690843
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/firms-to-answer-on-cost-disparity/story-e6frgakx-1226505607189
http://www.smh.com.au/business/retailers-forced-to-step-into-line-on-price-20130111-2cjx8.html
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2013/s3687910.htm
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/tech-giants-to-face-it-gouging-probe-20130211-2e80e.html
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/adobe_cuts_australian_prices_after_BgBXyFaCrXRGNIrS1M2fNN
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/02/australian-government-to-force-apple-microsoft-to-front-up-australia-tax-inquiry/
http://www.crn.com.au/News/333106,why-the-it-price-inquiry-summons-may-not-mean-answers.aspx
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/93744

Raytheon have been playing around with concepts similar to social networking OSINT (aware that FBI/DHS/NSA may have been working on similar technologies as well) and 'Algorithmic Masking' concepts outlined in 'Convergence' report.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9861155/Warning-over-social-networking-snooping-technology.html

Continuing work on 'Cybersecurity' report (Hope to finish soon. It's 871+ pages/229K+ words now though I think I should be able to cut down a lot). Been interesting just how much difficulty a lot of cutting edge projects have run into, in particular the JSF program.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-pentagons-new-trillion-dollar-jet-is-a-garbage-can
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/f-35-takes-flight-sans-ge-and-perhaps-canadians
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2011/03/air-force-norman-schwartz-says-software-may-slow-f-35-development-030611w/

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/

Diverging Convergence

The 'Convergence Effect' report has become far larger than I had originally intended. Part of this was due to feedback which indicated that, "more detail" would make the document more useful, part of it has to do with me thinking of other ideas, and part it has to do with me working on a few side projects (some are related to 'Security') and this document provides me with a good outlet for some of my notes.

Another reason is that I've discovered that LibreOffice currently has some issues dealing with large documents (I'm around the 210 page/61000 word mark) that aren't in the native file format (Switching to working in the native 'odt' file format seems to work well but for reasons of compatibility I'd like access to other formats as well though.). The side effects of this can be data loss, inexplicable crashing, etc...

For these reasons, I will be splitting the 'Security' chapter (The new document will be more 'technically orientated' and will take offensive and defensive positions into consideration.) into a separate document (For reasons of coherence, I will maintain maintain much of the current content/state of the 'Convergence Effect' report.) and will consider these projects as largely, separate entities.

As an aside, I recently discovered a bug with cup-pdf which means that partial page loads aren't well supported under certain web browsers. I've worked around the issue for now by switching to a different browser.

I've also had some feedback that the following is a bit complex, http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com/2011/03/eeepc-recovery-without-recovery.html

Since I recently damaged my recovery disk I've concur that the article can be a little difficult to read for someone who has never tried it before. Below is a simplified version:

1) Get 1005P recovery disc/image

2) Copy/extract contents to an 'arbitrary folder' which will be used to build a new image

3) Use ImgBurn to extract boot sector from recovery disc/image

4) Get recovery

5) Use a WIM utility to split the WIM image obtained from your 1015PD into sub 4GB files

6) Rename WIM files to asus.wim, asus2.wim, asus3.wim, etc... and drop them in the root directory of your 'arbitrary folder' where you stored the contents of the recovery image

7) Use ImgBurn to use boot image from disc/image on new recovery image

8) Create image

9) Write the image to an optical disc

10) Test whether it boots by using VM software such as VirtualBox or VMWare

Convergence Effect

If you've been watching this blog you may have noticed that there hasn't been a lot of activity lately. Part of this has to do with me working on other projects. One of these includes a report that I call the "Convergence Effect" which is basically a  follow up of "Building a Cloud Computing Service". If you're curious, both documents were/have been submitted to various organisations where more good can be done with them. Moreover, I consider both both works to be "WORKS IN PROGRESS" and I may make extensive alterations without reader notice. The latest versions are likely to be available here:

https://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/

Convergence Effect   ABSTRACT

A while back I wrote a document called "Building a Cloud Service". It was basically a document detailing my past experiences and details some of the issues that a cloud company may face as it is being built and run. Based on what had transpired since, a lot of the concepts mentioned in that particular document are becoming widely adopted and/or are trending towards them. This is a continuation of that particular document and will attempt to analyse the issues that are faced as we move towards the cloud especially with regards to to media and IT convergence. Once again, we will use past experience, research, as well as current events trends in order to write this particular report. I hope that this document will prove to be equally useful and will provide an insight not only to the current state of affairs but will provide a blueprint for those who may be entering the sector as well as those who may be using resources/services from this particular sector. Please note that this document has gone through many revisions and drafts may have gone out over time. As such, there will be concepts that may have been picked up and adopted by some organisations (as was the case with the "Cloud" document with several technologies) while others may have simply broken cover while this document was being drafted and sent out for comment. It also has a more strategic/business slant when compared to the original document which was more technically orientated.

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/