Sounds loopy, but visualizing what my writing will look like as I write helps it improve from illegible to readable - thought still ugly. Normally I just try to jot stuff down with the leaset amount of effort, and it shows.
If you normalize by population Sophos's reported national spam percentages things look
pretty different. The scores are no longer
so lopsided, and the winner is... Canada?
My electrodynamics is *very* rusty, but perhaps
whey they mean by a 'bubble' is that the field
(which AFAIK is electro-magnetic, despite what
the product hype says) is not your usual
electric field which falls off as 1/r^2,
but perhaps a dipole or quadrapole field
which falls off as 1/r^3 or 1/r^4. And there
are higher order fields which drop of even more
quickly.
In brief here are examples of the different
kinds of fields.
Monopole - a single positive charge at the origin.
Dipole - 1 pos charge at x=1, 1 neg charge at x=-1.
Quadrapole - 1 pos charge each at (x,y)=(1,1),(-1,-1),
1 neg charge each at (x,y)=(1,-1),(-1,1)
?pole - 1 pos charge each at (x,y,z)=(1,1,1),(1,-1,-1),(-1,1,-1),(-1,-1,1)
and 1 neg charge each at the others.
even higher pole - you can do these also, but the examples are not as simple.
I can't look it up now because the mrs. is sleeping.
Don't Panic, Noise is a just a by-product of Life
on
Auerbach on Internet Cruft
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
File this under Chicken Little.
The author concludes, mistakenly IMHO, that an
increase in noise from undetectable to
"noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs"
will inevitably lead to
"a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet".
I don't think so. Noise is a by-product of life,
it is unavoidable, and not an indication of impending system failure. The
author is another victim of that classic mistake,
linearly extrapolating a relation from a small domain to a much larger scale.
The author mentions three main sources of noise
Stale IP addresses, such as defunct Name Servers.
DOS Viruses
Spam
(1) will not scale with the growth of valid
traffic, and thus should be ignored. (2)
will go away over time as security holes are patched and MS learns how to avoid the buffer
overrun mistakes that have created their
stunning vulnerabilities. (3), I believe,
depend on the same MS security holes, and thus
will decrease as MS security holes decrease.
The net result is that over time (say 1 to 5 years) the current noise to signal ratio will decrease.
I'll check back in 2008.
I think SCO's tactics have taken way too much
of everyone's time and ink.
There's no point in trying to rebut SCO's statements because they are just
cynical manipulations of the public,
designed to milk the last bit of value from their doomed stock. If they were stupid enough to
believe what they say they wouldn't have the mental fortitude to dress themselves.
Just let them babble in the wind until their own lawyers turn on them and sue the crap out of them.
I think SCO is openning themselves up to a Class Action Suit for the all lies they've dished up, and maybe SEC violations as well for their attempt to manipulate their stock (disclaimer: IANAL).
Could some savvy lawyers file a class action suit against SCO because of damages done to end users due to SCO's bogus claims? Damages such as lost business due to FUD and whatever else might apply?
I also thought this was a big
story.
It sounds like this technique could lead to
a large number of improved products. The
article mentions these...
They have already spun the fibres into cloth, making supercapacitors - devices that store electricity.
"Promising electronic-textile applications for these fibres, which are easy to weave and sew, include distributed sensors, electronic interconnects, electromagnetic shields, antennas and batteries," they write.
Interestingly enough, they don't mention more
prosaic things such as bullet proof vests and
even very strong work clothes. I wonder if
these applications are practical.
This article should have been on the slashdot
front page.
I agree. Be sure to try this first before you go
the Air Conditioning route.
I've done this in my apartments/house for 20+ years. We place box fans in one or more windows (even though the box fan instructions say not to) on one end of the house, and open windows on the other.
The fans blow out so we don't suck in small
insects like 'no-see-ums', they can sometimes
be a real nuisance.
Sometimes when I get ambitious, I'll
hang a sheet across the doorways to the rooms
with the fans, leaving only a foot of clearance
between the sheet and the top of the doorway.
That way cold air - which sinks BTW - dams
up behind the sheet. Only the warmest air
get pulled up over the sheet into the fan room and then is expelled by the fan. It might sound silly, but you can feel the difference with and without the sheet on a cool (less than 70F) night.
During the day, we pull the shade down over
the windows, especially those in the sun.
We have room darkening shades, these are
not translucent. The translucent shades mostly
diffuse light so people can't see in, but you
don't want that light, it carries heat. Awnings
might even be better, but we don't have those.
How about this... Make each "diving board"
a shiny
mirror, and arrange them on top of transparent flat surface to create one large mirror.
Now, shine a light through the transparent surface.
The brighter the light, the more the mirror bends.
You can use this two ways
Project an image through the transparent bottom
layer. The projected image
will be reproduced by the reflected light
off the mirrored top. Its an image amplifier.
Something like those TI (?) chips they use
in video projectors, only it amplifies light directly.
Suitably adjust the light intensity
through the transparent layer, and you have
dynamically controlled mirror optics.
After you've taken measures to collect the information, your next big decision will be the analysis tools that you can bring to the table. If you have built your own system, your primary analysis tools will be tcpdump and the strings command.
<blatent plug>
... or you can try ipstrings which
is included in the
ipaudit
and
ipaudit-web
packages.
1) By N more systems than you need. That way
when one dies you can just swap out the
old hard drives (assuming it's ok) and put them
in the spare system. Then you can fix the
broken system when its convenient, and not
in a rush with the end user hovering by.
2) In your design, consider including
TWO of those slide-in hardrive bays in each
machine. One for the hard drive in your
original machine so *maybe* you can legally
transfer your Windows License (does it work
that way?). The second slide-in bay is for
a new larger disk drive. That way, if
someone's machines dies, you need only
slide the drives out of one machine and into
an waiting spare. Saves time and helps lower
anxiety.
3) Buy 5 or 10 complete systems as a trial. I've
found in my limited experience (the systems I've built number only in the teens) you're never sure
what you're going to get until they arrive. And
by ordering several systems you see if you the
vendors send identical parts or mixes them up.
Let's see. This disovery was made by
Professor Friedemann Freund and colleagues at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, its publicised in a Vancouver paper, but
the byline is from London.
News sure get's around.
"the Constitution grants cust.. rights" is wrong
on
When Elephants Dance
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The article states
customers certain rights with regard to
While the Constitution grants
copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.
I'm not a lawyer (not even close), but here's
my understanding of the situtation.
Althought the entertainment industry might
like us to believe this, it is backwards. The
Constitution grants certain privileges to copyright holders, not rights to customers.
In fact "customers" (i.e. citizens) have
inalienable rights. The are not granted by the Constitution, citizens own their rights.
The privilege granted to copyright holders is the exclusive use of their
creations for a limited time. The reason
the Constitution grants this privilege is to
encourage people to invest the time creating
useful or entertaining content. Ultimately this
is for the benefit of everyone, copyright holder and consumer alike.
The Entertainment industry consistently distorts
this fact for their own use. They like to
argue that copyrighted material is Intellectual Property, thereby distorting its true nature to resemble real property. They
then continue to argue that distributing copyrighted material is equivalent to stealing.
It isn't. Distributing copyrighted material is
equivalent to breaking a contract; the contract the Constitution established with the Copyright holder.
An important consequence of the fact that copyrights are a contract is that the contract
can be re-negotiated. This is something
the Entertainment Industry never addresses in their public arguments. They public agruments
go something like "we own this material, we can do what we like with it, and you can't tell us what to do", when in fact
the government signed a contract with the copyright holder, and the form of future contracts can be changed. In fact, recent changes to the contract
have been in the copyright holder's favor, such as the "Sonny Bono" law, or whatever it was called.
What needs to happen now is for the government to
re-negotiate future copyright contracts (i.e. copyright law) in light
of recent technological developments, and to
strike a balance between the content producers
and content consumers.
So if you work for a living you cannot
produce your own intellectual property.
You can only do so if you are independently
wealthy.
Those that have shall get,
those that don't shall lose,
so the bible says,
and it still is news
- Billie Holiday
Damn depressing.
I don't think this tactic will help your company
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
because
(1) Although the source is obfuscated, it is still GPL which means its freely available and freely compilable.
2) If folks know from which original obfuscated code the GPL derives, it may be possible to write some program that separates it from the new code and then the new (but obfuscated) code can be examined and possibly cleaned up, then voila new GPL code.
So your company produces code that must be distrubuted freely - how can they benifit?
The price difference might be irrelevant now that
we're all computer savvy, but back in the old
days when I had to choose between Dos/Intel
or Mac, the price difference was significant.
And now the damage is done, Intel has the bigger base.
.. was when I sent my card deck through a broken
card reader.
I had stacked the cards into the shiny metal
hopper and pressed the READ button.
The reader quickly slid the card after card
from the bottom of the deck, shot it through the
reading unit and then just as quickly
sent the cards to the output bin.
Unfortunately, the output bin was broken.
So rather
than deposit my cards in a neat pile,
my 500 cards were launched clear across the room.
I could only watch in horor
as they covered every flat surface
like oversized confetti.
I think I spent the next hour
re-sorting the deck.
Gee, I miss those punch cards.
Can anyone explain in English (not the
legalese found at
http://www.eclipse.org/legal/cpl-v05.html)
the difference between the Common Public Licence Version 0.5 that applies to Eclipse and the Gnu Public Licence?
I was running run 8.1beta with 64MB. Nautilus
under GNOME crawled. The desktop
would seem to hang - I opened a console window
and run top to see there were 3 or 4 processes
running Nautilus each consuming about 25% of
memory. I'd have to kill Nautilus to get
anything done. (BTW the CPU is Celeron 375mhz)
AFter I upgraded to 160MB it ran fine - Nautilus
was usable and actually pretty slick, but still
on the slow side.
I still don't have the faintest idea what he wants to do, though, but I'd like to get enlightened;)
Ditto. It sounds like he's trying something
that I'd like to be able to do, but what exactly
does he mean by
"
output a MIB definition"?
Does he want to write one of those MIB text
files? Or create a C structure to use internally
in net-snmp code?
Or something else?
Viral software is your best programming investment
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 1
The big attraction of the GPL is the assurance
that if you contribute to GPL'ed code you will
always be able to use/compile a derivative work. What a great way to leverage your productivity. It's like "cast your bread onto the water and
it will return n-fold". If you contribute
to a GPL'ed work your return is perpetual access to the improvements made by others. You can't say
the same about those other licenses.
This is an clever way to get funding for
asteroid tracking , convince the generals that they're potential
weapons. The asteroid arm's race will begin
and asteroid observatories will be rolling
in money.
I'm all for it, IMHO its a pretty good way to
spend your defense dollar.
I use perl all the time. There's three thnings
that really make it useful for me.
Versatile regular expressions
Really great for slicing and dicing those
text strings. Just about any pattern I
can imagine can be parsed. Probably more
then I imagine, 'cause I've only learned
about 50% of the regular expression syntax.
Associative Arrays
I'd never seen associative arrays (hashes)
until Perl, but they're great, they make it so much easier to organize information.
I believe LW himself
said something like "if you're not using
associative arrays in your Perl script you're
probably doing something wrong."
I really didn't grok the significance of hash tables (the underlying mechanism) until I encountered AAs in Perl. Now I love hash
tables.
Everything Else
which includes the fact that its interpreted
(no compilation), easy conversion between
types (or maybe its really no types),
anonymous variables (or whatever you call
those $_ things, they're really convenient
once you get used to them),
almost
all the neat little system functions C, and
a flexible/redundant syntax (but with the potential for
greater obfuscation) which makes perl
more like a human language then a computer
language, but not everyone will think that
last item is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds loopy, but visualizing what my writing
will look like as I write helps it improve
from illegible to readable - thought still ugly.
Normally I just try to jot stuff down with the
leaset amount of effort, and it shows.
If you normalize by population Sophos's reported national spam percentages things look pretty different. The scores are no longer so lopsided, and the winner is ... Canada?
COUNTRY.....PERC...........POP....PERC./POP.Canada.......6.80......32207113...2.1113e-07
US..........56.74.....290342554...1.9542e-07
Netherlands..2.13......16150511...1.3188e-07
South_Korea..5.77......48289037...1.1949e-07
Australia....1.21......19731984...6.1322e-08
Spain........1.05......40217413...2.6108e-08
France.......1.50......60180529...2.4925e-08
Germany......1.83......82398326...2.2209e-08
UK...........1.31......60094648...2.1799e-08
Mexico.......1.19.....104907991...1.1343e-08
Brazil.......2.00.....182032604...1.0987e-08
China........6.24....1286975468...4.8486e-09
That's where all the cagey geeks will keep it.
My electrodynamics is *very* rusty, but perhaps whey they mean by a 'bubble' is that the field (which AFAIK is electro-magnetic, despite what the product hype says) is not your usual electric field which falls off as 1/r^2, but perhaps a dipole or quadrapole field which falls off as 1/r^3 or 1/r^4. And there are higher order fields which drop of even more quickly.
In brief here are examples of the different kinds of fields.
File this under Chicken Little.
The author concludes, mistakenly IMHO, that an increase in noise from undetectable to "noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs" will inevitably lead to "a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet". I don't think so. Noise is a by-product of life, it is unavoidable, and not an indication of impending system failure. The author is another victim of that classic mistake, linearly extrapolating a relation from a small domain to a much larger scale.
The author mentions three main sources of noise
- Stale IP addresses, such as defunct Name Servers.
- DOS Viruses
- Spam
(1) will not scale with the growth of valid traffic, and thus should be ignored. (2) will go away over time as security holes are patched and MS learns how to avoid the buffer overrun mistakes that have created their stunning vulnerabilities. (3), I believe, depend on the same MS security holes, and thus will decrease as MS security holes decrease. The net result is that over time (say 1 to 5 years) the current noise to signal ratio will decrease. I'll check back in 2008.I think SCO's tactics have taken way too much of everyone's time and ink.
There's no point in trying to rebut SCO's statements because they are just cynical manipulations of the public, designed to milk the last bit of value from their doomed stock. If they were stupid enough to believe what they say they wouldn't have the mental fortitude to dress themselves.
Just let them babble in the wind until their own lawyers turn on them and sue the crap out of them. I think SCO is openning themselves up to a Class Action Suit for the all lies they've dished up, and maybe SEC violations as well for their attempt to manipulate their stock (disclaimer: IANAL).
Could some savvy lawyers file a class action suit
against SCO because of damages done to
end users due to SCO's bogus claims?
Damages such as lost business due to FUD and
whatever else might apply?
I also thought this was a big story. It sounds like this technique could lead to a large number of improved products. The article mentions these ...
Interestingly enough, they don't mention more prosaic things such as bullet proof vests and even very strong work clothes. I wonder if these applications are practical.
This article should have been on the slashdot front page.
I agree. Be sure to try this first before you go the Air Conditioning route.
I've done this in my apartments/house for 20+ years. We place box fans in one or more windows (even though the box fan instructions say not to) on one end of the house, and open windows on the other.
The fans blow out so we don't suck in small insects like 'no-see-ums', they can sometimes be a real nuisance.
Sometimes when I get ambitious, I'll hang a sheet across the doorways to the rooms with the fans, leaving only a foot of clearance between the sheet and the top of the doorway. That way cold air - which sinks BTW - dams up behind the sheet. Only the warmest air get pulled up over the sheet into the fan room and then is expelled by the fan. It might sound silly, but you can feel the difference with and without the sheet on a cool (less than 70F) night.
During the day, we pull the shade down over the windows, especially those in the sun. We have room darkening shades, these are not translucent. The translucent shades mostly diffuse light so people can't see in, but you don't want that light, it carries heat. Awnings might even be better, but we don't have those.
You should try it - it's cool :)
Where can I get one?
Now, shine a light through the transparent surface. The brighter the light, the more the mirror bends.
You can use this two ways
-
Project an image through the transparent bottom
layer. The projected image
will be reproduced by the reflected light
off the mirrored top. Its an image amplifier.
Something like those TI (?) chips they use
in video projectors, only it amplifies light directly.
-
Suitably adjust the light intensity
through the transparent layer, and you have
dynamically controlled mirror optics.
Just thought I'd share that.</blatent plug>
1) By N more systems than you need. That way when one dies you can just swap out the old hard drives (assuming it's ok) and put them in the spare system. Then you can fix the broken system when its convenient, and not in a rush with the end user hovering by.
2) In your design, consider including TWO of those slide-in hardrive bays in each machine. One for the hard drive in your original machine so *maybe* you can legally transfer your Windows License (does it work that way?). The second slide-in bay is for a new larger disk drive. That way, if someone's machines dies, you need only slide the drives out of one machine and into an waiting spare. Saves time and helps lower anxiety.
3) Buy 5 or 10 complete systems as a trial. I've found in my limited experience (the systems I've built number only in the teens) you're never sure what you're going to get until they arrive. And by ordering several systems you see if you the vendors send identical parts or mixes them up.
Let's see. This disovery was made by Professor Friedemann Freund and colleagues at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, its publicised in a Vancouver paper, but the byline is from London.
News sure get's around.
Althought the entertainment industry might like us to believe this, it is backwards. The Constitution grants certain privileges to copyright holders, not rights to customers. In fact "customers" (i.e. citizens) have inalienable rights. The are not granted by the Constitution, citizens own their rights.
The privilege granted to copyright holders is the exclusive use of their creations for a limited time. The reason the Constitution grants this privilege is to encourage people to invest the time creating useful or entertaining content. Ultimately this is for the benefit of everyone, copyright holder and consumer alike.
The Entertainment industry consistently distorts this fact for their own use. They like to argue that copyrighted material is Intellectual Property, thereby distorting its true nature to resemble real property. They then continue to argue that distributing copyrighted material is equivalent to stealing. It isn't. Distributing copyrighted material is equivalent to breaking a contract; the contract the Constitution established with the Copyright holder.
An important consequence of the fact that copyrights are a contract is that the contract can be re-negotiated. This is something the Entertainment Industry never addresses in their public arguments. They public agruments go something like "we own this material, we can do what we like with it, and you can't tell us what to do", when in fact the government signed a contract with the copyright holder, and the form of future contracts can be changed. In fact, recent changes to the contract have been in the copyright holder's favor, such as the "Sonny Bono" law, or whatever it was called.
What needs to happen now is for the government to re-negotiate future copyright contracts (i.e. copyright law) in light of recent technological developments, and to strike a balance between the content producers and content consumers.
I'm out of breath now.
You can only do so if you are independently wealthy. - Billie Holiday
Damn depressing.
because
(1) Although the source is obfuscated, it is still
GPL which means its freely available and freely
compilable.
2) If folks know from which original obfuscated
code the GPL derives, it may be possible to
write some program that separates it from the
new code and then the new (but obfuscated) code
can be examined and possibly cleaned up, then voila new GPL code.
So your company produces code that must be distrubuted freely - how can they benifit?
The price difference might be irrelevant now that
we're all computer savvy, but back in the old
days when I had to choose between Dos/Intel
or Mac, the price difference was significant.
And now the damage is done, Intel has the bigger base.
.. was when I sent my card deck through a broken card reader.
I had stacked the cards into the shiny metal hopper and pressed the READ button. The reader quickly slid the card after card from the bottom of the deck, shot it through the reading unit and then just as quickly sent the cards to the output bin. Unfortunately, the output bin was broken. So rather than deposit my cards in a neat pile, my 500 cards were launched clear across the room. I could only watch in horor as they covered every flat surface like oversized confetti.
I think I spent the next hour re-sorting the deck. Gee, I miss those punch cards.
Can anyone explain in English (not the legalese found at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/cpl-v05.html) the difference between the Common Public Licence Version 0.5 that applies to Eclipse and the Gnu Public Licence?
Thanks.
I was running run 8.1beta with 64MB. Nautilus under GNOME crawled. The desktop would seem to hang - I opened a console window and run top to see there were 3 or 4 processes running Nautilus each consuming about 25% of memory. I'd have to kill Nautilus to get anything done. (BTW the CPU is Celeron 375mhz)
AFter I upgraded to 160MB it ran fine - Nautilus was usable and actually pretty slick, but still on the slow side.
Ditto. It sounds like he's trying something that I'd like to be able to do, but what exactly does he mean by Does he want to write one of those MIB text files? Or create a C structure to use internally in net-snmp code? Or something else?
The big attraction of the GPL is the assurance that if you contribute to GPL'ed code you will always be able to use/compile a derivative work. What a great way to leverage your productivity. It's like "cast your bread onto the water and it will return n-fold". If you contribute to a GPL'ed work your return is perpetual access to the improvements made by others. You can't say the same about those other licenses.
This is an clever way to get funding for asteroid tracking , convince the generals that they're potential weapons. The asteroid arm's race will begin and asteroid observatories will be rolling in money.
I'm all for it, IMHO its a pretty good way to spend your defense dollar.
Really great for slicing and dicing those text strings. Just about any pattern I can imagine can be parsed. Probably more then I imagine, 'cause I've only learned about 50% of the regular expression syntax.
I'd never seen associative arrays (hashes) until Perl, but they're great, they make it so much easier to organize information. I believe LW himself said something like "if you're not using associative arrays in your Perl script you're probably doing something wrong." I really didn't grok the significance of hash tables (the underlying mechanism) until I encountered AAs in Perl. Now I love hash tables.
which includes the fact that its interpreted (no compilation), easy conversion between types (or maybe its really no types), anonymous variables (or whatever you call those $_ things, they're really convenient once you get used to them), almost all the neat little system functions C, and a flexible/redundant syntax (but with the potential for greater obfuscation) which makes perl more like a human language then a computer language, but not everyone will think that last item is a good thing.