Re:"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws...
on
Energy From Vibrations
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yeup. " Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes? "
You're lazy, all right.
"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws...
on
Energy From Vibrations
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics"
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging, but the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
#1 is the WebDAV vulnerability, affecting IIS 5 on Win2k. This is the one used to corrupt the military web server in question, and is a very worm friendly (arbitrary remote execution) vulnerability. This is the most likely target of a worm, as it can be purely automatic (a'la slammer and Code Red), and gives full system access.
#2 is a script engine vulnerability, allowing an email message or web page to execute arbitrary code. Although good for mail worms, this is less autonomous-worm friendly: it's a good secondary way to cross a firewall, but users need to read the email to spread, making a slower worm, something in the ballpark of an auto-executing Klez: a pain but nothing catastrophic. It also runs as the user, not as sysem, making it a (somewhat) less valuable exploit when targeting Win2k/XP.
Both are serious vulnerabilities which require patching, however.
So much is GNU however
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 1
By the same argument, you should call it GNU/BSD, GNU/Solaris, etc etc etc.
All the *nixes rely on gnu tools (gcc, tcsh, emacs, etc) for a great degree of their operation. So why does RMS obsess over linux and not everything else?
Exclusivity would only work until one manufacturer decided not to play that game.
Refull Anywhere would be a powerful marketing and usability tool. Once one manufacturer doesn't go the inkjet (gouge on the ink) route, the others will have to follow or get left behind.
Also, its not like methanol is really exclusive/exotic. You can pick it up at the hardware store for a paint thinner/solvent. It just isn't as widely available as ethanol.
There is one other very important aspect of micro-fuel-cells which, as far as I know, no company has latched onto at least in
public.
40% ethanol/60% water is a significantly less efficient fuel than methanol, but it is realily available (although heavily taxed) almost everywhere in the US as Vodka, as well as being much cheaper as denatured alcohol.
The probable ideal fuel cell would be able to operate on denatured ethanol (for lower cost) as well as straight vodka. It would be incredibly useful for one to be able to refill the fuel cell
using something readily available from most airline beverage services and hotel minibars.
Improvements to allow impurities (eg, Tequila, Whisky) would be even better, as now the fuel cell can operate on a wide variety of commonly available fuels. Allowing the cell to operate over a wider range of alcohol as well (20%-80% ethanol) would now allow even more variety in fuels as well as using more dense (and more efficient) fuels.
In 10 years, my personal bet is that most portable fuel cells will be ethanol powered, specifically for the fuel-availability convenience.
EMF Shielding, what's that?
on
Clear Case Roundup
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Looking at the photos, these cases don't have any good EMF shielding. Since the components inside tend to be pretty noisy on the EM spectrum, these cases could probably cause some pretty impressive interfearance on an old style TV nearby.
Just move out into Bumfuck Nowhere (tm) in the desert, grow your own grass (it doesn't take too much water to grow straw), and use the grass and mud to make an adobe house. For roofing, fell a few trees thyself (perhaps out of area and import them), make planks, and use a thach/plank roof.
So what if it leaks in the rain? It's nice, 100% natural building material. If your psychosomatic illness demands it, it's possible to do.
Any language which uses whitespace as a semantic meaning beyond simply breaking tokens is BAD BAD BAD. To do otherwise, even in the name of "readability" is a total crock of shit.
This is especially true when one wants to have programs output code, adding whitespace is extra crapola. Given any other blocking device (eg, {}s, ()s), one can write editor/prittyprinters to reformat code for easy readability.
Using whitespace as semantic information is a big big BUG, and stating otherwise is simply delusional.
Making it run on 40% ethanol, 60% water, denatured with methanol (nondrinkable) also is good, for the "lower cost (no booze taxes), lower availablity" fuel.
If you want a fuel cell to be practically usable, you should make it run on 40% Ethanol, 60% water. That way, there is a commonly available fuel (Vodka) which can be easily purchased most everywhere in the US (outside Mormonstan at least).
If you can make the fuel cell deal with more impurities, you could also use Whiskey or Tequila or similar distilled spirits.
One major difference between the US and UK is the liability on phantom and fradulent transactions. In the US, the bank has to prove you performed the transaction. In the UK, you have to prove that you did NOT perform the transaction.
This difference in liability results in vastly different response to vulnerabilities. In the US, a vulnerability like this is taken very seriously, and phantom transactions are tracked down as they cost the bank money. In the UK, since it is the customer left holding the bag, the banks just don't care until they are sued, and, when sued, will deny deny deny.
This is a classic example of Citibank trying to cover up a problem, because it allows the customer, in court, to prove that the problem is Citibank's.
It is generally assumed that if you have console access to the machine, you can breach the security and acquire root. Many systems allow you to do this, deliberately.
You can make a nice Linux boot-floopy or boot-cd to do the same thing.
Slammer hit so hard and fast (doubling every 8 seconds, peak scanning rate in 3 minutes, analysis.
An "hour" before is a preposterous claim. They might have gotten in 10 seconds before, or even a minute if the first couple of copies were on bad links, but an hour is total, complete, and UTTERLY ridiculous claims to make.
The only way they could make the claim is if they found an extra-buggy, prerelease version. IF so, we need to know about it as it aids in understanding the author.
My bet is they saw some unrelated script-kiddie scanning (we saw some of this in our OWN data sets) and someone in marketing is trying to say that they saw the worm 2 hours ahead of time.
EG, the XC2VP7 which is used in the core of that board has a PowerPC (>250 MHz), 8 SERDESes which can speak Gb ethernet with optical transievers (among other things), about 100 Kb of RAM, and 11,000 4-LUTs and flip-flops.
Xilinx promises that at the end of the year, in suitable quantities (>25,000), they will be $100/each.
A callous observation but true: Will this be the well deserved end to manned space flight?
Now manned space flight is really cool, but the space-station is nothing more than a multibilliondollar orbiting box where most of the time, effort, and money goes to insuring that those inside the box stay alive.
The space shuttle costs substantially more than conventional throwaway rockets to operate, and isn't really that much safer (experience suggests about a 1/50 chance of failure, which seems pretty close to the Feynman appendix if memory serves me).
What we learn from space these days comes from automated sattelites and automated space probes. OK, so on the last shuttle flight, we learned that ants behave really weirdly in zero gravity (Save the queen! Which one's the queen? I'm the queen. No, you're not! Freedom, horrible horrible freedom!), but couldn't you put an Uncle Miltie's with a web cam, toss it on a pegasus booster, and get the same result for a microscopic fraction of the cost?
It is tragic that seven lives were lost, but for years its been obvious that the space shuttle and space station weren't producing much useful science, or useful servicing (for most sattelites, its cheaper to build and fly a replacement than have a shuttle "service" them), or useful engineering.
If this represents the near-term (10-20 year) end of manned space flight, we should rejoice. With the billions of dollars wasted insuring that ugly bags of mostly water can survive the trip no longer being spent, perhaps we can go back to conducting real science in space, or spend that money better here on earth.
Trinitron tubes have always cost a lot more than Diamondtron (Mitsubishi's apature grill tubes), and I think sony may have been losing more business vs LCD than Mitsubishi has been, as the Mitsubishi tubes have been traditionaly cheaper.
The other factor is a 19" CRT is equivilent to a 17" LCD in practice, because the LCD's screen size is completely out there, while part of the CRT is hidden by the frame. Currently, 17" LCDs are more expensive, but the price is a lot narrower than it was a couple years ago.
If the product was misrepresented (used instead of new, software not really applied etc), you can return it and, if not, sue in small claims court as such behavior is fradulent.
The Imac looks really cool, but damn it is overpriced. With PC prices dropping like a stone, and even clever integrated PCs starting at $1000 (eg, Gateway's) and barebone PC chassis like the shuttle Cubes & motherboard for $300, the Jellybean is just not cost-effective unless you Gotta Have A Mac.
128K L1, 64K L2 (victim cache I assume). It's, architecture wise, roughly between a Pentium and PPro (and 2 and III) core, so roughly, a 933 MHz C3 would be about a 400 MHz Intel PIII. Not great, but fast enough for most tasks. The latest Epia board does have an MPEG2 decoder in hardware, so you can do full-rate DVD decoding.
Note that the C3's peak power is the same roughly as Transmeta (5.5 W), at a fraction of the cost (the die on the C3 is 53 mm^2 and it is PIII compatable chipset-wise), and considering how poorly Transmeta performs (notice Transmeta is very lax on giving benchmarks, and are really sensitive to caching on the instruction stream), Via pretty much has em beat.
If you want a small, low power platform, look at the latest from Via, which contains 933 MHz processor (C3), USB2, audio, video, TV, ethernet, 1x PCI, in a 17cmx17cm form-factor for $160 from Fry's.
It definatly blows away that transmeta one: giving more functionality for a fraction of the cost. You can even get slower (~600 MHz) versions which are totally fanless.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeup. " Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes? "
You're lazy, all right.
"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics"
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging, but the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
HA.
#1 is the WebDAV vulnerability, affecting IIS 5 on Win2k. This is the one used to corrupt the military web server in question, and is a very worm friendly (arbitrary remote execution) vulnerability. This is the most likely target of a worm, as it can be purely automatic (a'la slammer and Code Red), and gives full system access.
#2 is a script engine vulnerability, allowing an email message or web page to execute arbitrary code. Although good for mail worms, this is less autonomous-worm friendly: it's a good secondary way to cross a firewall, but users need to read the email to spread, making a slower worm, something in the ballpark of an auto-executing Klez: a pain but nothing catastrophic. It also runs as the user, not as sysem, making it a (somewhat) less valuable exploit when targeting Win2k/XP.
Both are serious vulnerabilities which require patching, however.
By the same argument, you should call it GNU/BSD, GNU/Solaris, etc etc etc.
All the *nixes rely on gnu tools (gcc, tcsh, emacs, etc) for a great degree of their operation. So why does RMS obsess over linux and not everything else?
Exclusivity would only work until one manufacturer decided not to play that game.
Refull Anywhere would be a powerful marketing and usability tool. Once one manufacturer doesn't go the inkjet (gouge on the ink) route, the others will have to follow or get left behind.
Also, its not like methanol is really exclusive/exotic. You can pick it up at the hardware store for a paint thinner/solvent. It just isn't as widely available as ethanol.
The water you evaporate. Heck, evaporative cooling would help everything else in the system, and you aren't talking about very much water.
As for the imurities/junk, just recirculate it back into the "fuel tank", and about once every few months, you dump the fuel tank out to clean it.
There is one other very important aspect of micro-fuel-cells which, as far as I know, no company has latched onto at least in public.
40% ethanol/60% water is a significantly less efficient fuel than methanol, but it is realily available (although heavily taxed) almost everywhere in the US as Vodka, as well as being much cheaper as denatured alcohol.
The probable ideal fuel cell would be able to operate on denatured ethanol (for lower cost) as well as straight vodka. It would be incredibly useful for one to be able to refill the fuel cell using something readily available from most airline beverage services and hotel minibars.
Improvements to allow impurities (eg, Tequila, Whisky) would be even better, as now the fuel cell can operate on a wide variety of commonly available fuels. Allowing the cell to operate over a wider range of alcohol as well (20%-80% ethanol) would now allow even more variety in fuels as well as using more dense (and more efficient) fuels.
In 10 years, my personal bet is that most portable fuel cells will be ethanol powered, specifically for the fuel-availability convenience.
Looking at the photos, these cases don't have any good EMF shielding. Since the components inside tend to be pretty noisy on the EM spectrum, these cases could probably cause some pretty impressive interfearance on an old style TV nearby.
Just move out into Bumfuck Nowhere (tm) in the desert, grow your own grass (it doesn't take too much water to grow straw), and use the grass and mud to make an adobe house. For roofing, fell a few trees thyself (perhaps out of area and import them), make planks, and use a thach/plank roof.
So what if it leaks in the rain? It's nice, 100% natural building material. If your psychosomatic illness demands it, it's possible to do.
Any language which uses whitespace as a semantic meaning beyond simply breaking tokens is BAD BAD BAD. To do otherwise, even in the name of "readability" is a total crock of shit.
This is especially true when one wants to have programs output code, adding whitespace is extra crapola. Given any other blocking device (eg, {}s, ()s), one can write editor/prittyprinters to reformat code for easy readability.
Using whitespace as semantic information is a big big BUG, and stating otherwise is simply delusional.
Making it run on 40% ethanol, 60% water, denatured with methanol (nondrinkable) also is good, for the "lower cost (no booze taxes), lower availablity" fuel.
If you want a fuel cell to be practically usable, you should make it run on 40% Ethanol, 60% water. That way, there is a commonly available fuel (Vodka) which can be easily purchased most everywhere in the US (outside Mormonstan at least).
If you can make the fuel cell deal with more impurities, you could also use Whiskey or Tequila or similar distilled spirits.
One major difference between the US and UK is the liability on phantom and fradulent transactions. In the US, the bank has to prove you performed the transaction. In the UK, you have to prove that you did NOT perform the transaction.
This difference in liability results in vastly different response to vulnerabilities. In the US, a vulnerability like this is taken very seriously, and phantom transactions are tracked down as they cost the bank money. In the UK, since it is the customer left holding the bag, the banks just don't care until they are sued, and, when sued, will deny deny deny.
This is a classic example of Citibank trying to cover up a problem, because it allows the customer, in court, to prove that the problem is Citibank's.
It is generally assumed that if you have console access to the machine, you can breach the security and acquire root. Many systems allow you to do this, deliberately.
You can make a nice Linux boot-floopy or boot-cd to do the same thing.
a) They caught a bad (well, even worse) pRNG copy.
b) Their PR people got confused on previous worms.
Slammer hit so hard and fast (doubling every 8 seconds, peak scanning rate in 3 minutes, analysis.
An "hour" before is a preposterous claim. They might have gotten in 10 seconds before, or even a minute if the first couple of copies were on bad links, but an hour is total, complete, and UTTERLY ridiculous claims to make.
The only way they could make the claim is if they found an extra-buggy, prerelease version. IF so, we need to know about it as it aids in understanding the author.
My bet is they saw some unrelated script-kiddie scanning (we saw some of this in our OWN data sets) and someone in marketing is trying to say that they saw the worm 2 hours ahead of time.
EG, the XC2VP7 which is used in the core of that board has a PowerPC (>250 MHz), 8 SERDESes which can speak Gb ethernet with optical transievers (among other things), about 100 Kb of RAM, and 11,000 4-LUTs and flip-flops.
Xilinx promises that at the end of the year, in suitable quantities (>25,000), they will be $100/each.
A callous observation but true: Will this be the well deserved end to manned space flight?
Now manned space flight is really cool, but the space-station is nothing more than a multibilliondollar orbiting box where most of the time, effort, and money goes to insuring that those inside the box stay alive.
The space shuttle costs substantially more than conventional throwaway rockets to operate, and isn't really that much safer (experience suggests about a 1/50 chance of failure, which seems pretty close to the Feynman appendix if memory serves me).
What we learn from space these days comes from automated sattelites and automated space probes. OK, so on the last shuttle flight, we learned that ants behave really weirdly in zero gravity (Save the queen! Which one's the queen? I'm the queen. No, you're not! Freedom, horrible horrible freedom!), but couldn't you put an Uncle Miltie's with a web cam, toss it on a pegasus booster, and get the same result for a microscopic fraction of the cost?
It is tragic that seven lives were lost, but for years its been obvious that the space shuttle and space station weren't producing much useful science, or useful servicing (for most sattelites, its cheaper to build and fly a replacement than have a shuttle "service" them), or useful engineering.
If this represents the near-term (10-20 year) end of manned space flight, we should rejoice. With the billions of dollars wasted insuring that ugly bags of mostly water can survive the trip no longer being spent, perhaps we can go back to conducting real science in space, or spend that money better here on earth.
Trinitron tubes have always cost a lot more than Diamondtron (Mitsubishi's apature grill tubes), and I think sony may have been losing more business vs LCD than Mitsubishi has been, as the Mitsubishi tubes have been traditionaly cheaper.
The other factor is a 19" CRT is equivilent to a 17" LCD in practice, because the LCD's screen size is completely out there, while part of the CRT is hidden by the frame. Currently, 17" LCDs are more expensive, but the price is a lot narrower than it was a couple years ago.
If the product was misrepresented (used instead of new, software not really applied etc), you can return it and, if not, sue in small claims court as such behavior is fradulent.
Considering the price, you may want to do that.
The Imac looks really cool, but damn it is overpriced. With PC prices dropping like a stone, and even clever integrated PCs starting at $1000 (eg, Gateway's) and barebone PC chassis like the shuttle Cubes & motherboard for $300, the Jellybean is just not cost-effective unless you Gotta Have A Mac.
Ammonium Nitrate was Texas City, not port Chicago.
There was no "Ordinance" involved. The two ships (there were two explosions) were carrying Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer.
Although it is true that Ammonium Nitrate + Fuel Oil was used for the Oaklahoma City bombing, Ammonium Nitrate is not military ordinance.
128K L1, 64K L2 (victim cache I assume). It's, architecture wise, roughly between a Pentium and PPro (and 2 and III) core, so roughly, a 933 MHz C3 would be about a 400 MHz Intel PIII. Not great, but fast enough for most tasks. The latest Epia board does have an MPEG2 decoder in hardware, so you can do full-rate DVD decoding.
Note that the C3's peak power is the same roughly as Transmeta (5.5 W), at a fraction of the cost (the die on the C3 is 53 mm^2 and it is PIII compatable chipset-wise), and considering how poorly Transmeta performs (notice Transmeta is very lax on giving benchmarks, and are really sensitive to caching on the instruction stream), Via pretty much has em beat.
If you want a small, low power platform, look at the latest from Via, which contains 933 MHz processor (C3), USB2, audio, video, TV, ethernet, 1x PCI, in a 17cmx17cm form-factor for $160 from Fry's.
It definatly blows away that transmeta one: giving more functionality for a fraction of the cost. You can even get slower (~600 MHz) versions which are totally fanless.