Is there a standard for rack depth? I need to rackmount a Compaq 5000, and I don't have the rails for it yet. This is all for a 4-post rack, of course.
I agree with a lot of the other posters in this thread. I think the producers of the show have a great, yet horribly executed concept. Jesse James? Building random shit? Sounds good.
Stupid announcer voices, graphical effects, and corporate sponsorship? Terrible.
Its amazing that Discovery got it so right with American Chopper, and so so wrong with Monster Garage. The ingredients are the same, there's just a distinct lack of trumped-up bullshit in American Chopper.
It seems like every third episode of Monster Garage Jesse is saying something that translates to "The Producers of this show are morons," and I think he's right. Remember the skate-board-ramp-RV episode? The producer gets into a whining match with one of the skater/builders that pretty clearly illustrates what a waste the producer is. And remember, he has artistic control... if he left that in, imagine what he's edited out. The crew from the two hearse shows (a dysfunctional group of people if I ever saw one) said similiar things about the producers, and most of them were hollywood types that should be used to that kind of nonsense.
Monster Garage has a lot of great aspects to it, but the "artistic input" of the producer and who ever else has their hands in the pie sure destroys it.
Beyond law school, any firm that your wife works for is going to run Windows, she's gonna have to do Word documents, there's no way around it. Short of working for yourself, the law world works with Windows and Word. Even when working for yourself, you can believe that any software you want to use for billing, forms, etc. will be Windows-based.
Just to pick nits, I worked IT at a law firm in southern Connecticut for three years, and during that time they used Macs on the desktop, and the billing software was web-based (and I wrote it).:)
It is the responsibility of the car makers to make cars safe, should it not be the responsibility of operating system makers to make desktops safe?
It astounds me that people actually make this argument.
Allow me to explain:
Every single car is in a postion to kill several people in the event of a catastrophic malfunction or operator error.
Very few computers are in a position to harm anyone.
And no, just because your computer contains documents you deem vital to your life does not mean that the impetus for securing them falls on the manufacturer and not yourself. The two situations could not be less comparable.
You're wrong, at least currently. SA (selective availability, the aritificially-induced clock skew in civilian GPS signals) has been turned off by default for the past several years. Anyone can have gauranteed 3 meter accuracy with a decent reciever. SA is region sensitive as well, so signal can be degraded over a sensitive region (i.e., warzone) without affecting the rest of the world.
And if you want to argue one meter vs. three, there's always differential systems like WAIS that can be implemented _far_ cheaper than another constellation of sattelites.
Does your hardware never fail? Does your filesystem never get corrupted? Power never goes out? Do you administer things in some sort of fantasy world of perfection?
The problem is that those improvements have only been applied to SUVs in a limited fashion. Some changes like fuel injection have been forced on the manufacturers by the need to achieve emissions standards. But they have not had the same incentive to reduce consumption.
I'd argue that fuel injection is required for computer control of the power train, which is good for a variety of reasons (On board diagnostics is a non-emissions related one that springs to mind). Other than (US-specific) weaker emssions controls on SUVs (since they are light trucks, after all), what do you base your comment on?
Some of the difference is explained by poor aerodynomics and greater weight - but not that much. There are huge differences in consumption between SUVs. My neighbor gets 8mpg from her SUV. I get 22mpg from my high performance sports car with a larger engine that gives over twice the power. Even more ridiculous my 4 litre sports car with a top speed of 155mph (artificially limited to save the tires) has better measured gas milage than the average US car.
Some engine / powertrain combinations get awful gas mileage. The Dodge Durango, in its base configuration, gets 8mpg I believe. In my humble opinion, people who buy a car that is that inefficient are dumb. Whats important is that the whole class of vehicles isn't like that - the buyer has a choice. Would you be as upset if you neighbor owned a BMW Z8 and got 14mpg in the city (and only a little more on the highway)?
The reason the car manufacturers do not change is simple, old plants. They build SUVs at the oldest and most outdated plants because they are the least demanding. Body on frame is cheap to manufacture - contrary to your claim monocoque build is considerably stronger for a given weight of material. That is why the luxury SUVs like the Range Rover have switched to it. Same goes for engines, the car makers like SUVs because it allows them to keep their obsolete powertrain manufacturing plants in operation. They can't make car engines there without new investment, but they can churn out obsolete engine designs to go in SUVs.
I don't know what particular interpretation of "stronger" you're using (not sarcasm, I mean it). While I agree that monocoque can be made as safe in accidents as body-on-frame, I doubt its stronger so far as usefulness goes. For instance, if you get stuck in a monocoque vehicle, like a (recent) Jeep Cherokee, and need to be pulled out by another vehicle, you need to attach the tow strap to specific hard points on the vehicles body. There's usually one of these in front, and one in back. If you try to tow/pull a monocoque vehicle by any other point on the body, the body is likely to develop a crack and the car is totalled. OTOH, with a ladder frame vehicle, you're free to hook up anywhere on the frame and tug as hard as you'd like without any real risk of hurting the vehicle.
As for why luxury SUVs are monocoque in construction, there are a lot of better reasons than strength. Monocoque is generally stiffer, since a monocoque body/frame is more box like than a ladder frame, which is pretty flat. Its also lighter (for similiarly sized vehicles) than a body and a frame, which has advantages other than fuel economy: a light car accelerates and decelerates more easily, which provides safety (through decreased breaking distance) and sportiness. Lets not forget that dubious safety features like 'crumple zones' only apply to monocoque vehicles.
There are lots of reasons for making monocoque non-luxury SUVs as well (which is done, often. The Ford Escape, and all the Jeeps that are bigger than the Liberty spring to mind). If you examine things a bit more, you're likely to find that SUVs that are actually designed for legitimate use are body-on-frame and based on pickup truck chassis, while the SUVs designed to be "cool minivans" are monocoque.
The solution to the energy crisis might be to drill in Alaska. However forcing the makers of SUVs to put fuel efficient engines in them seems a better solution. The oil in Alaska can only be drilled once and would only account for a years worth of gas burned by the inefficient SUVs. Building an efficient engine is not impossible, there are plenty of fuel efficient power plants. It is not the engine design, it is the engine manufacturing plants that the car makers refuse to modernise so they could built more modern designs."
Alright, what the fuck. I hear this argument often, and it doesn't make any sense to me.
Now, to get my bias out of the way, I drive a 98 Ford Explorer. Before that, I drove a 95 Ford Taurus sedan. The Explorer gets 20mpg _max_ on the highway, and 18mpg in conditions where the Taurus would have gotten 22mpg. Other Explorer engine/drivetrain/model/year combinations get different mileage.
For the purposese of this post, one assumes that there are legitimate uses of SUVs, and that everyone who drives one isn't just using it as a glorified minivan. I'm not going to justify my individual ownership of an SUV here, nor am I going to make an effort to prove that there are legitimate uses.
I will grant you that the internal combustion engine is an old design. The basics of it haven't changed since it was first invented. That doesn't mean, however, that it hasn't been continually improved. Things like computer control, fuel injection, synthetic lubricating oils, exhaust gas recirculation and a host of other technologies I don't fully understand have made gasoline engines more efficient now than ever before.
Now, my Taurus weighed about 3000 pounds. My Explorer weighs a bit over 4000. There are reasons for this: the Taurus was a unibody design, the Explorer is body-on-frame. That makes it heavier, but much much stronger. This, in turn, allows it to carry heavier loads. I can carry a half ton of gear in my explorer and still be within manufacturers specifications. I can also tow a 3500lb trailer and not be doing anything bad to the car. Neither of these were even remotely possible with my Taurus, although it was an excellent car.
To do these things, you require a larger, more powerful engine. The reason for this is it requires more energy to accelerate something as its weight increases. This is nothing more complex than introductory highschool physics. Fuel economy is not a magic thing. There's a specific amount of energy in a gallon of gas, and accelerating (and overcoming the rolling friction of) a vehicle requires a specific amount of energy. You can't just say "If SUVs had better engines, they'd get the same fuel economy as compacts" (I know you didn't actual say that). It simply requires more energy to move something thats heavier.
You might complain that hybrid gas/electric engines are extra-efficient due to regenerative breaking and so forth, and that automakers should be using them in SUVs. The answer to this is that they are. Ford is releasing a hybrid version of the Escape this coming model year, and I've seen a (really nice!) full-size GMC pickup testbed that was a hybrid. The technology is on its way, but the issue is that it doesn't help that much. No matter how you slice it, moving something big and heavy is harder than moving something small and lithe. And some people need big heavy cars.
There's also an episode of the (AWESOME) TV Show "Family Guy" where the father (Peter) is showing his friends a new car. He demos the nav system, which has several modes, one of which is Russian.
The car talks, and when he sets it to Russian mode it says: "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!"
Lord almighty... you had a machine in a production environment, and you did a kernel upgrade with an automated package management tool?
I hope no one is paying you to administer things. I can perhaps understand doing a remote kernel upgrade on a machine you don't have ready physical access to if you're compiling it yourself, but it certainly didn't take me long to figure that _no_ package management system should be trusted with making changes to the kernel.
I guess you have to learn things somehow, but christ...
I know what it is used for with moters but why on earth would you need it for a computer?
Two real reasons that I can think of, based on my experience with theatrical dimmers (which are totally exactly the same as mainframes! No... really!):
- You need to draw lots and lots of power (say... 1800 amps), and 4/0 gauge cable is expensive (many dollars per feet) or not big enough, not to mention stupidly hard to install and maintain. With three phase, you get one several smaller cables instead of one big one, without feeling dumb about having three plugs going to your Big Expensive Computer. - You have different systems you want to feed from (completely) different power sources. This might be because you have varying voltage requirements (any phase -> neutral is 120v, any phase -> any other phase is 220v, [in the US, if I recall]), or because some equipment causes lots of interference on the hot leg, or for redundancy purposes.
I am not a licensed electrician, just a theatre tech avoiding some Perl at work:)
It won't necessarily be public. A court can order a gag order on a criminal case, it wouldn't be surprising if they had a gag order on a case to protect the intellectual property involved.
Interesting idea, but OTP is not meant to be repeated, hence the "one time" part of its name.
Once you start repeating your pad data, the message as a whole becomes trivially vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks. If you know the structure of any part of the disk (this will depend greatly on the filesystem used), you can determine an equal portion of the key.
Given a 40GB disk, you need only know 1/320th of the contents to decrypt the entire disk. Given the well-documented and consistent nature of most filesystems, I think this would be trivial to break.
Umm, I definitely disagree. At least four or five years ago, the FBI would seize any and all computing equipment as part of their standard operating procedure. Most agents don't know much about computers, so the best tactic is to just take _everything_. This comes from a friend of mine who's a member of the FBI's Evidence Response Team.
You are right on some accounts. They're going to pull your disks and make bit-by-bit copies of everything before they start screwing around, or even power your machine on.
Slashdot Mirror
...
:)
The 1903 flyer had one engine. The props were counter rotating and chain driven. They were bicycle guys, remember?
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lds
Is there a standard for rack depth? I need to rackmount a Compaq 5000, and I don't have the rails for it yet. This is all for a 4-post rack, of course.
--
lds
My version of this was always the Weather Rock, a great way to entertain a group of new Boy Scouts for an hour.
If its warm its sunny.
If its wet its raining.
If its white its snowing.
If its moving its windy.
If its missing its stolen.
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lds
Is the tax per TV though? In that case, it would be closer to 50 million...
Just a though.
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lds
I agree with a lot of the other posters in this thread. I think the producers of the show have a great, yet horribly executed concept. Jesse James? Building random shit? Sounds good.
Stupid announcer voices, graphical effects, and corporate sponsorship? Terrible.
Its amazing that Discovery got it so right with American Chopper, and so so wrong with Monster Garage. The ingredients are the same, there's just a distinct lack of trumped-up bullshit in American Chopper.
It seems like every third episode of Monster Garage Jesse is saying something that translates to "The Producers of this show are morons," and I think he's right. Remember the skate-board-ramp-RV episode? The producer gets into a whining match with one of the skater/builders that pretty clearly illustrates what a waste the producer is. And remember, he has artistic control... if he left that in, imagine what he's edited out. The crew from the two hearse shows (a dysfunctional group of people if I ever saw one) said similiar things about the producers, and most of them were hollywood types that should be used to that kind of nonsense.
Monster Garage has a lot of great aspects to it, but the "artistic input" of the producer and who ever else has their hands in the pie sure destroys it.
--
lds
Yes! I've had that problem.
But its in unstable. And it has unstable in its name. And it hasn't been maintaned even remotely recently.
While its suprising when you try to install a package and something goes horribly wrong, its still called "unstable" for a reason.
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lds
Thats funny, I think Compact Flash. Of course, that doesn't work so well in this context...
Maybe you're confusing qmail with a poorly configured, non-DJB-endorsed SMTP AUTH layer?
If thats not the case, well, what you're saying makes no sense.
Just to pick nits, I worked IT at a law firm in southern Connecticut for three years, and during that time they used Macs on the desktop, and the billing software was web-based (and I wrote it).
hah, I've been well. Nickd gave me penix.net a couple years ago, its one of my throwaway domains now I use for things that don't fit elsewhere.
If you need hosting, let me know some time.
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lds
penix.net me and a friend registered years ago, because we thought it was funny.
shithole was the name of the first apartment I lived in, which the server in question was purchased for.
Hence, shithole.penix.net. Yeah, its an unfortunate choice, but I assure you that the content is good.
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lds
I've got a torrent up of one of the trailers (blue pill) in quicktime.
f inal.mov.torrent
http://shithole.penix.net/~spartan/blue_pill_web_
Have fun.
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lds
It astounds me that people actually make this argument.
Allow me to explain:
Every single car is in a postion to kill several people in the event of a catastrophic malfunction or operator error.
Very few computers are in a position to harm anyone.
And no, just because your computer contains documents you deem vital to your life does not mean that the impetus for securing them falls on the manufacturer and not yourself. The two situations could not be less comparable.
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lds
How are you doing this with ezmlm?
I'm looking (albeit not hard) for mailman-like web-based management for ezmlm. Any help would be great.
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Phil
Hi.
You're wrong, at least currently. SA (selective availability, the aritificially-induced clock skew in civilian GPS signals) has been turned off by default for the past several years. Anyone can have gauranteed 3 meter accuracy with a decent reciever. SA is region sensitive as well, so signal can be degraded over a sensitive region (i.e., warzone) without affecting the rest of the world.
And if you want to argue one meter vs. three, there's always differential systems like WAIS that can be implemented _far_ cheaper than another constellation of sattelites.
Okay, I'll feed the troll...
Does your hardware never fail? Does your filesystem never get corrupted? Power never goes out? Do you administer things in some sort of fantasy world of perfection?
Thats pretty impressive.
I'd argue that fuel injection is required for computer control of the power train, which is good for a variety of reasons (On board diagnostics is a non-emissions related one that springs to mind). Other than (US-specific) weaker emssions controls on SUVs (since they are light trucks, after all), what do you base your comment on?
Some engine / powertrain combinations get awful gas mileage. The Dodge Durango, in its base configuration, gets 8mpg I believe. In my humble opinion, people who buy a car that is that inefficient are dumb. Whats important is that the whole class of vehicles isn't like that - the buyer has a choice. Would you be as upset if you neighbor owned a BMW Z8 and got 14mpg in the city (and only a little more on the highway)?
I don't know what particular interpretation of "stronger" you're using (not sarcasm, I mean it). While I agree that monocoque can be made as safe in accidents as body-on-frame, I doubt its stronger so far as usefulness goes. For instance, if you get stuck in a monocoque vehicle, like a (recent) Jeep Cherokee, and need to be pulled out by another vehicle, you need to attach the tow strap to specific hard points on the vehicles body. There's usually one of these in front, and one in back. If you try to tow/pull a monocoque vehicle by any other point on the body, the body is likely to develop a crack and the car is totalled. OTOH, with a ladder frame vehicle, you're free to hook up anywhere on the frame and tug as hard as you'd like without any real risk of hurting the vehicle.
As for why luxury SUVs are monocoque in construction, there are a lot of better reasons than strength. Monocoque is generally stiffer, since a monocoque body/frame is more box like than a ladder frame, which is pretty flat. Its also lighter (for similiarly sized vehicles) than a body and a frame, which has advantages other than fuel economy: a light car accelerates and decelerates more easily, which provides safety (through decreased breaking distance) and sportiness. Lets not forget that dubious safety features like 'crumple zones' only apply to monocoque vehicles.
There are lots of reasons for making monocoque non-luxury SUVs as well (which is done, often. The Ford Escape, and all the Jeeps that are bigger than the Liberty spring to mind). If you examine things a bit more, you're likely to find that SUVs that are actually designed for legitimate use are body-on-frame and based on pickup truck chassis, while the SUVs designed to be "cool minivans" are monocoque.
What engine change
Alright, what the fuck. I hear this argument often, and it doesn't make any sense to me.
Now, to get my bias out of the way, I drive a 98 Ford Explorer. Before that, I drove a 95 Ford Taurus sedan. The Explorer gets 20mpg _max_ on the highway, and 18mpg in conditions where the Taurus would have gotten 22mpg. Other Explorer engine/drivetrain/model/year combinations get different mileage.
For the purposese of this post, one assumes that there are legitimate uses of SUVs, and that everyone who drives one isn't just using it as a glorified minivan. I'm not going to justify my individual ownership of an SUV here, nor am I going to make an effort to prove that there are legitimate uses.
I will grant you that the internal combustion engine is an old design. The basics of it haven't changed since it was first invented. That doesn't mean, however, that it hasn't been continually improved. Things like computer control, fuel injection, synthetic lubricating oils, exhaust gas recirculation and a host of other technologies I don't fully understand have made gasoline engines more efficient now than ever before.
Now, my Taurus weighed about 3000 pounds. My Explorer weighs a bit over 4000. There are reasons for this: the Taurus was a unibody design, the Explorer is body-on-frame. That makes it heavier, but much much stronger. This, in turn, allows it to carry heavier loads. I can carry a half ton of gear in my explorer and still be within manufacturers specifications. I can also tow a 3500lb trailer and not be doing anything bad to the car. Neither of these were even remotely possible with my Taurus, although it was an excellent car.
To do these things, you require a larger, more powerful engine. The reason for this is it requires more energy to accelerate something as its weight increases. This is nothing more complex than introductory highschool physics. Fuel economy is not a magic thing. There's a specific amount of energy in a gallon of gas, and accelerating (and overcoming the rolling friction of) a vehicle requires a specific amount of energy. You can't just say "If SUVs had better engines, they'd get the same fuel economy as compacts" (I know you didn't actual say that). It simply requires more energy to move something thats heavier.
You might complain that hybrid gas/electric engines are extra-efficient due to regenerative breaking and so forth, and that automakers should be using them in SUVs. The answer to this is that they are. Ford is releasing a hybrid version of the Escape this coming model year, and I've seen a (really nice!) full-size GMC pickup testbed that was a hybrid. The technology is on its way, but the issue is that it doesn't help that much. No matter how you slice it, moving something big and heavy is harder than moving something small and lithe. And some people need big heavy cars.
--
lds
There's also an episode of the (AWESOME) TV Show "Family Guy" where the father (Peter) is showing his friends a new car. He demos the nav system, which has several modes, one of which is Russian.
The car talks, and when he sets it to Russian mode it says:
"In Soviet Russia, car drives you!"
Thats my theory, at least.
--
Phil
Its definitely bandwidth. ticalc.org, which has always had a puny server, has survived several /.'ings thanks to its large, large pipe.
That and intelligent site design. Most of the pages on ticalc.org (most =~ all) are pregenerated.
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lds
Lord almighty... you had a machine in a production environment, and you did a kernel upgrade with an automated package management tool?
I hope no one is paying you to administer things. I can perhaps understand doing a remote kernel upgrade on a machine you don't have ready physical access to if you're compiling it yourself, but it certainly didn't take me long to figure that _no_ package management system should be trusted with making changes to the kernel.
I guess you have to learn things somehow, but christ...
Two real reasons that I can think of, based on my experience with theatrical dimmers (which are totally exactly the same as mainframes! No... really!):
- You need to draw lots and lots of power (say... 1800 amps), and 4/0 gauge cable is expensive (many dollars per feet) or not big enough, not to mention stupidly hard to install and maintain. With three phase, you get one several smaller cables instead of one big one, without feeling dumb about having three plugs going to your Big Expensive Computer.
- You have different systems you want to feed from (completely) different power sources. This might be because you have varying voltage requirements (any phase -> neutral is 120v, any phase -> any other phase is 220v, [in the US, if I recall]), or because some equipment causes lots of interference on the hot leg, or for redundancy purposes.
I am not a licensed electrician, just a theatre tech avoiding some Perl at work
--
lds
It won't necessarily be public. A court can order a gag order on a criminal case, it wouldn't be surprising if they had a gag order on a case to protect the intellectual property involved.
One can only hope it would be leaked.
Interesting idea, but OTP is not meant to be repeated, hence the "one time" part of its name.
Once you start repeating your pad data, the message as a whole becomes trivially vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks. If you know the structure of any part of the disk (this will depend greatly on the filesystem used), you can determine an equal portion of the key.
Given a 40GB disk, you need only know 1/320th of the contents to decrypt the entire disk. Given the well-documented and consistent nature of most filesystems, I think this would be trivial to break.
--
lds
Umm, I definitely disagree. At least four or five years ago, the FBI would seize any and all computing equipment as part of their standard operating procedure. Most agents don't know much about computers, so the best tactic is to just take _everything_. This comes from a friend of mine who's a member of the FBI's Evidence Response Team.
You are right on some accounts. They're going to pull your disks and make bit-by-bit copies of everything before they start screwing around, or even power your machine on.
--
lds