In commercial flights, why do they switch off the cabin lights and open the window blinds for night landings?
I've occasionally wondered that myself, so I did a little googling and found this Austrian Airlines article which had a reasonable explanation:
If the aircraft takes off or lands during the hours of darkness, the lights will be dimmed in the cabin for a short period. You may have wondered why this is. The solution to the puzzle is the so-called light-dark adaptation of our eyes. You will have experienced this phenomenon many times in the past: when we enter a dark room, we can initially see almost nothing, until we gradually recognise the contours of objects and obstacles in front of us. The lights in the cabin are dimmed in order that, in an emergency situation, our eyes will be able to adjust to the darkness outside more quickly. It need not be completely dark to accomplish this; reading lamps are still permitted.
Another safety measure is designed to maintain an unobstructed view of the world outside the cabin: the blinds on the windows must remain open during takeoff and landing, whatever the time of day. This is not because we want to disrupt your comfortable sleep, but because it is easier for our eyes to recognise and judge possible dangers outside the aircraft in an emergency situation.
You can read the text of the filesharing bill (now law) at...
Too bad ca.gov has to be subjected to the bandwidth demands of a slashdotting - maybe they should set up a torrent for downloading copies of the bill/law?;-)
Why is it Bush's fault when salaries go down, but a magical coincidence when they go up?
As people are fond of saying: "You must be new here..." (Not just to/., but to the planet Earth.;-)
It's for the same reason that leaders (in the U.S.A., and in other countries, and even the PHB down the hall from your cube) will claim credit for economic upturns during their reign, while claiming that any and all economic downturns were caused by:
magical coincidence
market forces (see "magical coincidence")
consumer uncertainty (see "magical coincidence")
the failed policies of a predecessor from an opposing political party
evil pixies (see both "magical coincidence" and "opposing party")
terrorists (see "opposing party")
Leaders in power like to claim credit for good things, and avoid responsibility for bad things. Opponents of leaders in power like to assign blame for bad things, and claim responsibility for good things (or at least deny that the leader may have had a role in the good things).
Welcome to the world of carbon-based Terran life forms. For further study, may I recommend reading a long-running classic field study of this planet's society, conducted by the noted sociologist, Scott Adams. While the studies focus primarily on interactions within hierarchical corporate institutions, you may find them illustrative as you attempt to understand the political systems you encounter on your survey of our planet.
Live long and prosper, or whatever the appropriate greeting is on your homeworld.
Re:Who do you want to attract?
on
Animal Robots
·
· Score: 1
Bring puppy to the park and you attract girls. Bring a robot and you attract nerds.
As long as a few of them are girl nerds, I'd personally still count that as a win...
This is Nasa... they can't use a tiny camera in there? They have to tape a mirror on the end of a stick and peek around?
First reaction: Over-engineered solution. Why use a multi-thousand dollar miniaturized camera when a $2 mirror on a stick can accomplish the same task?
Second reaction: Who am I to talk about over-engineering? After all, I spend my weekends geocaching, which is best summed up by this quote:
"I use multi-billion dollar military satellites to find tupperware hidden in the woods...What do YOU do?"
Let's all hope that Australian Labor Party wins the coming election and kicks out this lap-dog Howard government.
If they don't win, could they send a couple of candidates over here to the United States for our election? It'd be cool to have a president that starts off the State Of The Nation address with "G'day, mates!";-)
What about the hack that starts the coffee maker everytime a build fails... it is usually a *long* night when that happens around here.
Perhaps if the coffee maker hadn't been switched off in the first place, the programmers would have been awake enough that their code wouldn't have broken the build. A 32-ounce mug of prevention is worth a long night of cure.;-)
Whats next automechanics having to get licenses as ferriers to change tires?
Whoa there, boy -- now that's a horse of a different color! Let's stick with the original subject area here - you don't want to go changing horses in midstream, after all.;-)
Are they sending this extortion attempt to car mechanics? No? Funny that...
You've got a person who spends all day at a keyboard, versus a person who's adept at wielding a tire iron and can use a pneumatic wrench to remove all your (car's) nuts in five seconds flat. Now...which one would you chose as an extortion target?:-)
I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together.
Since you mention having far more servers than workstations, I'll assume that Fedora isn't what you're looking for. (x86_64 support, free updates, but sometimes a wee bit too much on the bleeding edge.)
If you want the stability of Red Hat Enterprise software on an x86_64 but don't want (or simply don't need) a support contract, you might want to check out:
Both of these distros are based on the Red Hat Enterprise SRPMs (legally they can't say that they are Red Hat Enterprise), and provide updates for free.
FWIW, I'm currently using Tao on a dual Opteron system. (Back when I was setting the box up, White Box hadn't quite finished their x86_64 release). Installed without any problems. If you've got a spare x86_64 machine to test with, you might want to take a look at these distributions.
The range of these rail guns is estimated to be over 250 miles.
Yeah, but at that distance, the enemy will be smaller than a single pixel... you won't even be able to see him behind your little aiming dot.
The U.S. had originally planned to use an aimbot, but then a bunch of other countries said they refused to play on any war server that allowed "assist" mods.
I've come up with the final word in firewall technology. What I do is connect my PC to the DSL router with a 10' ethernet cable. Then, using an approved tool, I carefully cut the cable, making sure to sever it completely.
This is a common mistake that many first-time security administrators make. You're supposed to cut the cable before making the PC/router connection -- always implement your security protocol before connecting equipment to the outside world.
What we really need is an article suggesting how I can speed up my downloads...
Your downloads are probably slow because your machine was compromised during the time when your security was down - i.e., the interval between connecting the unsecured cable and the time you properly locked the connection down. Slow downloads are a key sign of a compromised system.
Once you suspect your machine's been compromised, there's really no safe solution other than reinstalling everything from scratch. I'd also suggest discarding the cable and getting a new one - since you didn't secure the cable first, there may be an RF resonance bug lurking on the PC half of the cable, waiting to reinfect your machine when you hook it back up.
You're obviously new to this, so just in case you haven't heard about them - RF resonance bugs use the reflection characteristics of an Ethernet cable to create a self-reinforcing standing-wave signal containing a copy of the virus. Older versions of these bugs could be dealt with simply by putting the cable in a Faraday cage and grounding the cable. But several of the more current RF resonator bugs contain quantum-mechanical sideband waveforms - put one of those in a Faraday cage and the q-m sidebands can refractively propogate into the cage itself, and you'll spend the rest of the day chasing down heisenbugs.
Anyways, don't feel bad about this - it's a common enough mistake when you're just getting started with security. And by posting on/. you may have helped several other novices avoid making the same mistake.
I use Sendmail at work, and realizing how things have changed on the spam front I updated my/etc/mail/access file so it now starts like this:
# Reject cable and DSL users who are now Damned Zombie Spam Bastards - keep adding to this
cable.mindspring.com ERROR:"550 Blocked"
cq.shawcable.net ERROR:"550 Blocked"
cg.shawcable.net ERROR:"550 Blocked" ...
rd.shawcable.net ERROR:"550 Blocked"
va.shawcable.net ERROR:"550 Blocked" ...
I had tried the same/etc/mail/access approach for a while on my home email server. My experience was that it works well for some ISPs, but not well for others. (Ex: it deals poorly with ISPs using customer hostnames like "cust-1-2-3-4.some-isp.com" and legitimate mailservers named "mx01.some-isp.com" -- if you block "some-isp.com" to deal with the spambots on customer machines, you end up blocking the legitimate mailservers for that domain as well.)
It's also somewhat frustrating to have to type 51-odd nearly identical entries for, say, all the charter[state].com domains, or the various [province/city].shawcable.net subdomains.
You might want to take a look at Sendmail's "milter" API, and use it with something like milter-regex to implement your site blocks. For those who haven't heard of it before, the milter API allows sendmail to hook into external programs to evaluate/classify incoming email connections, and these external programs can provide more flexible and/or more advanced tests than sendmail itself can easily implement.
By using regular expressions, you can easily weed out "cust-1-2-3-4.some-isp.com" hostnames (just "^cust-.*\.some-isp\.com$") without running any risk of blocking legitimate servers for that domain.
You can also avoid a lot of the cut'n'pasting for ISPs using state/province/etc abbreviations in their customer hostnames, and have a single ".*\.(cq|cg|ed|...vs)\.shawcable\.net" rule. Shaw Cable's sort of a bad example for this, since there's a pair of much simpler/shorter expressions that can block all their home-user machines without having to figure out the abbreviation for every province/city in Canada -- from what I've seen, Shaw customer hostnames all start with either "h" followed by their IP address with dashes between the octets, or "S" followed by a string of hex digits (probably based on the customer's MAC).
My experience with milter-regex is that the vast majority of ISPs with spambot-infested customer machines can be handled with a single rule per ISP - most have an obvious, standardized pattern for customer hostnames. There's a couple of exceptions, like Charter and RoadRunner, but even those guys have less than a dozen different customer hostname schemes.
The other feature I've liked about milter-regex is that it makes it reasonably easy to deal with mail coming from machines that lack verifiable hostnames (either there's no reverse-DNS info, or their DNS server is temporarily offline for some reason). I've adopted the approach of returning a temporary failure message for these cases. Spam software doesn't usually bother resending a message if it gets a tempfail message back from the target server. OTOH, most serious/legitimate mail servers will do the right thing, and retry the message several more times, usually for several days. I've only had a couple of cases where legitimate email was trying to come in from a server lacking reverse DNS info (one from a friend whose corporate IT department didn't know how to set up reverse DNS, and another from a product newsletter that was farmed out to a [totally legitimate] bulk email service). I handle these cases by monitoring the sendmail logs and watching for entries from servers that are retrying messages at regular intervals (usually once per hour for the first day), temporarily whitelisting the server
Gotta watch out for those pesky journalled filesystems though! I don't think a typical shred program does anything useful on an ext3 filesystem, for example. IIRC you can't be sure that you are really overwriting the physical location of the the orignal data (especially if the file has grown over time) and the journalling will (presumably for files below a certain size) just optimise away the intermediate disk writes and just write the final bunch of 0's...
I've no clue about handling other journaled filesystems, but the solution for ext3 is pretty straightforward. Remember that ext3 is built on top of ext2, and that you can always mount an ext3 filesytem as ext2 -- there's no journaling done when it's mounted as ext2, but that's actually desirable in this case. So the procedure for shredding files on an ext3 filesystems is to first remount the ext3 filesystem as ext2, and then shred the files you want to get rid of. While mounted as ext2, there's no journaling going on to interfere with things. Once you're done shredding, you can remount the filesystem as ext3.
I ran linux without a swap file on 128 MB of memory a couple of years go. It was an accident, I didn't create a swap partition.
If you ever do find yourself in need of swap space sometime in the future, remember that swap doesn't have to be a partition - you can also swap to a file. Swapfiles aren't quite as efficient as partitions, but they're easy to set up, and you can add them to a system without repartitioning. Heck, you don't even need to reboot. All you need is free space on your existing filesystem.
This is a handy way to add permanent swap to a previously swapless machine. It's also useful on machines with a dedicated swap partition if you discover that you allocated too little swap for your needs. Or even if you just need some extra swap space on a temporary basis, perhaps to run a memory-hungry program for a couple of weeks for a project or class.
On most Linux distros, you can find info on this in the mkswap(8) manpage. If you don't happen to have the manpage (a common enough circumstance with servers), the general outline for creating a 512MB swapfile is as follows:
If this is going to be a long-time/permanent addition to your system, you'd want to add this to/etc/fstab so that it's automatically remounted whenever you reboot the machine, which you can do by adding an entry like:
/path/to/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0
If you don't add the swap file to fstab, just remember to do the swapon/path/to/swapfile command after you reboot the system.
If this was a temporary swapfile, when you're all done you can clean it up by doing:
swapoff/path/to/swapfile
(remove/etc/fstab entry if you added one)
rm/path/to/swapfile
Final note: Always be realistic, folks. Swap's useful in many cases, but it's not a magic bullet. If a program needs significantly more memory than your physical RAM, it's going to take a massive performance hit. If you'll be running something that needs that much memory on a regular basis, bite the bullet and buy more RAM. Or for short-term needs with memory-hungry applications, you might be better off finding the friendly neighborhood uber-geek (the one with the 16GB quad-Opteron machine) and trading a couple of pizzas for some runtime on a better-equipped machine.
I rather doubt this is a small toy glued to the camera, since Dino is currently (May 25 10:00 am NZST picture) casting a rather distinct shadow on one of the rocks.
Unless, of course, the prankster also glued a rock to the camera...:-)
How many thousands of years did the Greeks believe that a God named Apollo flew his chariot (that big bright ball of flame in the sky)? Hell, back then, people didn't even know the earth was ROUND.
Not to nit-pick, but "people back then", or at least the educated portions of the Greek population, were aware that the earth was round, and had even estimated its circumference with reasonable accuracy, given the limitations of the instruments available at the time. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (historical info), third librarian at Alexandria, conducted this experiment, using nothing more than a stick and a working knowledge of geometry.
There's even an "Eratosthenes Experiment" website for schools/students interested in repeating this classic experiment and comparing their results with other participants.
The Ultimate Extended Special Director's Edition Complete 4K Restored/Remastered Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers AND Return of the King.
Oh dude, you should've waited another month for the release of The Ultimate Extended Special Director's Edition Complete 4K Restored/Remastered Lord of the Rings, Collector's Edition.
There's going to be four versions available, each packaged with a different collectible playset -- Helm's Deep, Isengard, Minas Tirith, and Mount Doom. And they're all lovingly handcrafted out of genuine styrofoam, just like in the movies!
Re:It's so obvious it should be Gary Oldman..
on
Kernel 2.4.26 Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I know I've heard that somewhere, but I can't quite rememer where.
It's a parody of a well-known courtroom scene from "A Few Good Men" -- the first few lines were used extensively in the ads for the movie, and if you actually saw the movie or play the longer part of the dialog would probably ring a bell as well.
IMDB (and probably a few million other sites) has the original version in their memorable quotes section for the movie version. Look for "Col Jessep" -- that's the character being parodied as "CmdrTaco" in the parent post.
Slashdot Mirror
From the sound of things, directly over the cooling fan for your CPU would be the ideal location. :-)
Yes, you're quite correct. I keep my stolen paintings in the attic.
I've occasionally wondered that myself, so I did a little googling and found this Austrian Airlines article which had a reasonable explanation:
Too bad ca.gov has to be subjected to the bandwidth demands of a slashdotting - maybe they should set up a torrent for downloading copies of the bill/law? ;-)
As people are fond of saying: "You must be new here..." (Not just to /., but to the planet Earth. ;-)
It's for the same reason that leaders (in the U.S.A., and in other countries, and even the PHB down the hall from your cube) will claim credit for economic upturns during their reign, while claiming that any and all economic downturns were caused by:
Leaders in power like to claim credit for good things, and avoid responsibility for bad things. Opponents of leaders in power like to assign blame for bad things, and claim responsibility for good things (or at least deny that the leader may have had a role in the good things).
Welcome to the world of carbon-based Terran life forms. For further study, may I recommend reading a long-running classic field study of this planet's society, conducted by the noted sociologist, Scott Adams. While the studies focus primarily on interactions within hierarchical corporate institutions, you may find them illustrative as you attempt to understand the political systems you encounter on your survey of our planet.
Live long and prosper, or whatever the appropriate greeting is on your homeworld.
As long as a few of them are girl nerds, I'd personally still count that as a win...
Maybe you're just asking the wrong question... ;-)
First reaction: Over-engineered solution. Why use a multi-thousand dollar miniaturized camera when a $2 mirror on a stick can accomplish the same task?
Second reaction: Who am I to talk about over-engineering? After all, I spend my weekends geocaching, which is best summed up by this quote:
If they don't win, could they send a couple of candidates over here to the United States for our election? It'd be cool to have a president that starts off the State Of The Nation address with "G'day, mates!" ;-)
Even against sharks with freakin' laser beams attached to their heads?
Perhaps if the coffee maker hadn't been switched off in the first place, the programmers would have been awake enough that their code wouldn't have broken the build. A 32-ounce mug of prevention is worth a long night of cure. ;-)
Whoa there, boy -- now that's a horse of a different color! Let's stick with the original subject area here - you don't want to go changing horses in midstream, after all. ;-)
You've got a person who spends all day at a keyboard, versus a person who's adept at wielding a tire iron and can use a pneumatic wrench to remove all your (car's) nuts in five seconds flat. Now...which one would you chose as an extortion target? :-)
So once the poles finish reversing, will I have to hack my GPS receiver and invert its display to make its compass point to the new "North" pole?
And will we have to switch around all the highway signs so that I-95 North heads towards Mexico and I-95 South leads to Canda?
And will we have to rename North and South Dakota, North and South Carolina, etc?
The hell with the loggerhead turtles, I've got serious questions that need to be answered! :-)
Since you mention having far more servers than workstations, I'll assume that Fedora isn't what you're looking for. (x86_64 support, free updates, but sometimes a wee bit too much on the bleeding edge.)
If you want the stability of Red Hat Enterprise software on an x86_64 but don't want (or simply don't need) a support contract, you might want to check out:
Both of these distros are based on the Red Hat Enterprise SRPMs (legally they can't say that they are Red Hat Enterprise), and provide updates for free.
FWIW, I'm currently using Tao on a dual Opteron system. (Back when I was setting the box up, White Box hadn't quite finished their x86_64 release). Installed without any problems. If you've got a spare x86_64 machine to test with, you might want to take a look at these distributions.
The U.S. had originally planned to use an aimbot, but then a bunch of other countries said they refused to play on any war server that allowed "assist" mods.
This is a common mistake that many first-time security administrators make. You're supposed to cut the cable before making the PC/router connection -- always implement your security protocol before connecting equipment to the outside world.
Your downloads are probably slow because your machine was compromised during the time when your security was down - i.e., the interval between connecting the unsecured cable and the time you properly locked the connection down. Slow downloads are a key sign of a compromised system.
Once you suspect your machine's been compromised, there's really no safe solution other than reinstalling everything from scratch. I'd also suggest discarding the cable and getting a new one - since you didn't secure the cable first, there may be an RF resonance bug lurking on the PC half of the cable, waiting to reinfect your machine when you hook it back up.
You're obviously new to this, so just in case you haven't heard about them - RF resonance bugs use the reflection characteristics of an Ethernet cable to create a self-reinforcing standing-wave signal containing a copy of the virus. Older versions of these bugs could be dealt with simply by putting the cable in a Faraday cage and grounding the cable. But several of the more current RF resonator bugs contain quantum-mechanical sideband waveforms - put one of those in a Faraday cage and the q-m sidebands can refractively propogate into the cage itself, and you'll spend the rest of the day chasing down heisenbugs.
Anyways, don't feel bad about this - it's a common enough mistake when you're just getting started with security. And by posting on /. you may have helped several other novices avoid making the same mistake.
I've no clue about handling other journaled filesystems, but the solution for ext3 is pretty straightforward. Remember that ext3 is built on top of ext2, and that you can always mount an ext3 filesytem as ext2 -- there's no journaling done when it's mounted as ext2, but that's actually desirable in this case. So the procedure for shredding files on an ext3 filesystems is to first remount the ext3 filesystem as ext2, and then shred the files you want to get rid of. While mounted as ext2, there's no journaling going on to interfere with things. Once you're done shredding, you can remount the filesystem as ext3.
If you ever do find yourself in need of swap space sometime in the future, remember that swap doesn't have to be a partition - you can also swap to a file. Swapfiles aren't quite as efficient as partitions, but they're easy to set up, and you can add them to a system without repartitioning. Heck, you don't even need to reboot. All you need is free space on your existing filesystem.
This is a handy way to add permanent swap to a previously swapless machine. It's also useful on machines with a dedicated swap partition if you discover that you allocated too little swap for your needs. Or even if you just need some extra swap space on a temporary basis, perhaps to run a memory-hungry program for a couple of weeks for a project or class.
On most Linux distros, you can find info on this in the mkswap(8) manpage. If you don't happen to have the manpage (a common enough circumstance with servers), the general outline for creating a 512MB swapfile is as follows:
Voila. You now have 512MB of swap available.
If this is going to be a long-time/permanent addition to your system, you'd want to add this to /etc/fstab so that it's automatically remounted whenever you reboot the machine, which you can do by adding an entry like:
If you don't add the swap file to fstab, just remember to do the swapon /path/to/swapfile command after you reboot the system.
If this was a temporary swapfile, when you're all done you can clean it up by doing:
Final note: Always be realistic, folks. Swap's useful in many cases, but it's not a magic bullet. If a program needs significantly more memory than your physical RAM, it's going to take a massive performance hit. If you'll be running something that needs that much memory on a regular basis, bite the bullet and buy more RAM. Or for short-term needs with memory-hungry applications, you might be better off finding the friendly neighborhood uber-geek (the one with the 16GB quad-Opteron machine) and trading a couple of pizzas for some runtime on a better-equipped machine.
I rather doubt this is a small toy glued to the camera, since Dino is currently (May 25 10:00 am NZST picture) casting a rather distinct shadow on one of the rocks.
Unless, of course, the prankster also glued a rock to the camera... :-)
Not to nit-pick, but "people back then", or at least the educated portions of the Greek population, were aware that the earth was round, and had even estimated its circumference with reasonable accuracy, given the limitations of the instruments available at the time. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (historical info), third librarian at Alexandria, conducted this experiment, using nothing more than a stick and a working knowledge of geometry.
There's even an "Eratosthenes Experiment" website for schools/students interested in repeating this classic experiment and comparing their results with other participants.
Oh dude, you should've waited another month for the release of The Ultimate Extended Special Director's Edition Complete 4K Restored/Remastered Lord of the Rings, Collector's Edition.
There's going to be four versions available, each packaged with a different collectible playset -- Helm's Deep, Isengard, Minas Tirith, and Mount Doom. And they're all lovingly handcrafted out of genuine styrofoam, just like in the movies!
It's a parody of a well-known courtroom scene from "A Few Good Men" -- the first few lines were used extensively in the ads for the movie, and if you actually saw the movie or play the longer part of the dialog would probably ring a bell as well.
IMDB (and probably a few million other sites) has the original version in their memorable quotes section for the movie version. Look for "Col Jessep" -- that's the character being parodied as "CmdrTaco" in the parent post.
From the Stanford article:
And further down...
To paraphrase a cliche without any attempt at humor:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster running John the Ripper.