>The other option was soldering. How is it any faster?
It isn't... It's all a slow process with TP cable, soldered or crimped. It's all because you have to deal with individual strands of wire rather than an entire "package".
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, I guess. When I was a kid my parents would take me on such trips, and I'd lie in the back of the car and wonder if it is possible to sleep for 24 hours a day without going into a coma. "But the beach looks so nice, why don't you just enjoy it?". Pffft. Sleep time.
Now, give me something to do with some excitement, like watch a building collapse or riding the gravitron (for once being fat makes the ride more fun), and I'm in the zone.;-)
If it's what I think it is, it's a boot disk without an OS that runs it's own single program that puts random (or sometimes structured) patterns in memory and compares them with expected results.
Or am I wrong about that? Perhaps I'm thinking about the one from a Sun (or was it SGI?) engineer, but there could be another.
I know memtest86 is good, it's most likely a windows memory detection bug that caused the problem, and unless memtest86 has the same bug, I bet it wouldn't have any trouble finding the extra memory (which works just fine, considering neither box has locked up for any memory-related reasons, from what I can tell). Unfortunately, unless I decided not to run windows on the box, this wouldn't help.:-/
But yes, I agree, memtest86 is pretty good. And free!:-)
It takes seconds to crimp a ribbon cable. Cheap and easy. You can even do it yourself!
Taking a bunch of twisted pair wires (which is what would be required to keep the impedance and crosstalk bearable) and soldering them onto connectors individually takes a lot more effort, and therefore costs more.
Not to mention fabbing individual strands of insulated wire and twisting them together costs more than running 5 wires parallel to each other and simply coating them all at the same time with PVC.
>When I replaced one of the sticks, all the problems went away.
The big question is:
Did you replace it with an identical type and speed of RAM? Or did it perhaps have fewer chips?
memtest86 may not detect overclocked RAM, and on some boards, if the RAM is double sided, the extra "stress" on the bus of a poorly desgined board may be enough to cause errors when reading or writing the RAM.
I've seen other strange effects that only happen to windows, such as a board that detects a full complement of 384 MB of RAM in the BIOS (1 each of 256 MB and 128 MB) but only 128 MB in windows. Moving the RAM about on the board would cause windows to _sometimes_ detect the rest of the memory. Swapping the 256 MB stick with another machine's 256 MB caused both machines to reliably detect and use the memory.
While I never bothered with memtest86, I'm betting it would see the same amount of memory as the BIOS.
>When you build your own IROC-Z (*shiver*...please tell me someone wouldn't do this), you're doing the work of actually building the car.
And copying the Windows CD itself isn't doing the work yourself?
Like I said, it isn't like these are going to be mostly custom parts. Most all are available through third parties, who have copied the original designs for you.
>if you'r caught trying to sell a known forgery of a legitimately known piece of art, you'd probably get mightly screwed.
Ahhh, but here's the rub: If you tell the other person they are buying a forgery, no crime is comitted. I dare say there is anyone stupid enough to believe a $0.25 handwritten CD-R with no manuals is the real deal...
You don't want to hear this, I know, but LEDs do have a finite lifetime. Something in the hundreds of thousands of hours, but it is finite, and the LED clocks in the Pearson Airport definately show it.:-(
Maybe it's just me, but I find the new LED traffic lights cause a night-myopia-like effect in me. If I see one of those at night, a large area surrounding the bulb will be strongly overshadowed by green. Which sucks.:-/
Perhaps it's just an intensity issue. I don't think it's my eyes, as my opthamologist thinks they're just fine.
>You are very unlikely to notice any problems from one of those, so check 'em out.
Migraine sufferers are even more sensitive to annoying high-pitched noises, which many of the less-than-perfect high-frequency ballasts emit. Plus I want to harm whoever decided to install those bastardly things in my student lounge. As the (volunteer) audio tech there they bring me nothing but pain, inducing their signal into everything. Balanced cables don't help, as it seems to permeate the equipment itself. ARGH!:-)
>Yes, but nobody gives a flying fuck over a photocopy of the Mona Lisa, or even a pixel-perfect scan. Why? Because the value assigned to it is in that it's a single painting by some dead guy.
Uhhhh... I didn't say copy as in photocopy. Please don't put words in my mouth. If you require more detail on the matter (why, I don't know... the Mona Lisa is a well known popularly copied item) I mean copy as in expert artist makes a paint-by-numbers copy. This has been known to happen, many, many, many times.
>The value of software is that it performs a task. That task can be performed by a copy. The 'task' of the Mona Lisa cannot be transferred to a copy.
It sure as hell can. The 'task' of the Mona Lisa is to either look good, in which case a copy will do, or the 'task' is that its value increases, in which case the copy is no good.
So, yeah, I give a flying fuck about copies of the Mona Lisa, even if you don't seem to care about it.
That being said, it seems the art industry has survived without the original authors being informed whenever their paintings are being re-sold. FYI, there are even those who suspect the Mona Lisa in the Louvre we all call real could actually be a forgery itself. Yet the art industry continues to push ahead, unimpeded by Microsoft style authentication.
So, what do you have to say about that? Or do you just not give a flying fuck about art in general?
Don't be so quick to dismiss the copied car analogy. I have known mechanics that build their own cars, and there's no reason why they couldn't copy a car if they liked. The body parts that would make the difference (as far as most copyrights would go) are all easily available. Heck, there are third party companies that make their living by creating knock-off body parts.
So, pray tell me, what's the difference between a mechanic building their own IROC-Z and me copying MS-Windows? Is it just because it is easier to copy MS-Windows? Why don't we ask the mechanic if he'd rather learn the intricate details of using a computer and copying windows or if he'd rather build himself a kit replica of his favourite car?
You don't need Star Trek to see that copying most any physical item can be done. They have to come from somewhere, and I rarely hear of anything complicated that didn't have a human-built prototype preceed it.
>People talk a lot of shit on here about the feds but at least my employer (the Marine Corps) buys only Windows 2000. Much less hassle than XP and I am thankful for it.
Didn't windows 2000 almost sink one of your ships?
>Um, this kinds of logic just doesn't apply to software. Unless you live in the ST:TNG universe, you can't replicate your car so that more than one person can drive it at a time.
Okay, fine. Let's say I bought some fine artwork. Should it self erase if not "activated"? It is copyable.
The etymology of First Post is why it's so popular.
Remember, way back, like 5 years back, when people like B0redatWork posted?
Well, it turned out he spent more time surfing the site than anyone else, so would always end up posting first.
After a while, getting first post was sorta cool because you beat him at it.
A little more time passes and it just turns into a trollish thing to do.
But without the history of why, it's not really that interesting. There's a lot more history here than many people know about, like hidden sids, vladinator, editors losing their homes (or did I read that wrong), the time when users could type in any nick and email addy they liked, the time when there were no first posts, and the time I used to actually give out my real, home, quick contact email address to everyone, when cmdrtaco actually had his own section of slashdot, and so forth.
Welcome to slashdot, the ever evolving community. And, if the old stories were actually archived properly, you'd see the fact that I have such a high userID is because I protested the whole login idea, cause I thought it would lead to the problems of today.
But, time passes and logins become common, so I gave up.:-)
Unless you're talking 40 or 50 miles, I bet if you talk to a local radio expert, you would find that a high-gain directional antenna, properly aligned, plus a repeater, would work miracles.
>Actually, newer harddrives don't suffer from that problem anymore.
What, they magically got rid of lubed bearings, and head distances increased?;-)
As a computer tech, I know that while the rates and symptoms of stiction have changed, it still exists, and it's getting worse again as hard drives have started getting hotter and hotter (again).
I have a 13 GB Seagate HDD sitting in a drawer that will sometimes start up when it's given the usual anti-stiction taps. I've seen other drives with similar problems.
More common today is controller failure and the mysterious bad sector, though (although, unfortunately, due to the fact that most modern hard drives will remap hundreds of sectors until they display physical errors, the things get dead slow before you get to that point). Head crashes aren't all that unusual, either.
>Anyway, sure in 10 years, the harddrive will be broken. But the data won't be lost because I will have moved it to a newer drive. - That was my whole point.
Sounds like a really sucky backup plan where you're always having to re-backup your data. Leaving the data on a live drive and simply transferring copies all the time is inviting disaster. Just cause the hard drive doesn't burst into flames doesn't mean bad code won't scratch your data.
But that's just my opinion. Or perhaps I'm not clearly understanding what you're trying to say?
- I receive an email.
- Program processes it to see if user is already on white list.
- If user is on the whitelist, let the email through.
- If not, put the mail into a "holding" area. Reply with a check email stating that the user must send a random number (listed in the email) back in the subject to be whitelisted. Explain that there is a $500 proofreading cost per unsolicited commercial email, and that replying with this number in the subject of emails of this type implies your acceptance of the agreement (Finally we can use the DMCA for something useful).
- If the user does this within the week, they are permanently whitelisted and the email is released.
- If the user is a spammer, and starts doing this, at least you have a _valid_ email address and you can now start suing people (the reply email address has to be valid or how would they get the reply -- subpeona the ISP if they won't give you the information willingly [I'm sure they'd help, most ISPs hate spammers as much as the next guy]). Instead of doing the suing personally, a special set of lawyers could gather all these cases and do the work on your behalf as a class action lawsuit. Sure, you might only get $5, but they'd never spam again, and the effort is minimal!
- If no reply, the email is discarded.
Mailing lists. So, let's say you are subscribed to one. Let's say, on average, mailing lists have 250 people subscribed to each one, and top out at 5,000 people. Also, let's the users are subscribed to a daily digest.
If the hash is designed to take 5 seconds on an "average" computer, that means the mailing list will take on average 20 minutes of CPU to send out (not a big deal), and up to 7 hours to send out (a very big problem).
So, we would have to give up mailing lists just to satisfy spammers.
Not to mention all a spammer needs to do is start buying a bunch of boxes to do the work. 11 2 Ghz machines, with only one actually doing the mailing, and the rest distributing the processing load (and therefore are diskless and headless), we're talking $1,000 for the first box and about $200 per additional box (wholesale).
Considering the houses spammers buy, paying an extra $2,000 to get emailing time reduced to 1/2 second, isn't exactly a big deal. The spammer could now send out 86,400 emails per day. At a sucess rate of 1 in 10,000, that's almost 9 sales a day. If the item is a scam (as usual), and the item is being sold for $30 (cheaper than most crap I am asked to buy in spam) that's still an income of $270 daily, or enough income to spam an extra 8,640 people a day, or, in other words, the spammer pays for each new box in a week.
The worst this system can do is slow down what people want to do normally with computers, and cause a 1 or 2 month distributed computer array buliding delay for the spammer 'till he's up to speed. Of course, one can always increase the expected hash, at the risk of alienating the surprisingly large home user population that still has crappy Pentium 100 systems.
Slashdot Mirror
>The other option was soldering. How is it any faster?
It isn't... It's all a slow process with TP cable, soldered or crimped. It's all because you have to deal with individual strands of wire rather than an entire "package".
I'm pretty sure cause just like network cable, you'll still have to spend a bunch of time sorting out the conductors...
:-)
Try crimping a 50 pin IDC ribbon connector. Now crimp 3 1/2 network cables. Which takes way less time?
>Can't you just enjoy the scenery?
;-)
BAH! BORING!
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, I guess. When I was a kid my parents would take me on such trips, and I'd lie in the back of the car and wonder if it is possible to sleep for 24 hours a day without going into a coma. "But the beach looks so nice, why don't you just enjoy it?". Pffft. Sleep time.
Now, give me something to do with some excitement, like watch a building collapse or riding the gravitron (for once being fat makes the ride more fun), and I'm in the zone.
If it's what I think it is, it's a boot disk without an OS that runs it's own single program that puts random (or sometimes structured) patterns in memory and compares them with expected results.
:-/
:-)
Or am I wrong about that? Perhaps I'm thinking about the one from a Sun (or was it SGI?) engineer, but there could be another.
I know memtest86 is good, it's most likely a windows memory detection bug that caused the problem, and unless memtest86 has the same bug, I bet it wouldn't have any trouble finding the extra memory (which works just fine, considering neither box has locked up for any memory-related reasons, from what I can tell). Unfortunately, unless I decided not to run windows on the box, this wouldn't help.
But yes, I agree, memtest86 is pretty good. And free!
>Why not simply roll the ribbons up into cables?
Impedance, crosstalk (mentioned) and price.
It takes seconds to crimp a ribbon cable. Cheap and easy. You can even do it yourself!
Taking a bunch of twisted pair wires (which is what would be required to keep the impedance and crosstalk bearable) and soldering them onto connectors individually takes a lot more effort, and therefore costs more.
Not to mention fabbing individual strands of insulated wire and twisting them together costs more than running 5 wires parallel to each other and simply coating them all at the same time with PVC.
>When I replaced one of the sticks, all the problems went away.
:-)
The big question is:
Did you replace it with an identical type and speed of RAM? Or did it perhaps have fewer chips?
memtest86 may not detect overclocked RAM, and on some boards, if the RAM is double sided, the extra "stress" on the bus of a poorly desgined board may be enough to cause errors when reading or writing the RAM.
I've seen other strange effects that only happen to windows, such as a board that detects a full complement of 384 MB of RAM in the BIOS (1 each of 256 MB and 128 MB) but only 128 MB in windows. Moving the RAM about on the board would cause windows to _sometimes_ detect the rest of the memory. Swapping the 256 MB stick with another machine's 256 MB caused both machines to reliably detect and use the memory.
While I never bothered with memtest86, I'm betting it would see the same amount of memory as the BIOS.
Can you tell I hate modern memory modules yet?
Until the New U becomes possible?
Do have to commit carousel for reminding everyone of that movie?
>When you build your own IROC-Z (*shiver*...please tell me someone wouldn't do this), you're doing the work of actually building the car.
And copying the Windows CD itself isn't doing the work yourself?
Like I said, it isn't like these are going to be mostly custom parts. Most all are available through third parties, who have copied the original designs for you.
>if you'r caught trying to sell a known forgery of a legitimately known piece of art, you'd probably get mightly screwed.
Ahhh, but here's the rub: If you tell the other person they are buying a forgery, no crime is comitted. I dare say there is anyone stupid enough to believe a $0.25 handwritten CD-R with no manuals is the real deal...
You don't want to hear this, I know, but LEDs do have a finite lifetime. Something in the hundreds of thousands of hours, but it is finite, and the LED clocks in the Pearson Airport definately show it. :-(
:-/
Maybe it's just me, but I find the new LED traffic lights cause a night-myopia-like effect in me. If I see one of those at night, a large area surrounding the bulb will be strongly overshadowed by green. Which sucks.
Perhaps it's just an intensity issue. I don't think it's my eyes, as my opthamologist thinks they're just fine.
>You are very unlikely to notice any problems from one of those, so check 'em out.
:-)
Migraine sufferers are even more sensitive to annoying high-pitched noises, which many of the less-than-perfect high-frequency ballasts emit. Plus I want to harm whoever decided to install those bastardly things in my student lounge. As the (volunteer) audio tech there they bring me nothing but pain, inducing their signal into everything. Balanced cables don't help, as it seems to permeate the equipment itself. ARGH!
Is joke! Is more funny when is no serious replies.
:-)
Haha, funny... you are knowing!
>Yes, but nobody gives a flying fuck over a photocopy of the Mona Lisa, or even a pixel-perfect scan. Why? Because the value assigned to it is in that it's a single painting by some dead guy.
Uhhhh... I didn't say copy as in photocopy. Please don't put words in my mouth. If you require more detail on the matter (why, I don't know... the Mona Lisa is a well known popularly copied item) I mean copy as in expert artist makes a paint-by-numbers copy. This has been known to happen, many, many, many times.
>The value of software is that it performs a task. That task can be performed by a copy. The 'task' of the Mona Lisa cannot be transferred to a copy.
It sure as hell can. The 'task' of the Mona Lisa is to either look good, in which case a copy will do, or the 'task' is that its value increases, in which case the copy is no good.
So, yeah, I give a flying fuck about copies of the Mona Lisa, even if you don't seem to care about it.
That being said, it seems the art industry has survived without the original authors being informed whenever their paintings are being re-sold. FYI, there are even those who suspect the Mona Lisa in the Louvre we all call real could actually be a forgery itself. Yet the art industry continues to push ahead, unimpeded by Microsoft style authentication.
So, what do you have to say about that? Or do you just not give a flying fuck about art in general?
Don't be so quick to dismiss the copied car analogy. I have known mechanics that build their own cars, and there's no reason why they couldn't copy a car if they liked. The body parts that would make the difference (as far as most copyrights would go) are all easily available. Heck, there are third party companies that make their living by creating knock-off body parts.
So, pray tell me, what's the difference between a mechanic building their own IROC-Z and me copying MS-Windows? Is it just because it is easier to copy MS-Windows? Why don't we ask the mechanic if he'd rather learn the intricate details of using a computer and copying windows or if he'd rather build himself a kit replica of his favourite car?
You don't need Star Trek to see that copying most any physical item can be done. They have to come from somewhere, and I rarely hear of anything complicated that didn't have a human-built prototype preceed it.
So, how was IBM multiplan, anyways?
>People talk a lot of shit on here about the feds but at least my employer (the Marine Corps) buys only Windows 2000. Much less hassle than XP and I am thankful for it.
Didn't windows 2000 almost sink one of your ships?
>Um, this kinds of logic just doesn't apply to software. Unless you live in the ST:TNG universe, you can't replicate your car so that more than one person can drive it at a time.
Okay, fine. Let's say I bought some fine artwork. Should it self erase if not "activated"? It is copyable.
>It can when the DMV decides to suspend your license and/or your insurance company drops your coverage because you didn't keep current information.
If you've had your license revoked, you can say better than any of us if your car was still running well enough after that for it to be saleable.
>Why bother? Billion has nine zeroes!!!
Or twelve if you're not American.
The etymology of First Post is why it's so popular.
:-)
Remember, way back, like 5 years back, when people like B0redatWork posted?
Well, it turned out he spent more time surfing the site than anyone else, so would always end up posting first.
After a while, getting first post was sorta cool because you beat him at it.
A little more time passes and it just turns into a trollish thing to do.
But without the history of why, it's not really that interesting. There's a lot more history here than many people know about, like hidden sids, vladinator, editors losing their homes (or did I read that wrong), the time when users could type in any nick and email addy they liked, the time when there were no first posts, and the time I used to actually give out my real, home, quick contact email address to everyone, when cmdrtaco actually had his own section of slashdot, and so forth.
Welcome to slashdot, the ever evolving community. And, if the old stories were actually archived properly, you'd see the fact that I have such a high userID is because I protested the whole login idea, cause I thought it would lead to the problems of today.
But, time passes and logins become common, so I gave up.
Maybe they meant cooler as in:
"Man, that fire, it's like burning so much COOLER than that time we burned our school books!"
I'll add a little steam to the debate:
:-)
Whether Americans are fatter than the British or not, the net effect of the difference is negligible as far as life expectancy goes.
So, live in whichever country that has the food you like.
>I am British BTW, so that means I think pancakes are pancakes, not those HUGE dripping in syrup
I think the word you're looking for, or at least what I call British pancakes is "Flapjacks".
Pancakes is reserved by Americans. They trademarked it first! Dibs!
[ That's what I miss from the US. IHOPs and Waffle Houses all over. ]
5? 10? 15?
Unless you're talking 40 or 50 miles, I bet if you talk to a local radio expert, you would find that a high-gain directional antenna, properly aligned, plus a repeater, would work miracles.
>Actually, newer harddrives don't suffer from that problem anymore.
;-)
What, they magically got rid of lubed bearings, and head distances increased?
As a computer tech, I know that while the rates and symptoms of stiction have changed, it still exists, and it's getting worse again as hard drives have started getting hotter and hotter (again).
I have a 13 GB Seagate HDD sitting in a drawer that will sometimes start up when it's given the usual anti-stiction taps. I've seen other drives with similar problems.
More common today is controller failure and the mysterious bad sector, though (although, unfortunately, due to the fact that most modern hard drives will remap hundreds of sectors until they display physical errors, the things get dead slow before you get to that point). Head crashes aren't all that unusual, either.
>Anyway, sure in 10 years, the harddrive will be broken. But the data won't be lost because I will have moved it to a newer drive. - That was my whole point.
Sounds like a really sucky backup plan where you're always having to re-backup your data. Leaving the data on a live drive and simply transferring copies all the time is inviting disaster. Just cause the hard drive doesn't burst into flames doesn't mean bad code won't scratch your data.
But that's just my opinion. Or perhaps I'm not clearly understanding what you're trying to say?
I'd love to find a system like this:
- I receive an email.
- Program processes it to see if user is already on white list.
- If user is on the whitelist, let the email through.
- If not, put the mail into a "holding" area. Reply with a check email stating that the user must send a random number (listed in the email) back in the subject to be whitelisted. Explain that there is a $500 proofreading cost per unsolicited commercial email, and that replying with this number in the subject of emails of this type implies your acceptance of the agreement (Finally we can use the DMCA for something useful).
- If the user does this within the week, they are permanently whitelisted and the email is released.
- If the user is a spammer, and starts doing this, at least you have a _valid_ email address and you can now start suing people (the reply email address has to be valid or how would they get the reply -- subpeona the ISP if they won't give you the information willingly [I'm sure they'd help, most ISPs hate spammers as much as the next guy]). Instead of doing the suing personally, a special set of lawyers could gather all these cases and do the work on your behalf as a class action lawsuit. Sure, you might only get $5, but they'd never spam again, and the effort is minimal!
- If no reply, the email is discarded.
Goodbye spam!
Problems I already see with hash cash:
Mailing lists. So, let's say you are subscribed to one. Let's say, on average, mailing lists have 250 people subscribed to each one, and top out at 5,000 people. Also, let's the users are subscribed to a daily digest.
If the hash is designed to take 5 seconds on an "average" computer, that means the mailing list will take on average 20 minutes of CPU to send out (not a big deal), and up to 7 hours to send out (a very big problem).
So, we would have to give up mailing lists just to satisfy spammers.
Not to mention all a spammer needs to do is start buying a bunch of boxes to do the work. 11 2 Ghz machines, with only one actually doing the mailing, and the rest distributing the processing load (and therefore are diskless and headless), we're talking $1,000 for the first box and about $200 per additional box (wholesale).
Considering the houses spammers buy, paying an extra $2,000 to get emailing time reduced to 1/2 second, isn't exactly a big deal. The spammer could now send out 86,400 emails per day. At a sucess rate of 1 in 10,000, that's almost 9 sales a day. If the item is a scam (as usual), and the item is being sold for $30 (cheaper than most crap I am asked to buy in spam) that's still an income of $270 daily, or enough income to spam an extra 8,640 people a day, or, in other words, the spammer pays for each new box in a week.
The worst this system can do is slow down what people want to do normally with computers, and cause a 1 or 2 month distributed computer array buliding delay for the spammer 'till he's up to speed. Of course, one can always increase the expected hash, at the risk of alienating the surprisingly large home user population that still has crappy Pentium 100 systems.