If you use a normal phone, yes. Until recently I worked in telecoms and we were all issued with a near perfect bugging device - a butt phone with monitor mode. Monitor mode is high-impedance so undetectable without some clever kit. Connect it to the right pair, hit the button and you can listen in undetected at will. You can buy one for a hundred quid ($200) or so, probably less if you shop around. Monitoring lines was standard practice, albeit briefly, when working on a line - you listen to make sure nobody is using the phone, then dial a test number using the line to make sure it's the right circuit, then do whatever you need to do. You aren't supposed to listen to people's conversations, merely ensure the line isn't in use, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Telecoms cabinets aren't all that secure, it's easy to break in and put a tap in one and with a little care it wouldn't be obvious to an engineer working in the cabinet there was anything amiss. You could make a tap with a microcontroller with an ADC and some external RAM. The hard part would be finding the right pair without access to the phone company records or target's premises.
Sort of. I would not suggest studying the effects of sticking your hand in a blender, simply deciding it is a bad idea is sufficient. This line of reasoning extends to other things that are somewhat more germane to living your life (savings are better than debt, don't screw dirty whores, heroin is nasty, etc).
Heroin, or diamorphine, provides highly effective pain relief with comparatively few side effects. It's a faster acting, more potent form of morphine. If you were dying of cancer or had just had your leg blown off I don't think you'd call it nasty at all. In fact I think you'd call it very nice indeed.
The extra cost of installing Ubuntu is more than offset by not having to pay for the Windows license. If the Ubuntu models were cheaper by the full cost of an OEM copy of Windows you might have a point.
The Eiffel Tower is not covered by copyright. For a start, it's too old. However, night-time shots of the Eiffel Tower which include the modern lighting display are covered by copyright - the lighting display is the work covered.
Yet again we see proof that Microsoft has a monopoly. If there were real competition in the market, people would not be forced to bend over and pay more. There would be competition, Dell would have to offer it at the same price or another operating system would win.
This isn't about Microsoft's monopoly, it's about economies of scale. This is about exactly one thing: it costs Dell more money to offer XP than it does Vista. Why? Because most of their consumer machines are sold with Vista, so they install drives with Vista images by default when they build the machines. Dell are moving away from the built-to-order roots for their low-end consumer machines. Changing Vista to XP costs time, which costs money.
2 MB isn't even enough for a 1024x768 24bpp bitmap of the rendered page. In order to scroll smoothly, it'll be generating a bitmap of more than is immediately visible. If the Slashdot homepage is 1000x5000 pixels in a particular browser that's a 15 MB bitmap. If we assume all your pages are like the Slashdot homepage[1] you'd need 900 MB just to keep all 60 bitmaps in memory.
[1] All pages are not like the Slashdot homepage, I know. It was just a convenient example.
It's a full 24 hours, so you just need to find time at some point in the day. The best you can do at organising something like this is to try to ensure at least some of "your" 17th of June actually happens on 17th of June for every timezone and that you specify the time in a way people can easily convert to local time. UTC is in the middle of the timezones (noon in UTC is on the same day everywhere) and far more people know their timezone's offset from UTC than know their offset from $US_timezone. Mozilla's "17th of June" doesn't coincide at all with 17th of June in some parts of the world. I hope the Japanese Mozilla site has been advertising 18th of June.
Who cares about virtual memory use? (I don't mean swap) It's, you know, virtual. My Firefox 2 is using 550MB of VM, but only 125MB of real memory. The wonders of paged memory.
You've not run into that yet because DRM for the web isn't here yet. When DRM for the web does arrive, it'll be thanks to pricks like you blocking ads. Nobody is attempting to control what you spend your time seeing; if you don't like a site with ads, don't read it. Let the market decide what's an acceptable level of advertising.
As a kid, I did work experience at a bank data centre. The place was spectacularly secure - most of it underground with with doors that look like they were from a dry dock not a data centre. The funny looking external walls were, we were informed, designed to deflect mortar rounds. I think they could go for more than a day without air and a few weeks without food or fuel supplies.
They too had emergency cutoff switches - big red buttons, with no cover, on poles bout 4 feet high dotted around the cavernous server rooms. I never quite understood the need for cutoffs which are so trivial to accidentally hit. Is it a legal requirement when you're using a certain amount of power?
Even the printer friendly version has text ads sliming it up [...]
Those evil, evil bastards. Imagine wanting to get paid for your work. They should be like you and work for free. You do your day job for free, yes? I mean, you don't mind people taking your work without paying, even if the price is as mind-bogglingly low as a fraction of a second of mindshare, do you?
Do you think that up until the moment they tested them they a) didn't have working nukes and b) didn't know the other side had working nukes? The timing of the tests was pure political theatre, not the culmination of their nuclear programs.
We were going to have massive computer chaos on a global scale until all the important stuff got fixed. Come the end of 1999 I don't recall most experts saying there would be chaos, because thy knew the huge effort required to fix all the systems had been made. The fact that Y2K was a damp squib isn't evidence that there was never a problem, it's evidence that the problem was fixed in a timely fashion. It was fixed precisely because the experts made a fuss about it.
On the environmental front, it doesn't take many overheated components, delaminated boards or dry joints resulting in components being thrown away to outweigh the impact of a bit of lead. Mostly though, it's just nicer to work with.
I disagree 1,000,000 per cent. Gran Turismo has "OK" physics, which is good enough to make the masses happy. I just gave the new one a spin (the Prelude GT5 or whatever it's called) and they still have fake physics, complete with the inability to break traction with too much throttle or too hard on the brakes.
You obviously didn't switch the physics to "professional" and turn the traction control, stability control and ABS off. It's hard not to break traction in some cars with "real man" settings. You can play GT5 as an arcade game, but you can play it as a decent simulation too if you prefer.
Never heard of force feedback? With a good force feedback wheel you can get a decent amount of information about what the car's doing. You can easily feel under/oversteer, for example. Well, you can if you don't grip the wheel with white knuckles, but the same is true of real driving. It doesn't give you all the information you get in a real car but it is pretty good if implemented properly.
I installed Arch Linux on a cheap 2 GB Patriot flash drive. It boots pretty quickly and overall performance seems good, even for a cheap drive. However I don't do hugely disk intensive tasks with it.
One annoying thing I have noticed is that programs will periodically completely freeze up and I'll look over and notice that the activity light on the drive is flashing. A common experience is that Firefox will be completely unresponsive, not even redrawing itself when a window that was obscuring it is moved, until the drive stops flashing, and then Firefox will instantly come back to life.
I touched on this in an earlier post, but I experienced the same thing and tracked it down to the CFQ IO scheduler. I never got round to making a clean test case so never submitted the bug to the kernel. My wild-ass guess is that it's assuming reads and writes take equal time when they don't with flash, which confuses its notion of "fairness". It's a pity CFQ doesn't seem to work well with flash, as it has some tasty features like being able to ionice your backup process so foreground tasks get priority. It's not just me who things CFQ aint great for flash - the default kernel on an Eee PC doesn't even have it compiled in, despite CFQ being the default scheduler for the kernel version they use (it's still the default now, you're almost certainly using it).
The IO scheduler operates at the block device level, below the page cache daemon, so in theory even when dumping cache it shouldn't starve your reads and writes out. That's pretty much the point of having a clever IO scheduler - not having to wait for a 5 GB IO to finish before you get to read the 100 byte file you're blocking on. Mostly that's what Linux's schedulers do. But CFQ with a flash drive? Not so much.
You can change the IO scheduler and tune it at runtime, which is very handy indeed. This shouldn't cause data loss, and I've not had any problems.
I'll assume your flash drive is/dev/sda, change sda as appropriate.
To see which IO scheduler you're currently using and those available in your kernel:
I found the deadline scheduler had much better interactive performance that CFQ when booting from a flash drive.
Changing the scheduler as detailed above needs to be done after every boot and for every device. If you want to use a particular scheduler as the kernel default for all devices, either choose it at kernel compile time or pass the "elevator" parameter to your kernel in your bootloader config. For example, "elevator=deadline" makes the deadline scheduler the default. If you use grub, tag that on the end of the kernel line in/boot/grub/menu.lst.
There are tuning "knobs" for each scheduler. Read the docs in/linux/source/Documentation/block for the gory details. I tuned my system to use the deadline scheduler, group IOs less (no head seek penalty) and prioritise reads over writes (things regularly block on reads but less so on writes, which can be cached anyway - remember we're working below the level of the cache). Read the docs to understand the gory details - note that these tunables are for the deadline scheduler, they're different for different schedulers. They're not very scientifically selected and not exhaustively benchmarked so you may be able to do better. The numbers for expire are in milliseconds. This lot will dispatch IOs individually (instead of in groups of 16), do 10 reads for every write, prioritise a read a
Slashdot Mirror
If you use a normal phone, yes. Until recently I worked in telecoms and we were all issued with a near perfect bugging device - a butt phone with monitor mode. Monitor mode is high-impedance so undetectable without some clever kit. Connect it to the right pair, hit the button and you can listen in undetected at will. You can buy one for a hundred quid ($200) or so, probably less if you shop around. Monitoring lines was standard practice, albeit briefly, when working on a line - you listen to make sure nobody is using the phone, then dial a test number using the line to make sure it's the right circuit, then do whatever you need to do. You aren't supposed to listen to people's conversations, merely ensure the line isn't in use, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Telecoms cabinets aren't all that secure, it's easy to break in and put a tap in one and with a little care it wouldn't be obvious to an engineer working in the cabinet there was anything amiss. You could make a tap with a microcontroller with an ADC and some external RAM. The hard part would be finding the right pair without access to the phone company records or target's premises.
Heroin, or diamorphine, provides highly effective pain relief with comparatively few side effects. It's a faster acting, more potent form of morphine. If you were dying of cancer or had just had your leg blown off I don't think you'd call it nasty at all. In fact I think you'd call it very nice indeed.
The extra cost of installing Ubuntu is more than offset by not having to pay for the Windows license. If the Ubuntu models were cheaper by the full cost of an OEM copy of Windows you might have a point.
The Eiffel Tower is not covered by copyright. For a start, it's too old. However, night-time shots of the Eiffel Tower which include the modern lighting display are covered by copyright - the lighting display is the work covered.
Except Swizerland is currently on Central European Summer Time, which is UTC+2.
I agree, car analogies are the Ford Edsels of the English language.
This isn't about Microsoft's monopoly, it's about economies of scale. This is about exactly one thing: it costs Dell more money to offer XP than it does Vista. Why? Because most of their consumer machines are sold with Vista, so they install drives with Vista images by default when they build the machines. Dell are moving away from the built-to-order roots for their low-end consumer machines. Changing Vista to XP costs time, which costs money.
If you can't get people to listen to your 5 minute pitch, how do you get them to watch your 15 minute short or 100 minute feature?
Parallels does hardware accelerated video.
2 MB isn't even enough for a 1024x768 24bpp bitmap of the rendered page. In order to scroll smoothly, it'll be generating a bitmap of more than is immediately visible. If the Slashdot homepage is 1000x5000 pixels in a particular browser that's a 15 MB bitmap. If we assume all your pages are like the Slashdot homepage[1] you'd need 900 MB just to keep all 60 bitmaps in memory.
[1] All pages are not like the Slashdot homepage, I know. It was just a convenient example.
It's a full 24 hours, so you just need to find time at some point in the day. The best you can do at organising something like this is to try to ensure at least some of "your" 17th of June actually happens on 17th of June for every timezone and that you specify the time in a way people can easily convert to local time. UTC is in the middle of the timezones (noon in UTC is on the same day everywhere) and far more people know their timezone's offset from UTC than know their offset from $US_timezone. Mozilla's "17th of June" doesn't coincide at all with 17th of June in some parts of the world. I hope the Japanese Mozilla site has been advertising 18th of June.
Who cares about virtual memory use? (I don't mean swap) It's, you know, virtual. My Firefox 2 is using 550MB of VM, but only 125MB of real memory. The wonders of paged memory.
You're not alone, most of us have managers.
You've not run into that yet because DRM for the web isn't here yet. When DRM for the web does arrive, it'll be thanks to pricks like you blocking ads. Nobody is attempting to control what you spend your time seeing; if you don't like a site with ads, don't read it. Let the market decide what's an acceptable level of advertising.
As a kid, I did work experience at a bank data centre. The place was spectacularly secure - most of it underground with with doors that look like they were from a dry dock not a data centre. The funny looking external walls were, we were informed, designed to deflect mortar rounds. I think they could go for more than a day without air and a few weeks without food or fuel supplies.
They too had emergency cutoff switches - big red buttons, with no cover, on poles bout 4 feet high dotted around the cavernous server rooms. I never quite understood the need for cutoffs which are so trivial to accidentally hit. Is it a legal requirement when you're using a certain amount of power?
Those evil, evil bastards. Imagine wanting to get paid for your work. They should be like you and work for free. You do your day job for free, yes? I mean, you don't mind people taking your work without paying, even if the price is as mind-bogglingly low as a fraction of a second of mindshare, do you?
Do you think that up until the moment they tested them they a) didn't have working nukes and b) didn't know the other side had working nukes? The timing of the tests was pure political theatre, not the culmination of their nuclear programs.
We were going to have massive computer chaos on a global scale until all the important stuff got fixed. Come the end of 1999 I don't recall most experts saying there would be chaos, because thy knew the huge effort required to fix all the systems had been made. The fact that Y2K was a damp squib isn't evidence that there was never a problem, it's evidence that the problem was fixed in a timely fashion. It was fixed precisely because the experts made a fuss about it.
Only if you or your customers want to risk customs confiscating it.
On the environmental front, it doesn't take many overheated components, delaminated boards or dry joints resulting in components being thrown away to outweigh the impact of a bit of lead. Mostly though, it's just nicer to work with.
If it's just your hobby why are you bothering with lead-free solder? SnPb isn't illegal for hobby use (in the EU anyway, perhaps it is somewhere).
You obviously didn't switch the physics to "professional" and turn the traction control, stability control and ABS off. It's hard not to break traction in some cars with "real man" settings. You can play GT5 as an arcade game, but you can play it as a decent simulation too if you prefer.
Never heard of force feedback? With a good force feedback wheel you can get a decent amount of information about what the car's doing. You can easily feel under/oversteer, for example. Well, you can if you don't grip the wheel with white knuckles, but the same is true of real driving. It doesn't give you all the information you get in a real car but it is pretty good if implemented properly.
Use/> if line breaks are what you want, but mostly you probably want <p>paragraph</p> tags. Remember to close them.
I touched on this in an earlier post, but I experienced the same thing and tracked it down to the CFQ IO scheduler. I never got round to making a clean test case so never submitted the bug to the kernel. My wild-ass guess is that it's assuming reads and writes take equal time when they don't with flash, which confuses its notion of "fairness". It's a pity CFQ doesn't seem to work well with flash, as it has some tasty features like being able to ionice your backup process so foreground tasks get priority. It's not just me who things CFQ aint great for flash - the default kernel on an Eee PC doesn't even have it compiled in, despite CFQ being the default scheduler for the kernel version they use (it's still the default now, you're almost certainly using it).
The IO scheduler operates at the block device level, below the page cache daemon, so in theory even when dumping cache it shouldn't starve your reads and writes out. That's pretty much the point of having a clever IO scheduler - not having to wait for a 5 GB IO to finish before you get to read the 100 byte file you're blocking on. Mostly that's what Linux's schedulers do. But CFQ with a flash drive? Not so much.
You can change the IO scheduler and tune it at runtime, which is very handy indeed. This shouldn't cause data loss, and I've not had any problems.
I'll assume your flash drive is /dev/sda, change sda as appropriate.
To see which IO scheduler you're currently using and those available in your kernel:
That shows I have all four schedulers available and CFQ is currently in use. To change it, just echo the name of the new one to that file:
I found the deadline scheduler had much better interactive performance that CFQ when booting from a flash drive.
Changing the scheduler as detailed above needs to be done after every boot and for every device. If you want to use a particular scheduler as the kernel default for all devices, either choose it at kernel compile time or pass the "elevator" parameter to your kernel in your bootloader config. For example, "elevator=deadline" makes the deadline scheduler the default. If you use grub, tag that on the end of the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
There are tuning "knobs" for each scheduler. Read the docs in /linux/source/Documentation/block for the gory details. I tuned my system to use the deadline scheduler, group IOs less (no head seek penalty) and prioritise reads over writes (things regularly block on reads but less so on writes, which can be cached anyway - remember we're working below the level of the cache). Read the docs to understand the gory details - note that these tunables are for the deadline scheduler, they're different for different schedulers. They're not very scientifically selected and not exhaustively benchmarked so you may be able to do better. The numbers for expire are in milliseconds. This lot will dispatch IOs individually (instead of in groups of 16), do 10 reads for every write, prioritise a read a