And you could presumably trick users w/o regard to the OS they use. But it's far more likely that the windows user is logged in with full Admin privileges.
But it doesn't matter.
The trojan/worm need not be an administrator to trash a user's computer, even with Linux. Let's use Ubuntu as an example. It can still send mail and propagate just fine as a regular user. It can also trash that user's documents and files (which are likely to be the only important data on the machine). It can use a crontab entry to start a daemon on a high-numbered port, which will run without user interaction, or without them even being logged in. That daemon won't be root, but it will still be capable of being a very proficient zombie.
After that, for good measure, it can just run gksudo and simply ask the user for root permission. Ubuntu users are absolutely content to enter their own password into gksudo whenever prompted, especially when performing updates and patches (as this claims to be). So, the trojan will readily then gain root and be free to run completely amock. Trashing or rooting the OS is the obvious next step, but it's probably not even needed after all of the damage and infiltration already accomplished as a regular user.
Seriously - just because it's not Windows does not mean that it's secure. As long as people are able to run arbitrary programs on their own computers, these types of things will continue to be a problem...no matter what kind of computer it is, and no matter if it has root/administrator priveledges or not.
It's not a knee-jerk response, it's just the only valid thing I could come up with as a retort for the suggestion of such an atrociously bad wiring system.
It is not suitable for nice-and-neat installations, as the cables are all PRE TERMINATED AND OF FIXED LENGTH. Proper, neat-and-tidy cabling installations do NOT involve bundles of coiled slack at ALL. But RapidRun, with its pre-terminated cables, requires it. So the cables will (hopefully!) all be ordered at least dozen feet too long, and all that extra wire will need to go somewhere, and that somewhere will be a messy clusterfuck. (In a conventional patch panel installation, cable lengths are customized and precise, cut-to-fit on a wire-by-wire basis, and can be the antithesis of a clusterfuck.)
It is this pre-terminated nature which also makes it impossible to use with patch panels. Sure, one could always cut the connectors off and fuck around with attaching their cabling to patch panels, but then one could always avoid the product to begin with. I mean: It's those connectors which solely differentiate RapidRun as a unique product. To remove them would be to piss even more money into the wind and ruin the singular advantage that the product claims to offer.
Furthermore, those connectors are not impedance-patched, and there are two of them per run. This makes for measurably lousy performance compared proper connectors designed for the specific task at hand.
I said it before, here it is again: It looks like a decent system for pulling VGA cables through conduit, but that's about it.
Fact is, it's rather easy to install RJ-45 connectors onto Cat5. It is also fairly trivial to install F, RCA, or BNC connectors onto RG-6 coax using a compression tool. And by using generic, commoditized cabling and connectors instead of RapidRun, material expenses drop by an order of magnitude. Labor does goes up a bit with generic cabling, but due to terminations more so than multiple parallel runs (which can usually all be pulled at the same time). And the end result is a better-performing, better-looking, more flexible solution which, I dare say, costs less.
In conclusion: If you still think you're not a complete fuckhead for suggesting RapidRun, then let's just forget all about new-fangled cabling for a second. Imagine you're building a new house. And imagine that your plumber is using flexible pipes (like PEX, say). Imagine that these pipes only come in even increments of 25 feet, and that the length cannot be modified. And that, somewhere in your basement, there's a particularly frightening corner where all the extra length of plumbing lives, coiled up with zip-ties. And that every now and then, it drips a little bit, but you're not really sure where or why...
Now imagine that you paid extra for this.
Still not convinced?
Imagine that your electrician did the same thing instead of pulling Romex or BX and cutting to proper length, leaving huge loops of high-voltage cabling in various places. Imagine that the HVAC installer would use pre-terminated flexible duct to save time, and just leave the excess hang around sucking up furnace efficiency.
All of these situations are, of course, insane, unacceptable, and unrealistic. So why should anyone accept such a lousy and lazy installation technique when it comes to networking and AV cabling?
RapidRun is a cabling system designed to primarily to cost extra. For the applications I listed, it sucks ass, adding expense and mess (cables are no longer neatly cut to length at a patch panel, but instead must have coiled slack hidden somewhere, plus I get to pay a flunky and his marketing department to do the terminations for me instead of just doing it myself).
It looks marginally useful for running VGA signals through conduit, but that's literally all it's good for. And since I'm all about NOT USING FUCKING CONDUIT, then I guess that wouldn't apply to me, either.
It is plain to me that you are unfamiliar with both the problems and the solutions. Naff off.
No, sir. Nobody would ever suggest that you replace your fleet of $1.5k bar code readers just because someone has finally found WEP to be trivially easy to break. It's your network; open it to the world at your own peril.
Instead, I offer this suggestion: Stop using the old scanners, and go back to whatever system you were using before you decided that wireless bar code readers were Teh Way to Maximum Synergistic Productivity through Leveraged Asset Management and Total Quality Control. Use that old system for a few weeks.
After that, reevaluate whether the additional $1.6k for WPA-supporting scanners is in order. If it's still too expensive, you don't need it.
Having rewired my share of ancient wood frame American homes, I'd like to assert that there is no need: It is generally quite possible, and often rather easy, to run all manner of cabling inside of the walls of an existing home without using any conduit at all.
Oh, sure - it's convenient to have thoughtfully-placed, vacant, large-diameter conduit running all over the place like some byzantine aqueduct, but it's also terrifyingly expensive to install.
And since it's not needed, most folks just don't do it. Feel free to build your own house however you see fit, but mine will have dual RG-6 coax and three Cat5e (or maybe Cat6) to each room, and maybe 70V speaker lines to some common areas, all home-run to patch panels as appropriate, and none of it will be in conduit unless required by local code.
This cabling topology will survive just fine until the next infrastructure shift happens, which doesn't appear to be any time soon. And when it does happen, it'll be easy (trivial, in most sensibly-designed structures) to add whatever is needed.
You somehow managed to completely miss my entire fucking point, which had nothing at all to do with NTP. But this is Slashdot, so I guess I should expect that.
Here is my original point again, but perhaps better-formatted for the target audience:
1. TiVo connects to satellite, downloads hundreds of gigabytes of data ("video") from satellite. 2. TiVo cannot download system updates from satellite. 3. ??? 4. WTF!!!
if that's the case, then those high-performance compounds are really not very high-performing in that application, are they?
One thing I've wondered about is this: So, you've spread what appears to be a thin, even layer of goop across the top side of your CPU. You then place the heatsink on top of it, clamp it with a couple of pounds of spring tension, and call it done.
But it seems obvious, implicit even, that the goop layer cannot possibly be flat. And therefore there must be a possibility of air pockets being trapped wherever a valley is formed in this goop. Air pockets which cannot be removed with the slight 1 or 2 PSI of installed spring pressure.
Since the whole fucking point was to eliminate air from the thermal interface, this seems to be the wrong way to go about it. The air must go either go somewhere else, or remain where it is -- it can't just disappear. And with inertia being how it is and all, and the relatively weak mechanical force involved, my money says it stays right where it is, insulating the CPU from its heatsink.
So I've always used the "Hershey" method, as above. In addition to working quite expediently, it eliminates air, requires less material ("goop"), while also producing zero waste. Even with "high performance thermal pastes" like Arctic Silver, which seem to work just fine using this method with a very minute amount of goop.
Such a silly song, much is lost in the translation. Like all non-native languages, it takes a little interpretation on the part of the reader/listener -- there's a whole fuckton of German phrases which just don't work in English. And it's not their best work, to be sure, but Benzin is still an incredibly energetic and powerful song, able to cure the worst of moods with its music alone.
Like most great creations, Rammstein's best work is about drugs, death, joy, confusion, power, discovery, and/or fucking. And it's not always silly, but often quite serious, even after being translated. Oftentimes, their music is downright ugly. Sometimes, it helps to know that things could always have been worse.
Courtesy of herzeleid.com:
What does a man do what does a man do who can't tell the difference between human and animal what
He will go to his daughter she is beautiful and young in years and then, like a dog, he will mate with his own flesh and blood
What do you do What do you feel What are you but an animal
What does the woman do what does the woman do who can't tell the difference between animal and man
She dips the quill in his blood and write herself a letter lifeless lines to her childhood when her father slept by her
What do you do What do you feel What are you but an animal Rammstein, Tier
You've explained the problem so well that it's clear from your writings that there's nothing for this man to do but to keep rebooting his gear, over and over again.
Just last week, at a local department store, I saw a pallet of 19- or 20-inch televisions for sale in one of the main isles, which isn't at all unusual.
And it was a lousy set, by all appearances. But it did have a built-in ATSC tuner, which would let it watch HD shows over-the-air (at lower resolution, but so what).
But that didn't surprise me much, either.
What surprised me was that the whole kit was less than $100. If that is not an affordable HD-receiving set, then I do not know what is.
It seems absurd that a system as capacious as DirecTV, in combination with a system as robust and uniform as TiVo (which is just a strikingly general-purpose Linux install, after all), is incapable of having something line time zone information pushed over-the-air to the boxes.
However absurd it is, it does seem to be true. My faith in humanity has dropped another notch.
I recently completed the installation of a distributed antenna system in a new hospital building. 7 floors, 300 feet by 150 feet.
It works well. There is now excellent coverage throughout for cellular phones (specifically, 800MHz cellular A and B for Alltel and Verizon). There is also a separate, parallel system installed for the local public safety agencies 2-way radios, which really was the main point of the project. Adding more cellular carriers would be reasonably straight-forward at this point, now that the cabling and antennas are installed.
There's 4 cellular and 2 VHF antennas on each floor, with an additional smattering of each for the stairwells. These are all fed by 1/2" air-core plenum-rated coax, which itself is holy-fuck expensive, difficult to handle in a hospital environment without damaging it or yourself (400lb reels), and very tedious to install.
The installation was non-trivial, required several man-months of labor, and was hugely costly and difficult at all stages.
Does any of that sound familiar? It should. It's probably something very similar to what your NEC vendor was suggesting before it turned expensive.
No matter what you do, you're going to end up needing lots of antennas/transceivers scattered all over. And it's going to to be costly.
Think about it: A cell phone is just a radio. A NEC Dterm PSII system is just a radio. A radio that size which fits within FCC limits, and has battery life measured in hours instead of minutes, will have shit for output power. A low-powered radio will not penetrate concrete and steel very well. Using a cellular repeater system takes all of these propagation problems and antenna expenses, and adds to them the indignity of dropped calls, monthly bills, and additional reliance on outside services.
Re-evaluate your goals. You were probably already on the right by going with in-house system, though if your vendor is clueless and needs firing, you might look at using Spectralink as an alternative.
Re:throwing up my hands
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I can set the volume using alsa-mixer, sure, but that's not the point: I can also route air traffic, compute particle physics, and map oil fields using alsa-mixer on an emu10k1. It's beyond complicated with this chipset, to the point that it borders on pedantically stupid.
Which is why I'd like to use the volume control on the Ubuntu desktop or taskbar or whatever-it-is. I think it may have worked at one point, but updates to something-or-other broke it. My situation is almost certainly complicated somewhat by the fact that I'm using the card's digital output for all audio, but that doesn't seem to present any particular complication to Certain Other operating systems.
But it doesn't matter, really. I gave up on it long ago. I've lost enough hours to making desktop Linux work completely, only to have largely unwanted software updates hose up the whole thing.
I don't even bother trying to run Linux on my laptop bare-metal anymore (the first time I closed the lid and the backlight stupidly stayed on, I could see where things were headed) though I do have a pretty functional install of Ubuntu working on VMWare under Vista.
And I'm not about to abandon my Gentoo mail and off-site backup servers for anything. But desktop Linux pretty much blows, these days.
I had a more consistant Linux desktop with Slackware and FVWM2, over a decade ago. One used to configure things, and they stayed configured: I used to tell people that the coolest part about Linux was that sometimes it was hard to make something work, but once you finally figured it out it would stay working indefinately.
But that's not the case anymore. It shames me to say that Windows is less of a moving target than a typical Linux desktop.
[Unfortunately, the tickling I've had to due hasn't had anything to do with resolutions, but usually revolved around kernel module issues. So my experience with that problem won't help you much. You might look into setting a modeline in xorg.conf for 1280x1024 manually, and fine-tune it using something like xvidtune, and carefully increasing your range of allowed refresh timings for your monitor if X keeps being persistantly stupid.]
Again: Everyone, look at this. This conversation should not be happening, but it is happening.
A trap, indeed, but it's not called Vista.
Re:throwing up my hands
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
802.11: Certain Linux software (which often likes to bind to specific interfaces and addresses) gets distraught when it doesn't have an IP address, or that address changes after the software is loaded. None of the X-oriented 802.11 configuration methods help the machine be network-connected at boot time. Windows, if it does suffer such a dependancy problem, at least has not bitten me yet because of it. Linux has.
Volume controls: No, not at all like the hardware volume control on your laptop, which will work bloody anywhere. I mean just what I said: My SB Live does not have a functional volume control under Ubuntu. Click speaker icon. Adjust slider. Nothing changes. (Alternatively, I too can turn my brain off and discombobulate your words so that I can create a meaningless, out-of-context response: The volume up/down buttons on my IBM RapidAccess II keyboard don't adjust the volume on my SB Live equipped Ubuntu box, either.)
Bluetooth: Really?
Video: Yep. But nvidia-legacy is the driver I need for my GeForce 2. And Ubuntu breaks it at every opportunity.
Ho-hum.
Re:throwing up my hands
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes.
Except, certain things in Vista still work better than under (say) Ubuntu, or a lot of other Linux distributions.
Like, say, 802.11 configuration.
Or perhaps, volume controls. I've given up on getting a proper working fucking volume control on my SB Live-equipped Ubuntu desktop machine.
Or Bluetooth. Such pain and trauma to configure a Bluetooth mouse with Linux, but it was straight-forward with Vista.
Or video drivers. Neither Vista nor XP has ever trashed my video drivers with an automatic update. Meanwhile, every time Ubuntu switches to a new nvidia-legacy driver, my desktop machine needs to be tickled again before X will work. (I know - I should just stick with the free nv driver, since there's no fucking games for Linux to make 3D worth caring about, anyway. But I like xscreensaver's GL hacks.)
Vista's not perfect, though. It killed support for DirectSound3D and EAX, making games less enjoyable to play (for me, anyway). However, EAX never worked at all in Linux, so I guess I don't feel "trapped" anymore than I do with Linux.
Toshiba doesn't make content aka movies. It is content owners who need to give permission for their copyrighted, AACS-encumbered content to be decoded.
I don't like taxes. It's rigged, man. I tell ya. It costs me thousands, every year. And what do I get out of it? I get my Homeland Security money wasted removing Mooninites from Boston roadways, and a pointless war.
I think I just won't pay them anymore.
You cool with that? I sure am.
You know what else? I'm sick of people walking down my sidewalk. They've got no respect, and they might even be trying to steal from me. I pay a lot of money to maintain that sidewalk. I think I'll start ID'ing everyone who dares tread on my sidewalk, just in case they might be trying to rob me. And if anyone refuses, I'll deny them the use of it, forever! It's my Duty to defend myself and my property from these hooligans and vandals! Especially those wearing blue jeans. Did you know that almost all thieves wear blue jeans? The fuckers are everywhere, I tell ya!
And I sure could use an office for my home business, but signing a year-long lease could easily bankrupt me! I think I'll just squat, instead. It's so much easier, and the whole idea of land ownership is just rigged anyhow.
Once you persuade me of both your need to be a small shopkeeper, and then the need to accept credit cards, I'll begin listening to your arguments. Until then, you're just a whiny prick who thinks he doesn't need to follow the rules. And of course they're rigged! Nonetheless, you agreed in advance to follow them. But you refuse, because you think you need the extra security, and don't think you need the same fucking risk exposure as your peers. Because you are, of course, better than them, aren't you? More cunning. More stick-it-to-the-man. Your bullshit detector is a finely tuned work of art, not to be fucked with. And you are so righteous in your God-given entitlement to accept credit card payments and illicitly demand superflous identification!! Amen, brother! Down with the jeans-wearing thugs!
Nonetheless, I feel bad for you, but creatively interpreting contracts (particularly of the banking sort) is wrong and bluntly illegal. If you didn't like it, you shouldn't have signed it. If the deal is bad, or becomes that way, then don't be a part of it. That's your only honest recourse: To tell Visa Mastercard to go fuck themselves, and stop accepting their cards. Not to bend the agreed-upon rules, individually as you see fit, while depriving me (the cardholder and your customer) of my own rights under that same set of rules.
It is free because it costs nothing to use a disk which would otherwise be idle.
It is free because the CPU time needed to perform these actions is meaningless on a modern machine, and occurs when the CPU would otherwise be idle.
It is free because of the massive trend toward dedicated point-to-point connections like SATA, which alleviate concerns of bus contention.
In short, it is free because it lacks identifiable cost.
And the benefits are profound. Caching has done more to accelerate the modern computing experience than anything else, and the notion of caching things from disk in advance of needing them is the obvious extension of that.
(When I ran a BBS on a 10MHz XT, 16 years ago, I had a very carefully organized RAM disk on an 8-bit ISA card. It was populated at every boot to contain all of the most-used external program executables and certain key data sets which a BBS user would be likely to need during their call. Consequently, the machine -usually- felt more like a zippy 386 than a lowly XT, and the whole BBS was far more responsive than most. It was not free, because it required specialized hardware and special practices. Vista accomplishes the same goal without special hardware, and without intervention on my part: Free.)
Slashdot Mirror
And you could presumably trick users w/o regard to the OS they use. But it's far more likely that the windows user is logged in with full Admin privileges.
But it doesn't matter.
The trojan/worm need not be an administrator to trash a user's computer, even with Linux. Let's use Ubuntu as an example. It can still send mail and propagate just fine as a regular user. It can also trash that user's documents and files (which are likely to be the only important data on the machine). It can use a crontab entry to start a daemon on a high-numbered port, which will run without user interaction, or without them even being logged in. That daemon won't be root, but it will still be capable of being a very proficient zombie.
After that, for good measure, it can just run gksudo and simply ask the user for root permission. Ubuntu users are absolutely content to enter their own password into gksudo whenever prompted, especially when performing updates and patches (as this claims to be). So, the trojan will readily then gain root and be free to run completely amock. Trashing or rooting the OS is the obvious next step, but it's probably not even needed after all of the damage and infiltration already accomplished as a regular user.
Seriously - just because it's not Windows does not mean that it's secure. As long as people are able to run arbitrary programs on their own computers, these types of things will continue to be a problem...no matter what kind of computer it is, and no matter if it has root/administrator priveledges or not.
If there is enough room for you to be passed on the right, you aren't passing anyone on the right.
Thank you.
For the sake of fuck: It's "God," or perhaps "$deity," but never G*d.
Thank you.
I gave up on honor years ago.
It's not a knee-jerk response, it's just the only valid thing I could come up with as a retort for the suggestion of such an atrociously bad wiring system.
It is not suitable for nice-and-neat installations, as the cables are all PRE TERMINATED AND OF FIXED LENGTH. Proper, neat-and-tidy cabling installations do NOT involve bundles of coiled slack at ALL. But RapidRun, with its pre-terminated cables, requires it. So the cables will (hopefully!) all be ordered at least dozen feet too long, and all that extra wire will need to go somewhere, and that somewhere will be a messy clusterfuck. (In a conventional patch panel installation, cable lengths are customized and precise, cut-to-fit on a wire-by-wire basis, and can be the antithesis of a clusterfuck.)
It is this pre-terminated nature which also makes it impossible to use with patch panels. Sure, one could always cut the connectors off and fuck around with attaching their cabling to patch panels, but then one could always avoid the product to begin with. I mean: It's those connectors which solely differentiate RapidRun as a unique product. To remove them would be to piss even more money into the wind and ruin the singular advantage that the product claims to offer.
Furthermore, those connectors are not impedance-patched, and there are two of them per run. This makes for measurably lousy performance compared proper connectors designed for the specific task at hand.
I said it before, here it is again: It looks like a decent system for pulling VGA cables through conduit, but that's about it.
Fact is, it's rather easy to install RJ-45 connectors onto Cat5. It is also fairly trivial to install F, RCA, or BNC connectors onto RG-6 coax using a compression tool. And by using generic, commoditized cabling and connectors instead of RapidRun, material expenses drop by an order of magnitude. Labor does goes up a bit with generic cabling, but due to terminations more so than multiple parallel runs (which can usually all be pulled at the same time). And the end result is a better-performing, better-looking, more flexible solution which, I dare say, costs less.
In conclusion: If you still think you're not a complete fuckhead for suggesting RapidRun, then let's just forget all about new-fangled cabling for a second. Imagine you're building a new house. And imagine that your plumber is using flexible pipes (like PEX, say). Imagine that these pipes only come in even increments of 25 feet, and that the length cannot be modified. And that, somewhere in your basement, there's a particularly frightening corner where all the extra length of plumbing lives, coiled up with zip-ties. And that every now and then, it drips a little bit, but you're not really sure where or why...
Now imagine that you paid extra for this.
Still not convinced?
Imagine that your electrician did the same thing instead of pulling Romex or BX and cutting to proper length, leaving huge loops of high-voltage cabling in various places. Imagine that the HVAC installer would use pre-terminated flexible duct to save time, and just leave the excess hang around sucking up furnace efficiency.
All of these situations are, of course, insane, unacceptable, and unrealistic. So why should anyone accept such a lousy and lazy installation technique when it comes to networking and AV cabling?
No.
RapidRun is a cabling system designed to primarily to cost extra. For the applications I listed, it sucks ass, adding expense and mess (cables are no longer neatly cut to length at a patch panel, but instead must have coiled slack hidden somewhere, plus I get to pay a flunky and his marketing department to do the terminations for me instead of just doing it myself).
It looks marginally useful for running VGA signals through conduit, but that's literally all it's good for. And since I'm all about NOT USING FUCKING CONDUIT, then I guess that wouldn't apply to me, either.
It is plain to me that you are unfamiliar with both the problems and the solutions. Naff off.
No, sir. Nobody would ever suggest that you replace your fleet of $1.5k bar code readers just because someone has finally found WEP to be trivially easy to break. It's your network; open it to the world at your own peril.
Instead, I offer this suggestion: Stop using the old scanners, and go back to whatever system you were using before you decided that wireless bar code readers were Teh Way to Maximum Synergistic Productivity through Leveraged Asset Management and Total Quality Control. Use that old system for a few weeks.
After that, reevaluate whether the additional $1.6k for WPA-supporting scanners is in order. If it's still too expensive, you don't need it.
Hope this helps...
Having rewired my share of ancient wood frame American homes, I'd like to assert that there is no need: It is generally quite possible, and often rather easy, to run all manner of cabling inside of the walls of an existing home without using any conduit at all.
Oh, sure - it's convenient to have thoughtfully-placed, vacant, large-diameter conduit running all over the place like some byzantine aqueduct, but it's also terrifyingly expensive to install.
And since it's not needed, most folks just don't do it. Feel free to build your own house however you see fit, but mine will have dual RG-6 coax and three Cat5e (or maybe Cat6) to each room, and maybe 70V speaker lines to some common areas, all home-run to patch panels as appropriate, and none of it will be in conduit unless required by local code.
This cabling topology will survive just fine until the next infrastructure shift happens, which doesn't appear to be any time soon. And when it does happen, it'll be easy (trivial, in most sensibly-designed structures) to add whatever is needed.
You somehow managed to completely miss my entire fucking point, which had nothing at all to do with NTP. But this is Slashdot, so I guess I should expect that.
Here is my original point again, but perhaps better-formatted for the target audience:
1. TiVo connects to satellite, downloads hundreds of gigabytes of data ("video") from satellite.
2. TiVo cannot download system updates from satellite.
3. ???
4. WTF!!!
HTH.
Life or death?
There's a chance that someone will DIE if you miss a call?
And you're relying on a fucking cell phone to get that call?
Dude: Either stop exaggerating, or do yourself or that nearly-dead someone-else a huge favor, and start camping next to a real, known landline phone.
Please, you irrational sensationalist fuck. One or the other.
Thank you.
Just because it's more expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone, does not implicitly make it better.
(And yes, I love my BMW. 77 degrees in Ohio today! Time to get the snow tires off of it, I guess!)
if that's the case, then those high-performance compounds are really not very high-performing in that application, are they?
One thing I've wondered about is this: So, you've spread what appears to be a thin, even layer of goop across the top side of your CPU. You then place the heatsink on top of it, clamp it with a couple of pounds of spring tension, and call it done.
But it seems obvious, implicit even, that the goop layer cannot possibly be flat. And therefore there must be a possibility of air pockets being trapped wherever a valley is formed in this goop. Air pockets which cannot be removed with the slight 1 or 2 PSI of installed spring pressure.
Since the whole fucking point was to eliminate air from the thermal interface, this seems to be the wrong way to go about it. The air must go either go somewhere else, or remain where it is -- it can't just disappear. And with inertia being how it is and all, and the relatively weak mechanical force involved, my money says it stays right where it is, insulating the CPU from its heatsink.
So I've always used the "Hershey" method, as above. In addition to working quite expediently, it eliminates air, requires less material ("goop"), while also producing zero waste. Even with "high performance thermal pastes" like Arctic Silver, which seem to work just fine using this method with a very minute amount of goop.
YMMV.
Like most great creations, Rammstein's best work is about drugs, death, joy, confusion, power, discovery, and/or fucking.
And it's not always silly, but often quite serious, even after being translated. Oftentimes, their music is downright ugly. Sometimes, it helps to know that things could always have been worse.
Courtesy of herzeleid.com: What does a man do
what does a man do
who can't tell the difference
between human and animal
what
He will go to his daughter
she is beautiful and young in years
and then, like a dog, he will
mate with his own flesh and blood
What do you do
What do you feel
What are you
but an
animal
What does the woman do
what does the woman do
who can't tell the difference
between animal and man
She dips the quill in his blood
and write herself a letter
lifeless lines to her childhood
when her father slept by her
What do you do
What do you feel
What are you
but an animal Rammstein, Tier
Thank you.
You've explained the problem so well that it's clear from your writings that there's nothing for this man to do but to keep rebooting his gear, over and over again.
Keep up the good work!
Er. Uh.
Just last week, at a local department store, I saw a pallet of 19- or 20-inch televisions for sale in one of the main isles, which isn't at all unusual.
And it was a lousy set, by all appearances. But it did have a built-in ATSC tuner, which would let it watch HD shows over-the-air (at lower resolution, but so what).
But that didn't surprise me much, either.
What surprised me was that the whole kit was less than $100. If that is not an affordable HD-receiving set, then I do not know what is.
It seems absurd that a system as capacious as DirecTV, in combination with a system as robust and uniform as TiVo (which is just a strikingly general-purpose Linux install, after all), is incapable of having something line time zone information pushed over-the-air to the boxes.
However absurd it is, it does seem to be true. My faith in humanity has dropped another notch.
Thanks, fuckers.
Hello. I read your comment.
Twice.
I still don't get your point.
Are you trying to add to the conversation in some fashion?
If so, please clarify.
Thanks!
Also, too: Tin whiskers, which are a far scarier problem with lead-free solders.
I recently completed the installation of a distributed antenna system in a new hospital building. 7 floors, 300 feet by 150 feet.
It works well. There is now excellent coverage throughout for cellular phones (specifically, 800MHz cellular A and B for Alltel and Verizon). There is also a separate, parallel system installed for the local public safety agencies 2-way radios, which really was the main point of the project. Adding more cellular carriers would be reasonably straight-forward at this point, now that the cabling and antennas are installed.
There's 4 cellular and 2 VHF antennas on each floor, with an additional smattering of each for the stairwells. These are all fed by 1/2" air-core plenum-rated coax, which itself is holy-fuck expensive, difficult to handle in a hospital environment without damaging it or yourself (400lb reels), and very tedious to install.
The installation was non-trivial, required several man-months of labor, and was hugely costly and difficult at all stages.
Does any of that sound familiar? It should. It's probably something very similar to what your NEC vendor was suggesting before it turned expensive.
No matter what you do, you're going to end up needing lots of antennas/transceivers scattered all over. And it's going to to be costly.
Think about it: A cell phone is just a radio. A NEC Dterm PSII system is just a radio. A radio that size which fits within FCC limits, and has battery life measured in hours instead of minutes, will have shit for output power. A low-powered radio will not penetrate concrete and steel very well. Using a cellular repeater system takes all of these propagation problems and antenna expenses, and adds to them the indignity of dropped calls, monthly bills, and additional reliance on outside services.
Re-evaluate your goals. You were probably already on the right by going with in-house system, though if your vendor is clueless and needs firing, you might look at using Spectralink as an alternative.
I can set the volume using alsa-mixer, sure, but that's not the point: I can also route air traffic, compute particle physics, and map oil fields using alsa-mixer on an emu10k1. It's beyond complicated with this chipset, to the point that it borders on pedantically stupid.
Which is why I'd like to use the volume control on the Ubuntu desktop or taskbar or whatever-it-is. I think it may have worked at one point, but updates to something-or-other broke it. My situation is almost certainly complicated somewhat by the fact that I'm using the card's digital output for all audio, but that doesn't seem to present any particular complication to Certain Other operating systems.
But it doesn't matter, really. I gave up on it long ago. I've lost enough hours to making desktop Linux work completely, only to have largely unwanted software updates hose up the whole thing.
I don't even bother trying to run Linux on my laptop bare-metal anymore (the first time I closed the lid and the backlight stupidly stayed on, I could see where things were headed) though I do have a pretty functional install of Ubuntu working on VMWare under Vista.
And I'm not about to abandon my Gentoo mail and off-site backup servers for anything. But desktop Linux pretty much blows, these days.
I had a more consistant Linux desktop with Slackware and FVWM2, over a decade ago. One used to configure things, and they stayed configured: I used to tell people that the coolest part about Linux was that sometimes it was hard to make something work, but once you finally figured it out it would stay working indefinately.
But that's not the case anymore. It shames me to say that Windows is less of a moving target than a typical Linux desktop.
And all I wanted was a volume control.
See? See everyone?
This is what I'm talking about.
[Unfortunately, the tickling I've had to due hasn't had anything to do with resolutions, but usually revolved around kernel module issues. So my experience with that problem won't help you much. You might look into setting a modeline in xorg.conf for 1280x1024 manually, and fine-tune it using something like xvidtune, and carefully increasing your range of allowed refresh timings for your monitor if X keeps being persistantly stupid.]
Again: Everyone, look at this. This conversation should not be happening, but it is happening.
A trap, indeed, but it's not called Vista.
802.11: Certain Linux software (which often likes to bind to specific interfaces and addresses) gets distraught when it doesn't have an IP address, or that address changes after the software is loaded. None of the X-oriented 802.11 configuration methods help the machine be network-connected at boot time. Windows, if it does suffer such a dependancy problem, at least has not bitten me yet because of it. Linux has.
Volume controls: No, not at all like the hardware volume control on your laptop, which will work bloody anywhere. I mean just what I said: My SB Live does not have a functional volume control under Ubuntu. Click speaker icon. Adjust slider. Nothing changes. (Alternatively, I too can turn my brain off and discombobulate your words so that I can create a meaningless, out-of-context response: The volume up/down buttons on my IBM RapidAccess II keyboard don't adjust the volume on my SB Live equipped Ubuntu box, either.)
Bluetooth: Really?
Video: Yep. But nvidia-legacy is the driver I need for my GeForce 2. And Ubuntu breaks it at every opportunity.
Ho-hum.
Yes.
Except, certain things in Vista still work better than under (say) Ubuntu, or a lot of other Linux distributions.
Like, say, 802.11 configuration.
Or perhaps, volume controls. I've given up on getting a proper working fucking volume control on my SB Live-equipped Ubuntu desktop machine.
Or Bluetooth. Such pain and trauma to configure a Bluetooth mouse with Linux, but it was straight-forward with Vista.
Or video drivers. Neither Vista nor XP has ever trashed my video drivers with an automatic update. Meanwhile, every time Ubuntu switches to a new nvidia-legacy driver, my desktop machine needs to be tickled again before X will work. (I know - I should just stick with the free nv driver, since there's no fucking games for Linux to make 3D worth caring about, anyway. But I like xscreensaver's GL hacks.)
Vista's not perfect, though. It killed support for DirectSound3D and EAX, making games less enjoyable to play (for me, anyway). However, EAX never worked at all in Linux, so I guess I don't feel "trapped" anymore than I do with Linux.
Umm. Er. But.
Toshiba doesn't make content aka movies. It is content owners who need to give permission for their copyrighted, AACS-encumbered content to be decoded.
Toshiba already has such permission.
You know what?
I don't like taxes. It's rigged, man. I tell ya. It costs me thousands, every year. And what do I get out of it? I get my Homeland Security money wasted removing Mooninites from Boston roadways, and a pointless war.
I think I just won't pay them anymore.
You cool with that? I sure am.
You know what else? I'm sick of people walking down my sidewalk. They've got no respect, and they might even be trying to steal from me. I pay a lot of money to maintain that sidewalk. I think I'll start ID'ing everyone who dares tread on my sidewalk, just in case they might be trying to rob me. And if anyone refuses, I'll deny them the use of it, forever! It's my Duty to defend myself and my property from these hooligans and vandals! Especially those wearing blue jeans. Did you know that almost all thieves wear blue jeans? The fuckers are everywhere, I tell ya!
And I sure could use an office for my home business, but signing a year-long lease could easily bankrupt me! I think I'll just squat, instead. It's so much easier, and the whole idea of land ownership is just rigged anyhow.
Once you persuade me of both your need to be a small shopkeeper, and then the need to accept credit cards, I'll begin listening to your arguments. Until then, you're just a whiny prick who thinks he doesn't need to follow the rules. And of course they're rigged! Nonetheless, you agreed in advance to follow them. But you refuse, because you think you need the extra security, and don't think you need the same fucking risk exposure as your peers. Because you are, of course, better than them, aren't you? More cunning. More stick-it-to-the-man. Your bullshit detector is a finely tuned work of art, not to be fucked with. And you are so righteous in your God-given entitlement to accept credit card payments and illicitly demand superflous identification!! Amen, brother! Down with the jeans-wearing thugs!
Nonetheless, I feel bad for you, but creatively interpreting contracts (particularly of the banking sort) is wrong and bluntly illegal. If you didn't like it, you shouldn't have signed it. If the deal is bad, or becomes that way, then don't be a part of it. That's your only honest recourse: To tell Visa Mastercard to go fuck themselves, and stop accepting their cards. Not to bend the agreed-upon rules, individually as you see fit, while depriving me (the cardholder and your customer) of my own rights under that same set of rules.
It is free because it costs nothing to use a disk which would otherwise be idle.
It is free because the CPU time needed to perform these actions is meaningless on a modern machine, and occurs when the CPU would otherwise be idle.
It is free because of the massive trend toward dedicated point-to-point connections like SATA, which alleviate concerns of bus contention.
In short, it is free because it lacks identifiable cost.
And the benefits are profound. Caching has done more to accelerate the modern computing experience than anything else, and the notion of caching things from disk in advance of needing them is the obvious extension of that.
(When I ran a BBS on a 10MHz XT, 16 years ago, I had a very carefully organized RAM disk on an 8-bit ISA card. It was populated at every boot to contain all of the most-used external program executables and certain key data sets which a BBS user would be likely to need during their call. Consequently, the machine -usually- felt more like a zippy 386 than a lowly XT, and the whole BBS was far more responsive than most. It was not free, because it required specialized hardware and special practices. Vista accomplishes the same goal without special hardware, and without intervention on my part: Free.)