I drive a '98 Boxster. Not the fastest car in the universe, but still pretty quick, and it handles like a mid-engine dream.
A while ago, a guy in a Miata pulls up to me at a stop light. Revs his engine. Looks over and gives the old belligerent thrust of the chin. He means to race. I figure, what the hell? Why not? I rev back.
Light changes, and there's a lot of noise. Seconds later, I see his brake lights fading over the horizon.
I meet him at the next light. "Please tell me that's not stock!" I beg him. He just laughs, and drives off.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate illegal speed contests. This was (ahem) on a private road, which is not connected to public motorways.
I've hung around Porsche and Ferrari owners who talk purely about hp. Some of them just like the image, and know nothing about performance. You could probably get rich just by challenging Ferrari owners to races if you drive an NSX.
And it's not confined to sports-car people. I once had a guy challenge me to a quarter mile -- I was in a stripped, 1000lb, flat-four 95hp Porsche/VW 914, and he was in a two and a half ton, V-8 250+hp Chevy Suburban. He was convinced that the extra horsepower would dominate. Let's see... roughly five times the weight, twice the drag, and maybe three times the horsepower. Even ignoring the gearing (which was heavily in my favor), it looks stupid.
Not surprisingly, I smoked him. He was foolish enough to want to race for money -- being a charitable sort, I offered him a test run for free. He just couldn't believe it. Hell, my whole engine probably had the displacement of two of his cylinders. How could this be possible? Was I cheating? Did I use nitrous? I had to pop the engine compartment and show him that there was nothing unusual (not that he would have recognized it if it had been there).
Then, he offered the same race, except he'd drive his buddy's '69 GTO. I politely declined. I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy.
"Horsepower? What difference does that make? I think I'll buy this Geo Metro over here instead of that Corvette over there."
But the interesting thing is, most people think that "horsepower" and "torque" are the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people talk about horsepower as being the same as speed off the line.
It comes down to the fact that metrics are used to sell, even when they're not a "pure" representation of what the buyer is looking for. Just like you can have gearing on a car that's contrary to the performance patterns you're looking for, you can have a high GHz CPU with a lousy memory or I/O bandwidth. The metric looks good, but the product may not be. Otherwise all the Corvette drivers would be buying 500 horsepower tilling tractors, since they've got the horsepower per dollar advantage.
People buy cars and computers for what they think they'll use them for. Someone looking for simple transportation doesn't care about horsepower. Someone looking to impress their friends will get a high horsepower car. Someone who wants performance will look into torque curves , unsprung weight, gear ratios, and, yes, horsepower.
Similarly, people buying a computer so they can "have that internet thing" shouldn't really care much about CPU speed. Developers might care more about performance, and check disk size, memory, etc. Gamers will want to know that they can tweak CPU Input voltage, and will want to know how many cycles they lose for a secondary cache miss, etc.
You know, that shirt/sticker always has bothered me.
The problem with it is that "read" is both a present and past tense -- so a perfectly straightforward interpretation is simply that "I have received and read the email you sent me." Not scary at all.
What they really mean is "I can snoop your email," although that's also an admittedly bad formulation.
It's the unfortunate habit that most people have of shouting into their cell phones.
Some people talk loudly when sitting around with their friends. Some people don't. I don't know more than one or two (hearing-impaired) people who *always* shout.
Some cell phone users feel the need to shout into their phones. I know that I don't. You probably don't either. But you've doubtless experienced someone bellowing "WHAT? HONEY, DO WE NEED CHEESE?" into a cell phone at the market.
Sometimes it's because the just don't realize that the phone can pick up a normal voice. More often, they want you to hear something about their conversation.
It's annoying and unnecessary.
The neologism for being assaulted with this kind of noise is "eaveslammed." Sample usage: I was at the store, and this guy eaveslammed me with his conversation about condom brands.
Think about it. QA on Linux has the advantage that the first "users" of any new module/driver/system are actually developers and other savvy users. Many bugs get worked out relatively early -- certainly before they get rolled into a stable distribution.
The Windows OS has to support a nearly infinite variety of hardware, and. It doesn't have the same first-tier of support. Sure, it has beta testers, but, by and large, they aren't developers. They certainly can't tweak the source.
But even then, security is not easy. Think about Open BSD. This OS's community prides itself on its approach security, and they do a very good job. But occasionally, things sneak by (i.e., the SSH remote exploit of a year ago).
So it's nice idea to just do things right the first time. But you can't just make the decision "hey, from now on we're gonna do things right" and have the problem miraculously solved...
Just think how awful it will be for future generations.
Today, when someone dies, their heirs have to go through their belongings and (potentially) writings/documents/photos to see what's worth keeping.
When my gandparents went, it took nearly a year to go through the book collections, notes, etc.
If I were splattered by a bus on my way home this evening, my relatives would have to go through a collection of the same size (books, notebooks, photos), plus approximately 40 GB of data -- much of it redundant, much of it useless, some of it encrypted, etc, but some of it probably worth something to someone. What a nightmarish task!
And it's only going to get worse!
I anticipate a lot will simply fall through the cracks and vanish.
I do digital recording on my homebrew security system. On the non-audio cams, recording at 320x240 resolution with a decent quality factor for the mpeg, and it takes about 256MB/hr.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'd want to record my life in much better detail than a piddly 320x240, and I'd want good, quality stereo audio. (Heck, I'd probably want Smell-o-vision[tm], too).
So I think it's gonna be at least twice that bandwidth.
OK, I guess I've just proven to myself that your *real* point is correct: it ain't that far away.
Yeah, I remember upgrading from 4k to 16k (TRS-80), and thinking "Damn! It's like wide open country out here!"
Then I remember wire-wrapping all those damn 2k x 1 bit chips, until I had a whopping 48k. I never filled all of that up until years later, when I was writing my thesis, and had to break it into several chapters...
Bullets really have nothing to do with it, except in the rare cases where they lodge someplace where they are obstruent. Almost always, the problem comes from the bullets transferring their kinetic energy to tissue and bone.
This could lead to the slowest brute-force attack ever...
FBI: So, is your password "jhT78$^&" ? Rube: No. FBI: He's telling the truth. Damn. So, is your password "jhT78$^*" ? Rube: No. FBI: Damn. He's still telling the truth. So, is your password "jhT78$^(" ? Rube: No. ...
etc.
(Yes, I *know* that's not what the poster suggests, but still...)
Hey, some of us run legit servers on our DSL lines.
That's why we pay for DSL.
Arbitrarily blocking the ports leads to bad things.
Wouldn't it be better to have ISPs scan for open relays, and port filter SMTP for IP addresses failing the test?
Sure, there will be wrinkles for the DHCP crowd (e.g., Cable Modems), but most of them forbid the running of servers in their User Agreements. Oh, it would be good if they enforced those consistently, too. Those old MediaOne agreements that ban "the running of servers" really need to be enforced against the standard Windows servers (NetBIOS/NetBUIE, IIS, etc) as well, not just Apache.
I'll start by saying that I've been using Usenet since before the great hierarchy revision (back when it was net.news).
And I remember the day of the infamous Green Card Lottery usenet spam. This was after Spaf bailed, I believe, but it sure was a rude awakening for me. Had I only known what horrors it predicted for my inbox, I would have quit computers and become a subsistence farmer right then and there;)
But even with the depths it's all sunk to, Usenet (especially via the Deja News / Google Groups interface) is an invaluable tool.
I type in obscure error messages from rare programs, and find that someone else has already solved my problem. When doing development, and seeing strange situations, 80% of the time, Usenet archives will hold an answer, or enough of a clue that I can make the breakthrough.
Yeah, it's got problems. Spammers have polluted some groups to the point of uselessness (I can remember when alt.sex was a discussion group, populated by men and women who were not trying to make money, but were actually talking about sexual matters and their lives). But don't write off usenet yet!
The monks who brew beer might not be the most reliable.
Then there are the scribes who copy the Torah, for example, who have to throw away a whole page of parchment if they make any error whatsoever. Still, it seems like occasional errors have crept in over history.
The people who preserved the Hindu Vedas had to memorize them forwards *and* backwards. It appears that, even during all the time they were in the oral tradition, there was very little (if any) change.
And yeah, it gets expensive for using techniques like this to store binary data.
A recent translation of a 5000 year old cuneiform tablet from Sumer begins:
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. This by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and'top secret'...
Well, yeah, it strikes me as a silly idea. But you've got some facts wrong:
Most bombs work fine in the absence of external oxygen.
Bunker busters are designed to penetrate the rock above bunkers, as well as the bunkers themselves. (most "safety bunkers" are carved out of the bedrock).
Etched stone seems to have a staying power of approximately 10,000 years, even with some outdoor exposure.
Earthenware tablets, made of clay fired at low temperatures (1816F/991C), seem to do nearly as well, while stoneware tablets, made of clay fired at high temperature (2345F/1284C), last about the same as actual stone. Ceramics have relatively high resistance to moisture and thermal variation. Depending on the clay composition and the application of glazes, there is variable resistance to acid. Ceramics do not handle physical shock particularly well.
Glass can last thousands of years, but is vulnerable to shattering or acid.
None of these, however, are earthquake-resistant. Outside of the immediate blast radius, they're good against nukes.
Etching into stainless steel is good, although in the event of a nuclear attack, this would be succeptible to melting (or self-destruction due to induced current) within a certain area. It handles thermal and moisture extremes pretty well, but doesn't handle acids well.
Stamping into gold foil is expensive, but quite durable. It's immune to some of the chemical risks posed by steel, but is more likely to be stolen. It's also not as hard, thus leading to risk of data corruption or loss via impact.
Parchment, preserved lamb or sheep skin, can last a very long time (on the order of 2,000 years) in the right conditions. It does well with exposure to electromagnetic radiation, but deals badly with moisture or excessive dryness, and is highly vulnerable to acid.
Delay-line broadcast (reflecting your data with a laser off of a distant object, and rebroadcasting ad infinitum) is fairly reliable until occlusion of the data path occurs, or the transceiver is smashed, unplugged, EMPed.
You can kinda do the same thing, albeit slower, using something like rdiff-backup, RAID, and a fast network.
I could envision a super-fat pipe being used to mirror a facility to a neighboring (or even geographically-distant) facility along with a system like this.
rdiff-backup saved me when a power supply blew out on a server. Within an hour of the failure, I was back up and running on the backup server. It could have been much faster had I automated the failover...
Slashdot Mirror
I drive a '98 Boxster. Not the fastest car in the universe, but still pretty quick, and it handles like a mid-engine dream.
A while ago, a guy in a Miata pulls up to me at a stop light. Revs his engine. Looks over and gives the old belligerent thrust of the chin. He means to race. I figure, what the hell? Why not? I rev back.
Light changes, and there's a lot of noise. Seconds later, I see his brake lights fading over the horizon.
I meet him at the next light. "Please tell me that's not stock!" I beg him. He just laughs, and drives off.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate illegal speed contests. This was (ahem) on a private road, which is not connected to public motorways.
Yeah, well, maybe I'm just slow and/or humor impaired.
But I didn't find it particularly funny as a double entendre.
For some really good double entendres, do a Google search for "Falstaff"...
I'm not so sure about that regex.
I've hung around Porsche and Ferrari owners who talk purely about hp. Some of them just like the image, and know nothing about performance. You could probably get rich just by challenging Ferrari owners to races if you drive an NSX.
And it's not confined to sports-car people. I once had a guy challenge me to a quarter mile -- I was in a stripped, 1000lb, flat-four 95hp Porsche/VW 914, and he was in a two and a half ton, V-8 250+hp Chevy Suburban. He was convinced that the extra horsepower would dominate. Let's see... roughly five times the weight, twice the drag, and maybe three times the horsepower. Even ignoring the gearing (which was heavily in my favor), it looks stupid.
Not surprisingly, I smoked him. He was foolish enough to want to race for money -- being a charitable sort, I offered him a test run for free. He just couldn't believe it. Hell, my whole engine probably had the displacement of two of his cylinders. How could this be possible? Was I cheating? Did I use nitrous? I had to pop the engine compartment and show him that there was nothing unusual (not that he would have recognized it if it had been there).
Then, he offered the same race, except he'd drive his buddy's '69 GTO. I politely declined. I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy.
Exactly. The metric is not necessarily meaningful.
Otherwise all the sports car folks would be driving big-ass Caterpillar tractors -- those things can have 1200 horsepower or more.
But the interesting thing is, most people think that "horsepower" and "torque" are the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people talk about horsepower as being the same as speed off the line.
It comes down to the fact that metrics are used to sell, even when they're not a "pure" representation of what the buyer is looking for. Just like you can have gearing on a car that's contrary to the performance patterns you're looking for, you can have a high GHz CPU with a lousy memory or I/O bandwidth. The metric looks good, but the product may not be. Otherwise all the Corvette drivers would be buying 500 horsepower tilling tractors, since they've got the horsepower per dollar advantage.
People buy cars and computers for what they think they'll use them for. Someone looking for simple transportation doesn't care about horsepower. Someone looking to impress their friends will get a high horsepower car. Someone who wants performance will look into torque curves , unsprung weight, gear ratios, and, yes, horsepower.
Similarly, people buying a computer so they can "have that internet thing" shouldn't really care much about CPU speed. Developers might care more about performance, and check disk size, memory, etc. Gamers will want to know that they can tweak CPU Input voltage, and will want to know how many cycles they lose for a secondary cache miss, etc.
Actually, both are correct. One is the simple past tense, the other the present perfect tense.
You know, that shirt/sticker always has bothered me.
The problem with it is that "read" is both a present and past tense -- so a perfectly straightforward interpretation is simply that "I have received and read the email you sent me." Not scary at all.
What they really mean is "I can snoop your email," although that's also an admittedly bad formulation.
Yeah, well, anyway...
It's the unfortunate habit that most people have of shouting into their cell phones.
Some people talk loudly when sitting around with their friends. Some people don't. I don't know more than one or two (hearing-impaired) people who *always* shout.
Some cell phone users feel the need to shout into their phones. I know that I don't. You probably don't either. But you've doubtless experienced someone bellowing "WHAT? HONEY, DO WE NEED CHEESE?" into a cell phone at the market.
Sometimes it's because the just don't realize that the phone can pick up a normal voice. More often, they want you to hear something about their conversation.
It's annoying and unnecessary.
The neologism for being assaulted with this kind of noise is "eaveslammed." Sample usage: I was at the store, and this guy eaveslammed me with his conversation about condom brands.
Easy to say.
Not easy to do.
Think about it. QA on Linux has the advantage that the first "users" of any new module/driver/system are actually developers and other savvy users. Many bugs get worked out relatively early -- certainly before they get rolled into a stable distribution.
The Windows OS has to support a nearly infinite variety of hardware, and. It doesn't have the same first-tier of support. Sure, it has beta testers, but, by and large, they aren't developers. They certainly can't tweak the source.
But even then, security is not easy. Think about Open BSD. This OS's community prides itself on its approach security, and they do a very good job. But occasionally, things sneak by (i.e., the SSH remote exploit of a year ago).
So it's nice idea to just do things right the first time. But you can't just make the decision "hey, from now on we're gonna do things right" and have the problem miraculously solved...
Just think how awful it will be for future generations.
Today, when someone dies, their heirs have to go through their belongings and (potentially) writings/documents/photos to see what's worth keeping.
When my gandparents went, it took nearly a year to go through the book collections, notes, etc.
If I were splattered by a bus on my way home this evening, my relatives would have to go through a collection of the same size (books, notebooks, photos), plus approximately 40 GB of data -- much of it redundant, much of it useless, some of it encrypted, etc, but some of it probably worth something to someone. What a nightmarish task!
And it's only going to get worse!
I anticipate a lot will simply fall through the cracks and vanish.
I do digital recording on my homebrew security system. On the non-audio cams, recording at 320x240 resolution with a decent quality factor for the mpeg, and it takes about 256MB/hr.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'd want to record my life in much better detail than a piddly 320x240, and I'd want good, quality stereo audio. (Heck, I'd probably want Smell-o-vision[tm], too).
So I think it's gonna be at least twice that bandwidth.
OK, I guess I've just proven to myself that your *real* point is correct: it ain't that far away.
Yeah, I remember upgrading from 4k to 16k (TRS-80), and thinking "Damn! It's like wide open country out here!"
Then I remember wire-wrapping all those damn 2k x 1 bit chips, until I had a whopping 48k. I never filled all of that up until years later, when I was writing my thesis, and had to break it into several chapters...
No. Massive hemorrhaging kills people.
Bullets really have nothing to do with it, except in the rare cases where they lodge someplace where they are obstruent. Almost always, the problem comes from the bullets transferring their kinetic energy to tissue and bone.
Check out the "Rubber Hose Filesystem" for other approaches to this idea: http://www.rubberhose.org/
Wow. I can just see it now.
This could lead to the slowest brute-force attack ever...
FBI: So, is your password "jhT78$^&" ?
Rube: No.
FBI: He's telling the truth. Damn. So, is your
password "jhT78$^*" ?
Rube: No.
FBI: Damn. He's still telling the truth.
So, is your password "jhT78$^(" ?
Rube: No.
...
etc.
(Yes, I *know* that's not what the poster suggests, but still...)
Hey, some of us run legit servers on our DSL lines.
That's why we pay for DSL.
Arbitrarily blocking the ports leads to bad things.
Wouldn't it be better to have ISPs scan for open relays, and port filter SMTP for IP addresses failing the test?
Sure, there will be wrinkles for the DHCP crowd (e.g., Cable Modems), but most of them forbid the running of servers in their User Agreements. Oh, it would be good if they enforced those consistently, too. Those old MediaOne agreements that ban "the running of servers" really need to be enforced against the standard Windows servers (NetBIOS/NetBUIE, IIS, etc) as well, not just Apache.
no, no, no. The number of the Jenny was 867-5309
I'll start by saying that I've been using Usenet since before the great hierarchy revision (back when it was net.news).
;)
And I remember the day of the infamous Green Card Lottery usenet spam. This was after Spaf bailed, I believe, but it sure was a rude awakening for me. Had I only known what horrors it predicted for my inbox, I would have quit computers and become a subsistence farmer right then and there
But even with the depths it's all sunk to, Usenet (especially via the Deja News / Google Groups interface) is an invaluable tool.
I type in obscure error messages from rare programs, and find that someone else has already solved my problem. When doing development, and seeing strange situations, 80% of the time, Usenet archives will hold an answer, or enough of a clue that I can make the breakthrough.
Yeah, it's got problems. Spammers have polluted some groups to the point of uselessness (I can remember when alt.sex was a discussion group, populated by men and women who were not trying to make money, but were actually talking about sexual matters and their lives). But don't write off usenet yet!
Especially if you remember the Porsche advertising "Kills Bugs Fast" campaign.
You can see the poster at http://www.autotrend.com/9536.html
Depends on the monks.
The monks who brew beer might not be the most reliable.
Then there are the scribes who copy the Torah, for example, who have to throw away a whole page of parchment if they make any error whatsoever. Still, it seems like occasional errors have crept in over history.
The people who preserved the Hindu Vedas had to memorize them forwards *and* backwards. It appears that, even during all the time they were in the oral tradition, there was very little (if any) change.
And yeah, it gets expensive for using techniques like this to store binary data.
Good point.
A recent translation of a 5000 year old cuneiform tablet from Sumer begins:
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in
this transaction. This by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and'top
secret'...
Well, yeah, it strikes me as a silly idea. But you've got some facts wrong:
Most bombs work fine in the absence of external oxygen.
Bunker busters are designed to penetrate the rock above bunkers, as well as the bunkers themselves. (most "safety bunkers" are carved out of the bedrock).
Etched stone seems to have a staying power of approximately 10,000 years, even with some outdoor exposure.
Earthenware tablets, made of clay fired at low temperatures (1816F/991C), seem to do nearly as well, while stoneware tablets, made of clay fired at high temperature (2345F/1284C), last about the same as actual stone. Ceramics have relatively high resistance to moisture and thermal variation. Depending on the clay composition and the application of glazes, there is variable resistance to acid. Ceramics do not handle physical shock particularly well.
Glass can last thousands of years, but is vulnerable to shattering or acid.
None of these, however, are earthquake-resistant. Outside of the immediate blast radius, they're good against nukes.
Etching into stainless steel is good, although in the event of a nuclear attack, this would be succeptible to melting (or self-destruction due to induced current) within a certain area. It handles thermal and moisture extremes pretty well, but doesn't handle acids well.
Stamping into gold foil is expensive, but quite durable. It's immune to some of the chemical risks posed by steel, but is more likely to be stolen. It's also not as hard, thus leading to risk of data corruption or loss via impact.
Parchment, preserved lamb or sheep skin, can last a very long time (on the order of 2,000 years) in the right conditions. It does well with exposure to electromagnetic radiation, but deals badly with moisture or excessive dryness, and is highly vulnerable to acid.
Delay-line broadcast (reflecting your data with a laser off of a distant object, and rebroadcasting ad infinitum) is fairly reliable until occlusion of the data path occurs, or the transceiver is smashed, unplugged, EMPed.
Yeah, data preservation is hard in the long haul.
I could envision a super-fat pipe being used to mirror a facility to a neighboring (or even geographically-distant) facility along with a system like this.
rdiff-backup saved me when a power supply blew out on a server. Within an hour of the failure, I was back up and running on the backup server. It could have been much faster had I automated the failover...
Yeah, that's a good solution -- but it *does* still require that developers build a version for each chipset.
And you can bet that they'll pass the expense of doing so on to the consumer, probably in the guise of a version update.
That's the sticking point, not the technical problems involved.