In terms of physical size, the LS1 is actually smaller/lighter.
I read that the LS1 weighs 497 lbs. while the Nissan 3.5l VQ weighs 460 lbs.
You think those extra moving parts, like the 3 extra camshafts and 8 extra valves, etc etc have no mass or take up no space?
They aren't "extra". They are there to improve performance (no, performance is not measured solely by peak horsepower on a dyno).
There is more to an engine than just cubic inches.
And there's more to a CPU than just clock speed. That's the point of the analogy. You can't just measure one thing to determine performance potential. Just as you cannot just measure cubic inches to determine the performance of an engine, you can't just measure clock speed to determine the performance of a CPU.
You're welcome to try, but most CVTs have a very limited range of ratios. The problem is finding a CVT that can adjust ratios such that the moped could go anywhere from stopped to 30mph. It takes one heck of a ratio to let the CVT turn 15,000RPM when leaving the line and not exceed 16,000RPM at 30mph.
A 1.0L motorcycle engine would power a sedan just fine. Just make sure you gear it down low enough.
Untrue. The area under the torque curve very much influences the driveability of an automobile engine. If you have a peaky engine, such a 1-liter motorcycle engine, the powerband is insufficiently narrow to be used in a car, regardless of gearing.
Gearing the car down low will provide you adequate off-the-line performance, but what happens when you shift from first to second and your engine speed drops out of the peaky powerband? Answer: The engine bogs down.
Want another example? An OS model airplane engine that displaces only 9.95 cubic centimeters produces 1.8 horsepower at 16,000 RPM. That's with.2hp of the maximum allowed for mopeds. But do you think that the 3.3 inch long model airplane engine could power a moped? Of course not. It has too narrow of a powerband.
Most ISPs ban servers anyway, so you're doubly responsible.
Yet another stupid residential user comment. I pay for commercial Internet access, so don't tell me that I am "doubly responsible."
Besides, Slashdotting is not a DDoS.
Yes, it is. When you purposely and knowingly cause a site to receive so much traffic that you could reasonably expect it to go down, that's a DDoS.
It is the normal functioning of the Internet, and something it is your RESPONSIBILITY to foresee and deal with.
It is not "the normal functioning of the Internet." It is an example of what happens when an Internet behemoth behaves irresponsibly. I asked you before and I'll ask you again:
How the f*** am I supposed to know when some editor at Slashdot will find my website interesting? Please, tell me, Miss Cleo.
and
Or are you telling me that I should have to pay for third-party hosting for my web site, which, on average, gets a number of hits per day that can be counted with two digits -- just on the off-chance that some negligent editor at Slashdot happens to find something on it interesting some year?
What could you possibly be smoking that would make you think it's Slashdot's job to make sure that the PUBLIC SERVER you are running is adequate to meet the demands that you have placed on it?
If Slashdot sends 100,000 users to my server, they are the ones who are putting "the demands on it", not me. But I did not ask them to do an analysis of my web server. I can do that. All they have to do is ask me whether it can handle the traffic. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that some random, small-time web server is unlikely to be able to withstand the traffic that a Slashdot link would cause. It's one thing to link to a story on CNN. It is quite another for Slashdot to link to some guy's personal web page.
You are clearly deluded if you think that Slashdot bears no responsibility for their actions. It's an absurd and ill-informed comment that shows that you know little about the law.
Here's a Kuro5hin Op-Ed piece on this subject by someone who clearly understands it better than you do.
As the author says: It hasn't happened yet, but I see a "reckless linking" lawsuit where someone sues Slashdot or another site for causing monetary damages.
Anyone who knows much about cars, knows piston displacement really doesn't mean shit, put it on a dyno and see how an engine really performs.
How many engines have you built? I've built a few and I know that greater displacement on normally aspirated engines usually leads to higher torque at low RPMs. Low displacement usually equates to lower torque and that the only way to make lots of horsepower from low-displacement is to design the engine for high RPMs -- because horsepower = (torque[lb.-ft.] * RPM)/5250. That's why a 1 liter motorcycle engine can produce upwards of 140 horsepower but would be completely unsuitable for powering a sedan that does fine with a 140 horsepower, large-displacement engine.
There is absolutely no parallel between car engine performance and CPUs.
Yes, there is and the analogy that the original poster made is a good one. A high-performance engine design can have greater horsepower with a lower displacement. Much as an AMD Athlon can have greater computing horsepower with a lower clock speed.
Re:What happened to the good old days?
on
DRAM Price Fixing
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· Score: 1
I think you need to look up the meaning of "price fixing".
I know exactly what price fixing is. It involves collusion on the part of sellers.
But my point was the whining about "price fixing" is petty and absurd when you look at how little RAM costs. When you can put 2GB of top-quality DDR RAM into a PC for under $300, RAM prices are perfectly reasonable -- no matter what might have gone on behind the scenes.
Do you want the RAM industry to be like the airline industry -- where price competition forces supplier after supplier into bankruptcy? Then you will probably bitch that the only one left standing is a monopoly.
What happened to the good old days?
on
DRAM Price Fixing
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I remember back in the 1970's -- before this nasty price fixing -- when you could buy an Altair S-100 1K RAM card assembled and tested for only $139. So, if you needed 512MB of RAM, it would only have required 524,288 of those S-100 boards and the cost would have been a mere $72,876,032.00.
Now those bastards are gouging us with their price fixing. I just checked on Crucial's web site and 512MB (DDR PC2100) costs $65.99!
Your failure to adequately forsee the amount of traffic that your site will generate is Not Slashdot's Problem(tm).
You mean my inability to predict the future with 100% accuracy? How the f*** am I supposed to know when some editor at Slashdot will find my website interesting? Please, tell me, Miss Cleo.
What you are really saying is "Your inability to foresee a denial of service attack against your connection is not the fault of the person(s) who launched the attack."
The wrath of the Internet Hordes is well known, and you are negligent if you fail to prepare for it.
What a raft of bull****. I have one broadband ISP available to me and they run cable modem. Their TOS, like those of almost all other ISPs, has clauses that they can disconnect you at will. Are you telling me that, because my ISP will not tolerate infinite amounts of traffic directed at my static IP that I should forego running a web server at all? Or are you telling me that I should have to pay for third-party hosting for my web site, which, on average, gets a number of hits per day that can be counted with two digits -- just on the off-chance that some negligent editor at Slashdot happens to find something on it interesting some year?
It is your responsibility to insure that your site either stays up, or fails gracefully (your ISP pulls the plug if you exceed bandwidth limits, instead of just billing you for the overage).
So I'm supposed to lose my single static IP of connectivity when my ISP "pulls the plug"? My mail server is supposed to go down. My web server is supposed to go down. I should be unable to even browse the web until/unless they decide to turn the connection back on? That's your idea of a solution?
For better or for worse, when you put a website on the Internet, you are making it available to the public.
Each individual member of the public can access it. They have no reason to view their access as detrimental. But it's different when Slashdot knowingly puts up a link to a website hosted on a some guys 768K DSL connection. Slashdot is doing something that they practically know will cause the site owner harm. And when you knowingly cause someone else harm, you can be held civilly liable.
We are talking about a Distributed Denial of Service attack, plain and simple. Slashdot puts a link up to some guys web site that he hosts on a limited bandwidth connection knowing full well that the traffic will take down the site. Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
Since Slashdot is a NEWS site it would be simply impossible for Slashdot to wait several hours/days for positive responses from site owners before Slashdotting them.
Why? They often publish multiple duplicates of news stories, sometimes months apart, so we are not talking about late-breaking news in most cases. Many of the late-breaking news stories to which you refer point to web sites that have been up, and essentially unchanged, for months before Slashdot stumbles across them.
Regardless, when you put your server at the mercy of the Internet hordes, you can't really complain when said horde drops your server like a hot potato.
I didn't put up a server for the "Internet hordes." I put up a server which has adequate bandwidth to handle the amount of traffic I should reasonably expect -- and then some. But it's not going to serve 100,000 users on it at a time.
If the web site survives the Slashdot subscriber Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, then the unwashed masses at Slashdot will let loose with a full-fury DDoS.
Unlike most posters, this guy gave permission for Slashdot to DDoS him. On other sites, some poor schmuck running a small web server on his DSL or cable modem is crushed by the traffic, his connection is toast, and his ISP might threaten to cut him off. On small sites being hosted by low-cost providers, the Slashdotting often results in the web site being taken down or, worse, in the person being billed for the traffic.
When will Slashdot start behaving responsibly and get permission to link to small servers? (In this story the web site owner volunteered permission.) It's doing a disservice to Slashdot readers and website owners alike to provide a link knowing that the result with be a DDoS that takes the site down.
Aren't the diffraction spikes a predictable optical effect based on the star's brightness? Why isn't the effect corrected out of the image in postprocessing?
Subtracting data from scientific images is not a good idea. What if there is a dimmer star hidden in a diffraction spike? The next image of that section of sky is unlikely to be taken by a scope with diffraction spikes rotated relative to the former. Then, suddenly, they show a star that was "missing" on the post-processed image. At the very least, they waste time thinking that they have discovered a nova or supernova. At the worst, they announce this "finding", costing the scientific community time and money.
Something I've wondered for a while... what's up with the points coming off the stars?
As was mentioned in another post, those are diffraction spikes from the supports for the secondary mirror.
Newtonian reflectors and classical Cassegrain telescopes support their secondary mirror with "spiders" that produce diffraction spikes. There have been various efforts over the years to eliminate these from that type of telescope. One method is to seal the tube with an optical flat (a flat piece of optical glass) which supports the mirror. The trade-offs include longer times for the scopes to reach temperature equilibrium, distortion from imperfections in the optical figure of the flat, and slight light loss. Other attempts have included the use of spiders with curved support arms, which reduce or eliminates spikes at the cost of slightly degraded overall image contrast.
Other telescope types, such as refractors, Maksutovs, Schmidt-Cassegrains, and Yolo reflectors have no diffraction spikes, but they are all more optically complex (Yolos, for instance, require toroidal mirrors) and are more difficult to produce as a result. Refractors have the added problem of chromatic abberation, which is the fringing of color on the edge of bright objects. Various complex, multi-element objectives have been developed to reduce, or even practically eliminate, this problem. The problems are optical complexity, cost, and light loss. Figuring a 3-element objective lens for a refractor means grinding six optical surfaces with precise curves. Compare that to a Newtonian which has a single parabolic primary mirror and a flat optical secondary.
There are many other telescope types than the few popular types I mentioned here and each have their proponents. Most designs that have survived the test of time can be made to perform well, but each has trade-offs.
I think you're missing the point about using humor to deal with death.
No, I'm not. Humor is used to deal with death on a national level as well as a personal one. Why do you think that the most popular issue of The Onion ever was the post September 11 issue?
As an article by Ed Perkins said:
Slowly, a nervous nation got on with the business of daily life in the twin shadows of anthrax and the war in Afghanistan. As they are wont to do, the political pundits coined post-9/11 life as the "new normalcy."
But no one was laughing.
Thankfully, on Sept. 26, the irreverent satirists at a popular web site called The Onion broke the ice.
Since this is a family column, I won't repeat the title of the Onion's tongue-in-cheek report on 9/11. Let's just say that these guys had the chutzpah to say out loud what we all were thinking.
The Onion's outrageous humor set us free. As word got out, you could hear the belly-laughs from coast to coast -- along with the much needed sighs of relief.
Humor is a natural, normal, and appropriate way to deal with tragedy -- whether a personal tragedy or one felt by millions.
There's a reason why AIDS and Holocaust jokes aren't more popular.
Chapter 8 of the book I linked to earlier: AIDS Ain't Funny--Or Is It?
So it would be in fmmaxwell.com best interest to want to establish his identity.
The reality is that spam gets through not because they pretend to be a trusted domain. Besides, whitelisting millions of domains is not the answer. How would you know whether fmaxwell.com is the domain of a trustworthy party or whether it's one run by a bunch of penis enlarger spammers?
As for costs, you are probably already paying for static DSL ($65/mo here) and DNS hosting. Anything less and a large portion of the net already blocks your mail. I'd like to hear how you do it for less than $500/year.
I'll be happy to tell you. I have a cable modem connection which I upgraded from residential to "SOHO". That upgrade got me a static IP and got rid of the ever-more-restrictive residential TOS imposed by my ISP. The total difference in cost was about $15/month since I had no cable TV/modem bundle discount (I have DirecTV). Even if I was not going to run a server, I would have upgraded to the SOHO package, so that's not an additional cost. If you insist on counting that, it only comes to about $180 additional per year.
The DNS hosting for my domain is handled by three firms that provide the service at no charge: hn.org, dnsexit.com, and zoneedit.com. By using three providers (and, hence, six DNS servers), I have zero down-time due to DNS resolution problems.
My understanding of the proposal is that your existing ISP or DNS provider can operate as PCA and probably would sign the fmmaxwell.com cert at some level as part of the regular service they are already providing.
While that may be the existing proposal, I don't see that ever working that way. Why would your server trust the cert issued by some ISP to some firm in Peru? And what makes you think that an ISP or DNS provider would give anything away? They are looking to make money and would either charge for a cert or, more likely, say "we're the only broadband available to you and we won't deal with the hassle and risk of issuing you a certificate." Besides, how could they trust that Jay Random Customer was not a spammer? If the person turned out to be a spammer, then people might start distrusting the ISP's cert.
Perhaps I take offense too easily to words like this
You do.
It's a shame that seemingly all the time people joke about or take lightly incidents like these.
People make jokes to ease the pain of tragedy. When the Challenger Shuttle exploded, I was grief-stricken. Jokes about it were how I, and others, coped with it in the weeks the followed.
Your post is otherwise well thought out and valuable to this discussion.
Thank you. It's all too easy for people to criticized and a refreshing change to see someone take the time to say something positive.
Look, the minimum cost of hosting your own mail domain is going to be upwards of $500/year, and that's excluding admin time. A one-time certificate fee should be considered mearly a cost of doing business.
Well, I can see that you have little-to-no experience running a mail server and an equally limited amount of experience with certificates. Like many Internet hobbyists, I run a mail server. It's not for a business. I derive no income from it. It simply gives me a permanent e-mail address and allows me to filter spam (perhaps you are in need of a penis enlarger and herbal Viagra, but I'd rather keep messages advertising such things out of my inbox). I host it on a Dell server that cost me $250 after rebate. I assure you that it doesn't cost me "upwards of $500/year."
The certificate is not a "one-time" fee and it probably would not be $100. It's a recurring fee and the certificate expires. If it is like the certificates used for e-commerce web sites, Verisign will charge $349 per year for 40-bit encryption and $895 for 128-bit. Want to pay $350-$900 per year to run a mail server? How about every small business that has a domain? A two-person company struggling to get profitable doesn't need to be hit with hundreds of dollars of unnecessary fees every year.
Don't assume that something is a wasteful indulgence just because you don't do it.
I see this as a dangerous time. Many people have discussed going to an e-mail system that relies on encryption and security certificates. Are we going to end up with another debacle like we have now for secure websites, where Certificate Authorities like Verisign and Thawte charge hundreds of dollars every year for a certificate and free certificates set off more alarms than a than a Great White concert in a gasoline-soaked tent?
Will Microsoft make lucrative deals with high-roller Certificate Authorities to include them in the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server? Will you be unable to run a mail server without paying big bucks to some "trusted" Certificate Authority?
If we are not careful, the only e-mail servers that will exist will be commercial e-mail servers where the owners can afford hundreds of dollars every year for certificate renewals.
Why do I believe this? Because I follow the money. If Microsoft, Verisign/Thawte, Netscape, etc. think that there's a way to make money, they will push for a standard that ensures it.
In other words it dosn't[sic] integrate with anything else. e.g. a cellphone or PDA...
"Integrated" means that it is interwoven into the operating system rather than being an add-on like VNC. You really should understand the difference between "integrated" and "cross-platform compatability" before posting on Slashdot.
Wow, Windows XP has caught up with unix.
No, in this respect, it has surpassed Unix. Windows XP Remote Desktop works better than VNC. It does more, such as audio redirection, and is integrated into the O.S. rather than added onto it as an afterthought.
Just because the Windows version of VNC server emulates "RCONSOLE" does not imply that the unix version does this.
so there is no need to worry about the weakness of "homebrewed" security.
When I get on to a system using VNC, what privileges do I have? Who am I? Root if that's who's logged in when I come in through VNC? There's also the problem of having multiple mechanisms to provide security. You have the 8-character VNC password, SSH for encryption, the system username/password, etc.
Because XP's Remote Desktop is so tightly integrated with the OS, it can use the OS login functionality, redirect audio, etc.
I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but Remote Desktop is a nice piece of engineering. Don't get me wrong. I used VNC in the past and was always pleased with it.
Intergration[sic] to what? You can find a VNC client for just about any platform.
Hence, it is not well integrated into the OS. In order to have portability, the developers of VNC sacrificed integration.
Do you need some specific platform to use the XP "Windows Remote Desktop"?...
Yes, you need Windows XP (isn't that a shocker?). It is integrated into Windows XP. It uses the Windows login for security rather than some kind of add-on homebrewed security of its own. It automatically brings up a login screen on the local machine. That allows a support person to work on the machine without the local user watching everything he/she does and without the local user interfering. It moves audio. Last time I checked, I could not get sounds from a remote machine to play locally when I used VNC.
the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..) without spending insane amounts of money.
Since the two examples you cite are available on Windows, perhaps you need to get a better understanding of Windows. In fact, Windows Remote Desktop feature in XP is superior to VNC in functionality, response, and seamless integration, so VNC is hardly a compelling argument in favor of open source operating systems.
Perhaps you need to have someone with a more balanced perspective come into the organization and evaluate where Unix derivatives are the best choice and where Windows is a superior pick. Those who blindly promote *nix and open source as the solution to every computing problem are no more enlightened than those who automatically choose Microsoft products for every function.
Slashdot Mirror
How much low-end torque is on that VQ again?
Quite a bit with a blower.
In terms of physical size, the LS1 is actually smaller/lighter.
I read that the LS1 weighs 497 lbs. while the Nissan 3.5l VQ weighs 460 lbs.
You think those extra moving parts, like the 3 extra camshafts and 8 extra valves, etc etc have no mass or take up no space?
They aren't "extra". They are there to improve performance (no, performance is not measured solely by peak horsepower on a dyno).
There is more to an engine than just cubic inches.
And there's more to a CPU than just clock speed. That's the point of the analogy. You can't just measure one thing to determine performance potential. Just as you cannot just measure cubic inches to determine the performance of an engine, you can't just measure clock speed to determine the performance of a CPU.
What about using a CVT with such an engine?
You're welcome to try, but most CVTs have a very limited range of ratios. The problem is finding a CVT that can adjust ratios such that the moped could go anywhere from stopped to 30mph. It takes one heck of a ratio to let the CVT turn 15,000RPM when leaving the line and not exceed 16,000RPM at 30mph.
I was referring to the poster who disagreed with what you wrote. I think that your analogy was fine.
A 1.0L motorcycle engine would power a sedan just fine. Just make sure you gear it down low enough.
.2hp of the maximum allowed for mopeds. But do you think that the 3.3 inch long model airplane engine could power a moped? Of course not. It has too narrow of a powerband.
Untrue. The area under the torque curve very much influences the driveability of an automobile engine. If you have a peaky engine, such a 1-liter motorcycle engine, the powerband is insufficiently narrow to be used in a car, regardless of gearing.
Gearing the car down low will provide you adequate off-the-line performance, but what happens when you shift from first to second and your engine speed drops out of the peaky powerband? Answer: The engine bogs down.
Want another example? An OS model airplane engine that displaces only 9.95 cubic centimeters produces 1.8 horsepower at 16,000 RPM. That's with
Yet another stupid residential user comment. I pay for commercial Internet access, so don't tell me that I am "doubly responsible."
Besides, Slashdotting is not a DDoS.
Yes, it is. When you purposely and knowingly cause a site to receive so much traffic that you could reasonably expect it to go down, that's a DDoS.
It is the normal functioning of the Internet, and something it is your RESPONSIBILITY to foresee and deal with.
It is not "the normal functioning of the Internet." It is an example of what happens when an Internet behemoth behaves irresponsibly. I asked you before and I'll ask you again:
and
What could you possibly be smoking that would make you think it's Slashdot's job to make sure that the PUBLIC SERVER you are running is adequate to meet the demands that you have placed on it?
If Slashdot sends 100,000 users to my server, they are the ones who are putting "the demands on it", not me. But I did not ask them to do an analysis of my web server. I can do that. All they have to do is ask me whether it can handle the traffic. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that some random, small-time web server is unlikely to be able to withstand the traffic that a Slashdot link would cause. It's one thing to link to a story on CNN. It is quite another for Slashdot to link to some guy's personal web page.
You are clearly deluded if you think that Slashdot bears no responsibility for their actions. It's an absurd and ill-informed comment that shows that you know little about the law.
Here's a Kuro5hin Op-Ed piece on this subject by someone who clearly understands it better than you do.
As the author says: It hasn't happened yet, but I see a "reckless linking" lawsuit where someone sues Slashdot or another site for causing monetary damages.
Anyone who knows much about cars, knows piston displacement really doesn't mean shit, put it on a dyno and see how an engine really performs.
How many engines have you built? I've built a few and I know that greater displacement on normally aspirated engines usually leads to higher torque at low RPMs. Low displacement usually equates to lower torque and that the only way to make lots of horsepower from low-displacement is to design the engine for high RPMs -- because horsepower = (torque[lb.-ft.] * RPM)/5250. That's why a 1 liter motorcycle engine can produce upwards of 140 horsepower but would be completely unsuitable for powering a sedan that does fine with a 140 horsepower, large-displacement engine.
There is absolutely no parallel between car engine performance and CPUs.
Yes, there is and the analogy that the original poster made is a good one. A high-performance engine design can have greater horsepower with a lower displacement. Much as an AMD Athlon can have greater computing horsepower with a lower clock speed.
I think you need to look up the meaning of "price fixing".
I know exactly what price fixing is. It involves collusion on the part of sellers.
But my point was the whining about "price fixing" is petty and absurd when you look at how little RAM costs. When you can put 2GB of top-quality DDR RAM into a PC for under $300, RAM prices are perfectly reasonable -- no matter what might have gone on behind the scenes.
Do you want the RAM industry to be like the airline industry -- where price competition forces supplier after supplier into bankruptcy? Then you will probably bitch that the only one left standing is a monopoly.
I remember back in the 1970's -- before this nasty price fixing -- when you could buy an Altair S-100 1K RAM card assembled and tested for only $139. So, if you needed 512MB of RAM, it would only have required 524,288 of those S-100 boards and the cost would have been a mere $72,876,032.00.
Now those bastards are gouging us with their price fixing. I just checked on Crucial's web site and 512MB (DDR PC2100) costs $65.99!
Your failure to adequately forsee the amount of traffic that your site will generate is Not Slashdot's Problem(tm).
You mean my inability to predict the future with 100% accuracy? How the f*** am I supposed to know when some editor at Slashdot will find my website interesting? Please, tell me, Miss Cleo.
What you are really saying is "Your inability to foresee a denial of service attack against your connection is not the fault of the person(s) who launched the attack."
The wrath of the Internet Hordes is well known, and you are negligent if you fail to prepare for it.
What a raft of bull****. I have one broadband ISP available to me and they run cable modem. Their TOS, like those of almost all other ISPs, has clauses that they can disconnect you at will. Are you telling me that, because my ISP will not tolerate infinite amounts of traffic directed at my static IP that I should forego running a web server at all? Or are you telling me that I should have to pay for third-party hosting for my web site, which, on average, gets a number of hits per day that can be counted with two digits -- just on the off-chance that some negligent editor at Slashdot happens to find something on it interesting some year?
It is your responsibility to insure that your site either stays up, or fails gracefully (your ISP pulls the plug if you exceed bandwidth limits, instead of just billing you for the overage).
So I'm supposed to lose my single static IP of connectivity when my ISP "pulls the plug"? My mail server is supposed to go down. My web server is supposed to go down. I should be unable to even browse the web until/unless they decide to turn the connection back on? That's your idea of a solution?
For better or for worse, when you put a website on the Internet, you are making it available to the public.
Each individual member of the public can access it. They have no reason to view their access as detrimental. But it's different when Slashdot knowingly puts up a link to a website hosted on a some guys 768K DSL connection. Slashdot is doing something that they practically know will cause the site owner harm. And when you knowingly cause someone else harm, you can be held civilly liable.
We are talking about a Distributed Denial of Service attack, plain and simple. Slashdot puts a link up to some guys web site that he hosts on a limited bandwidth connection knowing full well that the traffic will take down the site. Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
Since Slashdot is a NEWS site it would be simply impossible for Slashdot to wait several hours/days for positive responses from site owners before Slashdotting them.
Why? They often publish multiple duplicates of news stories, sometimes months apart, so we are not talking about late-breaking news in most cases. Many of the late-breaking news stories to which you refer point to web sites that have been up, and essentially unchanged, for months before Slashdot stumbles across them.
Regardless, when you put your server at the mercy of the Internet hordes, you can't really complain when said horde drops your server like a hot potato.
I didn't put up a server for the "Internet hordes." I put up a server which has adequate bandwidth to handle the amount of traffic I should reasonably expect -- and then some. But it's not going to serve 100,000 users on it at a time.
If the web site survives the Slashdot subscriber Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, then the unwashed masses at Slashdot will let loose with a full-fury DDoS.
Unlike most posters, this guy gave permission for Slashdot to DDoS him. On other sites, some poor schmuck running a small web server on his DSL or cable modem is crushed by the traffic, his connection is toast, and his ISP might threaten to cut him off. On small sites being hosted by low-cost providers, the Slashdotting often results in the web site being taken down or, worse, in the person being billed for the traffic.
When will Slashdot start behaving responsibly and get permission to link to small servers? (In this story the web site owner volunteered permission.) It's doing a disservice to Slashdot readers and website owners alike to provide a link knowing that the result with be a DDoS that takes the site down.
The next image of that section of sky is unlikely to be taken by a scope with diffraction spikes rotated relative to the former.
Oops! I meant to say "likely" rather than "unlikely." Sorry for any confusion that may have caused.
Aren't the diffraction spikes a predictable optical effect based on the star's brightness? Why isn't the effect corrected out of the image in postprocessing?
Subtracting data from scientific images is not a good idea. What if there is a dimmer star hidden in a diffraction spike? The next image of that section of sky is unlikely to be taken by a scope with diffraction spikes rotated relative to the former. Then, suddenly, they show a star that was "missing" on the post-processed image. At the very least, they waste time thinking that they have discovered a nova or supernova. At the worst, they announce this "finding", costing the scientific community time and money.
Something I've wondered for a while... what's up with the points coming off the stars?
As was mentioned in another post, those are diffraction spikes from the supports for the secondary mirror.
Newtonian reflectors and classical Cassegrain telescopes support their secondary mirror with "spiders" that produce diffraction spikes. There have been various efforts over the years to eliminate these from that type of telescope. One method is to seal the tube with an optical flat (a flat piece of optical glass) which supports the mirror. The trade-offs include longer times for the scopes to reach temperature equilibrium, distortion from imperfections in the optical figure of the flat, and slight light loss. Other attempts have included the use of spiders with curved support arms, which reduce or eliminates spikes at the cost of slightly degraded overall image contrast.
Other telescope types, such as refractors, Maksutovs, Schmidt-Cassegrains, and Yolo reflectors have no diffraction spikes, but they are all more optically complex (Yolos, for instance, require toroidal mirrors) and are more difficult to produce as a result. Refractors have the added problem of chromatic abberation, which is the fringing of color on the edge of bright objects. Various complex, multi-element objectives have been developed to reduce, or even practically eliminate, this problem. The problems are optical complexity, cost, and light loss. Figuring a 3-element objective lens for a refractor means grinding six optical surfaces with precise curves. Compare that to a Newtonian which has a single parabolic primary mirror and a flat optical secondary.
There are many other telescope types than the few popular types I mentioned here and each have their proponents. Most designs that have survived the test of time can be made to perform well, but each has trade-offs.
No, I'm not. Humor is used to deal with death on a national level as well as a personal one. Why do you think that the most popular issue of The Onion ever was the post September 11 issue?
As an article by Ed Perkins said:
Humor is a natural, normal, and appropriate way to deal with tragedy -- whether a personal tragedy or one felt by millions.
There's a reason why AIDS and Holocaust jokes aren't more popular.
Chapter 8 of the book I linked to earlier: AIDS Ain't Funny--Or Is It?
So it would be in fmmaxwell.com best interest to want to establish his identity.
The reality is that spam gets through not because they pretend to be a trusted domain. Besides, whitelisting millions of domains is not the answer. How would you know whether fmaxwell.com is the domain of a trustworthy party or whether it's one run by a bunch of penis enlarger spammers?
As for costs, you are probably already paying for static DSL ($65/mo here) and DNS hosting. Anything less and a large portion of the net already blocks your mail. I'd like to hear how you do it for less than $500/year.
I'll be happy to tell you. I have a cable modem connection which I upgraded from residential to "SOHO". That upgrade got me a static IP and got rid of the ever-more-restrictive residential TOS imposed by my ISP. The total difference in cost was about $15/month since I had no cable TV/modem bundle discount (I have DirecTV). Even if I was not going to run a server, I would have upgraded to the SOHO package, so that's not an additional cost. If you insist on counting that, it only comes to about $180 additional per year.
The DNS hosting for my domain is handled by three firms that provide the service at no charge: hn.org, dnsexit.com, and zoneedit.com. By using three providers (and, hence, six DNS servers), I have zero down-time due to DNS resolution problems.
My understanding of the proposal is that your existing ISP or DNS provider can operate as PCA and probably would sign the fmmaxwell.com cert at some level as part of the regular service they are already providing.
While that may be the existing proposal, I don't see that ever working that way. Why would your server trust the cert issued by some ISP to some firm in Peru? And what makes you think that an ISP or DNS provider would give anything away? They are looking to make money and would either charge for a cert or, more likely, say "we're the only broadband available to you and we won't deal with the hassle and risk of issuing you a certificate." Besides, how could they trust that Jay Random Customer was not a spammer? If the person turned out to be a spammer, then people might start distrusting the ISP's cert.
Perhaps I take offense too easily to words like this
You do.
It's a shame that seemingly all the time people joke about or take lightly incidents like these.
People make jokes to ease the pain of tragedy. When the Challenger Shuttle exploded, I was grief-stricken. Jokes about it were how I, and others, coped with it in the weeks the followed.
Your post is otherwise well thought out and valuable to this discussion.
Thank you. It's all too easy for people to criticized and a refreshing change to see someone take the time to say something positive.
By the way, you might want to consider reading a book like The Courage to Laugh: Humor, Hope, and Healing in the Face of Death and Dying. It might put the issue of humor in the wake of tragedy into clearer focus.
Look, the minimum cost of hosting your own mail domain is going to be upwards of $500/year, and that's excluding admin time. A one-time certificate fee should be considered mearly a cost of doing business.
Well, I can see that you have little-to-no experience running a mail server and an equally limited amount of experience with certificates. Like many Internet hobbyists, I run a mail server. It's not for a business. I derive no income from it. It simply gives me a permanent e-mail address and allows me to filter spam (perhaps you are in need of a penis enlarger and herbal Viagra, but I'd rather keep messages advertising such things out of my inbox). I host it on a Dell server that cost me $250 after rebate. I assure you that it doesn't cost me "upwards of $500/year."
The certificate is not a "one-time" fee and it probably would not be $100. It's a recurring fee and the certificate expires. If it is like the certificates used for e-commerce web sites, Verisign will charge $349 per year for 40-bit encryption and $895 for 128-bit. Want to pay $350-$900 per year to run a mail server? How about every small business that has a domain? A two-person company struggling to get profitable doesn't need to be hit with hundreds of dollars of unnecessary fees every year.
Don't assume that something is a wasteful indulgence just because you don't do it.
I see this as a dangerous time. Many people have discussed going to an e-mail system that relies on encryption and security certificates. Are we going to end up with another debacle like we have now for secure websites, where Certificate Authorities like Verisign and Thawte charge hundreds of dollars every year for a certificate and free certificates set off more alarms than a than a Great White concert in a gasoline-soaked tent?
Will Microsoft make lucrative deals with high-roller Certificate Authorities to include them in the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server? Will you be unable to run a mail server without paying big bucks to some "trusted" Certificate Authority?
If we are not careful, the only e-mail servers that will exist will be commercial e-mail servers where the owners can afford hundreds of dollars every year for certificate renewals.
Why do I believe this? Because I follow the money. If Microsoft, Verisign/Thawte, Netscape, etc. think that there's a way to make money, they will push for a standard that ensures it.
In other words it dosn't[sic] integrate with anything else. e.g. a cellphone or PDA...
"Integrated" means that it is interwoven into the operating system rather than being an add-on like VNC. You really should understand the difference between "integrated" and "cross-platform compatability" before posting on Slashdot.
Wow, Windows XP has caught up with unix.
No, in this respect, it has surpassed Unix. Windows XP Remote Desktop works better than VNC. It does more, such as audio redirection, and is integrated into the O.S. rather than added onto it as an afterthought.
Just because the Windows version of VNC server emulates "RCONSOLE" does not imply that the unix version does this.
So VNC operates differently on each OS? Great...
so there is no need to worry about the weakness of "homebrewed" security.
When I get on to a system using VNC, what privileges do I have? Who am I? Root if that's who's logged in when I come in through VNC? There's also the problem of having multiple mechanisms to provide security. You have the 8-character VNC password, SSH for encryption, the system username/password, etc.
Because XP's Remote Desktop is so tightly integrated with the OS, it can use the OS login functionality, redirect audio, etc.
I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but Remote Desktop is a nice piece of engineering. Don't get me wrong. I used VNC in the past and was always pleased with it.
It's amazing that people can grab one line out of context and hammer some guy.
Had the line not been written so that it could be interpreted in two ways, the problem wouldn't exist.
He wants "the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a Unix platform..."
No, he wants "the capabilities on a Unix platform that only open source can provide." At least that's how I think you are interpreting it.
Intergration[sic] to what? You can find a VNC client for just about any platform.
Hence, it is not well integrated into the OS. In order to have portability, the developers of VNC sacrificed integration.
Do you need some specific platform to use the XP "Windows Remote Desktop"?...
Yes, you need Windows XP (isn't that a shocker?). It is integrated into Windows XP. It uses the Windows login for security rather than some kind of add-on homebrewed security of its own. It automatically brings up a login screen on the local machine. That allows a support person to work on the machine without the local user watching everything he/she does and without the local user interfering. It moves audio. Last time I checked, I could not get sounds from a remote machine to play locally when I used VNC.
the capabilities that only open source software can provide on a UNIX platform (VNC, OpenSSH, etc..) without spending insane amounts of money.
Since the two examples you cite are available on Windows, perhaps you need to get a better understanding of Windows. In fact, Windows Remote Desktop feature in XP is superior to VNC in functionality, response, and seamless integration, so VNC is hardly a compelling argument in favor of open source operating systems.
Perhaps you need to have someone with a more balanced perspective come into the organization and evaluate where Unix derivatives are the best choice and where Windows is a superior pick. Those who blindly promote *nix and open source as the solution to every computing problem are no more enlightened than those who automatically choose Microsoft products for every function.