Media companies charge more for rental copies - usually over $100. So $135 for replacement cost was very likely accurate (although perhaps they should have prorated it since they have to replace worn copies). I don't know if rental copies are specially marked. If not, you could have bought a personal copy and offered it as the replacement.
A guy at our church used to be a domestic terrorist. He had joined a KKK group. When he was finally caught and imprisoned, he had bombed dozens of black churches and synagogues. Initially, prison made him worse. But during a long stretch of solitary confinement, he finally took stock of his life and asked God to help him change into a better person.
I worked for the Kuwait Embassy many years ago, and heard a different version from the secretaries there. At that time, Kuwaiti students had their tuition paid at American Colleges, and $50,000 "spending money" (!) - provided they kept a certain GPA. Our software tracked their GPA, "stipend" payments, and sent warning letters when their GPA started slipping - something about enjoying the weather this time of year on an oil platform in the Baltic sea. As the story goes, one student was a big fan of US technology. He bought a fully decked out van, with cruise control, and a top of the line stereo. So he starts down the freeway, turns on the cruise control, and goes to the back to listen to the stereo...
And if part of the 'bribe' is ifnorming Nigeria about all the software that -won't- run on Mandriva but will run on Windows? Maybe they've already GOT some of that software, and they don't want to have to spend money replacing it as well.
One of the unexpected bennies of going all Linux at our household was discovering that a bunch of Windows 3.1 and Dos software that no longer runs on modern Windows (games and educational) suddenly works again. The kids are delighted. JETPACK.EXE might not have 3D graphics, but the gameplay is great. For modern Windows software, I think you'll find that Virtual Box will run any XP software that wine doesn't handle. Or buy VMware and run just about anything that doesn't require high-performance video. Or buy win4lin (paravirtualized Windows for Linux) to run multi-media Windows software better than Windows.
It also auto-mounts all partitions on USB drives. There are system partitions on my USB drive that I don't want auto-mounted. The drive is relatively permanent despite being connected via USB.
That is really cool. Sure, rsync has been doing that for years for us geeks, but Apple took the concept and gave it a name and metaphor that I think everyone will understand. The metaphor will still work when they introduce the Apple remote Time Machine service for internet backups. I don't have a Mac, I'm a Linux guy (like to hack on projects), but I can appreciate excellent UI design.
A layman's explanation is that focus fusion creates a long strand of plasma via initial energy input. Then, the strand is magnetically "cracked" like a whip, initiating a collapse from one end. A wave of magnetically confined plasma moves down the strand, gaining energy and getting smaller - just like a whip. If you do it right, the confined area reaches fusion temperature and density before it gets to the end of the strand - just like a whip goes supersonic before the snap reaches the end - the "crack" you hear is the sonic boom from the tip of the whip. The elegant part of this scheme is that electrons go sideways as beta radiation (losing some energy in xray radiation), and the newly created alpha particles all go in the same direction as the "snap" (since they were all moving that direction with the plasma pocket. So a good deal of the fusion energy is converted directly to electricity by providing nice targets for the electrons at the side and alpha particles at one end. The problems are getting the plasma whip to "crack" consistently, and not losing too much energy to the xrays.
What makes you believe the Creator is unknowable? [...] Many would argue convincingly that He is in fact very knowable if you only wish it.
Yet no one that claims to know Him can agree on what he really want, so he is either unknowable or he have a dissociative identity disorder. Does everyone that knows *you* agree on what you want, or what you meant when you say something? When they do agree, are they always 100% correct?
I have an ATI ES1000 (Dell SC440) that is supposed to have 2D acceleration, including xvideo. The driver reports working xvideo, but actually playing a video (on xine, mplayer, or totem) gives a blue screen where the video should be. (And the same software on older 2D only ATI cards works fine).
Frankly, I would prefer that my ISP have some sort of QoS so that my bulk traffic is at a lower priority than VoIP. Wouldn't you???
Only if *I* am the one defining what is "bulk" and what is not. How would you like it if UPS decided for you which packages to send Ground, and which to send NextDay? QoS is great if setting the QoS bits in packets leaving my computer causes my ISP to do something different (for an extra charge, even, like NextDay delivery). Non technical end-users would have checkboxes on their cable router setup with options like "optimize VOIP (minimize latency) - extra ISP charges may accrue". Geeks would have iptables...
The SOE (British intelligence agency tasked with things like operations in occupied Europe) only supported the resistance for its morale boosting and propaganda value - most actions in occupied France were carried out by British operatives.
Since conservatives credit the "Main Stream Media" with turning a decisive victory in Vietnam into defeat, it seems to me that "morale boosting and propaganda" are indeed instrumental for victory. Some of those very brave resistance fighters, though few perhaps, have very inspiring stories. I'm thinking at the moment of Jacques Lusseyran.
While outwardly welcoming the Nazis with open arms, the French underground was instrumental in defeating Hitler. Poland bravely met the Nazis in open battle, and got wiped out. You could say the French were more devious, but it took guts to be in the underground too. Those who were caught went to the infamous death camps.
You mention usage 5 in whatever dictionary, but the "unproved or false story" meaning is the most recent. The original meaning of myth was anthropological. It is a story that "resonates" with the culture ("informs the ethics and morals of a people" according to one description - usage 1 in the Gnome dictionary applet is close enough). Spiderman, Starwars, are modern mythic stories, comparable to the ancient Greek myths with their own gods and heroes. But historical incidents can become myth also. George Washington crossing the Delaware, the Winter at Valley Forge are mythic tales in the US - somewhat stylized in the telling as are all myths. "Myths of National Origin" as the anthropologists would say.
Most science textbooks have a mythic chapter concerning the Origin of Life in the Primordial Soup. This does not mean the story is false - just that the telling has taken on the stylized reverent tones of myth: "Myths of Cosmic Origin". In the same way, the Cockroach Myth is important because of what it implies about our sense of vulnerability and cosmic justice in the event of nuclear war. It will live on even if shown to be false in a literal sense. Spiderman doesn't have to be a historical fact to inform our ethics and morals.
Equating myth with falsehood is a modern trend. Many are uncomfortable with myths that dare to intrude on the "real world" by turning out to be historically or literally true.
I actually already have several decoy addresses, which are used to train my bayes filter. That count is emails to my private domain. When you run your own mail gateway, that is what you can expect very quickly. Spammers get a list of all domains and start guessing localparts. SMTP protocol allows them 100 guesses per connection, although I ban their IP after 5.
You are exactly correct. A huge number of spam connections are dictionary attacks searching for valid localparts. After 5 invalid RCPTs, I add the connect IP to a banned list for 7 days. There are about 500000 IPs in the banned list. This saves a lot of bandwidth, but still. It is pointless to change emails. I would be more interested in trying a new mail protocol that enforces sender authentication: IM2000 or Jabber. I'd have my mail server send a 551 with instructions for the new protocol. But this requires that it be easily available to most end-users - i.e. a Windows, Mac, and Linux client.
Checking my mail stats, since 4 am this morning, I've received 51985 emails, 51909 of which were filtered as spam. That's 99%. Checking the bandwidth monitor, the spam has consumed a steady 100Kbit/s since 4 am, despite being mostly blocked in SMTP envelope via SPF and reputation (SPF blocks forgeries, reputation blocks spammers with the balls to use their own domain).
"Mere formalities" are important
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
Shortly after I learned the game in college, and was looking for players, I met an Asian guy who had advanced a few levels in a club and offered to instruct me. We played our first game, and he instructed me on how I had "lost" the game already in the first few moves. Well, this wasn't Martial Arts, so I said, "show me", and concentrated on smaller areas of the board and played like Kudzu, switching to an agressive play in another area the instant it looked like I was starting to lose in one area. It worked, and I beat him handily despite having borked the subtle opening moves (and I'm quite confident he was giving me good instruction). This happened several times, and he complained that it was no fun playing with me because it was so tedious dealing with my amateur and unsubtle style of play. But it beat him. But I lost a good instructor (seem to have borked the social gameplay as well).
Nevertheless, the take home point is that subtle threats and counter-threats are useless unless you are prepared to actually carry them out in tedious detail.
How does the drive know which sectors are used during boot-up?
Heh. I know reading comprehension is not the greatest when trying to sneak in slashdot at work, but I'll repeat the (hardly the only) idea I made previously: Keep the sectors read shortly after the last power up in NV read cache.
How does the drive decide what fraction of the drive to allocate to boot-up sectors versus most-accessed sectors versus write-back caching?
Again, to repeat from my previous post: don't use flash for read cache, except boot up sectors per above. Use volatile RAM for read cache in operation. To elaborate a little, I would record a weight that decays rapidly after power up/reset. Would resetting the drive during operation (perhaps because of some hardware lockup) destroy the boot cache? Absolutely - but it will get refreshed again at the boot - no different than loading a new kernel.
The allocation between write cache and boot cache depends is adjusted at each boot. Sectors that are read again at boot could slide the partition. Note that *which* sectors can be recorded in NV without recording their contents - for the purpose of adjust the boot cache size. Once the OS starts reading sectors that are different between boots, they don't go in the boot cache. Again, the longer the elapsed time since boot, the less important the sector is to the boot cache (since the user is already bored) - hence the decaying weight.
Apparently, both the Seagate and Samsung drives are not integrated, since they require Windows Vista to actually used the flash. Seems really stupid to me. The drive ought to just accumulate writes in the flash so as to avoid spinning up the disk until the flash is full. Use regular RAM for read caching. On power failure, accumulated writes are still in flash - unlike with a RAM cache. They talk about faster bootups too, which would require keeping sectors read shortly after powerup in flash until next powerup.
Why does any of this require OS hooks? If you're going to have OS hooks, you might as well glue a USB thumb drive to the hard drive and be done with it. (And in fact, an md-like linux driver to combine two block devices in a manner like the above would be a great hack.)
Everyone has multiple sets of DNA. Some of your mothers stem cells migrate to
your body before and during birth. There, they been documented to become
immune cells, heart cells in the case of an infant with a weak heart, and
other needed parts to help an infant survive. The average person has about 50
million of his mothers cells still alive in his or her body in adulthood. The
chances of this affecting a standard DNA sample are infinitesimal, of course.
However, 1 in a million adults is a chimera, with significant portions of
alternate DNA. Sometimes, twin embryos merge instead of developing separately
- the ultimate siamese twin.
This leads to heartbreaking legal situations. A mother applied for welfare
benefits. When they did DNA testing to make sure the kids were hers, DNA
testing showed half were not, and they took half her kids away. Her
obstetrician and her husband testified under oath that they had observed the
kids birth, but to the bureaucracy, DNA was incontrovertible. Years later, a
doctor interested in chimerism noticed her case, took multiple DNA samples
from many locations, and showed that she had 2 major and one minor DNA
profile. The minor was her mother, the 2 major profiles were her and her
fraternal sister. The embryos had merged, and half her eggs were one DNA and
half her sisters (or vice versa - it's hard to say if it's her or her sister).
A winning athlete was accused of blood doping (blood transfusion before the competition to increase stamina) and lost his medal, despite medical testimony that he was a chimera, and had two types of bone marrow DNA, and hence two types of blood.
I have no problem with traffic shaping. I would love to be able to flag a portion of the packets leaving my linux router as "low latency" or "high bandwidth". I am even happy to pay extra for high priority packets. What is evil about the current ISP proposals is that *they*, not consumers, get to pick what is high priority and what is not. That is the censorship issue, not the traffic shaping itself.
Internet Qos should work like parcel delivery. How would you like it if the post office, not you, decided which of your parcels got "next day" and which got "ground"? If ISPs would implement consumer choice QOS, they could charge a premium for priority packets. Geeks would use iptables to select which packets get priority, while end users with no interest in the details would have simple switches for common needs in their consumer broadband router: for example, "make VOIP high priority". ISPs could even offer to prioritize traffic for end-users that chose it - as long as they don't force it on the rest of us.
I used P-code also, and other ancient virtual machines from the '60s. IMHO, however, the key feature of the Java virtual machine is the ability to create a secure sandbox for arbitrary p-code. The byte-code verifier allows maintaining the security even when compiling to native code. I don't know whether Java was the first with these features (and I seem to recall a similar verifier for some other obscure language), but it has succeeded in becoming the first widely used language with such features. As I recall, a subset of Java was even proved secure (in that you couldn't escape the VM semantics). Naturally, JNI libraries are necessary to do anything useful (like IO), and every JNI library is a potential security hole (as is every SecurityManager method). But at least Java VM security narrows the areas of concern.
integrated with ZFS is the "high end enterprise feature" that is most attractive about Solaris. While the cost issue dragged us away from AIX (robust LVM integrated with JFS), my years with Linux have been filled with homesickness for features that even in AIX 4.x were way ahead of the latest and greatest in the Linux world. At this point, if it came down to buying an IBM server with AIX or a Sun server with Solaris, Solaris would win because of the open source aspect. Both are high priced (but worth it for many applications) options compared to generic/Dell servers running Linux/RedHat.
I am uneasy about the demise of the PowerPC coalition and the hegemony of x86. I would also be inclined toward any non-Intel open source solution (e.g. Linux on IBM Power or Solaris on Sun hardware) - but that would necessarily take a back seat to cost. Part of the cost at this point would be relearning the Solaris/AIX environments after so many years using RedHat derived Linux almost exclusively. Both of these considerations are why Open Solaris on generic Intel is not an obvious winner.
I think the OP's point is that this may be used in such a way that the parents don't bother devising their own system for raising their child based on their own child's needs/interests/wants...basically, using someone elses "system" for raising their own child.
Also known in the USA as "public school".
Seriously, I've filtered my childrens web browsing through squid since RedHat 7.2 (how long ago is that?). What's with the patent? Usually, restrictions have less to do with inappropriate content, and more to do with, "no, you can't watch/play... until you finish your homework." The Microsoft system sounds worse than useless. Once, a porn email with embedded images slipped past my spam filter. 10 year old daughter had little idea what they were seeing, other than a vague feeling of something "not right" and called mom - mom and dad did the freaking out. (Is emailing porn to minors a criminal offense?)
Yes, appropriate content varies widely by child. One daughter had nightmares about "ducks biting her". No, "Jurassic Park" is not appropriate. Another daughter is a budding Lara Croft, and adores action/adventure. Currently wants to join Coast Guard. (Cue a dose of reality to meet real accident/war victims and see real animals slaughtered [for food] so that she doesn't think it is all "fun".)
Slashdot Mirror
Media companies charge more for rental copies - usually over $100. So $135 for replacement cost was very likely accurate (although perhaps they should have prorated it since they have to replace worn copies). I don't know if rental copies are specially marked. If not, you could have bought a personal copy and offered it as the replacement.
A guy at our church used to be a domestic terrorist. He had joined a KKK group. When he was finally caught and imprisoned, he had bombed dozens of black churches and synagogues. Initially, prison made him worse. But during a long stretch of solitary confinement, he finally took stock of his life and asked God to help him change into a better person.
I worked for the Kuwait Embassy many years ago, and heard a different version from the secretaries there. At that time, Kuwaiti students had their tuition paid at American Colleges, and $50,000 "spending money" (!) - provided they kept a certain GPA. Our software tracked their GPA, "stipend" payments, and sent warning letters when their GPA started slipping - something about enjoying the weather this time of year on an oil platform in the Baltic sea. As the story goes, one student was a big fan of US technology. He bought a fully decked out van, with cruise control, and a top of the line stereo. So he starts down the freeway, turns on the cruise control, and goes to the back to listen to the stereo...
One of the unexpected bennies of going all Linux at our household was discovering that a bunch of Windows 3.1 and Dos software that no longer runs on modern Windows (games and educational) suddenly works again. The kids are delighted. JETPACK.EXE might not have 3D graphics, but the gameplay is great. For modern Windows software, I think you'll find that Virtual Box will run any XP software that wine doesn't handle. Or buy VMware and run just about anything that doesn't require high-performance video. Or buy win4lin (paravirtualized Windows for Linux) to run multi-media Windows software better than Windows.
It also auto-mounts all partitions on USB drives. There are system partitions on my USB drive that I don't want auto-mounted. The drive is relatively permanent despite being connected via USB.
That is really cool. Sure, rsync has been doing that for years for us geeks, but Apple took the concept and gave it a name and metaphor that I think everyone will understand. The metaphor will still work when they introduce the Apple remote Time Machine service for internet backups. I don't have a Mac, I'm a Linux guy (like to hack on projects), but I can appreciate excellent UI design.
A layman's explanation is that focus fusion creates a long strand of plasma via initial energy input. Then, the strand is magnetically "cracked" like a whip, initiating a collapse from one end. A wave of magnetically confined plasma moves down the strand, gaining energy and getting smaller - just like a whip. If you do it right, the confined area reaches fusion temperature and density before it gets to the end of the strand - just like a whip goes supersonic before the snap reaches the end - the "crack" you hear is the sonic boom from the tip of the whip. The elegant part of this scheme is that electrons go sideways as beta radiation (losing some energy in xray radiation), and the newly created alpha particles all go in the same direction as the "snap" (since they were all moving that direction with the plasma pocket. So a good deal of the fusion energy is converted directly to electricity by providing nice targets for the electrons at the side and alpha particles at one end. The problems are getting the plasma whip to "crack" consistently, and not losing too much energy to the xrays.
I have an ATI ES1000 (Dell SC440) that is supposed to have 2D acceleration, including xvideo. The driver reports working xvideo, but actually playing a video (on xine, mplayer, or totem) gives a blue screen where the video should be. (And the same software on older 2D only ATI cards works fine).
Only if *I* am the one defining what is "bulk" and what is not. How would you like it if UPS decided for you which packages to send Ground, and which to send NextDay? QoS is great if setting the QoS bits in packets leaving my computer causes my ISP to do something different (for an extra charge, even, like NextDay delivery). Non technical end-users would have checkboxes on their cable router setup with options like "optimize VOIP (minimize latency) - extra ISP charges may accrue". Geeks would have iptables...
The SOE (British intelligence agency tasked with things like operations in occupied Europe) only supported the resistance for its morale boosting and propaganda value - most actions in occupied France were carried out by British operatives.
Since conservatives credit the "Main Stream Media" with turning a decisive victory in Vietnam into defeat, it seems to me that "morale boosting and propaganda" are indeed instrumental for victory. Some of those very brave resistance fighters, though few perhaps, have very inspiring stories. I'm thinking at the moment of Jacques Lusseyran.
many years ago when they started their campaign to ban the element Chlorine. (I kid you not.)
While outwardly welcoming the Nazis with open arms, the French underground was instrumental in defeating Hitler. Poland bravely met the Nazis in open battle, and got wiped out. You could say the French were more devious, but it took guts to be in the underground too. Those who were caught went to the infamous death camps.
Most science textbooks have a mythic chapter concerning the Origin of Life in the Primordial Soup. This does not mean the story is false - just that the telling has taken on the stylized reverent tones of myth: "Myths of Cosmic Origin". In the same way, the Cockroach Myth is important because of what it implies about our sense of vulnerability and cosmic justice in the event of nuclear war. It will live on even if shown to be false in a literal sense. Spiderman doesn't have to be a historical fact to inform our ethics and morals.
Equating myth with falsehood is a modern trend. Many are uncomfortable with myths that dare to intrude on the "real world" by turning out to be historically or literally true.
I actually already have several decoy addresses, which are used to train my bayes filter. That count is emails to my private domain. When you run your own mail gateway, that is what you can expect very quickly. Spammers get a list of all domains and start guessing localparts. SMTP protocol allows them 100 guesses per connection, although I ban their IP after 5.
You are exactly correct. A huge number of spam connections are dictionary attacks searching for valid localparts. After 5 invalid RCPTs, I add the connect IP to a banned list for 7 days. There are about 500000 IPs in the banned list. This saves a lot of bandwidth, but still. It is pointless to change emails. I would be more interested in trying a new mail protocol that enforces sender authentication: IM2000 or Jabber. I'd have my mail server send a 551 with instructions for the new protocol. But this requires that it be easily available to most end-users - i.e. a Windows, Mac, and Linux client.
Checking my mail stats, since 4 am this morning, I've received 51985 emails, 51909 of which were filtered as spam. That's 99%. Checking the bandwidth monitor, the spam has consumed a steady 100Kbit/s since 4 am, despite being mostly blocked in SMTP envelope via SPF and reputation (SPF blocks forgeries, reputation blocks spammers with the balls to use their own domain).
Nevertheless, the take home point is that subtle threats and counter-threats are useless unless you are prepared to actually carry them out in tedious detail.
Heh. I know reading comprehension is not the greatest when trying to sneak in slashdot at work, but I'll repeat the (hardly the only) idea I made previously: Keep the sectors read shortly after the last power up in NV read cache.
How does the drive decide what fraction of the drive to allocate to boot-up sectors versus most-accessed sectors versus write-back caching?
Again, to repeat from my previous post: don't use flash for read cache, except boot up sectors per above. Use volatile RAM for read cache in operation. To elaborate a little, I would record a weight that decays rapidly after power up/reset. Would resetting the drive during operation (perhaps because of some hardware lockup) destroy the boot cache? Absolutely - but it will get refreshed again at the boot - no different than loading a new kernel.
The allocation between write cache and boot cache depends is adjusted at each boot. Sectors that are read again at boot could slide the partition. Note that *which* sectors can be recorded in NV without recording their contents - for the purpose of adjust the boot cache size. Once the OS starts reading sectors that are different between boots, they don't go in the boot cache. Again, the longer the elapsed time since boot, the less important the sector is to the boot cache (since the user is already bored) - hence the decaying weight.
Why does any of this require OS hooks? If you're going to have OS hooks, you might as well glue a USB thumb drive to the hard drive and be done with it. (And in fact, an md-like linux driver to combine two block devices in a manner like the above would be a great hack.)
This leads to heartbreaking legal situations. A mother applied for welfare benefits. When they did DNA testing to make sure the kids were hers, DNA testing showed half were not, and they took half her kids away. Her obstetrician and her husband testified under oath that they had observed the kids birth, but to the bureaucracy, DNA was incontrovertible. Years later, a doctor interested in chimerism noticed her case, took multiple DNA samples from many locations, and showed that she had 2 major and one minor DNA profile. The minor was her mother, the 2 major profiles were her and her fraternal sister. The embryos had merged, and half her eggs were one DNA and half her sisters (or vice versa - it's hard to say if it's her or her sister).
A winning athlete was accused of blood doping (blood transfusion before the competition to increase stamina) and lost his medal, despite medical testimony that he was a chimera, and had two types of bone marrow DNA, and hence two types of blood.
Internet Qos should work like parcel delivery. How would you like it if the post office, not you, decided which of your parcels got "next day" and which got "ground"? If ISPs would implement consumer choice QOS, they could charge a premium for priority packets. Geeks would use iptables to select which packets get priority, while end users with no interest in the details would have simple switches for common needs in their consumer broadband router: for example, "make VOIP high priority". ISPs could even offer to prioritize traffic for end-users that chose it - as long as they don't force it on the rest of us.
I used P-code also, and other ancient virtual machines from the '60s. IMHO, however, the key feature of the Java virtual machine is the ability to create a secure sandbox for arbitrary p-code. The byte-code verifier allows maintaining the security even when compiling to native code. I don't know whether Java was the first with these features (and I seem to recall a similar verifier for some other obscure language), but it has succeeded in becoming the first widely used language with such features. As I recall, a subset of Java was even proved secure (in that you couldn't escape the VM semantics). Naturally, JNI libraries are necessary to do anything useful (like IO), and every JNI library is a potential security hole (as is every SecurityManager method). But at least Java VM security narrows the areas of concern.
I am uneasy about the demise of the PowerPC coalition and the hegemony of x86. I would also be inclined toward any non-Intel open source solution (e.g. Linux on IBM Power or Solaris on Sun hardware) - but that would necessarily take a back seat to cost. Part of the cost at this point would be relearning the Solaris/AIX environments after so many years using RedHat derived Linux almost exclusively. Both of these considerations are why Open Solaris on generic Intel is not an obvious winner.
Also known in the USA as "public school".
Seriously, I've filtered my childrens web browsing through squid since RedHat 7.2 (how long ago is that?). What's with the patent? Usually, restrictions have less to do with inappropriate content, and more to do with, "no, you can't watch/play ... until you finish your homework." The Microsoft system sounds worse than useless. Once, a porn email with embedded images slipped past my spam filter. 10 year old daughter had little idea what they were seeing, other than a vague feeling of something "not right" and called mom - mom and dad did the freaking out. (Is emailing porn to minors a criminal offense?)
Yes, appropriate content varies widely by child. One daughter had nightmares about "ducks biting her". No, "Jurassic Park" is not appropriate. Another daughter is a budding Lara Croft, and adores action/adventure. Currently wants to join Coast Guard. (Cue a dose of reality to meet real accident/war victims and see real animals slaughtered [for food] so that she doesn't think it is all "fun".)