The contents of all storage media associated with OIT facilities may be considered property of CMU
Are you an OIT facility? No? Then don't worry about that. If they wanted explicit access to your machine, it'd have been phrased that way. They're talking about lab machines and servers, i.e. hardware that is owned by the university, likely in order to deal with the problems associated with "Well, that jackass is running a porn site off of his university-provided FTP space. We kinda have to delete that." or clueless people who go over their e-mail quota.
This is academia, not the corporate world. Try looking up the academic freedom policies your university enforces-- odds are good anyone even trying to monitor your individual network use *even just over the campus network* without prior notice or an outside legal complaint is going to get shit-canned. If any of the policies seriously conflict with that ideal, take it up with the dean of students and they'll probably go beat people up for you.
Hell, if you want confirmation of any of that, call the helpdesk and ask them. If something is particularly annoying for you and you sound like you know what you're doing and won't cause any problems, they'll probably tell you exactly how to get around it just so they can get you off their phone.
Oh, so by 50+ hours of gameplay in, you're only occasionally seeing new things? And this is Valve's fault, for only putting out a game that you've been playing for 50+ hours? Or maybe you could try the other four campaigns? Maybe go play a MMO like all of the other crackheads?
L4D is a great game, and wonderfully entertaining in the time that I have to play it. If you have too much time, maybe you should get a fucking job.
I have my issues with L4D, mainly around the matchmaking system, but I'll gladly pay $50 for L4D2 when it comes out. If you don't want to, then don't, but dissing L4D/Valve because you want more free stuff is bullshit. The content and polish that's already there is what I'm paying for, and L4D2 should add even more.
So, a standard incandescent bulb puts out something like 10-15% of the energy input as visible light?...and this process boosts that up to maybe 15-25% efficiency?
This is interesting from a materials science perspective and for lighting technology in the near-term, but hardly what I'd call super-efficient. Wake me up in a couple years when they have the bugs worked out of LED lighting...
The employer is obligated to provide a safe working environment, provide training, protective equipment, supervision, and to protect the employee from their own stupidity.
Agreed, but never attribute to stupidity what can be equally explained by lack of appropriate knowledge or training. The world is a complicated enough place without giving people enough information to avoid unknowingly replicating known mistakes.
Nobody has enough knowledge or training to work safely in every field, there are just too damn many things that can injure or kill when working with energy-dense technology.
That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one.
RTFA. 50k potential addresses, some of which are quite possibly already in use for legitimate sites? Or simply registered under false pretenses? Any one of which could potentially have been r00ted already? Until zero-hour, there's no way to know... so we've got 50k potential command and control servers that need to be either intercepted, blocked, or checked for infection if we're actually planning some form of action 'beforehand'. This is a non-trivial enterprise.
As for finding the people behind this afterward? All they need to do is establish an effectively un-traceable communications channel with the main C&C network. If I were planning it, I'd have several modified conficker variants triggering early to compromise a couple thousand machines, then use that to obfuscate the primary C&C channels.
How many hops through infected machines do you need to create complete deniability when all you need to do is set up a very low-bandwidth communications channel to update the main bot network? 10? 100?
Think infinitely nested russian dolls, all of which point to somewhere else as the true source, or even a dozen somewhere elses.
Nor, with the active presence of the US Coast Guard and a stable, cooperative Mexico, will pirates be a serious problem in the Gulf of Mexico.
A stable, cooperative Mexico is no longer a really safe bet. When narcotrafficking gangs are seriously challenging the legitimacy/stability of the government over a significant part of a country's territory, all bets are off.
The i7 isn't the half of it. The linked stats suggest that it'll be endowed with the mobile version of a GeForce 280. That'll probably take >150W at load.
This is a 'laptop' designed to be used in the set of all areas with a table to put it on that are within 10' of a power outlet.
You obviously do not realize that here in the US most universities would not exist without the income generated by their football(US) teams.
Yeah, that would make a lot of sense... if the yearly operating budget for a large public university wasn't measured in billions of dollars. Major universities are huge institutions, athletic revenues are a drop in the bucket.
Very true. It amazes me that middle class anarchists believe that if the current society is obliterated it will be a net gain for them because a more equitable society will replace it. Historically you're much more likely to end up with a some sort of Pol Pot style nightmare.
Even as a hardcore liberal, that's my main argument in favor of gun ownership, a well-armed populace, with personal liberty and responsibility as our most essential civic virtues. Where guns are prohibited, the only people with guns are criminals... and the government. In Cambodia, the Khmer took the guns first, and then massacred 40% of their population.
I just wish other people looked at history and saw the same cautionary tales. The concept that democratic societies are somehow automagically inoculated against totalitarianism strikes me as hopelessly naive. For example, I'm really creeped out at the growing state-sponsored helplessness of our our brothers and sisters in the UK.
Just more proof that the motheaten left/right paradigm that talking heads are always blathering about hasn't been relevant since the French Revolution. We're all in this together as a society, and if you can't trust your law-abiding neighbors with guns, you need to get to know them better.
Good ventilation is enough, but there's a reason most halogen bulbs are open-bulb outdoor or free-standing installations. You don't want that kind of heat output in an enclosed space-- that'd be the reason most lighting fixtures have a maximum wattage rating, and it typically isn't the wiring they're running to the bulbs.
8kW is a reasonable amount of power. I have a hard time seeing normal minimal-conditions usage beat that without the involvement of an electric dryer or electric heating-- if you've got gas appliances, your peak consumption is probably a LOT lower. YMMV
No, the point is to provide revenue for the government, and depending on your ideological leanings, either use the market system to encourage conservation or unreasonably distort price levels and mess up the market with all of your unwarranted government intervention.
As far as taxation goes, being even roughly proportional is about as good as it gets, and the gas tax is pretty close to proportionate to road usage and wear and tear, within some fudge factors. It's as close or closer to proportional than any of the alternatives, and has the added benefit of being much simpler to administer than anything else that's even close.
There is no perfect solution, and holding out for one is an open invitation to screw things up. So, unless you're planning to set up a labyrinthine bureaucratic/technical hell of graduated usage fees for any given stretch of road... stop worrying about the poor, sad lawnmower/offroad gas consumers who constitute an insignificant fraction of the whole. Even if they're not causing wear and tear on public roads, lawnmowers tend to have nasty emissions and offroad travel tends to cause other problems.
Yes, because fleet-owned vehicles with maintenance staff and people who drive for a living are notoriously bad about spending money to keep their cars running, especially compared to everyday commuters who hop in their car and expect it to just go?
I'd say regular, comprehensive maintenance is a better phrase.
a chemical powder use for adding butter-flavor to microwave popcorn causing lung-disease in factory workers [osha.gov] (it's only hazardous when inhaled, not when eaten).
Microwaving the oils of that popcorny goodness sure doesn't volatilize them into a miasma of oily-popcorn-smell which is inhaled by everyone in the vicinity.
Personally, I can't stand the smell of manufactured popcorn.:P
I'd update the BIOS first, that'll probably take care of at least some problems, and maybe try increasing the voltage to the northbridge by 0.05V or so. Oh, and try each questionable RAM stick individually, or in a known-good system. Bad sticks do happen, and just one bad stick will keep you from booting and complicate things a lot. One of the four sticks I purchased was just bad, and I wasted a couple hours trying to get it working by switching slots and changing voltages before I replaced it and was fine.
If it's still not working, it might be worth it to just spend $40 on some normal DDR2-800 RAM. Unless you're planning a serious overclock, lowering the RAM divider should let you run the CPU/FSB as fast as you want while keeping the RAM at 800 or below.
Faster RAM frequencies are nice and shiny, but the overall performance gain for overclocking the RAM is minimal under most circumstances.
Also, you'll usually want the CPU multiplier as high as it'll go, then adjust the FSB upward until you reach the CPU's stability limit. That'll get you the highest performance performance with your mobo/FSB/RAM not running at their bleeding edge, typically leading to higher stability.
The RAM. Once you get over about DDR2-6400, you start to reach the normal limits of what can be done within the DDR2 1.8V standard specs. Anything rated higher is intended to live in a different world that's out of the DDR2 spec, usually 2.0V or even 2.1V/2.2V, and budget motherboards often have trouble giving them what they need.
That said, I'm running my IP35 Pro/E6750 @ 425MHz FSB, wayyy over the 333MHz stock. Gawd, I love what you can do with overclocking the Core2s and some quality components to back it up...
luckily such crack pot schemes don't get off the ground.
It'd be hard to get off the ground, half an inch of water evenly distributed across the globe ends up around 1500 cubic miles of water-- a bit more than half the volume of Lake Superior, and substantially more than any of the other Great Lakes. Oh, or in other terms, about 7% of the total freshwater in the world. The world is big.
Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.
The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.
Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.
You seriously think you are going to fry your motherboard if you pay less for a standard designed product that may possibly have a slightly shortly life due to lower grade components ?
Yes. Buy a cheap generic PSU, and you don't know what you'll end up with. It may work. It may not. It may be so deficient that catastrophic failure fries components downstream. "Lower quality" works against you in two ways-- lower rated performance specifications for the components, and greater allowable variance within the components supplied. The problem is that you have no information about what you are actually getting.
Your system is spinning up a HDD and suddenly wants 20 amps of current for a short time. Your cheap PSU is rated to handle 16A on that rail, but a temporary spike just stresses it a bit and heats things up. Normally it would survive, but one of the capacitors running that rail is on the lower end of the reliability curve and shorts. *POP*, acrid smoke, a series of short circuits, and depending on the layout and where in the AC input cycle that happened, you have either a dead PSU or a dead PSU that sent out a voltage spike and took something else with it.
Sure, that's a worst-case scenario, and it's remarkably bad enough that our minds are wired to see that as a much lower-probability event than it actually is. So, I'll say that it doesn't take catastrophic failure to dissuade me from purchasing a cheap power supply.
All it takes is the knowledge that even minor variations in output voltage are like little gremlins in your computer. Transient under-voltage to your RAM? Oops, some of the bits may have flipped! Hopefully that wasn't anything important, like a HDD write queue order or the handle for core operating system components.
Slightly wonky power supplies are the #1 cause of untraceable system instability. You get what you pay for, and spending $30 more on a name-brand PSU with quality components and active power-factor correction instead of putting that money toward another 5% CPU speed jump just makes sense.
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The contents of all storage media associated with OIT facilities may be considered property of CMU
Are you an OIT facility? No? Then don't worry about that. If they wanted explicit access to your machine, it'd have been phrased that way. They're talking about lab machines and servers, i.e. hardware that is owned by the university, likely in order to deal with the problems associated with "Well, that jackass is running a porn site off of his university-provided FTP space. We kinda have to delete that." or clueless people who go over their e-mail quota.
This is academia, not the corporate world. Try looking up the academic freedom policies your university enforces-- odds are good anyone even trying to monitor your individual network use *even just over the campus network* without prior notice or an outside legal complaint is going to get shit-canned. If any of the policies seriously conflict with that ideal, take it up with the dean of students and they'll probably go beat people up for you.
Hell, if you want confirmation of any of that, call the helpdesk and ask them. If something is particularly annoying for you and you sound like you know what you're doing and won't cause any problems, they'll probably tell you exactly how to get around it just so they can get you off their phone.
by the 50th playthrough.
Oh, so by 50+ hours of gameplay in, you're only occasionally seeing new things? And this is Valve's fault, for only putting out a game that you've been playing for 50+ hours? Or maybe you could try the other four campaigns? Maybe go play a MMO like all of the other crackheads?
L4D is a great game, and wonderfully entertaining in the time that I have to play it. If you have too much time, maybe you should get a fucking job.
I have my issues with L4D, mainly around the matchmaking system, but I'll gladly pay $50 for L4D2 when it comes out. If you don't want to, then don't, but dissing L4D/Valve because you want more free stuff is bullshit. The content and polish that's already there is what I'm paying for, and L4D2 should add even more.
So, a standard incandescent bulb puts out something like 10-15% of the energy input as visible light? ...and this process boosts that up to maybe 15-25% efficiency?
This is interesting from a materials science perspective and for lighting technology in the near-term, but hardly what I'd call super-efficient. Wake me up in a couple years when they have the bugs worked out of LED lighting...
Yeah, but I doubt that there's a WoW player that's a illiterate mass-murdering celebrity billionaire terrorist!
Exactly, if Paris Hilton played WoW, the tabloids would already know.
The employer is obligated to provide a safe working environment, provide training, protective equipment, supervision, and to protect the employee from their own stupidity.
Agreed, but never attribute to stupidity what can be equally explained by lack of appropriate knowledge or training. The world is a complicated enough place without giving people enough information to avoid unknowingly replicating known mistakes.
Nobody has enough knowledge or training to work safely in every field, there are just too damn many things that can injure or kill when working with energy-dense technology.
and if there are clouds, you can be supported by spooky fusion at a distance!
The 8800s used the G80 chip, and are fine. Anything else in the 8xxx range and at least some earlier revisions of the 9600 are bad news.
All cards based off of G84 (8600) or G86 (8300, 8400, 8500) are dead silicon walking, as well as at least some of the earlier revisions of G94. (9600)
I'm a specialist in post-nazi argumentation.
That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one.
RTFA. 50k potential addresses, some of which are quite possibly already in use for legitimate sites? Or simply registered under false pretenses? Any one of which could potentially have been r00ted already? Until zero-hour, there's no way to know... so we've got 50k potential command and control servers that need to be either intercepted, blocked, or checked for infection if we're actually planning some form of action 'beforehand'. This is a non-trivial enterprise.
As for finding the people behind this afterward? All they need to do is establish an effectively un-traceable communications channel with the main C&C network. If I were planning it, I'd have several modified conficker variants triggering early to compromise a couple thousand machines, then use that to obfuscate the primary C&C channels.
How many hops through infected machines do you need to create complete deniability when all you need to do is set up a very low-bandwidth communications channel to update the main bot network? 10? 100?
Think infinitely nested russian dolls, all of which point to somewhere else as the true source, or even a dozen somewhere elses.
Oh great. Now we're going to start getting "B1GG3R F1SH 4 U" spam and the world's gonna end in dinosaur feet.
Nor, with the active presence of the US Coast Guard and a stable, cooperative Mexico, will pirates be a serious problem in the Gulf of Mexico.
A stable, cooperative Mexico is no longer a really safe bet. When narcotrafficking gangs are seriously challenging the legitimacy/stability of the government over a significant part of a country's territory, all bets are off.
The i7 isn't the half of it. The linked stats suggest that it'll be endowed with the mobile version of a GeForce 280. That'll probably take >150W at load.
This is a 'laptop' designed to be used in the set of all areas with a table to put it on that are within 10' of a power outlet.
You obviously do not realize that here in the US most universities would not exist without the income generated by their football(US) teams.
Yeah, that would make a lot of sense... if the yearly operating budget for a large public university wasn't measured in billions of dollars. Major universities are huge institutions, athletic revenues are a drop in the bucket.
I've yet to hear of a prison that has a surplus of cash lying around either.
In any bureaucracy, a surplus of cash is by nature a self-resolving problem:
"Quick, spend it before they notice and reduce next year's budget!"
From that perspective, prisons simply have the additional advantage of operating under low-oversight conditions.
Very true. It amazes me that middle class anarchists believe that if the current society is obliterated it will be a net gain for them because a more equitable society will replace it. Historically you're much more likely to end up with a some sort of Pol Pot style nightmare.
Even as a hardcore liberal, that's my main argument in favor of gun ownership, a well-armed populace, with personal liberty and responsibility as our most essential civic virtues. Where guns are prohibited, the only people with guns are criminals... and the government. In Cambodia, the Khmer took the guns first, and then massacred 40% of their population.
I just wish other people looked at history and saw the same cautionary tales. The concept that democratic societies are somehow automagically inoculated against totalitarianism strikes me as hopelessly naive. For example, I'm really creeped out at the growing state-sponsored helplessness of our our brothers and sisters in the UK.
Just more proof that the motheaten left/right paradigm that talking heads are always blathering about hasn't been relevant since the French Revolution. We're all in this together as a society, and if you can't trust your law-abiding neighbors with guns, you need to get to know them better.
Good ventilation is enough, but there's a reason most halogen bulbs are open-bulb outdoor or free-standing installations. You don't want that kind of heat output in an enclosed space-- that'd be the reason most lighting fixtures have a maximum wattage rating, and it typically isn't the wiring they're running to the bulbs.
8kW is a reasonable amount of power. I have a hard time seeing normal minimal-conditions usage beat that without the involvement of an electric dryer or electric heating-- if you've got gas appliances, your peak consumption is probably a LOT lower. YMMV
No, the point is to provide revenue for the government, and depending on your ideological leanings, either use the market system to encourage conservation or unreasonably distort price levels and mess up the market with all of your unwarranted government intervention.
As far as taxation goes, being even roughly proportional is about as good as it gets, and the gas tax is pretty close to proportionate to road usage and wear and tear, within some fudge factors. It's as close or closer to proportional than any of the alternatives, and has the added benefit of being much simpler to administer than anything else that's even close.
There is no perfect solution, and holding out for one is an open invitation to screw things up. So, unless you're planning to set up a labyrinthine bureaucratic/technical hell of graduated usage fees for any given stretch of road... stop worrying about the poor, sad lawnmower/offroad gas consumers who constitute an insignificant fraction of the whole. Even if they're not causing wear and tear on public roads, lawnmowers tend to have nasty emissions and offroad travel tends to cause other problems.
All this with minimal maintenance.
Yes, because fleet-owned vehicles with maintenance staff and people who drive for a living are notoriously bad about spending money to keep their cars running, especially compared to everyday commuters who hop in their car and expect it to just go?
I'd say regular, comprehensive maintenance is a better phrase.
a chemical powder use for adding butter-flavor to microwave popcorn causing lung-disease in factory workers [osha.gov] (it's only hazardous when inhaled, not when eaten).
Microwaving the oils of that popcorny goodness sure doesn't volatilize them into a miasma of oily-popcorn-smell which is inhaled by everyone in the vicinity.
Personally, I can't stand the smell of manufactured popcorn. :P
I'd update the BIOS first, that'll probably take care of at least some problems, and maybe try increasing the voltage to the northbridge by 0.05V or so. Oh, and try each questionable RAM stick individually, or in a known-good system. Bad sticks do happen, and just one bad stick will keep you from booting and complicate things a lot. One of the four sticks I purchased was just bad, and I wasted a couple hours trying to get it working by switching slots and changing voltages before I replaced it and was fine.
If it's still not working, it might be worth it to just spend $40 on some normal DDR2-800 RAM. Unless you're planning a serious overclock, lowering the RAM divider should let you run the CPU/FSB as fast as you want while keeping the RAM at 800 or below.
Faster RAM frequencies are nice and shiny, but the overall performance gain for overclocking the RAM is minimal under most circumstances.
Also, you'll usually want the CPU multiplier as high as it'll go, then adjust the FSB upward until you reach the CPU's stability limit. That'll get you the highest performance performance with your mobo/FSB/RAM not running at their bleeding edge, typically leading to higher stability.
The RAM. Once you get over about DDR2-6400, you start to reach the normal limits of what can be done within the DDR2 1.8V standard specs. Anything rated higher is intended to live in a different world that's out of the DDR2 spec, usually 2.0V or even 2.1V/2.2V, and budget motherboards often have trouble giving them what they need.
That said, I'm running my IP35 Pro/E6750 @ 425MHz FSB, wayyy over the 333MHz stock. Gawd, I love what you can do with overclocking the Core2s and some quality components to back it up...
luckily such crack pot schemes don't get off the ground.
It'd be hard to get off the ground, half an inch of water evenly distributed across the globe ends up around 1500 cubic miles of water-- a bit more than half the volume of Lake Superior, and substantially more than any of the other Great Lakes. Oh, or in other terms, about 7% of the total freshwater in the world. The world is big.
Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.
The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.
Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.
You seriously think you are going to fry your motherboard if you pay less for a standard designed product that may possibly have a slightly shortly life due to lower grade components ?
Yes. Buy a cheap generic PSU, and you don't know what you'll end up with. It may work. It may not. It may be so deficient that catastrophic failure fries components downstream. "Lower quality" works against you in two ways-- lower rated performance specifications for the components, and greater allowable variance within the components supplied. The problem is that you have no information about what you are actually getting.
Your system is spinning up a HDD and suddenly wants 20 amps of current for a short time. Your cheap PSU is rated to handle 16A on that rail, but a temporary spike just stresses it a bit and heats things up. Normally it would survive, but one of the capacitors running that rail is on the lower end of the reliability curve and shorts. *POP*, acrid smoke, a series of short circuits, and depending on the layout and where in the AC input cycle that happened, you have either a dead PSU or a dead PSU that sent out a voltage spike and took something else with it.
Sure, that's a worst-case scenario, and it's remarkably bad enough that our minds are wired to see that as a much lower-probability event than it actually is. So, I'll say that it doesn't take catastrophic failure to dissuade me from purchasing a cheap power supply.
All it takes is the knowledge that even minor variations in output voltage are like little gremlins in your computer. Transient under-voltage to your RAM? Oops, some of the bits may have flipped! Hopefully that wasn't anything important, like a HDD write queue order or the handle for core operating system components.
Slightly wonky power supplies are the #1 cause of untraceable system instability. You get what you pay for, and spending $30 more on a name-brand PSU with quality components and active power-factor correction instead of putting that money toward another 5% CPU speed jump just makes sense.