I had just gotten my first job as a UNIX admin, and my make-work learning task was to resurrect a machine which had just been replaced by a new, faster machine. The old box was still in its rack next to the new one, because the new box had all the old disks cabled to it. I was supposed to be getting the old one to net-boot off a root on the new server (a great way to learn, by the way, since you have access to the root filesystem even when you screw it up so much it won't boot).
Anyway, I hung the machine some how, hard enough that our console server's break didn't drop into the boot monitor, so I called up operations and asked them to powercycle it. I described in exquisite detail where it was, where the power switch was, etc. Took them a damn long time but finally my machine started to boot and we got off the phone. Later I mentioned how long it took to my boss and he had me repeat my explanation. "You just described the new machine," he told me. Sure enough, I had mixed up left/right because I was trying to send them to the back instead of the front. Luckily they were smart enough not to reboot the production machine.
Several people have explained what's going on, and even quoted the press conference where this was discussed. One of the other points from that same press conference was that the pigments of the calibration target were carefully chosen so that each is useful for multiple filters. That sounds strange if you think about the pancams like a pocket digital, but they're not. They use a filter wheel, so each wavelength images all of the calibration target. By making each "color" on the target cover multiple wavelengths they get more information. I think the specific example was that the blue target shows up as bright white to the near-IR filter they were using. The result is that in the *composite* they are wacky colors, since the aggregate of the calibrations doesn't "make sense".
In other exciting news, this morning they showed some of the mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) images. That data is very hard to interpret, so it is ripe for crackpot articles that can be posted on/. with no editorial review.
AOL won't let me send email to any of their customers, just because I run my own SMTP server.
I ran into the same problem. Prodigy is another example. I'm not as limited as some of the other posters (I have secured smtp servers available to me that don't mangle my domain etc) but I didn't want to send ALL of my mail through a relay just to appease AOL. What I did was enable mailertable, for example by:
If your ISP's server is just slow (ie it doesn't mangle your mail) just put it in there and only the domains that care will see mail from them instead of you directly.
If you see a lot of blockiness, chances are your TV is not adjusted correctly. Most sets come from the factory with brightness and contrast settings that are way out of line. Blacks are gray and everything in shadow is too bright. The encoding blocks up a lot in dark areas, but on a well-adjusted set those will typically be dark enough that you don't notice.
If you want to talk *artifacts*, try Tivo on Basic (or even Medium) quality. That's a great way to see the mpeg process live.
Anyway, get a copy of Video Essentials (or if you're old skool, a laserdisc copy of A Video Standard, which is an earlier version of the same thing). You can often rent it, though it will not come with the color calibration gel. You can still do a lot of useful adjustments with it.
The problem with RAID5 is that the performance when degraded (due to a lost drive) is usually far worse than when the array is healthy. If you design your experiment to use the peak performance of your array then a failure will cause it to fail even though you won't lose any of the data you've gathered so far.
I suspect that the KVM initializes the mouse as a generic PS/2 mouse and then pretends to BE a mouse for each computer it is connected to. The KVM is probably ignoring the initialization that it receives (or at least ignoring the extended settings) rather than passing it on to the mouse. So it's a driver issue in the sense that the KVM's dumb internal mouse driver is not enabling the mousewheel.
There were some moles in my yard, so I bought some of the vibrating stakes that are supposed to repell them. And a load of D cell batteries to put in them. I never did get around to installing them, but the moles are gone now.
By the way, does anyone know of any other devices that use D cells these days? I have a bunch in my junk drawer...
I'm sure they're blocking a lot of mail. But you can't say it's all spam if you block it -- no one is looking at all of the blocked mail to make sure it's spam. I won an eBay auction from someone with an AOL address and discovered that I can't send mail directly to AOL from my cable modem anymore. Normally I would just let it slide, but since it was a financial transaction I had to use another server. I'm still debating whether to fix it long term or continue to ignore AOL...
At the first 2 clicks of ffw (which are 2x and 30x) on the Tivo you can easily make out everything that's going on. Three clicks (60x) reduces most commercial breaks to 2-3 seconds. Even though you have to pay careful attention at that speed to get the resume right (personally my youthful reaction time is too fast for the auto-backup that Tivo does, so I have to wait an extra beat) I still have little or no idea what the skipped commercials were. Using 30s skip is about the same unless you hit it really fast (eg anticipate at least 2 minutes of commercials and hit it 4 times rapidly) in which case you can see even less.
I was amazed at how quickly I adapted to skipping commercials (my 8 year old VCR's ~9x ffw was more like muting than skipping). Now I find it extremely frustrating to watch TV with commercials.
If you think RTBLs are great, wait until you get on one of them. It's almost Orwellian. Amazingly simple to be in one, incredibly difficult to get out.
At least you know what list you're on. If theWorld (or any other private person or ISP) adds your IP to their blacklist, you may never find out. And they're not necessarily going to have a webpage explaining the procedure for getting off the list. The 69.* netblocks are a perfect example. Centralized lists have centralized accountability.
You know how you're obsessed with your favorite hobby? Maybe it's cooking, or building PCs, or golfing. You read everything there is to read on that topic. You're subscribed to the magazines, but you're kind of sick of them because you can point out the subtle errors in the articles. You read all the reviews for the tools of the trade. Friends and family come to you for advice when they want to do something similar. You've tried all the mainstream stuff AND all the fringe stuff. You know how to get the best prices on everything you need. You have a large collection of hobby-themed junk you got as Christmas and birthday presents. You've even tried to find a way to make money with your hobby.
That's how a travel agent feels about travel. Sure, you can MAKE travel your hobby, and learn enough to do without an agent. But you can't just say, "I've got Orbitz and Travelocity, I don't need an agent!" anymore than your mom can say, "I've got shopper.com and pricewatch, I don't need Dell or Gateway to build my PC!"
All you need to break into this guy's house is a few seconds with his "keys" and a photocopier. Though I guess if you were really worried about that you could put a small label printer by the door and get a new key every time you left...
It does make connections last for a very long time. That may be part of the reason why it only sleeps for 1 second (unless you hack it). sendmail does have a connection throttle so it won't eat your machine -- I forgot to mention that I ended up adding:
define(`confMAX_DAEMON_CHILDREN',`64')dnl
since the default limit was low enough that delayed clients were in the way of legitimate mail.
I'm willing to put up with the resource drain in order to make it harder to spam in general. Sleeping for 10 seconds is nothing compared with spamassassin (gigantic regexps!) which has to run for all of the good recipients. My inbox alone got almost 10,000 junk messages in the 3 weeks around Christmas (about 2-3x normal volume). That sucked some serious CPU!
to my mc file. This causes (recent versions of) sendmail to add a short delay before responding to each bad recipient after the first one. The delay is hardcoded at 1 second (unfortunately) but I also changed the source to increase it to 10 seconds.
You can run dictionary attacks against domains I handle mail for, but at least it will take you a damn long time! I just wish everybody was doing it. Eventually it would take too long to spam effectively.
SD is faster (4x?) than MMC, in theory. But make sure the slot in your device can take advantage of that -- the Zarus SL-5x00 cannot.
Some devices only support memory (not SD accessories like bluetooth).
Stranger still, some support only MMC. The Franklin e-Bookman (a palm-class device recently on sale for $50 at costco!) manual claims to support only MMC. (and an aside, the MMC storage in the e-Bookman is not general purpose -- only certain types of data can be put on the card rather than RAM)
For whatever reason, some devices support a limited range of flash sizes. The e-Bookman is limited to 64M. The Zaurus requires a software upgrade to use 256M cards.
And finally, make sure you can easily return/exchange your card. The Zaurus, for example, can mount and read any brand of card. But a problem (driver bug? hardware bug? card bug?) causes some to become inaccessible after a suspend/resume event. You can find tables of user-tested cards online, but I wouldn't necessarily risk postage or a restocking fee on their accuracy.
I hoped to just moderate this thread, but it's not generating much good discussion.
If you are looking for features to fix usability problems then you have fundamentally misunderstood the problem. There was essentially nothing missing from the original MacOS or Amiga's Intuition that you'd need to make a usable UI. In fact, feature (and processing power) limitations have inspired some of the most usable interfaces around (PalmOS, my Nokia phone).
The other assumption of this question is the notion that usability is poorly understood. In fact, there has been extensive HCI (human/computer interaction) research, and it has produced some very readable, accessible books targeted at software people. The real question is: why don't we apply these lessons?
I don't know the technical specs, but I saw one in a gateway store and it looked terrible. It was playing one of the stock HDTV loops I've seen at hi-fi type stores. Unlike most TVs, this one didn't even have to compete against 100 neighbors, or get a video feed from a bajillion-way splitter, and it still made me cringe to look at it.
I've also seen the Sampo 42" display (which is not one of the higher res 42" displays) and it was much, MUCH nicer looking, just playing a regular DVD on a cheap player.
If Eolas wins and they have the choice between being billionaires and getting to kick Microsoft in the nuts, I'm pretty sure they'll choose to be billionaires.
I was born with a rare condition that prevents me from viewing Flash objects. Can the crack slashdot legal community advise me about how to pursue my lawsuit against the many abusers of Flash?
All the systems I have seen are either broken or have so many
locks in them that they may as well be single-threaded.
Don't you mean they had so few locks in them thay they might as well be single-threaded? Having more locks isn't a bad thing unless your critical sections have to hold more than one or two locks at a time. After all, you've got to have some kind of mutual exclusion when modifying global data, and you can only have as many threads holding locks as there are locks to hold!
To scale well you want to lock data rather than code and that can lead to many locks when you are operating on many structures. Ideally these locks each have less contention and better data sharing than "bigger" locks.
The 411 people seem to have a good hybrid solution to this problem. You call up and a computer asks you to name the city you want, and the listing. They can queue that info, and as soon as a human is ready to help you, they can hear your request (probably with dead space removed, eliminating your stammering) and their voice recognition expert system has prompted them with some likely choices. If there is any question (eg you ask for "McDonalds" in "New York") they can ask for an address or other details. When you and the operator agree on a listing, a computer is ready to read it to you as many times as you like (or "dial it for an additional fee"). This might be hell for the operators, but I bet they can clear 3-4x the volume of information inquiries than they could if they did the computerized parts.
Slashdot Mirror
I had just gotten my first job as a UNIX admin, and my make-work learning task was to resurrect a machine which had just been replaced by a new, faster machine. The old box was still in its rack next to the new one, because the new box had all the old disks cabled to it. I was supposed to be getting the old one to net-boot off a root on the new server (a great way to learn, by the way, since you have access to the root filesystem even when you screw it up so much it won't boot).
Anyway, I hung the machine some how, hard enough that our console server's break didn't drop into the boot monitor, so I called up operations and asked them to powercycle it. I described in exquisite detail where it was, where the power switch was, etc. Took them a damn long time but finally my machine started to boot and we got off the phone. Later I mentioned how long it took to my boss and he had me repeat my explanation. "You just described the new machine," he told me. Sure enough, I had mixed up left/right because I was trying to send them to the back instead of the front. Luckily they were smart enough not to reboot the production machine.
Several people have explained what's going on, and even quoted the press conference where this was discussed. One of the other points from that same press conference was that the pigments of the calibration target were carefully chosen so that each is useful for multiple filters. That sounds strange if you think about the pancams like a pocket digital, but they're not. They use a filter wheel, so each wavelength images all of the calibration target. By making each "color" on the target cover multiple wavelengths they get more information. I think the specific example was that the blue target shows up as bright white to the near-IR filter they were using. The result is that in the *composite* they are wacky colors, since the aggregate of the calibrations doesn't "make sense".
/. with no editorial review.
In other exciting news, this morning they showed some of the mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) images. That data is very hard to interpret, so it is ripe for crackpot articles that can be posted on
I remember watching it on TV and they used every graphic about 5 times and repeated every concept at least 3 times. The compressed video will be tiny!
If you see a lot of blockiness, chances are your TV is not adjusted correctly. Most sets come from the factory with brightness and contrast settings that are way out of line. Blacks are gray and everything in shadow is too bright. The encoding blocks up a lot in dark areas, but on a well-adjusted set those will typically be dark enough that you don't notice.
If you want to talk *artifacts*, try Tivo on Basic (or even Medium) quality. That's a great way to see the mpeg process live.
Anyway, get a copy of Video Essentials (or if you're old skool, a laserdisc copy of A Video Standard, which is an earlier version of the same thing). You can often rent it, though it will not come with the color calibration gel. You can still do a lot of useful adjustments with it.
I don't speak navy-blue text on grainy, dark background image.
The problem with RAID5 is that the performance when degraded (due to a lost drive) is usually far worse than when the array is healthy. If you design your experiment to use the peak performance of your array then a failure will cause it to fail even though you won't lose any of the data you've gathered so far.
I am eagerly awaiting commands from Slashdot telling me whether I should be mad at the old Blizzard or the Blizzard founders.
I suspect that the KVM initializes the mouse as a generic PS/2 mouse and then pretends to BE a mouse for each computer it is connected to. The KVM is probably ignoring the initialization that it receives (or at least ignoring the extended settings) rather than passing it on to the mouse.
So it's a driver issue in the sense that the KVM's dumb internal mouse driver is not enabling the mousewheel.
There were some moles in my yard, so I bought some of the vibrating stakes that are supposed to repell them. And a load of D cell batteries to put in them. I never did get around to installing them, but the moles are gone now.
By the way, does anyone know of any other devices that use D cells these days? I have a bunch in my junk drawer...
I'm sure they're blocking a lot of mail. But you can't say it's all spam if you block it -- no one is looking at all of the blocked mail to make sure it's spam. I won an eBay auction from someone with an AOL address and discovered that I can't send mail directly to AOL from my cable modem anymore. Normally I would just let it slide, but since it was a financial transaction I had to use another server. I'm still debating whether to fix it long term or continue to ignore AOL...
At the first 2 clicks of ffw (which are 2x and 30x) on the Tivo you can easily make out everything that's going on. Three clicks (60x) reduces most commercial breaks to 2-3 seconds. Even though you have to pay careful attention at that speed to get the resume right (personally my youthful reaction time is too fast for the auto-backup that Tivo does, so I have to wait an extra beat) I still have little or no idea what the skipped commercials were. Using 30s skip is about the same unless you hit it really fast (eg anticipate at least 2 minutes of commercials and hit it 4 times rapidly) in which case you can see even less.
I was amazed at how quickly I adapted to skipping commercials (my 8 year old VCR's ~9x ffw was more like muting than skipping). Now I find it extremely frustrating to watch TV with commercials.
That's how a travel agent feels about travel. Sure, you can MAKE travel your hobby, and learn enough to do without an agent. But you can't just say, "I've got Orbitz and Travelocity, I don't need an agent!" anymore than your mom can say, "I've got shopper.com and pricewatch, I don't need Dell or Gateway to build my PC!"
All you need to break into this guy's house is a few seconds with his "keys" and a photocopier. Though I guess if you were really worried about that you could put a small label printer by the door and get a new key every time you left...
I'm willing to put up with the resource drain in order to make it harder to spam in general. Sleeping for 10 seconds is nothing compared with spamassassin (gigantic regexps!) which has to run for all of the good recipients. My inbox alone got almost 10,000 junk messages in the 3 weeks around Christmas (about 2-3x normal volume). That sucked some serious CPU!
You can run dictionary attacks against domains I handle mail for, but at least it will take you a damn long time! I just wish everybody was doing it. Eventually it would take too long to spam effectively.
SD is faster (4x?) than MMC, in theory. But make sure the slot in your device can take advantage of that -- the Zarus SL-5x00 cannot.
Some devices only support memory (not SD accessories like bluetooth).
Stranger still, some support only MMC. The Franklin e-Bookman (a palm-class device recently on sale for $50 at costco!) manual claims to support only MMC. (and an aside, the MMC storage in the e-Bookman is not general purpose -- only certain types of data can be put on the card rather than RAM)
For whatever reason, some devices support a limited range of flash sizes. The e-Bookman is limited to 64M. The Zaurus requires a software upgrade to use 256M cards.
And finally, make sure you can easily return/exchange your card. The Zaurus, for example, can mount and read any brand of card. But a problem (driver bug? hardware bug? card bug?) causes some to become inaccessible after a suspend/resume event. You can find tables of user-tested cards online, but I wouldn't necessarily risk postage or a restocking fee on their accuracy.
If you are looking for features to fix usability problems then you have fundamentally misunderstood the problem. There was essentially nothing missing from the original MacOS or Amiga's Intuition that you'd need to make a usable UI. In fact, feature (and processing power) limitations have inspired some of the most usable interfaces around (PalmOS, my Nokia phone).
The other assumption of this question is the notion that usability is poorly understood. In fact, there has been extensive HCI (human/computer interaction) research, and it has produced some very readable, accessible books targeted at software people. The real question is: why don't we apply these lessons?
I don't know the technical specs, but I saw one in a gateway store and it looked terrible. It was playing one of the stock HDTV loops I've seen at hi-fi type stores. Unlike most TVs, this one didn't even have to compete against 100 neighbors, or get a video feed from a bajillion-way splitter, and it still made me cringe to look at it.
I've also seen the Sampo 42" display (which is not one of the higher res 42" displays) and it was much, MUCH nicer looking, just playing a regular DVD on a cheap player.
If Eolas wins and they have the choice between being billionaires and getting to kick Microsoft in the nuts, I'm pretty sure they'll choose to be billionaires.
I was born with a rare condition that prevents me from viewing Flash objects. Can the crack slashdot legal community advise me about how to pursue my lawsuit against the many abusers of Flash?
To scale well you want to lock data rather than code and that can lead to many locks when you are operating on many structures. Ideally these locks each have less contention and better data sharing than "bigger" locks.
The 411 people seem to have a good hybrid solution to this problem. You call up and a computer asks you to name the city you want, and the listing. They can queue that info, and as soon as a human is ready to help you, they can hear your request (probably with dead space removed, eliminating your stammering) and their voice recognition expert system has prompted them with some likely choices. If there is any question (eg you ask for "McDonalds" in "New York") they can ask for an address or other details. When you and the operator agree on a listing, a computer is ready to read it to you as many times as you like (or "dial it for an additional fee"). This might be hell for the operators, but I bet they can clear 3-4x the volume of information inquiries than they could if they did the computerized parts.