You can get an Intel Johnstown board (Atom N270 - 1.6ghz) for around $110. RAM will set you back another $20 or so. The Johnstown board is nice in that it has a built-in PSU and just requires an external 12v brick. If you don't have one, that's another $20. For the chassis, it depends on what sort of storage you want to put in it. Anything that'll hold an ITX board will do, though I like the mini-box cases (an M350 will set you back $40 though it requires the use of laptop drives). An M300 is more expensive at $60 but allows the use of a single 3.5" drive so you can recycle a hard drive you already own.
Anyway, I think the best bang for the buck is one of the Intel Mini-ITX boards. They're inexpensive, capable and familiar. Be aware that the older Intel boards (Little Falls, Little Falls 2) have no integrated PSUs so that drives their prices up relative to the Johnstown.
I second this recommendation - I used these folks back when they called themselves IMAP-Partners. I never had a data-loss issue though their anti-spam technology was, at the time, rather anemic which meant I'd often miss an important email due to the poor signal to noise ratio. I'd expect that it's better now.
Actually, that Hayes modem is worth about $400 to the right customer. Specifically some poor bloke who does old-school business alarms.
True story: Big Storm rolls through town with the full set of pyrotechnics. Blows up my very expensive US Robotics Courier HST modem. I was sad. But not as sad as the alarm company dude who rolls into the computer store the following morning desperate for a modem that'll do 110 baud. 'Cause that's the fastest his gear runs. We have boxes and boxes of modems but they all bottom out at 300 baud. But! Inventory shows that we have an original Hayes 2400 in stock. I and another tech spend half an hour digging it out. Sure enough, it goes down to 110 baud. Dude asks the boss what its price is, boss points at the sticker on the (unopened! shrink-wrapped!) box which says $399.95. Fellow turns red and stammers. Boss shrugs and tells us to return the box to the bowels of the stockroom. Fellow about has a stroke and then asks if we take a business check. Boss smiles and takes the desperate man's money.
Oh, man. Qoole was the only 3D editor that I could ever use with any success - it just worked the way my brain wanted it to. =) For a long time, back when VRML was still occasionally useful, I used it to create objects - though the whole chain of converters was terribly fragile.
Hmm, I think I still have my two registered CDs around here someplace...
Why not give an AlphaSmart a try for your writing? Runs PalmOS (though the wide-screen aspect ratio will royally confuse apps that make poor assumptions about resolution) and lasts darn near forever on 3x AAA alkalines. I don't work for the makers, but I do know several professional writers who love the little machines.
Sadly, this won't help you with your photo conundrum, but you might consider one of those hard-drive based photo wallets (perhaps something like this) and visit an internet cafe periodically to replicate to a server.
Me either. My first Tyan was an S2850 which lost both its ethernet ports (one was dead from the moment I bought it, the other failed slowly over eighteen months). I sent it in for service and they returned it to me claiming that they just had to re-flash the BIOS to make it work. I tried that, but whatever. I put the server back together again, fired it up and got nothing. No beeps, nada. Moved the CPU/RAM back to an old MSI server board and got CPU failure beeps. Grr. Swore off buying their stuff until about three months ago when I tried one of their S3850 boards - it was on sale for about $75 less than the SuperMicro H8SSL-i boards I had been buying. As far as I can tell, it's very, very picky about DRAM voltage. Had to exchange it for a SuperMicro because none of my Corsair or Crucial sticks would even POST in the thing.
I hear tell their boards are wonderful, but I sure don't see it. And their tech-support is awful, especially compared to the service I get from SuperMicro. No more chances from me.
... people will tend to buy the $3 Wal*Mart pickle because it's the lowest price for a highly elastic good.
And that's what's wrong with America! People insist on buying those soggy, nasty, elastic pickles. I much prefer the firm, crisp pickles one finds in the refrigerator section.
Could you expand a bit on how you've got that set up? I've tried a couple of different Linux distros with Xen on AMD64 hardware (Supermicro H8SSL-i and -i2 boards) but haven't had any luck with them being stable enough to use. One time in ten the Dom0 would panic or the xendomain management bits would fail seemingly randomly. =/ I've not had anything to do with Solaris since 8 was around and haven't had the gumption to try OpenSolaris out.
With EXTREMELY few exceptions, absolutely everything in WoW was pioneered with EverQuest.
Er, not really. EQ was novel because they married a text-based MUD to a graphical engine and were able to scale that environment to around 2k folks per server. I'd call that more of a logical extension than any kind of pioneering.
And EQ was a commercial success too. Not the runaway cultural phenomenon that WoW has become, but with 400k active subscribers at peak (less now), it can hardly be thought of as a marginal game either way. UO might have taken this spot (it also at one time was in excess of 100k at the least, and it WAS first), but extremely few of its conventions survived to other MMOs.
Actually, UO wasn't the first. It was arguably the first really popular graphical MMORPG, but it wasn't first to market. Wikipedia has a very nice writeup on the history of MMORPGs.
Virtually everything about EQ has been in successors.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify any sort of similarity between EQ and City of Heroes (outside of a the obvious of player-characters driving around mashing bad-guys) but that's just me being picky.
And yes, I've played all 3 of the games I mentioned for significant amounts of time (and more games besides those too). WoW put everything together in a good package, and that alone is a talent, and obviously has brought success, but innovation? Very very little.
Somewhat amusingly, there are these sworn statements over on the Diku MUD homepage which stem from accusations that the EQ server software was lifted from Diku. I still remember the mudslinging which, as I recall at least, centered around some description typos which were in EQ and were identical to typos in Diku.
EQ, just like WoW, is built on ideas and concepts explored by others. I would be very tempted to say that the true origin of today's MMO is Crowther and Woods' Adventure game. It wasn't multi-player (massively or otherwise) and it isn't the number-crunching spreadsheet-esque RPG so popular now, but you did don the mantle of the nameless spelunker and go explore a cave. Spiff up the UI, add a bookstore worth of quests and allow a bunch of folks to interact in the same environment and you've got the modern MMORPG. At least that's what I think.
Hopefully this is buried enough that none of my former coworkers will find it...
Around 10 years ago, I wrote a system to do online registration for some continuing education courses at my university. It was a series of horrible, horrible Perl scripts that kept its data in a dbm hash until it was manually entered into Paradox by the conference registration staff. This worked splendidly for several months until it was decided, for efficiency's sake, that we should upload the data directly into a Paradox holding table. Good idea, but Paradox ran on our Novell network while our web server was an SGI running IRIX.
We batted around a few ideas until it hit me - we could make it work by sticking a PC in between the two. The first pass at it had the SGI box FTPing completed registration records to the Novell server. Once there, "Reggie", the PC, had a special Paradox script that polled the FTP directory, sucked in any new data and wrote it out to the holding table in the master registration database.
As far as I know, that system is still in place (at least judging by the IM I got from a fellow a couple of years ago that started out "YOU ARE THE AUTHOR OF MY PAIN!"... ehehehe).
> What exactly can't IMAP do that is IMAP (the protocol's) fault?
It can't receive notifications of new messages arriving in multiple folders (such as if you've got a bunch of procmail rules sorting stuff on the server.) There was some discussion on the Dovecot mailing list a while ago about whose fault it was for that feature not working. =)
> as someone who just had his PHPNuke site (running since sometime in late 2000) attacked, crippled and corupted data, I can certainly understand the bitterness.
My condolences. Nobody should have to suffer that sort of thing.:(
> I do, however, believe that some quality applications can, and are, done up in PHP.
Oh yes, I totally agree. That's what gives me the love-hate relationship I have with the language. Recent releases of Wordpress are so darn compelling because of the oodles of themes and plugins available for it. We've got a pair of really nice PHP apps at work, DokuWiki and Mantis, that we can't find equivalent levels of functionality in any other package. We also have DotProject, which isn't nearly as nice a package (or as maintained, apparently), but has the singular advantage that it's the only web-based project management system we've bumped into that passes the "takes less than a day to install and configure" metric.
Happily all those apps are protected from the wild, wild, web by the SSL cert and Apache-level ACL that I mentioned in my original post. If I had to expose them publicly... *shudder*
There is a major benefit that Java brings to the table versus PHP and that is security. My inside voice says that the only way to secure a PHP webapp is to delete it. My outside voice says that if you've just got to have a particular PHP package, then fine - that particular PHP package you can have, along with an SSL cert, a site-wide ACL and off-machine logging so that *WHEN* the app gets hacked, you know who to go after.:P
Some folks don't think that PHP has anything intrinsically wrong with it, that PHP is just trying hard to be an incredibly helpful language, that it's not a bad language - it's just drawn that way. I don't think so. It's got a history of stuff like: "Oh, you provided some URL parameters? Allow me to convert those into variables automagically!" (Yes, yes - this has since been changed but it was around for a long, long time and is still available if you set the proper config variable) "You want to talk to a database? Please, feed me a string and I'll do whatever you want me to do. In fact, if you give me several things to do, I'll do them all!" (Hooray for SQL injection) And on it goes.
I'm sure a case could be made that schlock code written in any language can be abused - but in the typical Java (or Perl, or Ruby, or Python, or some other non-PHP language of your choice) framework you've got to work a lot harder to create exploitable things. PHP is entirely too damn easy to be bitten by unforeseen circumstances - witness the same vulnerabilities being lovingly replicated over and over and over in lots of different projects.
In closing, yes it takes more up-front effort to bang out a simple CRUD app in Java versus what the average tutorial or manual would tell you to do in PHP. But the Java version isn't vulnerable while the PHP version is and will require a net greater expenditure of effort to understand and fix the problem. And that's not talking about the energy burned up by the poor shmucks running the code and having to clean up and rebuild after the app gets owned. (No, I'm not still bitter phpBB, Gallery, Wordpress and PHP-Nuke. Not at all. I don't even miss my data anymore. Nor do I regret having to deal with my account being used to attack other machines. Not one bit.)
Considering that these ships are intended to be used by the coast guard in the gulf of Mexico, I don't see the problem.
3. Unshielded cables.
WTF is he talking about? The only way to sniff data from an unshielded cable is if you are right next to it. It is not going to help you when the cable is on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Further, the moment data is transmitted off the ship via radar, all bets are off. Unless you encrypt it *anyone* can listen to it.
Some points of information:
Gulf of Mexico != middle of the ocean - but that's just a nitpick
Maximum distance to electrically sniff from an unshielded cable != right next to it - see TEMPEST
Encrypting something != only you can listen to it - it simply means that other folks will have a hard time understanding it which is a critical distinction
It's also worth considering that, today, the vessels are going to be used in the Gulf. However, their specs say they'd be fit for use farther north. Lockheed was probably banking on getting a refit contract when it was discovered that the FLIR equipment failed in cold weather once the ships were reassigned. I'm sure they could find a suitable patsy to take the fall for the "oversight" at that point and not jeopardize the rework. This is a pattern that continues to play out, over and over, in the DoD contracting arena. The Pentagon Wars is a good flick to catch for another example of this sort of stupidity (albeit one with some dramatic license taken).
I'd very much like my pharmacy, CVS, to implement the voice-activated prompts in lieu of the damn number key entry.
Why?
Because my idiot cell phone (a Hiptop) got upgraded into non-functionality by my provider, SunCom. The latest firmware decided that whenever I punch a number key during an open call, it needs to continue emitting the DTMF for a full second. Their IVR software interprets that as multiple presses of the same key.
I've worked around the issue by submitting refills on their website and calling other places from work, but still. *grumble*
Aha! I was under the (mistaken) impression that the two electrons were "paired" somehow (tied by cosmic string? =P) and that altering the spin of one would, by virtue of the entanglement, force a change in the other. Thank you for clarifying that. =)
Well, I'll admit that after I worked my butt off to get a B in calc, I decided that instead of CompSci I'd rather go with InfoSci and learn all about PowerPunt instead of hard stuff like math. =)
That said, I am very interested in this sort of thing but stuff that I google about is either written for folks with more background than I have or are written by quacks who want to sell me a quantum cure for athlete's foot. *shrug* Not that I expected a lot of difference here on/. (which is why I phrased the question the way I did) but I did get a very accessible response.
Confusingly, the kernel also has its own compressed cpio archive within its own text containing the initial content of the initramfs. At a minimum, it holds/,/dev, and/dev/console.
Interesting! I didn't realize that the kernel provided that. Neat!
I read somewhere else that if you're using cpio format archives, you can provide a list of them to the bootloader they'll all be extracted to the initramfs. (syslinux at least claims this - I don't know about others and I haven't tried it personally on any of 'em.) That sounds to me like an interesting way to patch or enhance the functionality of a "stock" initrd without having to re-roll it. Have you (or any one of the legion of people brighter than I) played with that any?
Slashdot Mirror
You can get an Intel Johnstown board (Atom N270 - 1.6ghz) for around $110. RAM will set you back another $20 or so. The Johnstown board is nice in that it has a built-in PSU and just requires an external 12v brick. If you don't have one, that's another $20. For the chassis, it depends on what sort of storage you want to put in it. Anything that'll hold an ITX board will do, though I like the mini-box cases (an M350 will set you back $40 though it requires the use of laptop drives). An M300 is more expensive at $60 but allows the use of a single 3.5" drive so you can recycle a hard drive you already own.
Anyway, I think the best bang for the buck is one of the Intel Mini-ITX boards. They're inexpensive, capable and familiar. Be aware that the older Intel boards (Little Falls, Little Falls 2) have no integrated PSUs so that drives their prices up relative to the Johnstown.
Like, ew and stuff.
Once again, XKCD predicts the future:
http://xkcd.com/463/
Dang that guy is scary ...
I second this recommendation - I used these folks back when they called themselves IMAP-Partners. I never had a data-loss issue though their anti-spam technology was, at the time, rather anemic which meant I'd often miss an important email due to the poor signal to noise ratio. I'd expect that it's better now.
Actually, that Hayes modem is worth about $400 to the right customer. Specifically some poor bloke who does old-school business alarms.
True story: Big Storm rolls through town with the full set of pyrotechnics. Blows up my very expensive US Robotics Courier HST modem. I was sad. But not as sad as the alarm company dude who rolls into the computer store the following morning desperate for a modem that'll do 110 baud. 'Cause that's the fastest his gear runs. We have boxes and boxes of modems but they all bottom out at 300 baud. But! Inventory shows that we have an original Hayes 2400 in stock. I and another tech spend half an hour digging it out. Sure enough, it goes down to 110 baud. Dude asks the boss what its price is, boss points at the sticker on the (unopened! shrink-wrapped!) box which says $399.95. Fellow turns red and stammers. Boss shrugs and tells us to return the box to the bowels of the stockroom. Fellow about has a stroke and then asks if we take a business check. Boss smiles and takes the desperate man's money.
Oh, man. Qoole was the only 3D editor that I could ever use with any success - it just worked the way my brain wanted it to. =) For a long time, back when VRML was still occasionally useful, I used it to create objects - though the whole chain of converters was terribly fragile.
Hmm, I think I still have my two registered CDs around here someplace ...
Um, I don't think it's the University of California, Los Angeles backing WikiLeaks.
Why not give an AlphaSmart a try for your writing? Runs PalmOS (though the wide-screen aspect ratio will royally confuse apps that make poor assumptions about resolution) and lasts darn near forever on 3x AAA alkalines. I don't work for the makers, but I do know several professional writers who love the little machines.
Sadly, this won't help you with your photo conundrum, but you might consider one of those hard-drive based photo wallets (perhaps something like this) and visit an internet cafe periodically to replicate to a server.
I hear tell their boards are wonderful, but I sure don't see it. And their tech-support is awful, especially compared to the service I get from SuperMicro. No more chances from me.
And that's what's wrong with America! People insist on buying those soggy, nasty, elastic pickles. I much prefer the firm, crisp pickles one finds in the refrigerator section.
I suspect the notes from his constituents appear in the memo fields on his campaign contribution checks. I'm just sayin'.
Could you expand a bit on how you've got that set up? I've tried a couple of different Linux distros with Xen on AMD64 hardware (Supermicro H8SSL-i and -i2 boards) but haven't had any luck with them being stable enough to use. One time in ten the Dom0 would panic or the xendomain management bits would fail seemingly randomly. =/ I've not had anything to do with Solaris since 8 was around and haven't had the gumption to try OpenSolaris out.
EQ, just like WoW, is built on ideas and concepts explored by others. I would be very tempted to say that the true origin of today's MMO is Crowther and Woods' Adventure game. It wasn't multi-player (massively or otherwise) and it isn't the number-crunching spreadsheet-esque RPG so popular now, but you did don the mantle of the nameless spelunker and go explore a cave. Spiff up the UI, add a bookstore worth of quests and allow a bunch of folks to interact in the same environment and you've got the modern MMORPG. At least that's what I think.
Hopefully this is buried enough that none of my former coworkers will find it ...
... ehehehe).
Around 10 years ago, I wrote a system to do online registration for some continuing education courses at my university. It was a series of horrible, horrible Perl scripts that kept its data in a dbm hash until it was manually entered into Paradox by the conference registration staff. This worked splendidly for several months until it was decided, for efficiency's sake, that we should upload the data directly into a Paradox holding table. Good idea, but Paradox ran on our Novell network while our web server was an SGI running IRIX.
We batted around a few ideas until it hit me - we could make it work by sticking a PC in between the two. The first pass at it had the SGI box FTPing completed registration records to the Novell server. Once there, "Reggie", the PC, had a special Paradox script that polled the FTP directory, sucked in any new data and wrote it out to the holding table in the master registration database.
As far as I know, that system is still in place (at least judging by the IM I got from a fellow a couple of years ago that started out "YOU ARE THE AUTHOR OF MY PAIN!"
> What exactly can't IMAP do that is IMAP (the protocol's) fault?
It can't receive notifications of new messages arriving in multiple folders (such as if you've got a bunch of procmail rules sorting stuff on the server.) There was some discussion on the Dovecot mailing list a while ago about whose fault it was for that feature not working. =)
> as someone who just had his PHPNuke site (running since sometime in late 2000) attacked, crippled and corupted data, I can certainly understand the bitterness.
:(
... *shudder*
My condolences. Nobody should have to suffer that sort of thing.
> I do, however, believe that some quality applications can, and are, done up in PHP.
Oh yes, I totally agree. That's what gives me the love-hate relationship I have with the language. Recent releases of Wordpress are so darn compelling because of the oodles of themes and plugins available for it. We've got a pair of really nice PHP apps at work, DokuWiki and Mantis, that we can't find equivalent levels of functionality in any other package. We also have DotProject, which isn't nearly as nice a package (or as maintained, apparently), but has the singular advantage that it's the only web-based project management system we've bumped into that passes the "takes less than a day to install and configure" metric.
Happily all those apps are protected from the wild, wild, web by the SSL cert and Apache-level ACL that I mentioned in my original post. If I had to expose them publicly
(This is gonna hose my karma, but it's something I feel strongly about so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! )
:P
There is a major benefit that Java brings to the table versus PHP and that is security. My inside voice says that the only way to secure a PHP webapp is to delete it. My outside voice says that if you've just got to have a particular PHP package, then fine - that particular PHP package you can have, along with an SSL cert, a site-wide ACL and off-machine logging so that *WHEN* the app gets hacked, you know who to go after.
Some folks don't think that PHP has anything intrinsically wrong with it, that PHP is just trying hard to be an incredibly helpful language, that it's not a bad language - it's just drawn that way. I don't think so. It's got a history of stuff like: "Oh, you provided some URL parameters? Allow me to convert those into variables automagically!" (Yes, yes - this has since been changed but it was around for a long, long time and is still available if you set the proper config variable) "You want to talk to a database? Please, feed me a string and I'll do whatever you want me to do. In fact, if you give me several things to do, I'll do them all!" (Hooray for SQL injection) And on it goes.
I'm sure a case could be made that schlock code written in any language can be abused - but in the typical Java (or Perl, or Ruby, or Python, or some other non-PHP language of your choice) framework you've got to work a lot harder to create exploitable things. PHP is entirely too damn easy to be bitten by unforeseen circumstances - witness the same vulnerabilities being lovingly replicated over and over and over in lots of different projects.
In closing, yes it takes more up-front effort to bang out a simple CRUD app in Java versus what the average tutorial or manual would tell you to do in PHP. But the Java version isn't vulnerable while the PHP version is and will require a net greater expenditure of effort to understand and fix the problem. And that's not talking about the energy burned up by the poor shmucks running the code and having to clean up and rebuild after the app gets owned. (No, I'm not still bitter phpBB, Gallery, Wordpress and PHP-Nuke. Not at all. I don't even miss my data anymore. Nor do I regret having to deal with my account being used to attack other machines. Not one bit.)
One can only hope they've invested more time in securing the communications channel than in Bluetooth. Bluesnarfing for the win! Or something. =/
- Gulf of Mexico != middle of the ocean - but that's just a nitpick
- RADAR != transmission device - see RADAR
- Maximum distance to electrically sniff from an unshielded cable != right next to it - see TEMPEST
- Encrypting something != only you can listen to it - it simply means that other folks will have a hard time understanding it which is a critical distinction
It's also worth considering that, today, the vessels are going to be used in the Gulf. However, their specs say they'd be fit for use farther north. Lockheed was probably banking on getting a refit contract when it was discovered that the FLIR equipment failed in cold weather once the ships were reassigned. I'm sure they could find a suitable patsy to take the fall for the "oversight" at that point and not jeopardize the rework. This is a pattern that continues to play out, over and over, in the DoD contracting arena. The Pentagon Wars is a good flick to catch for another example of this sort of stupidity (albeit one with some dramatic license taken).I'd very much like my pharmacy, CVS, to implement the voice-activated prompts in lieu of the damn number key entry.
Why?
Because my idiot cell phone (a Hiptop) got upgraded into non-functionality by my provider, SunCom. The latest firmware decided that whenever I punch a number key during an open call, it needs to continue emitting the DTMF for a full second. Their IVR software interprets that as multiple presses of the same key.
I've worked around the issue by submitting refills on their website and calling other places from work, but still. *grumble*
Aha! I was under the (mistaken) impression that the two electrons were "paired" somehow (tied by cosmic string? =P) and that altering the spin of one would, by virtue of the entanglement, force a change in the other. Thank you for clarifying that. =)
Well, I'll admit that after I worked my butt off to get a B in calc, I decided that instead of CompSci I'd rather go with InfoSci and learn all about PowerPunt instead of hard stuff like math. =)
/. (which is why I phrased the question the way I did) but I did get a very accessible response.
That said, I am very interested in this sort of thing but stuff that I google about is either written for folks with more background than I have or are written by quacks who want to sell me a quantum cure for athlete's foot. *shrug* Not that I expected a lot of difference here on
Thank you! My brain neither imploded nor did I further devolve into a gibbering baboon. It is a good day, I have learned something new. =)
The Wikipedia article about Quantum Entanglement says no, but the explanation seems to be: "of course it's not FTL because we can only verify the communication at lightspeed."
Umm, okay. Can some big-brain 'splain it to me using small words so I'll be sure to understand?
I read somewhere else that if you're using cpio format archives, you can provide a list of them to the bootloader they'll all be extracted to the initramfs. (syslinux at least claims this - I don't know about others and I haven't tried it personally on any of 'em.) That sounds to me like an interesting way to patch or enhance the functionality of a "stock" initrd without having to re-roll it. Have you (or any one of the legion of people brighter than I) played with that any?