I am surprised that Microsoft does not do what Linux does and have a common DLL provide all the JPEG functionality. At least in Linux, most, if not all apps, use libjpeg.so.
Fixing a problem like this in Linux is trivial. Only libjpeg needs to be patched, and automagically, all apps that depend on that library are also rendered invulnerable.
We saw this with png and other shared libraries. Also, offering many of these common libraries as DLLs helps reduce code bloat since every app no longer needs to reinvent the wheel.
Do you think you have made the United States safer by toppling Saddam now that Muslims are flocking to Iraq to join the fight against the United States and recruitment has become far easier for Al Queda?
Do you think we should have put a lot more troops on the ground in Afghanistan early on in our hunt for Osama bin Laden?
Do you think it is fair for large corporations to set up divisions in the Cayman Islands or other locations in order to avoid paying taxes (i.e. Enron, Haliburton), especially when it's often just a mailstop?
Do you think companies that do this deserve all the benefits a company that does pay its U.S. taxes gets? Do you think the US government should do business with corporations that practice this behavior?
Do you think the law needs to be changed and if so how and if not, why not?
It doesn't help that their lead programmer was arrested for embezzlement. There's so many holes and back doors in Diebold's software to make Windows XP default install look like Fort Knox.
While I know there are plenty of low power solutions out there, I have yet to find one that fits my requirements.
I am currently running a 333MHz PII based Linux server (uptime 409 days, SuSE 8.2) in my closet. I use it for firewall, email, web, FTP, ssh, NFS, Samba, etc. and it works great. However, I would love to find something with a bit more powerful CPU and something that can run mirrored RAID. While the VIA ITX board looks nice, it only has one PCI slot and one Ethernet port. I'd love to find a mini-ATX motherboard based on the VIA or some other very low power CPU with 2 or more PCI slots or with one PCI slot and on-board RAID and/or gigabit Ethernet. I don't need a blazingly fast CPU, just something fast enough but low power is the key.
This box has been rock solid, as long as I don't try and run Seti@Home on it (410 days ago it caused the CPU to lock up solid every time I tried).
The current CPU can get bogged down a bit with the spam filter and I'd love to move to gigabit (everything else is ready for it) so I can use it to archive MPEG files off of my ReplayTV.
I know they do this in some places. When excess electricity capacity is available from renewable or nuclear power plants, water is pumped uphill until peak demand, where it is used to generate power. Of course this doesn't work very well in places like Florida or Kansas. Too bad Florida can't tap into all their hurricanes for power.
This reminds me of when I went to the World's Fair in Vancouver in 1986. The Romanian pavilion was hilarious. They were claiming to have invented the lightbulb, the airplane, and just about everything else. This was before the overthrow of Ceausescu.
-Aaron
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
I actually found some via mail order at http://www.topbulb.com and they've been working like a charm with my X10 stuff. Granted, I usually don't dim them that often, but they seem to work fairly well, at least until you get to a very low setting. They also seem to last OK, I have yet to have one burn out.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
I imagine the cost to create a CF bulb is not that much more than a regular light bulb, and may often in fact be cheaper. Granted, there's usually a small PCB with an electronic ballast inside, but most of the parts on it only cost a few pennies apiece, and some CF bulbs you can keep the ballast and only replace the bulb when needed. The bulb itself is relatively simple. A spiral type bulb (the most common) is just a glass tube twisted around. Some phosphorus and a tiny bit of mercury and a couple filaments at the ends.
I don't know about other areas, but here in northern California, it is not uncommon to see 60 or 75 watt equivelent CF bulbs for $1 each or even less. They're maybe twice the cost of a regular bulb, but they last far longer and use far less electricity. Also, given that my utility bill averages over $0.20/kwh, people using incandescent bulbs are insane. I've read in several places that electricity usage per person in CA is 49th out of 50 and are near the bottom in terms of usage per person. When the energy crisis caused by Enron and friends hit, CA residents very quickly cut their usage. CF bulbs were everywhere and were dirt cheap (and still are).
In my own house, I have replaced ALL incandescent bulbs with CF except for a few lights where it's not possible.
Note that this is NOT an article about Bush in any way, and in fact is an article provided by an HMO (Cigna). However, there is a very strong correlation with Bush's behavior to the point of it being scarey.
My guess is that the larger cache of the Xeon significantly helps putchar since it will need to periodically make kernel calls to write the data. The frequency of the writing would depend on the default buffer size stdio assigns to stdout. Also, the putchar code may perform a mutex lock around the operation, although I doubt there's any calls to the kernel for the lock and my guess is they incur a negligible impact on performance. Increasing the stdout write buffer size should significantly reduce the putchar overhead. Set the buffer to something like 1MB or so.
Just remember in November, a vote for Bush is also a vote for John Ashcroft, who rammed through the Patriot act after 9/11. Before 9/11 it was only a wet dream of Ashcroft's. Remember, Ashcroft lost his election run to a dead man.
This wouldn't be the first time the FBI has used the Patriot act outside of terrorism, as others have already stated. You can bet it won't be the last, either.
Something like this happened to a friend of mine. He got partially cooked but survived. The weird thing was that after he recovered he was sensitive to radar. He could always detect a cop using a radar gun long before he could see it.
My father told similar stories when he was in the navy about frying birds from the aircraft carrier he was on. He said that sometimes the sailors would intentionally cook the seagulls.
I'm a paying SpamCop reporter. It's just starting to get too expensive to keep reporting. I'll probably keep it up for a bit, but that 16MB quota disappears awfully fast now. Hopefully Comcast cleaning up its act will reduce the spam load significantly.
I took a class taught by Professor Huffman at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was an excellent teacher and really enjoyed teaching. The class, Introduction to Cybernetics, included Huffman coding and some basic neural network stuff, but never once did he call it Huffman Coding. One thing I remember from his class was we had to use a lot of logarithms and the results would have to be something like 5*log2(7) + log3(5). This ruled out using a calculator or a computer for the most part.
He also frequently gave credit to Claude Shannon on information coding.
Sadly (or fortunately) I avoided his other class, due to the fact that the failure rate was 60% for people taking the class for the second time. I think the first time takers failed at 90%.
On the front page of Weekly World News was a picture of Dick Cheney showing proof that he's really a robot. It must be true! It was in big print in the checkout line in the grocery store.
Actually what would be cool is -48 volt DC supplies. Where I work we make a bunch of telco type equipment and one of the big requirements is the ability to run off of -48 volts DC. 48v is a lot better than 12 since the amount of current required is 1/4, hence the amount of power lost in transmission is significantly lower. Also, -48v is a nice multiple of 12v, so using 4 12v batteries in series makes a nice UPS, so UPS are also cheap with virtually no loss due to switching up to 115VAC.
I would think this would be relatively easy to defend against, and in fact regular stun guns should also be easy to defend. All one would need is clothing with a fine wire mesh embedded in it. A tinfoil hat would also likely work well to protect the head. Just as long as the mesh runs all the way down to the ground it should protect whoever is inside.
Often the more complex the weapon, the easier it is to defend against. Much of the Star Wars SDI type weapons are also easy to defend against. Just put a bunch of small ball bearings in the tip of a warhead and explode it some distance away. A low tech weapon that will be effective for quite some time in space.
USB support in Linux has gotten a lot better recently. SuSE 9.1 works just fine out of the box with my Canon SD100 camera. My Logitech webcam is another story, but there's drivers for it. USB printers should be pretty easy as well unless it's some strange off-brand.
In fact, when I plug in my camera, an icon appears on the desktop for it automatically.
OS/2 did this also and I found it useful. Perhaps the window manager could renice everything down a bit except for the selected window? Or else add a process priority boost feature into the scheduler. I must say that upgrading to SuSE 9.1 with the 2.6 kernel is much more responsive than the 2.4 kernel.
If the window manager reniced everything, it could also make the wm more responsive. This also would not affect other users (i.e. root) since it would be restricted to tasks belonging only to that user. Of course, a process started as another user in a window would always have priority.
It could be interesting if better realtime support were added to the kernel, kind of like what TimeSys Linux does.
I've been running DSpam for several months now and have found it works much better than Spam Assassin at catching spam. Furthermore, unlike SA, I have yet to get any false positives.
My only problem is DSpam was not easy to set up with Postfix, at least for me since I'm not an experienced mail administrator. While I now have it mostly working, I have not been able to get the alias accounts working so I can forward missed spams for automatic learning.
I look forward to upgrading to DSpam 3.0 when it is fully released. So far it is working much better than even Mozilla 1.6's spam filter.
I have Postfix running with DSpam and Cyrus IMAP, and by using sieve I have it automatically place spam messages into a spam folder.
All the major carriers are moving towards this model. The new requirements coming out of the DSL forum require equipment makers have the ability to do all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and quality of service.
The company I work for makes equipment that does this. We set it up so an ISP can create a portal where a subscriber can select services and the network will automatically adjust the shaping and priority settings so the subscriber gets that service while allowing the provider to charge for it.
If Jane Doe wants to watch a certain movie, our box will guarantee the bandwidth between the video server and her DSL line while still limiting other traffic to the normal rates. Or if John Smith wants to download a huge ISO and doesn't want to wait, he can click to up his bandwidth to download it and lower it back down when he's done and gets charged extra for the amount of time he has the higher bandwidth.
Anyone can provide a pipe, but it's not real profitable for the providers. They want to make money off of things like pay-per-view or other special services.
Actually, Comcast DOES limit the amount of outbound traffic. When forwarding a bunch of email the email server would periodically block incoming connections saying I was sending too much email. After a couple of minutes it would open back up again.
As for running mail servers, I have been running servers on my cable modem for years, since the original @Home AUP I signed never forbade it nor did it say it could be later altered. I can't help it if AT&T then Comcast bought it.
I also run my own mail server for incoming email and run my own spam filter and imap server internally. I use Comcast's mail server for forwarding outbound email. I've found Comcast's spam filter, if they even run one, to be useless. I also love the fact I have my mail server set up to tarpit several RBLs and that I block China, Korea, Nigeria, Russia, etc.
I have a Philips DVX8000 home theater PC which includes a remote control and a keyboard. Both are infra-red. The keyboard includes an integrated mouse, kind of like a joystick on the upper right which you can operate with your thumb.
Things work reasonably well except for the fact that the keyboard is infrared which causes problems trying to use it in your lap.
I think these keyboards are the same as those used in the earlier web TV boxes.
The keyboard is limited, i.e. no numeric pad, to keep it small and light.
Bluetooth would be a much better solution than the infra-red.
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I am surprised that Microsoft does not do what Linux does and have a common DLL provide all the JPEG functionality. At least in Linux, most, if not all apps, use libjpeg.so.
Fixing a problem like this in Linux is trivial. Only libjpeg needs to be patched, and automagically, all apps that depend on that library are also rendered invulnerable.
We saw this with png and other shared libraries. Also, offering many of these common libraries as DLLs helps reduce code bloat since every app no longer needs to reinvent the wheel.
So we just declare that Jupiter has weapons of mass destruction and invade and extract all its hydrogen.
Mr. President,
Do you think you have made the United States safer by toppling Saddam now that Muslims are flocking to Iraq to join the fight against the United States and recruitment has become far easier for Al Queda?
Do you think we should have put a lot more troops on the ground in Afghanistan early on in our hunt for Osama bin Laden?
Do you think it is fair for large corporations to set up divisions in the Cayman Islands or other locations in order to avoid paying taxes (i.e. Enron, Haliburton), especially when it's often just a mailstop?
Do you think companies that do this deserve all the benefits a company that does pay its U.S. taxes gets? Do you think the US government should do business with corporations that practice this behavior?
Do you think the law needs to be changed and if so how and if not, why not?
It doesn't help that their lead programmer was arrested for embezzlement. There's so many holes and back doors in Diebold's software to make Windows XP default install look like Fort Knox.
While I know there are plenty of low power solutions out there, I have yet to find one that fits my requirements.
I am currently running a 333MHz PII based Linux server (uptime 409 days, SuSE 8.2) in my closet. I use it for firewall, email, web, FTP, ssh, NFS, Samba, etc. and it works great. However, I would love to find something with a bit more powerful CPU and something that can run mirrored RAID. While the VIA ITX board looks nice, it only has one PCI slot and one Ethernet port. I'd love to find a mini-ATX motherboard based on the VIA or some other very low power CPU with 2 or more PCI slots or with one PCI slot and on-board RAID and/or gigabit Ethernet. I don't need a blazingly fast CPU, just something fast enough but low power is the key.
This box has been rock solid, as long as I don't try and run Seti@Home on it (410 days ago it caused the CPU to lock up solid every time I tried).
The current CPU can get bogged down a bit with the spam filter and I'd love to move to gigabit (everything else is ready for it) so I can use it to archive MPEG files off of my ReplayTV.
-Aaron
I know they do this in some places. When excess electricity capacity is available from renewable or nuclear power plants, water is pumped uphill until peak demand, where it is used to generate power. Of course this doesn't work very well in places like Florida or Kansas. Too bad Florida can't tap into all their hurricanes for power.
This reminds me of when I went to the World's Fair in Vancouver in 1986. The Romanian pavilion was hilarious. They were claiming to have invented the lightbulb, the airplane, and just about everything else. This was before the overthrow of Ceausescu.
-Aaron
I actually found some via mail order at http://www.topbulb.com and they've been working like a charm with my X10 stuff. Granted, I usually don't dim them that often, but they seem to work fairly well, at least until you get to a very low setting. They also seem to last OK, I have yet to have one burn out.
I imagine the cost to create a CF bulb is not that much more than a regular light bulb, and may often in fact be cheaper. Granted, there's usually a small PCB with an electronic ballast inside, but most of the parts on it only cost a few pennies apiece, and some CF bulbs you can keep the ballast and only replace the bulb when needed. The bulb itself is relatively simple. A spiral type bulb (the most common) is just a glass tube twisted around. Some phosphorus and a tiny bit of mercury and a couple filaments at the ends.
I don't know about other areas, but here in northern California, it is not uncommon to see 60 or 75 watt equivelent CF bulbs for $1 each or even less. They're maybe twice the cost of a regular bulb, but they last far longer and use far less electricity. Also, given that my utility bill averages over $0.20/kwh, people using incandescent bulbs are insane. I've read in several places that electricity usage per person in CA is 49th out of 50 and are near the bottom in terms of usage per person. When the energy crisis caused by Enron and friends hit, CA residents very quickly cut their usage. CF bulbs were everywhere and were dirt cheap (and still are).
In my own house, I have replaced ALL incandescent bulbs with CF except for a few lights where it's not possible.
Note that this is NOT an article about Bush in any way, and in fact is an article provided by an HMO (Cigna). However, there is a very strong correlation with Bush's behavior to the point of it being scarey.
My guess is that the larger cache of the Xeon significantly helps putchar since it will need to periodically make kernel calls to write the data. The frequency of the writing would depend on the default buffer size stdio assigns to stdout. Also, the putchar code may perform a mutex lock around the operation, although I doubt there's any calls to the kernel for the lock and my guess is they incur a negligible impact on performance. Increasing the stdout write buffer size should significantly reduce the putchar overhead. Set the buffer to something like 1MB or so.
Just remember in November, a vote for Bush is also a vote for John Ashcroft, who rammed through the Patriot act after 9/11. Before 9/11 it was only a wet dream of Ashcroft's. Remember, Ashcroft lost his election run to a dead man.
This wouldn't be the first time the FBI has used the Patriot act outside of terrorism, as others have already stated. You can bet it won't be the last, either.
Something like this happened to a friend of mine. He got partially cooked but survived. The weird thing was that after he recovered he was sensitive to radar. He could always detect a cop using a radar gun long before he could see it.
My father told similar stories when he was in the navy about frying birds from the aircraft carrier he was on. He said that sometimes the sailors would intentionally cook the seagulls.
I'm a paying SpamCop reporter. It's just starting to get too expensive to keep reporting. I'll probably keep it up for a bit, but that 16MB quota disappears awfully fast now. Hopefully Comcast cleaning up its act will reduce the spam load significantly.
I took a class taught by Professor Huffman at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was an excellent teacher and really enjoyed teaching. The class, Introduction to Cybernetics, included Huffman coding and some basic neural network stuff, but never once did he call it Huffman Coding. One thing I remember from his class was we had to use a lot of logarithms and the results would have to be something like 5*log2(7) + log3(5). This ruled out using a calculator or a computer for the most part.
He also frequently gave credit to Claude Shannon on information coding.
Sadly (or fortunately) I avoided his other class, due to the fact that the failure rate was 60% for people taking the class for the second time. I think the first time takers failed at 90%.
-Aaron
On the front page of Weekly World News was a picture of Dick Cheney showing proof that he's really a robot. It must be true! It was in big print in the checkout line in the grocery store.
Actually what would be cool is -48 volt DC supplies. Where I work we make a bunch of telco type equipment and one of the big requirements is the ability to run off of -48 volts DC. 48v is a lot better than 12 since the amount of current required is 1/4, hence the amount of power lost in transmission is significantly lower. Also, -48v is a nice multiple of 12v, so using 4 12v batteries in series makes a nice UPS, so UPS are also cheap with virtually no loss due to switching up to 115VAC.
I would think this would be relatively easy to defend against, and in fact regular stun guns should also be easy to defend. All one would need is clothing with a fine wire mesh embedded in it. A tinfoil hat would also likely work well to protect the head. Just as long as the mesh runs all the way down to the ground it should protect whoever is inside.
Often the more complex the weapon, the easier it is to defend against. Much of the Star Wars SDI type weapons are also easy to defend against. Just put a bunch of small ball bearings in the tip of a warhead and explode it some distance away. A low tech weapon that will be effective for quite some time in space.
USB support in Linux has gotten a lot better recently. SuSE 9.1 works just fine out of the box with my Canon SD100 camera. My Logitech webcam is another story, but there's drivers for it. USB printers should be pretty easy as well unless it's some strange off-brand.
In fact, when I plug in my camera, an icon appears on the desktop for it automatically.
OS/2 did this also and I found it useful. Perhaps the window manager could renice everything down a bit except for the selected window? Or else add a process priority boost feature into the scheduler. I must say that upgrading to SuSE 9.1 with the 2.6 kernel is much more responsive than the 2.4 kernel.
If the window manager reniced everything, it could also make the wm more responsive. This also would not affect other users (i.e. root) since it would be restricted to tasks belonging only to that user. Of course, a process started as another user in a window would always have priority.
It could be interesting if better realtime support were added to the kernel, kind of like what TimeSys Linux does.
-Aaron
I've been running DSpam for several months now and have found it works much better than Spam Assassin at catching spam. Furthermore, unlike SA, I have yet to get any false positives.
My only problem is DSpam was not easy to set up with Postfix, at least for me since I'm not an experienced mail administrator. While I now have it mostly working, I have not been able to get the alias accounts working so I can forward missed spams for automatic learning.
I look forward to upgrading to DSpam 3.0 when it is fully released. So far it is working much better than even Mozilla 1.6's spam filter.
I have Postfix running with DSpam and Cyrus IMAP, and by using sieve I have it automatically place spam messages into a spam folder.
All the major carriers are moving towards this model. The new requirements coming out of the DSL forum require equipment makers have the ability to do all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and quality of service.
The company I work for makes equipment that does this. We set it up so an ISP can create a portal where a subscriber can select services and the network will automatically adjust the shaping and priority settings so the subscriber gets that service while allowing the provider to charge for it.
If Jane Doe wants to watch a certain movie, our box will guarantee the bandwidth between the video server and her DSL line while still limiting other traffic to the normal rates. Or if John Smith wants to download a huge ISO and doesn't want to wait, he can click to up his bandwidth to download it and lower it back down when he's done and gets charged extra for the amount of time he has the higher bandwidth.
Anyone can provide a pipe, but it's not real profitable for the providers. They want to make money off of things like pay-per-view or other special services.
Actually, Comcast DOES limit the amount of outbound traffic. When forwarding a bunch of email the email server would periodically block incoming connections saying I was sending too much email. After a couple of minutes it would open back up again.
As for running mail servers, I have been running servers on my cable modem for years, since the original @Home AUP I signed never forbade it nor did it say it could be later altered. I can't help it if AT&T then Comcast bought it.
I also run my own mail server for incoming email and run my own spam filter and imap server internally. I use Comcast's mail server for forwarding outbound email. I've found Comcast's spam filter, if they even run one, to be useless. I also love the fact I have my mail server set up to tarpit several RBLs and that I block China, Korea, Nigeria, Russia, etc.
I have a Philips DVX8000 home theater PC which includes a remote control and a keyboard. Both are infra-red. The keyboard includes an integrated mouse, kind of like a joystick on the upper right which you can operate with your thumb.
Things work reasonably well except for the fact that the keyboard is infrared which causes problems trying to use it in your lap.
I think these keyboards are the same as those used in the earlier web TV boxes.
The keyboard is limited, i.e. no numeric pad, to keep it small and light.
Bluetooth would be a much better solution than the infra-red.