262,144 didn't make a lot of sense to me, so I figured it as a power of 2 -- 2^18th. Odd. It also counts for 512^2, or 4 banks of 2^16th. Only somewhat more logical... but it still doesn't make much sense to me.
The choice of number seems... unusual. Is there some special signifigance or particular reason for that number? Any ideas on how this particular approach would be applied? (Am I missing something, or was it just that point where the economy of scale was most favorable?)
Geez... I always thought a cubit was defined as the distance from a grown man's elbow to his outstretched fingertips. I do know it's commonly accepted to be approximately 18 inches (which converts to about 0.457 meters).
Still... adding on 9 inches could be... painful. Just ask any woman who's had her ovaries jostled by an overeager fellow -- feels a lot like a kick to the goolies for the guys. It'll end the festivities REAL quick.
"...run screaming for the exits..."
Certainly a very possible reaction -- that, or they nominate the fellow for "Hung Jury." (Don't know what Hung Jury is? Use your imagination, or look it up. Hint: dating for women who like to "live large.")
First off, I'm not a physicist. It's been years since "Physics for Engineers" and I didn't even do very well in that course... (Though I would fare better now, as my calc skills have improved vastly!)
That having been said... That PDF is quite a document! It seems very comprehensive -- is it something you put together, or was it given out by your professor? (If so... God! Wish I got PDF handouts in my day!) I did note the creator info, but "Ian Clark" doesn't mean anything to me. All that work using LaTeX, too!
They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE [infosync.no] (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.
The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign.WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?
Still... I want one!
Oh well... if they can cut-n-paste, I guess I have to as well.
They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.
The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign.WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?
Thanks to the rather zealous readership you've attracted, I think we all have a good idea of who you're marrying, and what she looks like. Truly a beautiful woman, and a sharp mind, too. Congratulations are definitely in order!
You certainly had to expect this would generate a lot of traffic here, but who imagined the reaction from the press?!? I was amazed to see Wired cover it... and The Register, and MSNBC (posting the C-Net story), etc! Geez Rob, you're a public icon!
Now that things have settled a bit and your proposal "story" has risen to be well-seated in the Hall of Fame (currently #5, and close to being #4!)... allow me to review the coverage your proposal generated:
Cupid's Bull's-Eye on Nerd Site The co-founder of the popular Slashdot website proposes to his girlfriend on Valentine's Day. One reader wonders if the marriage would be an open-source arrangement. By Michelle Delio.
A Google search on "Kathleen Fent" turns up 77 hits -- The first two being your proposal and its' place in the Hall of Fame, and nearly all of the rest referring to your proposal!
My wife (who happens to be a redhead as well!) thinks the way you proposed was really sweet. She wants to steal Sushi, too... but that's something else entirely. Our congratulations on your engagement, and my wife and I wish the both of you a long, happy and healthy life together!
I use a program called "Tardis 2000" from H. C. Mingham-Smith, Ltd. in Berkshire, England. It's shareware, so you can use it now; for the honest, it only costs $20. It will interface with a standard NMEA GPS (which most are), so you can solve your problem for the cost of the software and a $200 commodity consumer GPS with a serial cable. (I'd suggest you get one with an external antenna option.) Heck, it'll even run as an NT/2000 service, so you don't get clutter in your system tray.
(According to it, my clock drift is 4.703 seconds per day, based on time signals from tick.usno.navy.mil -- do you need thousandths-of-a-second accuracy? I sure don't! I think it shows the general precision of a computer's clock, though.)
The GPS time units I suspect you've looked at are paired with, I believe, a disciplined frequency standard. IIRC, it's nothing much more than an oven-regulated quartz crystal and a huge price tag. Yes, they are extraordinarily accurate and precise, but the clock drift that'll occur between your workstations' time synchronizations will completely negate the ridiculous accuracy of such a device. Don't waste your money, if you need "precise time, accurate to ±1 second," then you're set for about $220 to $250.
Besides, I love the name -- it's so perfectly appropriate.
First, let me qualify my experience. I am familiar with OpenBSD -- what I use for my firewall -- not Linux. I have done many boxes with multiple identical cards, and never had them 'come up' in a different configuration than I had originally configured. Ever. I never gave it much thought, and I really have no idea exactly how it's prevented -- MAC address, perhaps? It'd make sense, at least to me...
I don't believe there'd be any danger of cards randomizing on every reboot -- there are far too many people out there using multiple interfaces to not allow that problem -- if there was one -- to be addressed.
Now, as far as this solution being aimed at home use... There are many people who wish to run services from their home network. Mail, file services, a proxy for their websurfing while at work... not all these services are 100% secure. Yes, I know I used business examples, but the same vulnerabilities could happen at home. Heck, when Code Red went around, look at all the home-based servers that were affected! The home/business line is very blurred.
Or, if you're lucky enough to be playing with 64 bit PCI @ 66 MHz... there's the newer Adaptec stuff.
Adaptec 64044 4-port 64bit/66MHz PCI fast Ethernet adapter
Not cheap in any case -- but it'll sure open up some PCI slots!
Now, to answer the Rick's "Feasible? Stupid?" question...
Feasible? Certainly. These cards are basically 4 Ethernet chipsets put on one card. The Phobos one uses an Intel DS21143 setup, and can be addressed with generic Linux drivers (tulip.o) as 4 separate devices.
Stupid? Possibly. Everything coming in from the internet has to pass through the bridge first, and thus pass its' rules. Nothing can directly address it. Pretty much perfectly invulnerable. The only real vulnerability would be a DoS, but that depends on the rules you've plugged into the firewall. In any case, it's impossible to directly compromise the firewall portion of the machine.
Having the machine providing other services does mean, however, that if something is somehow compromised that your firewall is compromised too -- it's a risk you have to weigh yourself.
Imagine you're running a webserver on the machine -- with a vulnerable CGI. Someone discovers this, and takes over what they think is "only" a webserver -- only to find they've taken over your company's firewall, too! Ouch.
Something worth considering though -- it'd make for less hardware, and it's something I find attractive for home use -- a combined worry-free firewall + home file server + seamless internet access... nice idea.
Please, I'm not blaming Loki's demise on Microsoft. My point was that I don't find the kind of response Hyperion Entertainment has received beyond suspicion of (some) Microsoft sponsorship. Microsoft is a company who:
Charged computer manufacturers for every system shipped, regardless of the OS loaded,
Buried Netscape when they realized they wanted the browser market and all the commerce opportunities it offered,
"Encourages" developers to produce ActiveX games -- which cannot easily be ported to any other operating system (except the X-Box, and that really doesn't count),
Has no problems lying under oath in court (remember the videotape?),
... and I'm supposed to belive they're cute and cuddly? Fat frickin' chance. They're a 900 pound gorilla, and they belong behind bars.
I'm all for responsibility and accountability, and I want them to 'fess up to what they've done and be held accountable for it! This goes for all companies, as well -- I'm not creating any higher standard for Microsoft than I expect elsewhere.
<humor>
(As for the paranoia part, bash the ever-perfect Linux community again, and I'll accuse you of working for Microsoft! How's that for paranoia?) </humor>
I read the parent comment, and my reaction was a dawning 'holy sh!t' realization. You know, Microsoft really isn't above sponsoring this kind of behavior:
Contacting developers that are known to support both Linux and Windows
Demanding (the more rude, the better!) a free copy of the Linux version "...because I got the windows demo in a CrackerJack box."
...And thus souring managers, some developers, and other decision-makers on the idea of commercial success with products for Linux.
It's probably a lot more effective than you'd think. I'd like to see software and operating systems stand on their own merits (BeOS anyone?), but it has been clearly demonstrated that MS just doesn't play fair.
In Stephen Hawking's Cambridge Lectures, he points out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a statistical, rather than absolute, law. It applies in most cases that we have observed, yet we can not prove it applies to all cases.
The relevant part; tape 2, side 2:
"...The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases with time. Moreover, when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems."
(He gives an example)
" The Second Law of Thermodynamics has a rather different status to that of other laws of science. Other laws, such as Newton's Law of Gravity, for example, are absolute laws. That is, they always hold.
On the other hand, the Second Law is a statistical law. That is, it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases."
Damn those black holes. Or gravastars. Whatever you want to call them.
Zero-point energy probably does exist. There certainly is something there, we have managed to prove that much. I just don't believe that a single person, working alone, with a mechanical background, is going to 'suddenly uncover' the secret. I believe we are, unfortunately, beyond that point in our scientific development.
Almost all of these supposed 'perpetual motion' devices have some mechanical component. Something moving, some clockworks, something. There was even one instance where the reporter noticed the speed of the device was rather random. Upon closer inspection, a small cable was found, leading to the next room. The device was, in fact, powered by an elderly man in a rocking chair!
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", huh?
I'd forgotten about the voting-on-stories bit over there. Probably because I just read, and have never bothered to create an account.
Still, to their credit, I wouldn't call their story as "gushing" as what I saw from Reuters via Yahoo. They come right out and ask "Discovery or Hoax?", as well as including the fact that critics call it "voodoo science." Their 'story' is also a simple paragraph with a link to Yahoo, versus an entire page.
The readership probably voted it up more to point out Reuters' stupidity than their own.
On a side note, I find it most suspicious that the 'machine' appears to be welded shut, and even more suspicious that the reporter didn't question the fact.
Thanks for reminding me about K5... I hadn't visited them much since their server problems back in December. Now, about the K5 readers being "...taken in...", allow me to quote the first comment -- I think it sums things up perfectly.
Perpetual Energy or Hoax? (3.72 / 11) (#1)
by greyrat on Tue Jan 22nd, 2002 at 03:28:12 PM EST
Okay, it's been a few years... let's see if I can remember this right...
Exchange Server is hard wired to crash if there is less than 20 MB left on the drive where the daily message logs are kept.
This system had a dedicated 40 GB RAID partition for log files, and half of it was free.
The backup software was ArcServe 6 (IIRC), backups were going to a DLT changer, and everything was working properly. (I could verify any backup I wanted to, they were fine.)
Nothing odd to this point, everything's working like it should. Right? Now here's where it started going south:
Try logging into Exchange with the Exchange Administrator password -- it fails (yes, it was the right one!)
Stop and then restart the Exchange services (basically 'kill -HUP' for you UNIX people), I can log in... for a few minutes.
The message store service would then crash.
I didn't spend a lot of time staring at this thing, since I was out of ideas (and being billed at $185/hour). I hopped on the knowledge base, we got on the phone with MS (with credit card in hand) and... got told we needed a better computer. Something on the order of
"...obviously you're running Exchange on a server that isn't equipped to handle the load." There were only 30 users! Yes, a couple of them did have 500 MB mail stores, but that wasn't the point -- when it had been working, it had worked just fine!
We ended up calling another fellow who had worked on this machine before. When I finally got him on the phone, he had this little pearl:
"Sometimes Exchange won't properly remove the old log files when it's been notified by the backup service (whichever one you have installed) of a successful backup. It marks the files as removed, hence they don't appear on the disk or appear to take up disk space... but they still are. Shut down Exchange, backup the partition, format the partition and then restore the files.
It worked.
I ran into a similar problem on a much smaller machine serving a 3 person office -- this time, it was MS Backup instead of ArcServe... same problem. The drive only had ~800 MB free anyway, and there were performance complaints... so this problem stood out in my mind. Worked then, too.
$185 an hour to babysit a backup & restore job... Boy, I sure wish I could get a job like that again.
Inappropriate, uncalled for, and absolutely unacceptable. In the absence of accountability, I at least demand accuracy.
The example I used is based on an experience I had with Exchange Server crashing uncontrollably. It was running on one of the sweetest Compaq servers I have seen to date, with things like UltraSCSI RAID 5 and over a gigabyte of memory (back when that meant something.) I was working for a VAR, and we had the support contract for this machine. Microsoft Knowledgebase: useless. Phone call to MS: no help, $90 down the drain. The one guy in our company who'd dealt with it before on the phone: priceless.
Before you berate me for being clueless, get this -- the thing was crashing while unplugged from the network! That's right, zero load, no users. It was weird... but it eventually got fixed.
You're probably right; whoever made that purchase decision ought to be flogged.
We're talking about a company here that wants to milk as much money out of its' customers, with the least effort required.
They're certainly working well toward that goal -- look where we are now!
We have a 'server' OS that differs from the 'Ooo, SHINY!' home version by virtue of just a few registry settings!
(Why does a server need Media Player, DirectX, Active Desktop, and all the other home-version 'shell-upgrade' tweaks, anyway?!?)
Microsoft will accept NO liability for its' software, neither for fitness for purpose, the accidental destruction of your company, or the surreptitious mailing of your anti-government rants to the FBI.
Two words: Product Activation. Once upon a time, the MS Office license actually allowed you to install it on your home & work machines. Gee, Microsoft sure is a nice company! They're cute and cuddly, too! Now that everyone's used to it, all of a sudden we have to pay for every copy -- you can't tell me that wasn't a patiently engineered plan.
If Microsoft wants to make subscriptions attractive, offer something in return -- we already get all the benefits of WindowsUpdate, are they going to take that away? What is needed is a guarantee of fitness for use, stability, and timely repair of problems. And by timely, I mean 'timely from the customer's definition', not Microsoft's!
If I go to Ford and buy a dump truck, I am guaranteed that it will haul N tons of material, or N cubic meters, whichever is less. If I bought a 10-ton truck, and the wheels fall off when I put a 5-ton payload in it, I can sue.
Apply this comparison to Microsoft: I purchase Windows 2000 Server, Exchange Server, and the recommended hardware to run it on, and when it fails at half the advertised max load, Microsoft will gladly bill me for a support incident to tell me I need better hardware!...And there's nothing I can do about it.
I know this comparison isn't perfect, but it certainly makes the point. I know a lot of companies are sick and tired of buying something advertised as suiting a particular purpose, only to find it lacking.
If the subscription allows me to hold MS accountable, I'm interested. Otherwise, forget it.
IIRC, LN2 is a byproduct of Liquid Oxygen production. It's a happy coincidence, so it's relatively cheap.
The refridgerators to make it aren't, though. So you end up pouring a constant stream of it into your system, and being plugged into their 'scheduled delivery' system worse than a crack addict.
That's when it gets expensive.
"Oh, you don't want your precious computer to melt? I've got just the thing! Now... what are you going to do for me...?"
Just kidding... they're not quite that bad. Close, though.
I have several older IBM SCSI drives (they're "only" 9.1 GB... geez...) that offer this option. It's a jumper that can be optionally set to command a delay of (x seconds) times the SCSI ID -- it has to be used in conjunction with the Auto-Start jumper.
The other option is from the host adapter: the 'unit start' command. Don't know if the SCSI-IDE adapters will do any good and heed this command...
Thinking about it, what with all the power saving and sleep modes that are supposed to be in HDs these days... you'd think you could just delay the start and get the BIOS to play along.
(Perhaps this is something the Linux BIOS Project can address?)
When I had my first experience with Unix, it was Solaris 7 / x86. I didn't learn
squat from it because of that damn CDE shell -- I didn't know where to look for anything, and (with my windows-addled brain) I didn't understand where the equivalent of the 'control panel' was.
Fast forward (slightly) to 1998. I now had a cable modem, and wanted to share it between several computers. I had learned about the differences between proxies and NAT, and tried several products that would run under Windows. All of those were commercial demos, with rather aggressive pricing. I was not impressed.
I had seen comments here about OpenBSD, so I looked into it. I took an old P-100, followed the directions, and had a working NAT firewall in a day. I had learned more about UNIX in about a week (this includes reading time) than I had in 4 months with Solaris!
Today, it's still there. The same hardware, at least -- it just got upgraded to OpenBSD 3.0
The moral of this story:
If you have the patience, it is both simple and easy to use. I found it very straight forward and logical -- follow the directions, it will work.
(Yes, I know -- that can be a big "if.")
On a side note, I installed OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad last year... it found the sound card, the peripherals (3com ethernet & US Robotics PCMCIA modem), and setting up XWindows was a piece of cake -- there were config files readily available. Perhaps not incredible, but it was easier than installing Windows on the same machine, and that is impressive!
Slashdot Mirror
262,144 didn't make a lot of sense to me, so I figured it as a power of 2 -- 2^18th. Odd. It also counts for 512^2, or 4 banks of 2^16th. Only somewhat more logical... but it still doesn't make much sense to me.
The choice of number seems... unusual. Is there some special signifigance or particular reason for that number? Any ideas on how this particular approach would be applied? (Am I missing something, or was it just that point where the economy of scale was most favorable?)
Geez... I always thought a cubit was defined as the distance from a grown man's elbow to his outstretched fingertips. I do know it's commonly accepted to be approximately 18 inches (which converts to about 0.457 meters).
Still... adding on 9 inches could be... painful. Just ask any woman who's had her ovaries jostled by an overeager fellow -- feels a lot like a kick to the goolies for the guys. It'll end the festivities REAL quick.
- "...run screaming for the exits..."
Certainly a very possible reaction -- that, or they nominate the fellow for "Hung Jury." (Don't know what Hung Jury is? Use your imagination, or look it up. Hint: dating for women who like to "live large.")Applets, Javascript, mouse-overs... all things that my proxy quite happily disables, thank God. Be glad your browser didn't bother to render it.
First off, I'm not a physicist. It's been years since "Physics for Engineers" and I didn't even do very well in that course... (Though I would fare better now, as my calc skills have improved vastly!)
That having been said... That PDF is quite a document! It seems very comprehensive -- is it something you put together, or was it given out by your professor? (If so... God! Wish I got PDF handouts in my day!) I did note the creator info, but "Ian Clark" doesn't mean anything to me. All that work using LaTeX, too!
Impressive. Thanks for the posting it!
Gee... if
I refer to this comment.
I referred to better pictures of the Journada 928,
- infoSync's article [infosync.no] has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 [infosync.no] than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.
And then went on to talk about the OS on it:-
They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE [infosync.no] (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.
Oh well... if they can cut-n-paste, I guess I have to as well.The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?
Still... I want one!
infoSync's article has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.
They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.
The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?
Still... I want one!
Dear Rob,
Thanks to the rather zealous readership you've attracted, I think we all have a good idea of who you're marrying, and what she looks like. Truly a beautiful woman, and a sharp mind, too. Congratulations are definitely in order!
You certainly had to expect this would generate a lot of traffic here, but who imagined the reaction from the press?!? I was amazed to see Wired cover it... and The Register, and MSNBC (posting the C-Net story), etc! Geez Rob, you're a public icon!
Now that things have settled a bit and your proposal "story" has risen to be well-seated in the Hall of Fame (currently #5, and close to being #4!)... allow me to review the coverage your proposal generated:
- Cupid's Bull's-Eye on Nerd Site
- Slashdot editor proposes on front page
- News for Nerds: Will you marry me? (Cnet) or the same thing on MSNBC
- Geek pops the question online (ZDnet)
- A Google search on "Kathleen Fent" turns up 77 hits -- The first two being your proposal and its' place in the Hall of Fame, and nearly all of the rest referring to your proposal!
My wife (who happens to be a redhead as well!) thinks the way you proposed was really sweet. She wants to steal Sushi, too... but that's something else entirely. Our congratulations on your engagement, and my wife and I wish the both of you a long, happy and healthy life together!The co-founder of the popular Slashdot website proposes to his girlfriend on Valentine's Day. One reader wonders if the marriage would be an open-source arrangement. By Michelle Delio.
"Valentine's Day special" 14 February 2002 4:22pm
I use a program called "Tardis 2000" from H. C. Mingham-Smith, Ltd. in Berkshire, England. It's shareware, so you can use it now; for the honest, it only costs $20. It will interface with a standard NMEA GPS (which most are), so you can solve your problem for the cost of the software and a $200 commodity consumer GPS with a serial cable. (I'd suggest you get one with an external antenna option.) Heck, it'll even run as an NT/2000 service, so you don't get clutter in your system tray.
(According to it, my clock drift is 4.703 seconds per day, based on time signals from tick.usno.navy.mil -- do you need thousandths-of-a-second accuracy? I sure don't! I think it shows the general precision of a computer's clock, though.)
The GPS time units I suspect you've looked at are paired with, I believe, a disciplined frequency standard. IIRC, it's nothing much more than an oven-regulated quartz crystal and a huge price tag. Yes, they are extraordinarily accurate and precise, but the clock drift that'll occur between your workstations' time synchronizations will completely negate the ridiculous accuracy of such a device. Don't waste your money, if you need "precise time, accurate to ±1 second," then you're set for about $220 to $250.
Besides, I love the name -- it's so perfectly appropriate.
First, let me qualify my experience. I am familiar with OpenBSD -- what I use for my firewall -- not Linux. I have done many boxes with multiple identical cards, and never had them 'come up' in a different configuration than I had originally configured. Ever. I never gave it much thought, and I really have no idea exactly how it's prevented -- MAC address, perhaps? It'd make sense, at least to me...
I don't believe there'd be any danger of cards randomizing on every reboot -- there are far too many people out there using multiple interfaces to not allow that problem -- if there was one -- to be addressed.
Now, as far as this solution being aimed at home use... There are many people who wish to run services from their home network. Mail, file services, a proxy for their websurfing while at work... not all these services are 100% secure. Yes, I know I used business examples, but the same vulnerabilities could happen at home. Heck, when Code Red went around, look at all the home-based servers that were affected! The home/business line is very blurred.
Or... you could just use one of these:
- D-Link DFE-570tx 4-port 32bit PCI fast Ethernet adapter
Not cheap in any case -- but it'll sure open up some PCI slots!Phobos P430 (same thing)
Adaptec 6944a Discontinued model, cheaper -- still 4-port, still 10/100
Or, if you're lucky enough to be playing with 64 bit PCI @ 66 MHz... there's the newer Adaptec stuff.
Adaptec 64044 4-port 64bit/66MHz PCI fast Ethernet adapter
Now, to answer the Rick's "Feasible? Stupid?" question...
- Feasible? Certainly. These cards are basically 4 Ethernet chipsets put on one card. The Phobos one uses an Intel DS21143 setup, and can be addressed with generic Linux drivers (tulip.o) as 4 separate devices.
Something worth considering though -- it'd make for less hardware, and it's something I find attractive for home use -- a combined worry-free firewall + home file server + seamless internet access... nice idea.Stupid? Possibly. Everything coming in from the internet has to pass through the bridge first, and thus pass its' rules. Nothing can directly address it. Pretty much perfectly invulnerable. The only real vulnerability would be a DoS, but that depends on the rules you've plugged into the firewall. In any case, it's impossible to directly compromise the firewall portion of the machine.
Having the machine providing other services does mean, however, that if something is somehow compromised that your firewall is compromised too -- it's a risk you have to weigh yourself.
Imagine you're running a webserver on the machine -- with a vulnerable CGI. Someone discovers this, and takes over what they think is "only" a webserver -- only to find they've taken over your company's firewall, too! Ouch.
Please, I'm not blaming Loki's demise on Microsoft. My point was that I don't find the kind of response Hyperion Entertainment has received beyond suspicion of (some) Microsoft sponsorship. Microsoft is a company who:
I'm all for responsibility and accountability, and I want them to 'fess up to what they've done and be held accountable for it! This goes for all companies, as well -- I'm not creating any higher standard for Microsoft than I expect elsewhere.
<humor>
(As for the paranoia part, bash the ever-perfect Linux community again, and I'll accuse you of working for Microsoft! How's that for paranoia?)
</humor>
I read the parent comment, and my reaction was a dawning 'holy sh!t' realization. You know, Microsoft really isn't above sponsoring this kind of behavior:
- Contacting developers that are known to support both Linux and Windows
- Demanding (the more rude, the better!) a free copy of the Linux version "...because I got the windows demo in a CrackerJack box."
...And thus souring managers, some developers, and other decision-makers on the idea of commercial success with products for Linux.
It's probably a lot more effective than you'd think. I'd like to see software and operating systems stand on their own merits (BeOS anyone?), but it has been clearly demonstrated that MS just doesn't play fair.Where's Mulder when you need him...?
In Stephen Hawking's Cambridge Lectures , he points out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a statistical, rather than absolute, law. It applies in most cases that we have observed, yet we can not prove it applies to all cases.
The relevant part; tape 2, side 2:
Damn those black holes. Or gravastars. Whatever you want to call them.Zero-point energy probably does exist. There certainly is something there, we have managed to prove that much. I just don't believe that a single person, working alone, with a mechanical background, is going to 'suddenly uncover' the secret. I believe we are, unfortunately, beyond that point in our scientific development.
Almost all of these supposed 'perpetual motion' devices have some mechanical component. Something moving, some clockworks, something. There was even one instance where the reporter noticed the speed of the device was rather random. Upon closer inspection, a small cable was found, leading to the next room. The device was, in fact, powered by an elderly man in a rocking chair!
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", huh?
Oh, good point!
I'd forgotten about the voting-on-stories bit over there. Probably because I just read, and have never bothered to create an account.
Still, to their credit, I wouldn't call their story as "gushing" as what I saw from Reuters via Yahoo. They come right out and ask "Discovery or Hoax?", as well as including the fact that critics call it "voodoo science." Their 'story' is also a simple paragraph with a link to Yahoo, versus an entire page.
The readership probably voted it up more to point out Reuters' stupidity than their own.
On a side note, I find it most suspicious that the 'machine' appears to be welded shut, and even more suspicious that the reporter didn't question the fact.
Thanks for reminding me about K5... I hadn't visited them much since their server problems back in December. Now, about the K5 readers being "...taken in...", allow me to quote the first comment -- I think it sums things up perfectly.
-- END OF LINE.
Okay, it's been a few years... let's see if I can remember this right...
- Exchange Server is hard wired to crash if there is less than 20 MB left on the drive where the daily message logs are kept.
- This system had a dedicated 40 GB RAID partition for log files, and half of it was free.
- The backup software was ArcServe 6 (IIRC), backups were going to a DLT changer, and everything was working properly. (I could verify any backup I wanted to, they were fine.)
Nothing odd to this point, everything's working like it should. Right? Now here's where it started going south:- I didn't spend a lot of time staring at this thing, since I was out of ideas (and being billed at $185/hour). I hopped on the knowledge base, we got on the phone with MS (with credit card in hand) and... got told we needed a better computer. Something on the order of
- "...obviously you're running Exchange on a server that isn't equipped to handle the load." There were only 30 users! Yes, a couple of them did have 500 MB mail stores, but that wasn't the point -- when it had been working, it had worked just fine!
- "Sometimes Exchange won't properly remove the old log files when it's been notified by the backup service (whichever one you have installed) of a successful backup. It marks the files as removed, hence they don't appear on the disk or appear to take up disk space... but they still are. Shut down Exchange, backup the partition, format the partition and then restore the files.
I ran into a similar problem on a much smaller machine serving a 3 person office -- this time, it was MS Backup instead of ArcServe... same problem. The drive only had ~800 MB free anyway, and there were performance complaints... so this problem stood out in my mind. Worked then, too.We ended up calling another fellow who had worked on this machine before. When I finally got him on the phone, he had this little pearl:
It worked.
$185 an hour to babysit a backup & restore job... Boy, I sure wish I could get a job like that again.
It's still in there? Amazing. I don't have a copy of OfficeXP, so I can't look.
For some reason I thought they'd phased that out a few years back. (About the time WordPerfect was twitching on the floor.)
Never said my memory was perfect.
"...everybody lies with performance figures."
"...lies..."
Inappropriate, uncalled for, and absolutely unacceptable. In the absence of accountability, I at least demand accuracy.
The example I used is based on an experience I had with Exchange Server crashing uncontrollably. It was running on one of the sweetest Compaq servers I have seen to date, with things like UltraSCSI RAID 5 and over a gigabyte of memory (back when that meant something.) I was working for a VAR, and we had the support contract for this machine. Microsoft Knowledgebase: useless. Phone call to MS: no help, $90 down the drain. The one guy in our company who'd dealt with it before on the phone: priceless.
Before you berate me for being clueless, get this -- the thing was crashing while unplugged from the network! That's right, zero load, no users. It was weird... but it eventually got fixed.
You're probably right; whoever made that purchase decision ought to be flogged.
Good department. Certainly appropriate.
We're talking about a company here that wants to milk as much money out of its' customers, with the least effort required.
They're certainly working well toward that goal -- look where we are now!
- We have a 'server' OS that differs from the 'Ooo, SHINY!' home version by virtue of just a few registry settings!
- Microsoft will accept NO liability for its' software, neither for fitness for purpose, the accidental destruction of your company, or the surreptitious mailing of your anti-government rants to the FBI.
- Two words: Product Activation. Once upon a time, the MS Office license actually allowed you to install it on your home & work machines. Gee, Microsoft sure is a nice company! They're cute and cuddly, too! Now that everyone's used to it, all of a sudden we have to pay for every copy -- you can't tell me that wasn't a patiently engineered plan.
If Microsoft wants to make subscriptions attractive, offer something in return -- we already get all the benefits of WindowsUpdate, are they going to take that away? What is needed is a guarantee of fitness for use, stability, and timely repair of problems. And by timely, I mean 'timely from the customer's definition', not Microsoft's!(Why does a server need Media Player, DirectX, Active Desktop, and all the other home-version 'shell-upgrade' tweaks, anyway?!?)
If I go to Ford and buy a dump truck, I am guaranteed that it will haul N tons of material, or N cubic meters, whichever is less. If I bought a 10-ton truck, and the wheels fall off when I put a 5-ton payload in it, I can sue.
Apply this comparison to Microsoft: I purchase Windows 2000 Server, Exchange Server, and the recommended hardware to run it on, and when it fails at half the advertised max load, Microsoft will gladly bill me for a support incident to tell me I need better hardware! ...And there's nothing I can do about it.
I know this comparison isn't perfect, but it certainly makes the point. I know a lot of companies are sick and tired of buying something advertised as suiting a particular purpose, only to find it lacking.
If the subscription allows me to hold MS accountable, I'm interested. Otherwise, forget it.
Try your local welding gas store.
IIRC, LN2 is a byproduct of Liquid Oxygen production. It's a happy coincidence, so it's relatively cheap.
The refridgerators to make it aren't, though. So you end up pouring a constant stream of it into your system, and being plugged into their 'scheduled delivery' system worse than a crack addict.
That's when it gets expensive.
Just kidding... they're not quite that bad. Close, though.
I can't be the only one that finds humor in
- "U.S. Patent 5,851,117: "Building Block Training Systems and Training Methods"; Keith A. Alsheimer and others..."
Absolutely hilarious!!I have several older IBM SCSI drives (they're "only" 9.1 GB... geez...) that offer this option. It's a jumper that can be optionally set to command a delay of (x seconds) times the SCSI ID -- it has to be used in conjunction with the Auto-Start jumper.
The other option is from the host adapter: the 'unit start' command. Don't know if the SCSI-IDE adapters will do any good and heed this command...
Thinking about it, what with all the power saving and sleep modes that are supposed to be in HDs these days... you'd think you could just delay the start and get the BIOS to play along.
(Perhaps this is something the Linux BIOS Project can address?)
Please consider this:
- When I had my first experience with Unix, it was Solaris 7 / x86. I didn't learn
- squat from it because of that damn CDE shell -- I didn't know where to look for anything, and (with my windows-addled brain) I didn't understand where the equivalent of the 'control panel' was.
The moral of this story:Fast forward (slightly) to 1998. I now had a cable modem, and wanted to share it between several computers. I had learned about the differences between proxies and NAT, and tried several products that would run under Windows. All of those were commercial demos, with rather aggressive pricing. I was not impressed.
I had seen comments here about OpenBSD, so I looked into it. I took an old P-100, followed the directions, and had a working NAT firewall in a day. I had learned more about UNIX in about a week (this includes reading time) than I had in 4 months with Solaris!
Today, it's still there. The same hardware, at least -- it just got upgraded to OpenBSD 3.0
(Yes, I know -- that can be a big "if.")
On a side note, I installed OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad last year... it found the sound card, the peripherals (3com ethernet & US Robotics PCMCIA modem), and setting up XWindows was a piece of cake -- there were config files readily available. Perhaps not incredible, but it was easier than installing Windows on the same machine, and that is impressive!
"Let me tell you about my mother..."
Yeah, I suppose I could see that happening...
Yes, they will... but how?
and...
This comment has been a knee-jerk reaction. We now return you to your normal thread.