Doing anything that can be done server-side on the client side is generally a bad idea
Oh, I don't know - what about the simple stuff like form validation? On a high traffic site, receiving a complex form from a client, only to have to send a page back saying "sorry, you forgot this field,do it again" seems to be a waste of both the servers resources and the user's time. Better to just have a JS popup telling them and changing focus to the problem field - no effort on your server's part is needed.
Of course, double-check everything you get at the server, just give the client a chance to sort it out at their end first before troubling you with it.
Try a masthead antenna amplifier. Get a good quality one and (hopefully) it will help compensate for the god-awful frontend in your TV tuner.
(Yes, I know masthead amps are really to compensate for long cable runs, but a low noise amp at the front upping things by 10-12dB is sometimes all it takes.)
I get a call about if from my Wife, and have to SSH in from work to re-launch the Myth front-end? It was really cool that I could do this - but quite unfortunate that I had to.
I hooked into the ACPI power button routines to kill/restart the X server when mythtv hung up. The backend was it's own process outside of X, so it continued to run fine when this was done.
So, all non-technical wife-types had to do when mythTV hung was to press the power button and it would take care of itself. But to be fair, by the time I stopped using it (I went off-grid) it was pretty stable - perhaps once a month a frontend reset was needed.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 game console is a $12 computer as well.
It may be all very ho-hum for you with your GHz PC and internet connection, but I think it's interesting. It has :
- Keyboard (important step up from the traditional game console of old). - Known / Familiar hardware, being a NES clone. - TV-out, which means that any low-income family that has a TV, can get a relatively cheap computer.
Combine that with a decent software cartridge with : - Word processor - Spreadsheet - Good kids educational software - BASIC (or Pascal,if you're feeling sadistic. The logical steps/sequence in programming apply across all programming languages.) - A few MB of flash ram for storage of docs,etc - File manager / DOS of some sort. - A port or two would be nice for a printer/modem, but it's probably pushing it.
annnnnd with all that you're suddenly on par with the IBM PC-XT of 25 years ago, and it helped revolutionise personal/business computers then.
So, seeing that the hardware's done, all MIT has to do is come up with a NES cartridge with decent software. Seems doable.
I was accosted by a convenience store clerk as I entered the store, and told that I had to remove my ski mask or they would call the police.
Having no idea on the current 1984-esque laws in the US at the moment, from an Australian point of view I can only point out that that is a "store policy" only. It's a far cry from "public places".
To use a bit of Political Correctness (spit) against The Man, one can simply say,"but what about Muslim women and their full-body, face-covering burkhas and veils? Surely you're not discriminating against them, are you? Tsk-Tsk. Maybe I should call a few people in the press."
They'll be backpedalling before you can say "Anti-discrimination Comission"
You are a chinese honeytrap now in possession of an aide's blackberry. It is 1am. The aide has passed out drunk three steps inside the front door of his flat, and won't be in any fit capacity until about 8am, when he realises his blackberry is missing and goes looking for it. The IT boys cancel his password at 9am.
That gives you 8 hours to:
- Read all his recent email, for starters. If they're doing IMAP, then god knows how many personal IMAP folders there are to browse through on the server. Look for the good folders like "Foreign Policy". "Sent Items" and "Drafts" can also be fascinating.
- Get his contact list, recent callers,etc, allowing you to analyse and see where this particular cog fits in the Government Machine. If he turns out to be a well-connected individual, it might pay in the future to keep an eye on him. If he's not well-connected, that's one more person you cross off the list.
- Possibly fire off a few trojans to a few "inside" email accounts on that list, who might accept them from a known,"trusted" source. Doesn't hurt to try something like "Revision to yesterday's document -- URGENT".
You can call them, if you want , and they'll send one out. I've never done it myself - one would hope that you could find your way to the right person by looking them up in the phone book. Knowing the labyrinthe process involved in Big Business, I'd set aside a good couple of hours.
Anyway, from the beginning of XP (that is, there was an update CD prior to the release of SP1),they've been free of charge. I can't recall offhand if there was such a CD with previous incarnations.
The problem with sending them out to all-and-sundry is that people often don't register (as opposed to "activate' - bah!) their copy of windows, so there's a lot of difficultly direct-mailing them. I suppose they could do as you ask, and keep them in major shops, but it is a lot of wastage, AOL-style. It's not the kind of thing that's useful if you don't have a copy of windows on hand, unlike an AOL CD, which can serve a (quasi)useful purpose by itself.
I guess there's no easy answer, hey? Unless they were rewritable CD's.... that'd be pretty good.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to add a patch CD to the box, or when patches are released to ship patch CDs..... to people that ask nicely for them?
It seems that it's not that hard, seeing that they already do.
Your homework for today is to find the link at Microsoft's site that lets you get a copy of the SP3 security update CD mailed to you, and post it below. Extra points if you can write a script that goes through your local phone book and orders a CD for each person.
I have NO IDEA on how fast ice melt, and I am a physicist (*)
tsk. Hang your head in shame.
Then put your degree back in whatever cereal box it came in and go out and start drinking. Isn't "Introductory Alcoholism" a required first year physics subject?:-P
Your average joe has no fucking idea what the heck a kilowatt of cooling is in real-world terms, but I'm sure that they've put some drinks on ice, or watched a few cubes melt in a glass on a lazy afternoon. It's relatively easy to extrapolate:
"Hmmm. A 5-pound bag of ice keeps a dozen beers icy-cold for a day... what? Your average A/C is a like melting a couple of tons of ice a day? That's a lot of ice! It would keep my beers cold for weeks! Let me look at these piddly little cooling packs in this widget. Huh. They don't stand a chance in hell of keeping me cool all day."
I know, I know, if I had managed to work in some bastardised units involving volkswagons, football fields and Libraries of Congress, perhaps factoring in daily running costs in terms of monthly Gulf War expenditure, it would have made it that much more understandable to the common man.
Actually, it's not an evaporative cooler. The bottles are sealed, no evaporation from them takes place. Thus, you are limited to the amount of cooling that you can get from melting a chunk of ice and bringing the resultant water up to room temp.
It might be enough to cool a person who was directly in its airstream, but I wouldn't blow my money on it. Get a real evaporative cooler instead, or make your own with a fan and a wet towel/sack over the back of it and save your pennies for some other "engineering genius from china" that actually uses a decent compressor-driven phase-change refrigerative cycle.
I live in a country that Saw The Light Of The S.I. Unit a generation ago and thus your olde worlde units are strange and confusing to me. Tons still crops up occasionally in A/C lingo, but now it's all kilowatts, all the time, baby,yeah. Regarding sizing of the A/C, a 6kW unit will do a reasonable-sized loungeroom in a 40 deg C north Queensland summer, due to the fact that insulation (huh? what's that?) is a unknown and mysterious thing here.
Personally, if I lived anywhere where the humidity was below 50%, I'd just use an evaporative cooler instead.
There's an old unit of measurement for heat transfer called 'tons'. You don't see it around much anymore, due to the switch to units like btu.hr or kWh. But it would be really useful to bring it back for things such as this.
"1 ton" is the amount of heat needed to melt 1 ton of ice in a 24 hour period,or about 3.5kWh. Your typical car air-conditioner, or big-ish room A/C, has a cooling capacity of about 2.5 tons.
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
Sooooooo....How much ice is in those cooling blocks? A kilo or two?The only possible real effect is that it might temporarily de-humidify the air in your room a little due to condensation on the ice blocks, giving the impression that it is "somewhat" cooler.
And when, exactly, would that be? I'd bet you'd be off by years, but no matter what I say I doubt it'll change your mind.
Well, he would likely say after UID30000.... personally, I would say after UID40000 or so.
But the First Unspoken Rule Of/. is "Do not be led into tedious pedantic, off-topic discussions". Unfortunately the Second Rule is "Ignore the First Rule."
So, here we are.
(long pause)
Ummmm, I bet you're a Gentoo user. I can tell by your tedious pedanticness.
the engine block would cool down to the point where the reaction wouldn't work even with the catalyst pretty quickly. A car engine needs to produce something of the order of 100kW.
All other bullshit about this article aside, the general rule of thumb for I.C. engines is that 1/3rd of the fuel's energy goes to motive power, 1/3rd goes to engine coolant/oil as heat and 1/3rd goes out the exhaust as heat.
If you could recover 1/2 of the energy lost going out the coolant+exhaust and put it to use, you would double the engine's output.
Not to worry, NYCL wrote letters to both judges, reminding them of what the RIAA lawyers had forgotten.
Hey Ray,
Would you care to state, for the record, that you love life and don't have any - you know - suicidal tendencies, or that you don't like to partake in high risk activities?
This is an indication of the sad state the world is in. Think about it. You are apologising in advance in case your rather obvious fictional examples of names used in a possible situation might actually be someone in the slashdot readership.
Come on now - you're making an example, using typical nametypes.... does political correctness really have to stretch this far? "oh, noes, I might *offend* someone! Better apologise straight up."
The proper answer to anyone who might possibly be offended (who actually complains) is "Sorry about that - now fuck you, grow some skin, and stop whining about some trivial thing."
Fucking political correctness, it gives me the shits.
Images in E-mail are almost always either for tracking, for spam, or for viruses.
or for : - smilies and other emoticons (gah! Learn to write formal business prose without needing the crutch of emoticons) - "stationery" - you know, flowery backgrounds and the kind of crap that secretaries like. - company logos. A legitimate usage. - a digitised copy of someone's sig (madness, if you ask me, but you see them on occasion.)
These are all the sort of things that you see on business email every single day.
Something to remember is that you can't rely on simple convective cooling in orbit. In microgravity hot air doesn't 'rise' anywhere in particular, it just tends to stay where it is. So things generally have to be fan-cooled or cooled by some other (usually active) means.
Hence the cold plate to transfer the heat to something else.
....resented being asked to pay $20 more than we had been for the same hardware....
Without being privy to Linksys's internal discussions on this, again I would suggest that economies of scale come into it.
Eg.
- You, the manufacturer, introduce another model with equivalent performance that supersedes the old model.
- You recognise that there's a market for the old type , thus you want to keep the old model about for the hackers.
- You figure that you'll only sell 1/10th of previous volume you were selling, considering that the usual plebs that buy your routers don't give a damn about modding them.
- You need to make a profit on whatever you sell (you don't care about hackers *that* much).
- Your manufacturing plant in China says that it will cost x percent more per unit to do a smaller production run of the old model, what with warehousing, having to stock different parts,etc.
- You add x percent to cover the costs of this.
- You add y percent simply because you know you're now selling a specialty product and hackers will pay a premium for them.
This last percentage takes quite a bit of economic theory and experience to work out. I don't begrudge Linksys this premium. You do, and fair enough - everyone is different. It's the fine line between number of sales / total profit that they walk, and every manufacturer walks it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has access to any of my accounts but myself. Not even my wife.
I hope you've got things sorted out well for emergencies. Somebody has power of attorney, yes?
So you are saying, they run water through the turbines to generate electricity to pump that water back up behind the dam?
A hydro system is not an island.
They use cheap power from other base load power stations to pump the water back up the hill overnight, then let it rip during peak hours.
Careful.
You read just like the timecube guy did, before he took that last hit of bad acid.
Doing anything that can be done server-side on the client side is generally a bad idea
Oh, I don't know - what about the simple stuff like form validation? On a high traffic site, receiving a complex form from a client, only to have to send a page back saying "sorry, you forgot this field,do it again" seems to be a waste of both the servers resources and the user's time. Better to just have a JS popup telling them and changing focus to the problem field - no effort on your server's part is needed.
Of course, double-check everything you get at the server, just give the client a chance to sort it out at their end first before troubling you with it.
Try a masthead antenna amplifier. Get a good quality one and (hopefully) it will help compensate for the god-awful frontend in your TV tuner.
(Yes, I know masthead amps are really to compensate for long cable runs, but a low noise amp at the front upping things by 10-12dB is sometimes all it takes.)
I get a call about if from my Wife, and have to SSH in from work to re-launch the Myth front-end? It was really cool that I could do this - but quite unfortunate that I had to.
I hooked into the ACPI power button routines to kill/restart the X server when mythtv hung up. The backend was it's own process outside of X, so it continued to run fine when this was done.
So, all non-technical wife-types had to do when mythTV hung was to press the power button and it would take care of itself. But to be fair, by the time I stopped using it (I went off-grid) it was pretty stable - perhaps once a month a frontend reset was needed.
You missed a bit off the end of that shipping forecast:
"And an extra special good night to Stoker Cheeky Hoyle. {smooch} night night petal pants!"
A cookie to my US brothers if they can source that quote without google.
Of course,Tuesday. I could never get the hang of Tuesdays.
Only one response to my lighthearted pascal troll in 5 hours?
Pascal really *is* dead!
But seriously, Pascal's OK - I spent many hours with Turbo Pascal 2 and 3 on a Sperry XT in my younger years.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 game console is a $12 computer as well.
It may be all very ho-hum for you with your GHz PC and internet connection, but I think it's interesting. It has :
- Keyboard (important step up from the traditional game console of old).
- Known / Familiar hardware, being a NES clone.
- TV-out, which means that any low-income family that has a TV, can get a relatively cheap computer.
Combine that with a decent software cartridge with :
- Word processor
- Spreadsheet
- Good kids educational software
- BASIC (or Pascal,if you're feeling sadistic. The logical steps/sequence in programming apply across all programming languages.)
- A few MB of flash ram for storage of docs,etc
- File manager / DOS of some sort.
- A port or two would be nice for a printer/modem, but it's probably pushing it.
annnnnd with all that you're suddenly on par with the IBM PC-XT of 25 years ago, and it helped revolutionise personal/business computers then.
So, seeing that the hardware's done, all MIT has to do is come up with a NES cartridge with decent software. Seems doable.
I was accosted by a convenience store clerk as I entered the store, and told that I had to remove my ski mask or they would call the police.
Having no idea on the current 1984-esque laws in the US at the moment, from an Australian point of view I can only point out that that is a "store policy" only. It's a far cry from "public places".
To use a bit of Political Correctness (spit) against The Man, one can simply say,"but what about Muslim women and their full-body, face-covering burkhas and veils? Surely you're not discriminating against them, are you? Tsk-Tsk. Maybe I should call a few people in the press."
They'll be backpedalling before you can say "Anti-discrimination Comission"
Let's see:
You are a chinese honeytrap now in possession of an aide's blackberry. It is 1am. The aide has passed out drunk three steps inside the front door of his flat, and won't be in any fit capacity until about 8am, when he realises his blackberry is missing and goes looking for it. The IT boys cancel his password at 9am.
That gives you 8 hours to:
- Read all his recent email, for starters. If they're doing IMAP, then god knows how many personal IMAP folders there are to browse through on the server. Look for the good folders like "Foreign Policy". "Sent Items" and "Drafts" can also be fascinating.
- Get his contact list, recent callers,etc, allowing you to analyse and see where this particular cog fits in the Government Machine. If he turns out to be a well-connected individual, it might pay in the future to keep an eye on him. If he's not well-connected, that's one more person you cross off the list.
- Possibly fire off a few trojans to a few "inside" email accounts on that list, who might accept them from a known,"trusted" source. Doesn't hurt to try something like "Revision to yesterday's document -- URGENT".
So you see, there's plenty of scope for mischief.
You can call them, if you want , and they'll send one out. I've never done it myself - one would hope that you could find your way to the right person by looking them up in the phone book. Knowing the labyrinthe process involved in Big Business, I'd set aside a good couple of hours.
Anyway, from the beginning of XP (that is, there was an update CD prior to the release of SP1),they've been free of charge. I can't recall offhand if there was such a CD with previous incarnations.
The problem with sending them out to all-and-sundry is that people often don't register (as opposed to "activate' - bah!) their copy of windows, so there's a lot of difficultly direct-mailing them. I suppose they could do as you ask, and keep them in major shops, but it is a lot of wastage, AOL-style. It's not the kind of thing that's useful if you don't have a copy of windows on hand, unlike an AOL CD, which can serve a (quasi)useful purpose by itself.
I guess there's no easy answer, hey? Unless they were rewritable CD's.... that'd be pretty good.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to add a patch CD to the box, or when patches are released to ship patch CDs..... to people that ask nicely for them?
It seems that it's not that hard, seeing that they already do.
Your homework for today is to find the link at Microsoft's site that lets you get a copy of the SP3 security update CD mailed to you, and post it below. Extra points if you can write a script that goes through your local phone book and orders a CD for each person.
I have NO IDEA on how fast ice melt, and I am a physicist (*)
tsk. Hang your head in shame.
Then put your degree back in whatever cereal box it came in and go out and start drinking. Isn't "Introductory Alcoholism" a required first year physics subject? :-P
Your average joe has no fucking idea what the heck a kilowatt of cooling is in real-world terms, but I'm sure that they've put some drinks on ice, or watched a few cubes melt in a glass on a lazy afternoon. It's relatively easy to extrapolate:
"Hmmm. A 5-pound bag of ice keeps a dozen beers icy-cold for a day... what? Your average A/C is a like melting a couple of tons of ice a day? That's a lot of ice! It would keep my beers cold for weeks! Let me look at these piddly little cooling packs in this widget. Huh. They don't stand a chance in hell of keeping me cool all day."
I know, I know, if I had managed to work in some bastardised units involving volkswagons, football fields and Libraries of Congress, perhaps factoring in daily running costs in terms of monthly Gulf War expenditure, it would have made it that much more understandable to the common man.
Actually, it's not an evaporative cooler. The bottles are sealed, no evaporation from them takes place. Thus, you are limited to the amount of cooling that you can get from melting a chunk of ice and bringing the resultant water up to room temp.
It might be enough to cool a person who was directly in its airstream, but I wouldn't blow my money on it. Get a real evaporative cooler instead, or make your own with a fan and a wet towel/sack over the back of it and save your pennies for some other "engineering genius from china" that actually uses a decent compressor-driven phase-change refrigerative cycle.
Uh, in the US, anyway...
I live in a country that Saw The Light Of The S.I. Unit a generation ago and thus your olde worlde units are strange and confusing to me. Tons still crops up occasionally in A/C lingo, but now it's all kilowatts, all the time, baby,yeah. Regarding sizing of the A/C, a 6kW unit will do a reasonable-sized loungeroom in a 40 deg C north Queensland summer, due to the fact that insulation (huh? what's that?) is a unknown and mysterious thing here.
Personally, if I lived anywhere where the humidity was below 50%, I'd just use an evaporative cooler instead.
There's an old unit of measurement for heat transfer called 'tons'. You don't see it around much anymore, due to the switch to units like btu.hr or kWh. But it would be really useful to bring it back for things such as this.
"1 ton" is the amount of heat needed to melt 1 ton of ice in a 24 hour period,or about 3.5kWh.
Your typical car air-conditioner, or big-ish room A/C, has a cooling capacity of about 2.5 tons.
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
Sooooooo....How much ice is in those cooling blocks? A kilo or two?The only possible real effect is that it might temporarily de-humidify the air in your room a little due to condensation on the ice blocks, giving the impression that it is "somewhat" cooler.
And when, exactly, would that be? I'd bet you'd be off by years, but no matter what I say I doubt it'll change your mind.
/. is "Do not be led into tedious pedantic, off-topic discussions".
Well, he would likely say after UID30000.... personally, I would say after UID40000 or so.
But the First Unspoken Rule Of
Unfortunately the Second Rule is "Ignore the First Rule."
So, here we are.
(long pause)
Ummmm, I bet you're a Gentoo user. I can tell by your tedious pedanticness.
the engine block would cool down to the point where the reaction wouldn't work even with the catalyst pretty quickly. A car engine needs to produce something of the order of 100kW.
All other bullshit about this article aside, the general rule of thumb for I.C. engines is that 1/3rd of the fuel's energy goes to motive power, 1/3rd goes to engine coolant/oil as heat and 1/3rd goes out the exhaust as heat.
If you could recover 1/2 of the energy lost going out the coolant+exhaust and put it to use, you would double the engine's output.
Not to worry, NYCL wrote letters to both judges, reminding them of what the RIAA lawyers had forgotten.
Hey Ray,
Would you care to state, for the record, that you love life and don't have any - you know - suicidal tendencies, or that you don't like to partake in high risk activities?
Just in case something.... unfortunate happens.
Thanks.
* My profound apologies....(etc)
This is an indication of the sad state the world is in. Think about it. You are apologising in advance in case your rather obvious fictional examples of names used in a possible situation might actually be someone in the slashdot readership.
Come on now - you're making an example, using typical nametypes.... does political correctness really have to stretch this far? "oh, noes, I might *offend* someone! Better apologise straight up."
The proper answer to anyone who might possibly be offended (who actually complains) is "Sorry about that - now fuck you, grow some skin, and stop whining about some trivial thing."
Fucking political correctness, it gives me the shits.
(end rant)
Images in E-mail are almost always either for tracking, for spam, or for viruses.
or for :
- smilies and other emoticons (gah! Learn to write formal business prose without needing the crutch of emoticons)
- "stationery" - you know, flowery backgrounds and the kind of crap that secretaries like.
- company logos. A legitimate usage.
- a digitised copy of someone's sig (madness, if you ask me, but you see them on occasion.)
These are all the sort of things that you see on business email every single day.
Something to remember is that you can't rely on simple convective cooling in orbit. In microgravity hot air doesn't 'rise' anywhere in particular, it just tends to stay where it is. So things generally have to be fan-cooled or cooled by some other (usually active) means.
Hence the cold plate to transfer the heat to something else.
....resented being asked to pay $20 more than we had been for the same hardware....
Without being privy to Linksys's internal discussions on this, again I would suggest that economies of scale come into it.
Eg.
- You, the manufacturer, introduce another model with equivalent performance that supersedes the old model.
- You recognise that there's a market for the old type , thus you want to keep the old model about for the hackers.
- You figure that you'll only sell 1/10th of previous volume you were selling, considering that the usual plebs that buy your routers don't give a damn about modding them.
- You need to make a profit on whatever you sell (you don't care about hackers *that* much).
- Your manufacturing plant in China says that it will cost x percent more per unit to do a smaller production run of the old model, what with warehousing, having to stock different parts,etc.
- You add x percent to cover the costs of this.
- You add y percent simply because you know you're now selling a specialty product and hackers will pay a premium for them.
This last percentage takes quite a bit of economic theory and experience to work out. I don't begrudge Linksys this premium. You do, and fair enough - everyone is different. It's the fine line between number of sales / total profit that they walk, and every manufacturer walks it.