And still no reference to Snow Crash. Disappointing.
That book's getting closer and closer to reality - which is beginning to worry me.
Quote : She hears a crack, the first loud noise so far. She turns to follow the sound, looking in the direction of a water tower that looms above this area, providing a fine vantage point for a sniper.
But then her attention is drawn by the pencil-thin blue-white exhaust of a tiny rocket that lances up into the sky from Ng's van. It doesn't do anything; it just goes up to a certain height and hovers, sitting on its exhaust. She doesn't care, she's kicking her way down the road now on her plank, trying to get something between her and that water tower.
There is a second cracking noise. Before this sound even reaches her ears, the rocket darts horizontally like a minnow, makes one or two minor cuts to correct its course, zeroes in on that sniper's perch, up in the water tower's access ladder. There is a great nasty explosion without any flame or light, like the loud pointless booms that you get sometimes at fireworks shows. For a moment, she can hear the clamor of shrapnel ringing through the ironwork of the water tower.
It seems to me that you could certainly circumvent this easily enough, with just some social engineering. Carry a lot of sniffer-activating things in your luggage. Travel 15 times on the route, or until you reliably know the security people.
After 15 times, the conversation goes like so:
You: "Hi Steve." Security: "Hi John." Detector : beeep! bip! beep! bip! beep! BEEEEEEEP! You: "Damn detector. Can't they tone those things down a little?" Security: "Every time you go through, these things go off." (opens luggage) Security: "Cheese, fertiliser, and trinitite. Again." You: "Well, a man's got to earn a living some way. Isn't there some form or something I can fill out to get out of this?" Security: "Nope. Everyone gets checked." (closes luggage) Security: "Off you go."
Travel 15 times without the bomb so everyone gets to know you. The 16th time, travel with the bomb concealed somewhere in your luggage, but leave the cheese , fertiliser and trinitite on top. Odds are pretty good that you'll get on that plane.
A lot of Rowan Atkinson's work (that is to say, Mr Bean) had no dialogue at all. Mind you, any of his live performances (with a lot of dialog) are quite funny (with a fair bit of wit) as well.
If you were reading one of our PDFs, you could be assured that the content was accurate. I hope you don't stake the whole company on that. I do a simple pdftops (or, print to a postscript printer) , edit the postscript file in any number of editors, then pstopdf again. This is all with standard ghostscript tools.
In fact I've often done it to people's protected PDF tender documents, just to get large portions of text to include in our reply/quote.
Without document signing (and people checking for that *every single time* they open the document) you're screwed.
Clean the CPU heatsink when it gets fluffy, or your CPU temp goes up to the point where you feel uncomfortable. Otherwise, don't bother. And unless you have *serious* temperature issues, turn off a few of those fans. Your computer doesn't *have* to double as a wind tunnel, ya know.
My mythtv box runs at 40 to 60 degrees C for it's CPU and 45-55 degrees for it's drives, 24/7, with no failures yet. As a guide to it's lifetime, it's main drive is over 17000 power on hours.
A few years back, I used to work for a coal sampling laboratory. Coal dust used to get *EVERYWHERE*. I have a photo somewhere of a i386 desktop case PC full of coal dust all over the motherboard, well past the point of not being able to see the tracks on the board. A finger run along any flat surface in the case left about 1/8" deep track in the coal.
This computer still operated perfectly, again, 24/7, and had been doing so for 8 years when I opened the case to put a bigger drive in. So, if coal (being 70-80% carbon) has little effect, then I fail to see how a bit of dust can.
But I'm sure there's a mob of angry slashdotters with pitchforks and burning torches just itching to refute this statement and paint me as an idiot, so I'll hand it over to them:-)
Meanwhile, Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.
You're comparing apples to oranges a little here. Internode (in Australia) is crippled somewhat by the limited capacity and high cost of overseas links.
Be had better be prepared for the incredible amount of leeeeching. 24Mbps is no good if you'll only get that to the next system upstream at the Be office, with 5k/s to The Rest Of The World. As pretty much all relevant ISPs (that is, the ones that are still in business) have discovered, truly unlimited high-speed internet is not a good, sustainable business plan at the moment.
This is why Internode, for example, have plans that get shaped to 64kbps after your limit. They also have flatrate plans that (after a set amount) dynamically prioritise your packets depending on how much you've downloaded compared to everyone else online at the moment. These are more expensive (AUD100-200/month). Then you have the true, unlimited 'leased-line' style plans, which cost in the order of AUD500-1000 a month.
So I wonder how much backbone capacity Be has, and I also wonder how long it will be before they completely oversubscribe it to the point of end-users leaving. I give it 6 months, tops. Bookmark this post:-)
Re-evaluate what's on your storage. You sound like me - a bit of a hoarder.
Firstly, get a good catalogue system going. Put all your crap in one area. Get a sorted listing of creation time,last access time and categories. Get some hard-and-fast rules going as to when it should be archived offline. Go through once a month (or more often) and work out any new stuff that you need to backup. You do backup, don't you? Of course you do.
Then go through and check the last access times of your categories, and move to offline storage as appropriate.The advantage of getting this sort of regime going is that you've got more chance of having a backup offline somewhere when the inevitable happens and your drive wakes up dead one day.
For example, once you've got categories and last access times sorted:
- Digital Photos, family movies , documents - anything more than 12 months - Offline to DVD. Use par2 for archive copies (sent to distant relatives for storage), but make another set without par2 for normal, semi-random access.
- ISO's of distros? Got a broadband connection? Ditch them. No broadband? Get them all offline, regardless of age.
- TV Episodes? If it's later than say, 3 months - off to DVD they go.
- Web Site content? 3 months.
And so on. Work the times out for yourself.
You really need a good cataloging system to help find out where the offline files are. Everyone's idea of a good catalog is different - Hell, I just label DVD's and keep them sorted by catagory - so I'll leave it to you.
If you organise your data and find that you still haven't enough drive space to keep all your current data online, then (and only then) go and look at the expensive options.
Personally, I believe that there are a lot more things a lot more ruinous to your health than a couple of humming wires stung out in your backyard. However, saying that, we'll move on.
Ok, so you have a power line to supply trains running along the back of your house. Exactly how hot is it? 25kV? 66kV? Check the insulators - anything longer than a foot (or so) is high voltage, anything less is likely 3.3kV or below.
If you don't have a field strengh meter, get an average 36W fluoro, go out to your backyard barefoot at night and hold one end. Wave it around a bit - if there's any serious amount of power around, it will light up the closer you get to the lines. Check how much it drops off between the back of your backyard and your house.
Field strength drops off with the square of distance, so unless you're directly under 300kV lines, you probably have more pressing things to worry about, like that clock radio near your head when you sleep. Or the electric blanket that's millimeters away from you. Or the colour TV (or monitor) that is basically a particle accelerator.
If the wires are an appreciable height above your roofline, and you are still concerned, earth out your roof (properly, with a ground stake,etc). This will shield the bulk of your house. Personally, as mentioned before, I'd go worry about other things, such as the resistant bacteria thats cropping up, or the apparent dwindling oil supply, or whether N. Korea gets The Bomb.
Then you don't need part 745 specifically, most of the time you have enough redundancy in the bits you've downloaded that you don't need anything. And if you don't, par2 will tell you that you need x recovery blocks to repair it. *Any* x blocks. So if you can get those blocks off usenet, you're fine.
par2's also good for making redundant backups - if you make a set of par2 files that's got more than 50% redundancy, then all you have to do is put a random half on one CD and again on another. Even if both CD's are fairly corrupted, if you can recover at least half the total data blocks off the CD's, you're fine.
But it's coming..... and in some cases, they've got a LOT more land to cover than the United States has!
That's right - and they'll be fucked, because the developed countries, with all their personal SUV use and their 95 million km of paved roads will have pushed the supply of oil to unaffordable heights.
So, they'll be the ones with the 45 year old 2 cylinder micro-car from the eatern bloc with worse economy than your average californian SUV, because they can't afford the tech that would let them use the remaining oil efficiently.... because they're poor to start out with and it takes a weeks wages to fuel that car to go to work for a week.
People said that no-one could change the moon's orbit, or the earths rotation, as you're talking about a trillion trillion trillion tons of rock and inertia that would require more energy to budge than we could possibly hope to harness in the next thousand years.
And they were right.
Because it is people who persevere to turn their dreams into reality are the one who advance knowledge and civilisation, and that it's the people who say that things will never work or catch on are the ones who hold civilisation back.
Be aware that some mars photos of those devils might be one and the same. It might be just one that keeps popping up in frame as it's moving quicker than the camera taking the set of photos. For example, it looks like the shadow of the big devil on the left hand side is repeated a little bit in the next image - I guess you could get an idea of how fast they are moving from that.
If your neighbour's kid comes into your house and makes the call, you will still have to pay - it's then up to you to seek compensation from said neighbour.
This isn't about invoicing, it's about breaking copyright law. If we're going to drag out all the analogies again:
If I give the keys to my car to someone, and they proceed to run 15 red lights and double park everywhere, am I to be charged for those infringements?
If I leave the keys on the desk and a minor gets to them and proceeds to do the same thing, am I to be charged?
To take it further:
If I leave the keys in the car and the engine running, and someone takes it and does bad things with it, will I be charged for the bad things? (I probably *will* be charged with some offense relating to unattended vehicle)
The blame rests with the person actually performing the act. If they can't actually finger you as the person, well, that's a little tough for them.
What gets me about the whole debate is that CFC's are heavier than air. Chlorine (the molecule CL2, by itself) is heavier than air. You knock a jar of chlorine gas over, it'll fall to the floor quicker than a brick will fall to the bottom of a pool.
So how does the big CFC molecule get to the ozone layer, 50km up? It won't float. And how does the CL2 (once broken out of the CFC) stay 50km up, when everything else around it, ozone, O2, N2, is lighter than it.
In know, it's something to do with diffusion. But it still irks me, dammit.
Water ice doesn't melt on Mars - it simply evaporates, like "dry ice" (CO2) does here. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is just a little too low to allow liquid water to exist.
Uptime of that box is in the order of a few weeks to a month, before power issues or my tinkering ends in a reboot (hmmm, I wonder if I can get bios wakeup going in myth? (much rebooting later).... not yet).
Personally, if it's stable for a few weeks , then you've only really got a couple of rarely-encountered corner cases that could cause it to fall over. And I rarely encounter them:-)
I've used various incarnations of 2.6 on my mythtv box. It's under fairly high load, with memory, video and disk intensive processes, has high PCI utilisation (2 capture cards, sometimes running at once). It runs 24/7, sometimes hot enough to get the CPU temp alarm beeping.
Number of times it's had a kernel panic over the last year? Zero. Good enough for me.
And as other posters have said, the advantages with hardware, latency patches, acpi support help too.
Can someone much smarter than me tell me how data forensics deals with that????
You also recover the swap file / partition and grep it for passphrases. Because even though PGP is pretty good:-) about keeping things out of swap, "grep the swap file" is probably the next thing to do after a dictionary attack fails.
Slashdot Mirror
And still no reference to Snow Crash.
Disappointing.
That book's getting closer and closer to reality - which is beginning to worry me.
Quote :
She hears a crack, the first loud noise so far. She turns to follow the
sound, looking in the direction of a water tower that looms above this area,
providing a fine vantage point for a sniper.
But then her attention is drawn by the pencil-thin blue-white exhaust
of a tiny rocket that lances up into the sky from Ng's van. It doesn't do
anything; it just goes up to a certain height and hovers, sitting on its
exhaust. She doesn't care, she's kicking her way down the road now on her
plank, trying to get something between her and that water tower.
There is a second cracking noise. Before this sound even reaches her
ears, the rocket darts horizontally like a minnow, makes one or two minor
cuts to correct its course, zeroes in on that sniper's perch, up in the
water tower's access ladder. There is a great nasty explosion without any
flame or light, like the loud pointless booms that you get sometimes at
fireworks shows. For a moment, she can hear the clamor of shrapnel ringing
through the ironwork of the water tower.
It seems to me that you could certainly circumvent this easily enough, with just some social engineering. Carry a lot of sniffer-activating things in your luggage. Travel 15 times on the route, or until you reliably know the security people.
After 15 times, the conversation goes like so:
You: "Hi Steve."
Security: "Hi John."
Detector : beeep! bip! beep! bip! beep! BEEEEEEEP!
You: "Damn detector. Can't they tone those things down a little?"
Security: "Every time you go through, these things go off."
(opens luggage)
Security: "Cheese, fertiliser, and trinitite. Again."
You: "Well, a man's got to earn a living some way. Isn't there some form or something I can fill out to get out of this?"
Security: "Nope. Everyone gets checked."
(closes luggage)
Security: "Off you go."
Travel 15 times without the bomb so everyone gets to know you.
The 16th time, travel with the bomb concealed somewhere in your luggage, but
leave the cheese , fertiliser and trinitite on top. Odds are pretty good that you'll get on that plane.
What, you mean something like nntp?
A lot of Rowan Atkinson's work (that is to say, Mr Bean) had no dialogue at all.
Mind you, any of his live performances (with a lot of dialog) are quite funny (with a fair bit of wit) as well.
If you were reading one of our PDFs, you could be assured that the content was accurate.
I hope you don't stake the whole company on that. I do a simple pdftops (or, print to a postscript printer) , edit the postscript file in any number of editors, then pstopdf again. This is all with standard ghostscript tools.
In fact I've often done it to people's protected PDF tender documents, just to get large portions of text to include in our reply/quote.
Without document signing (and people checking for that *every single time* they open the document) you're screwed.
Clean the CPU heatsink when it gets fluffy, or your CPU temp goes up to the point where you feel uncomfortable. Otherwise, don't bother. And unless you have *serious* temperature issues, turn off a few of those fans. Your computer doesn't *have* to double as a wind tunnel, ya know.
:-)
My mythtv box runs at 40 to 60 degrees C for it's CPU and 45-55 degrees for it's drives, 24/7, with no failures yet. As a guide to it's lifetime, it's main drive is over 17000 power on hours.
A few years back, I used to work for a coal sampling laboratory. Coal dust used to get *EVERYWHERE*. I have a photo somewhere of a i386 desktop case PC full of coal dust all over the motherboard, well past the point of not being able to see the tracks on the board. A finger run along any flat surface in the case left about 1/8" deep track in the coal.
This computer still operated perfectly, again, 24/7, and had been doing so for 8 years when I opened the case to put a bigger drive in. So, if coal (being 70-80% carbon) has little effect, then I fail to see how a bit of dust can.
But I'm sure there's a mob of angry slashdotters with pitchforks and burning torches just itching to refute this statement and paint me as an idiot, so I'll hand it over to them
Meanwhile, Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.
:-)
You're comparing apples to oranges a little here. Internode (in Australia) is crippled somewhat by the limited capacity and high cost of overseas links.
Be had better be prepared for the incredible amount of leeeeching. 24Mbps is no good if you'll only get that to the next system upstream at the Be office, with 5k/s to The Rest Of The World. As pretty much all relevant ISPs (that is, the ones that are still in business) have discovered, truly unlimited high-speed internet is not a good, sustainable business plan at the moment.
This is why Internode, for example, have plans that get shaped to 64kbps after your limit. They also have flatrate plans that (after a set amount) dynamically prioritise your packets depending on how much you've downloaded compared to everyone else online at the moment. These are more expensive (AUD100-200/month). Then you have the true, unlimited 'leased-line' style plans, which cost in the order of AUD500-1000 a month.
So I wonder how much backbone capacity Be has, and I also wonder how long it will be before they completely oversubscribe it to the point of end-users leaving. I give it 6 months, tops. Bookmark this post
Re-evaluate what's on your storage. You sound like me - a bit of a hoarder.
Firstly, get a good catalogue system going. Put all your crap in one area. Get a sorted listing of creation time,last access time and categories. Get some hard-and-fast rules going as to when it should be archived offline. Go through once a month (or more often) and work out any new stuff that you need to backup. You do backup, don't you? Of course you do.
Then go through and check the last access times of your categories, and move to offline storage as appropriate.The advantage of getting this sort of regime going is that you've got more chance of having a backup offline somewhere when the inevitable happens and your drive wakes up dead one day.
For example, once you've got categories and last access times sorted:
- Digital Photos, family movies , documents - anything more than 12 months - Offline to DVD. Use par2 for archive copies (sent to distant relatives for storage), but make another set without par2 for normal, semi-random access.
- ISO's of distros? Got a broadband connection? Ditch them.
No broadband? Get them all offline, regardless of age.
- TV Episodes? If it's later than say, 3 months - off to DVD they go.
- Web Site content? 3 months.
And so on. Work the times out for yourself.
You really need a good cataloging system to help find out where the offline files are. Everyone's idea of a good catalog is different - Hell, I just label DVD's and keep them sorted by catagory - so I'll leave it to you.
If you organise your data and find that you still haven't enough drive space to keep all your current data online, then (and only then) go and look at the expensive options.
Personally, I believe that there are a lot more things a lot more ruinous to your health than a couple of humming wires stung out in your backyard. However, saying that, we'll move on.
Ok, so you have a power line to supply trains running along the back of your house. Exactly how hot is it? 25kV? 66kV? Check the insulators - anything longer than a foot (or so) is high voltage, anything less is likely 3.3kV or below.
If you don't have a field strengh meter, get an average 36W fluoro, go out to your backyard barefoot at night and hold one end. Wave it around a bit - if there's any serious amount of power around, it will light up the closer you get to the lines. Check how much it drops off between the back of your backyard and your house.
Field strength drops off with the square of distance, so unless you're directly under 300kV lines, you probably have more pressing things to worry about, like that clock radio near your head when you sleep. Or the electric blanket that's millimeters away from you. Or the colour TV (or monitor) that is basically a particle accelerator.
If the wires are an appreciable height above your roofline, and you are still concerned, earth out your roof (properly, with a ground stake,etc). This will shield the bulk of your house. Personally, as mentioned before, I'd go worry about other things, such as the resistant bacteria thats cropping up, or the apparent dwindling oil supply, or whether N. Korea gets The Bomb.
Who wants to look for part 745 of a 10000 part .rar file?
This is why you have utilities like par2.
Then you don't need part 745 specifically, most of the time you have enough redundancy in the bits you've downloaded that you don't need anything. And if you don't, par2 will tell you that you need x recovery blocks to repair it. *Any* x blocks. So if you can get those blocks off usenet, you're fine.
par2's also good for making redundant backups - if you make a set of par2 files that's got more than 50% redundancy, then all you have to do is put a random half on one CD and again on another. Even if both CD's are fairly corrupted, if you can recover at least half the total data blocks off the CD's, you're fine.
But it's coming..... and in some cases, they've got a LOT more land to cover than the United States has!
That's right - and they'll be fucked, because the developed countries, with all their personal SUV use and their 95 million km of paved roads will have pushed the supply of oil to unaffordable heights.
So, they'll be the ones with the 45 year old 2 cylinder micro-car from the eatern bloc with worse economy than your average californian SUV, because they can't afford the tech that would let them use the remaining oil efficiently.... because they're poor to start out with and it takes a weeks wages to fuel that car to go to work for a week.
It's because all the misspelt domains, etc in IE get automatically directed to MSN.
So every single typo the average joe does is a hit for MSN. But you can't get to google with a misspelling.
Hmm. Not enough use of the words dumb, stupid, blind. Plenty of evil, that's fine.
Please repost your TimeCube comment again below, with more vitriol this time.
People said that no-one could change the moon's orbit, or the earths rotation, as you're talking about a trillion trillion trillion tons of rock and inertia that would require more energy to budge than we could possibly hope to harness in the next thousand years.
And they were right.
Because it is people who persevere to turn their dreams into reality are the one who advance knowledge and civilisation, and that it's the people who say that things will never work or catch on are the ones who hold civilisation back.
Ye canna' change the laws o' physics, lad.
what? It's only 4 grams.
An ant could pick it up.
So can I :
You are here
Be aware that some mars photos of those devils might be one and the same. It might be just one that keeps popping up in frame as it's moving quicker than the camera taking the set of photos. For example, it looks like the shadow of the big devil on the left hand side is repeated a little bit in the next image - I guess you could get an idea of how fast they are moving from that.
If your neighbour's kid comes into your house and makes the call, you will still have to pay - it's then up to you to seek compensation from said neighbour.
This isn't about invoicing, it's about breaking copyright law. If we're going to drag out all the analogies again:
If I give the keys to my car to someone, and they proceed to run 15 red lights and double park everywhere, am I to be charged for those infringements?
If I leave the keys on the desk and a minor gets to them and proceeds to do the same thing, am I to be charged?
To take it further:
If I leave the keys in the car and the engine running, and someone takes it and does bad things with it, will I be charged for the bad things? (I probably *will* be charged with some offense relating to unattended vehicle)
The blame rests with the person actually performing the act. If they can't actually finger you as the person, well, that's a little tough for them.
What gets me about the whole debate is that CFC's are heavier than air. Chlorine (the molecule CL2, by itself) is heavier than air. You knock a jar of chlorine gas over, it'll fall to the floor quicker than a brick will fall to the bottom of a pool.
So how does the big CFC molecule get to the ozone layer, 50km up? It won't float. And how does the CL2 (once broken out of the CFC) stay 50km up, when everything else around it, ozone, O2, N2, is lighter than it.
In know, it's something to do with diffusion. But it still irks me, dammit.
Water ice doesn't melt on Mars - it simply evaporates, like "dry ice" (CO2) does here.
The atmospheric pressure on Mars is just a little too low to allow liquid water to exist.
They invested in the system. It seems to work well in my estimation.
As long as it isn't paging the lifeguards 15 times a day with false alarms, that is. Wait, there's no mention of *that* in the article.
Uptime of that box is in the order of a few weeks to a month, before power issues or my tinkering ends in a reboot (hmmm, I wonder if I can get bios wakeup going in myth? (much rebooting later).... not yet).
:-)
Personally, if it's stable for a few weeks , then you've only really got a couple of rarely-encountered corner cases that could cause it to fall over. And I rarely encounter them
I've used various incarnations of 2.6 on my mythtv box. It's under fairly high load, with memory, video and disk intensive processes, has high PCI utilisation (2 capture cards, sometimes running at once). It runs 24/7, sometimes hot enough to get the CPU temp alarm beeping.
Number of times it's had a kernel panic over the last year? Zero. Good enough for me.
And as other posters have said, the advantages with hardware, latency patches, acpi support help too.
But the one time the odds fail you and an unlikely natural disaster wipes out your community you get a bunch of criticism for where you live.
A large proportion is below sea level for fucks sake! This is not "an unlikely natural disaster". It's the darwin awards, for cities.
I can see the fark headline now:
(Dumbass) City built below sea level with an "ingenious system of levees and pumps" What could possibly go wrong?.
Hmm. Maybe I should go check fark....
Can someone much smarter than me tell me how data forensics deals with that????
:-) about keeping things out of swap, "grep the swap file" is probably the next thing to do after a dictionary attack fails.
You also recover the swap file / partition and grep it for passphrases. Because even though PGP is pretty good