I agree with your sentiment that it is good to show these kids that the world of computers does not equate to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Microsoft Windows. Most ordinary computer users probably spend 90% of their time using these or some other small handful of apps, and it's easy to assume that's all there is to computers if you've never experienced anything else.
But, I don't think this is the proper setting to demonstrate this idea. The whole point of alternatives is choosing the best solution for the task at hand. Here you've got a case where the alternate tool does not have the necessary functionality, at least not without extra development work. It doesn't have support from any of the administation, and indeed would probably draw some degree of negativity. And it's not saving any money or other resources, because clearly the Windows PCs and their software have already been purchased, configured, and work just fine.
Don't force the square peg in the round hole. There are many times when the alternatives make sense, and this is not one of them.
What you should instead do is find a task to which Linux and free software are suited. Try having an assignment where the kids use Octave or gnuplot or something like that to analyze their data. Surely there's some task that would require the purchase of non-free software for Windows that can be done with free software on Linux. It doesn't even have to be a very involved task, but perhaps if you had the basic skeleton/framework script setup and the kids just enter their data and get an advanced analysis.
If it doesn't violate policy, offer to also let the kids use this linux computer in between classes or after school, to surf the web or type assignments or whatever. Surely you will get a few curious kids that want to screw around on it since it's different. A few might want to use it if other labs are full, or they don't have a computer at home, or it's simply convenient at the time, or whatever. Point is, they'll get some exposure even if it's not an integral part of the class (i.e., not driving your lab hardware.)
Can't even get the tabs right...
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Open Source Art?
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· Score: 2
So one of the major points of this exhibit is to "peek under the hood" of computer art and have people look at the code, in the same way that you might look at an artists brushes, paints, etc. Given that, you would think that they could format the source code properly. Look at this C source for the Linescape piece. It looks like someone hastily ran code2html without any concern for getting the tabs/whitespace correct, and called it a day.
Come on, if the point is to view source code the way it is "in the wild" then at least get the formatting correct. I don't know of any programmer that would purposefully write code that looks like that. The comments and other multiline structures don't line up, and there seem to be many spurious line breaks. (And the tab stops should be 2 columns, The Way God Intended, but that's just my opinion.)
If I were an artist who had created a commissioned piece of code and they posted it like that, I would feel a bit insulted. It's as if the gallery had let some photographic prints get waterlogged or a feature broke off of a sculpture during shipping, and they just continue to show the piece as if that's how it was supposed to look.
(And, if indeed that is how the author Camille Utterback truly formatted the source, then I shudder. For an exhibit about the "art of code", that's some damn butt-ugly code there. I'm only referring to the formatting, not its content.)
There is an interesting website called css/edge which attempts to explore all the possibilities of doing "neat stuff" using only standards-compliant HTML and CSS. There are some really stunning demonstrations, such as the complexspiral demo. This demo shows a page that has a two column menu/content layout, complete with alpha-blended translucent background that seamlessly glides over a fixed background image as you scroll, with the translucency changing for mouse-over events on the buttons. The text size can be gracefully sized, and the layout works for any window size. This is done only with pure HTML, a stylesheet, and four JPGs -- no javascript, alpha-channel PNGs, half-screen GIFs, etc.
Thing is, if you visit this site with Internet Explorer on Windows, the above demo and most of the other demos look like crap. This really opened my eyes to IE's lack of CSS conformance. But visit the page in Mozilla, Konquerer 3, or IE5/mac, and it's beautiful.
(Not to mention that the W3C validator is extremely anal about "obsolete" tags. Maybe I want a FONT tag in one piece of text that I'm never going to change. Why do I need a CSS name for EVERYTHING?)
Use a SPAN tag with a STYLE attribute, e.g. <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 125%">
are the least of your problems... seven? You gotta be kidding me. Anyone actually design like this, even in the dark ages?
Uhh, ever view the source of this slashdot page you are currently reading? Try it some time. Each block of comments at a given indent level is a nested table. It's called "Nested" for a reason. (I can't belive anyone actually uses that godawful "Threaded" option that's the default, but it too uses nested tables as well.) And the the entire block of comments themselves are nested in a table, which itself is nested. Notice the page layout, the menus on the left, the 5% black borders on the margins, etc, those are all from tables.
Deeply nested tables are more common than you would think, because webmasters use tables for specifying page layout.
The page I'm typing this comment on is 11.1 k. zipped it is 3.5, and I think I have fast compression on. I'm sure the main slashdot page would save even more. Slashdot could litterally save megs a day.
It's not a free lunch, you have to consider the resulting increase in server CPU load. It's probably not an issue for low traffic sites but it's definitely a concern for sites like slashdot.
Okay, this is something I don't understand about this proposed scheme. Let's say media server A wants to send content to client B. A of course asks B to confirm that B is in secure mode, so that the owners of the content about to be transmitted can sleep well at night knowing that the recipient has paid. What prevents B from running a nonsecure client/OS and reponding "yeah sure, palladium enabled" and receiving the content and storing it unencumbered?
My first thought would be some sort of cryptographic challenge/response would be used to signal this fact. But client B is totally under our control, since we've disabled the secure mode of the CPU, or we're running a non-DRM OS, or we have a legacy CPU, or whatever. So now it appears that we're back to the same situation as the content scrambling system on DVDs. There's some secret key or challenge/response protocol imbedded in the secure OS that's supposed to be running on client B. But we've hacked that software, found the key, whatever. As long as we have the binaries to this OS, someone will eventually find the secret key and that will be the end of that.
In short, how could this form of digital rights management ever work? The situation is almost exactly analogous to DVDs, as far as I can tell -- you have the "trusted" clients (consumer DVD players -> Microsoft's future palladium OS) and the "untrusted" clients (standard PCs with DVD ROMs -> standard PCs running non-DRM OS.)
How does this protect anything? Why go to all the trouble?
Having worked for a handful of years in a small office that ran OS/2 on all machines, I had quite a chuckle when I walked past an ATM machine one day and immediately recognised the old "Trap D" blue screen. It happens. OS/2 is (was) pretty nice, but no OS is immune from lockups. This was in May of 1998, in the lobby of an airport in Munich.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
Sorry, this is almost impossible. You underestimate the tremendous energy density of gasoline. To move an equivalent amount of electical energy in such a short time would probably require conductors too heavy to lift, and refueling stations would require special high capacity hookups to the electrical grid.
Gasoline has an energy density of about 44 MJ/kg, and a density of 740kg/m^3. Let's assume you put 15 gallons into your tank in five minutes (which would be a pretty slow gas pump if you ask me.) That's 1.85 GJ of energy! Now, certainly not all of that energy is put to use moving the vehicle. Most of it goes to the atmosphere as heat. Let's say 20% of it does useful work. (Or, alternatively, that electric vehicles are 1/.2 or 5 times more efficient.) That means that our electric vehicle needs 370 MJ of energy for the equivalent fillup. If you want that in 5 minutes, you're looking at a rate of 1.23 MW (that's megawatts!) At 120 Volts, that would be over 10,000 amperes. Even at at 10,000 Volts, that's still 123 amperes.
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better. This completely ignores the fact that the "system voltage" of the vehicle is probably around 75 - 150V, so this refilling voltage would have to get stepped down again, and you're back to the problem of how to handle 10,000 amps. And of course there's the fact that the electrical grid probably could not handle short bursts of several megawatts for every person refilling a car. How many simultaneous people are refilling their cars at any given time? And how much extra headroom does your power company have?
This is one of the classic problems of the all-electric vehicle. I don't think you'll ever see charging times reduced to less than 4 - 6 hours. And that's for specialized refilling stations. Most households just aren't wired for anywhere close to that much power. Older houses I think had 150 amp service, newer houses are built to 200 or 250 amp service, if I recall.
Why bother going to all the trouble? Take those DIMMs, install them on your mainboard and create a ramdrive. Copy your application to it and run it from there. This is faster (memory bus beats PCI/IDE), cheaper, and easier. Plus, your OS can use the unallocated ramdrive space for cache or application memory -- much more efficient than having the empty space go to waste.
I know what you're going to say: "You can't boot from it." True. "It loses its contents when you shut off the computer." True. But a battery-backed DIMM isn't permanent either, at best you could only have your system off for a number of hours. I honestly don't think many people would trust their sole copy of any data to such a system. What if there was an extended power outage? What if your computer's power supply failed? Don't forget, these ordinary DIMMs are not designed for low power (rather for speed), and with a few gigs worth of RAM, you are looking at much more than a trickle of power. I estimate around 15-20 watts of power, worst case, for each gigabyte of RAM. At that rate, even with a number of large batteries I'd be surprised if it could last overnight. I certainly wouldn't expect PDA-like battery life.
By creating the ramdisk you enforce the condition that a nonvolatile backup exists. If booting from solid state media is one of your objectives, then buy a relatively small Flash drive to boot from, and then copy whatever is necessary from the HD to the ramdrive. I'm sure you'd come out ahead speed wise over the HD-only solution.
Also: Solar Realms Elite and Operation Overkill (II?) Those rocked. As a sysop I would often take the modem off-hook and play OOII in local mode. This was of course before multitasking worked well. DESQview was pretty good though.
But, I can understand the desire to not start listing every multiplayer game but rather the first or most influential ones. Otherwise, it would read like a boring list of BBS door games.
The real question is: when will professional gaming take off?
It already has, go to Korea some time. They have cable TV channels dedicated to broadcasting game competitions. There are clans of players with equivalent status to pro sports teams, they are celebreties. Read about it here as well as the associated slashdot discussion. From the article:
Starcraft is not just a game in South Korea, it is a national sport, what football was in America in the 1970s. Five million people -- equivalent to 30 million in the US - play.
[...]
Chong points out a 20-year-old in an orange sweatshirt, immersed in online tactical warfare. "He's a pro gamer. Most of them practice 10 hours every day, like musicians," he says. "In Korea, people play games using the Internet like that. It's a kind of boom.
Example: 10 spams get the word 'blunderbuss' but he has no regular email with that word. Therefore, any future email may be rejected because of the word 'blunderbuss', even though there is no basis to know whether the word CAN be used legitamately.
Not likely. Remember, the algorithm only considers the top 15 most interesting words of the whole email. Interesting means words that are close to either extreme in percentage. If only 10 spams contained 'blunderbuss' (out of however many thousands in the "spam corpus" used to establish the wordlist) then its percentage would be near the middle, since it was only present in 10 out of thousands of spams. So it will probably not be one of the 15 most interesting words -- if it is a legitimate email there will certainly be a lot of low-score words (near zero, i.e. common to many legit emails) and these are what are considered when judging the message.
In order for 'blunderbuss' to cause a message to be marked as spam, 'blunderbuss' would had to have been present in thousands of previous emails known to be spam, and the message would've had to have a near absense of any words common to thousands of legit emails. If this was the case then it probably was indeed spam, and the algorithm predicted correcly.
If it's never been seen before, an authentication message is sent to the sender asking them to reply to it to authorize themselves. If that authmessage is bounced back, a db entry is made as "denied".
It's unfortunate that you do this, since almost all spam emails have falsified 'From:' lines. Most of the time it's probably a nonexistant account on a large provider (@hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.), but sometimes the spammers put a legitimate email address (that of one of their hated foes) on their 'From:' lines, since they know that innocent person will receive hundreds if not thousands of nasty "don't spam me you bastard" replies. I realize that this step is crucial to your method, since the occasional legit correspondant would need to be notified that their mail hadn't gone through and they need to whitelist themselves. But if everyone did what you did, then any poor sap who the spammers dislike would get flooded with thousands of "Please respond if you wish to communicate" autoreplies when a spammer used their address in one of their emails.
It's another example of something that doesn't hurt the spammers one bit (in that they never supply a valid return address) and costs ordinary regular people time and/or money.
His algorithm works because spam uses the same repetive syntax. Because so many spam/emails are sent out - it can be flagged by pattern recognition... based on the assumption that it is written in English!
Huh? Where do you get that? The algorithm has NO KNOWLEDGE of syntax or structure. It knows only the presence (or absense) of words in the message, nothing of how they are grouped, positioned, ordered, related, structured, etc. There is zero grammar / pattern recognition as far as I can tell. As long as your corpus or database of reference mail is in the same language as the emails you wish to test, then the algorithm would work just fine. Perhaps you were thinking it used Markov chains?
No, that's not necessary. They can use MIME multipart encoding (base64) to include the images. Often these days the entire email is just a block of encoded goo. Do a "view source" (or whatever your mail client calls it) on some spam, and chances are it'll be a solid hunk of base64 encoded content.
(in fact there was a recent explot of IE6 posted to BugTraq that used something similar to this: It turns out you can encode an arbirary.EXE (using MIME) into some server created error message, and then get the code to execute as local user. End result: system compromised with rootkit simply by viewing a webpage.)
If I've already got a windows machine, in theory, why can't I just install the same OS license on the new box and throw away the old one?
If it was a bundled copy of Windows (i.e. came with the machine) then you can't do this. The OEM license specifically binds the software to the particular machine, so that if you build or buy a new machine, you need a new license, even if you put the old box in a dumpster. I know, pretty stupid; but that's how it's written.
I wonder how many people are in violation of this. Actually, there's probably a whole spectrum. On one extreme you've got the people who are too cool to pay for stuff they use, and have a handful of various pirated Windows installations on several machines. Somewhere near the middle you've got those people who paid for 'n' different upgrade versions but never the full price. Sometimes this chain of upgrades is based on an original ancient OEM license on long-dead hardware (and is therefore technically illegal.) On the far end of the spectrum are your average Gateway/Dell types that don't worry about this sort of thing and just use whatever came with the hardware, buying a new machine and license every so often.
Maybe someone can explain it to me, I just don't understand why people like Red Bull. It tastes like ass, and yet these companies are shoveling in the money from this and other small-can-shaped "energy" drinks.
Nutrition Facts: Serving Size: 8.3 fl. oz Servings per Container: 1 Amount per serving: Calories: 113 Total Fat: 0g Sodium: 215mg Protein: 0g Total Carbohydrates: 28g Sugars: 28g
And this costs, what two bucks? Three dollars? WTF?
You are basically getting highly sugared water (about 5 teaspoons per can) and 80mg of caffeine, which is not that much. If this is your thing, then all the more power to you, but there are vastly cheaper ways to go about it. Personally I just go down to Kmart and buy caffeine pills: each of those is 200mg and you can buy a package of 90 of them for a few dollars. Avoid the brand names, they cost a lot more. And if it's sugar that you crave, then soda should do the trick.
So that just leaves us with these mysterious ingredients taurine and glucuronolactone. Here is where we encounter the manufacturer's (and anyone hocking these three dollar sugar shots) claims of all sorts of "revitalization." Yeah, whatever. I have not the medical knowledge to debunk this load, but just consider that taurine is often an ingredient in baby milk formulas and that when Coca Cola was still a young company they often touted "the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nut" and the "invigorating" power of its mysterious ingredients -- the secret is that there is no secret.
So if you're truly athletic and drink Red Bull for performance, then go read a book on nutrition or sports medicine. How could a drink that's a diuretic and contains only a sip of water possibly be a good sports drink?
Ah, the club crowd -- the company's bread and butter, although they claim otherwise (see the linked article below for a direct quote from a company representative.) Drinking alcohol with Red Bull is a poor man's speedball, caffeine's upper to alcohol's downer. I'm sure it lets you stay awake longer and drink more, and it's oh-so-trendy. I have no problem with this, but just realize that there's nothing magical or special in that $3 can.
Most web developers do not understand DOM and how Javascript (ECMAScript) has improved.
My opinion is that this happens because the culture of learning Javascript/DOM seems to be "screw around with google searches until you find someone's code snippet that is close enough, and then fiddle." I'm sure we've all done this at some point. And on top of that, if you try to go to the horses mouth (such as the official spec) it's often difficult if you're new to the subject or not sure exactly what you're looking for, since they're very formal. So most people cobble something together and run with it. I'm sure it's a little better than this if you are a professional... but then you have to worry about supporting Netscape 0.12alpha or some such beast. I get the impression that a lot of day-job html guys would love to drop everything and code to 100% standards but could never get away with it for compatibility's sake.
As for my nephew, he'll no longer be using any of my computers anymore. His taste in pRon was just plain horrid anyways. Not even one good free site did he find.
After you chew him out, at least point him to Usenet and a binary slurper, so that he can enjoy years and years of quality, ad-free pr0n fishing like it was meant to be.
I did this - the hassle is that sometimes (always?) you have to restart mozilla for it to take effect.
As the other poster said, get Privoxy, formerly Internet Junkbuster. You can block just about any annoyance, including flash, with fine grain control. No more messing with plug-in files and restarting. And it will apply to any browser, should you use more than one.
-10 Terrible -1 Bad 0 Neutral 12 Positive 25 Good 99999 Excellent
Or at least those are the values in the slashcode CVS, which we think are what Slashdot is running. The 50 cap is still in place, you just don't see it.
See also Taco's journal entry. There was also a discussion thread where Taco talked about it but since it was not associated with an article ("user created sid") the posts have since expired (two week threshold.)
Re:SP2 on CD: Get 'em while they last!
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More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 2
If you use Windows 2000, it's in your own best interests to grab a copy of this (or even two if you're really paranoid) and lock it away in a safe place if you ever need to re-install.
While I certainly understand the logic behind this, don't you think it's a tad paranoid? Microsoft would have hundreds of screaming sysadmins on their hands if they suddenly stopped providing older service packs. There's just too many environments where the "internally supported" platform is not the current service pack level. For example, here's the FTP site with every NT 4.0 service pack. As much as I think MS would love to only support the latest SP, I don't think that will ever happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your sentiment that it is good to show these kids that the world of computers does not equate to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Microsoft Windows. Most ordinary computer users probably spend 90% of their time using these or some other small handful of apps, and it's easy to assume that's all there is to computers if you've never experienced anything else.
But, I don't think this is the proper setting to demonstrate this idea. The whole point of alternatives is choosing the best solution for the task at hand. Here you've got a case where the alternate tool does not have the necessary functionality, at least not without extra development work. It doesn't have support from any of the administation, and indeed would probably draw some degree of negativity. And it's not saving any money or other resources, because clearly the Windows PCs and their software have already been purchased, configured, and work just fine.
Don't force the square peg in the round hole. There are many times when the alternatives make sense, and this is not one of them.
What you should instead do is find a task to which Linux and free software are suited. Try having an assignment where the kids use Octave or gnuplot or something like that to analyze their data. Surely there's some task that would require the purchase of non-free software for Windows that can be done with free software on Linux. It doesn't even have to be a very involved task, but perhaps if you had the basic skeleton/framework script setup and the kids just enter their data and get an advanced analysis.
If it doesn't violate policy, offer to also let the kids use this linux computer in between classes or after school, to surf the web or type assignments or whatever. Surely you will get a few curious kids that want to screw around on it since it's different. A few might want to use it if other labs are full, or they don't have a computer at home, or it's simply convenient at the time, or whatever. Point is, they'll get some exposure even if it's not an integral part of the class (i.e., not driving your lab hardware.)
So one of the major points of this exhibit is to "peek under the hood" of computer art and have people look at the code, in the same way that you might look at an artists brushes, paints, etc. Given that, you would think that they could format the source code properly. Look at this C source for the Linescape piece. It looks like someone hastily ran code2html without any concern for getting the tabs/whitespace correct, and called it a day.
Come on, if the point is to view source code the way it is "in the wild" then at least get the formatting correct. I don't know of any programmer that would purposefully write code that looks like that. The comments and other multiline structures don't line up, and there seem to be many spurious line breaks. (And the tab stops should be 2 columns, The Way God Intended, but that's just my opinion.)
If I were an artist who had created a commissioned piece of code and they posted it like that, I would feel a bit insulted. It's as if the gallery had let some photographic prints get waterlogged or a feature broke off of a sculpture during shipping, and they just continue to show the piece as if that's how it was supposed to look.
(And, if indeed that is how the author Camille Utterback truly formatted the source, then I shudder. For an exhibit about the "art of code", that's some damn butt-ugly code there. I'm only referring to the formatting, not its content.)
There is an interesting website called css/edge which attempts to explore all the possibilities of doing "neat stuff" using only standards-compliant HTML and CSS. There are some really stunning demonstrations, such as the complexspiral demo. This demo shows a page that has a two column menu/content layout, complete with alpha-blended translucent background that seamlessly glides over a fixed background image as you scroll, with the translucency changing for mouse-over events on the buttons. The text size can be gracefully sized, and the layout works for any window size. This is done only with pure HTML, a stylesheet, and four JPGs -- no javascript, alpha-channel PNGs, half-screen GIFs, etc.
Thing is, if you visit this site with Internet Explorer on Windows, the above demo and most of the other demos look like crap. This really opened my eyes to IE's lack of CSS conformance. But visit the page in Mozilla, Konquerer 3, or IE5/mac, and it's beautiful.
(Not to mention that the W3C validator is extremely anal about "obsolete" tags. Maybe I want a FONT tag in one piece of text that I'm never going to change. Why do I need a CSS name for EVERYTHING?)
Use a SPAN tag with a STYLE attribute, e.g. <SPAN STYLE="font-size: 125%">
are the least of your problems... seven? You gotta be kidding me. Anyone actually design like this, even in the dark ages?
Uhh, ever view the source of this slashdot page you are currently reading? Try it some time. Each block of comments at a given indent level is a nested table. It's called "Nested" for a reason. (I can't belive anyone actually uses that godawful "Threaded" option that's the default, but it too uses nested tables as well.) And the the entire block of comments themselves are nested in a table, which itself is nested. Notice the page layout, the menus on the left, the 5% black borders on the margins, etc, those are all from tables.
Deeply nested tables are more common than you would think, because webmasters use tables for specifying page layout.
The page I'm typing this comment on is 11.1 k. zipped it is 3.5, and I think I have fast compression on. I'm sure the main slashdot page would save even more. Slashdot could litterally save megs a day.
It's not a free lunch, you have to consider the resulting increase in server CPU load. It's probably not an issue for low traffic sites but it's definitely a concern for sites like slashdot.
Okay, this is something I don't understand about this proposed scheme. Let's say media server A wants to send content to client B. A of course asks B to confirm that B is in secure mode, so that the owners of the content about to be transmitted can sleep well at night knowing that the recipient has paid. What prevents B from running a nonsecure client/OS and reponding "yeah sure, palladium enabled" and receiving the content and storing it unencumbered?
My first thought would be some sort of cryptographic challenge/response would be used to signal this fact. But client B is totally under our control, since we've disabled the secure mode of the CPU, or we're running a non-DRM OS, or we have a legacy CPU, or whatever. So now it appears that we're back to the same situation as the content scrambling system on DVDs. There's some secret key or challenge/response protocol imbedded in the secure OS that's supposed to be running on client B. But we've hacked that software, found the key, whatever. As long as we have the binaries to this OS, someone will eventually find the secret key and that will be the end of that.
In short, how could this form of digital rights management ever work? The situation is almost exactly analogous to DVDs, as far as I can tell -- you have the "trusted" clients (consumer DVD players -> Microsoft's future palladium OS) and the "untrusted" clients (standard PCs with DVD ROMs -> standard PCs running non-DRM OS.)
How does this protect anything? Why go to all the trouble?
Having worked for a handful of years in a small office that ran OS/2 on all machines, I had quite a chuckle when I walked past an ATM machine one day and immediately recognised the old "Trap D" blue screen. It happens. OS/2 is (was) pretty nice, but no OS is immune from lockups. This was in May of 1998, in the lobby of an airport in Munich.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
Sorry, this is almost impossible. You underestimate the tremendous energy density of gasoline. To move an equivalent amount of electical energy in such a short time would probably require conductors too heavy to lift, and refueling stations would require special high capacity hookups to the electrical grid.
Gasoline has an energy density of about 44 MJ/kg, and a density of 740kg/m^3. Let's assume you put 15 gallons into your tank in five minutes (which would be a pretty slow gas pump if you ask me.) That's 1.85 GJ of energy! Now, certainly not all of that energy is put to use moving the vehicle. Most of it goes to the atmosphere as heat. Let's say 20% of it does useful work. (Or, alternatively, that electric vehicles are 1/.2 or 5 times more efficient.) That means that our electric vehicle needs 370 MJ of energy for the equivalent fillup. If you want that in 5 minutes, you're looking at a rate of 1.23 MW (that's megawatts!) At 120 Volts, that would be over 10,000 amperes. Even at at 10,000 Volts, that's still 123 amperes.
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better. This completely ignores the fact that the "system voltage" of the vehicle is probably around 75 - 150V, so this refilling voltage would have to get stepped down again, and you're back to the problem of how to handle 10,000 amps. And of course there's the fact that the electrical grid probably could not handle short bursts of several megawatts for every person refilling a car. How many simultaneous people are refilling their cars at any given time? And how much extra headroom does your power company have?
This is one of the classic problems of the all-electric vehicle. I don't think you'll ever see charging times reduced to less than 4 - 6 hours. And that's for specialized refilling stations. Most households just aren't wired for anywhere close to that much power. Older houses I think had 150 amp service, newer houses are built to 200 or 250 amp service, if I recall.
Why bother going to all the trouble? Take those DIMMs, install them on your mainboard and create a ramdrive. Copy your application to it and run it from there. This is faster (memory bus beats PCI/IDE), cheaper, and easier. Plus, your OS can use the unallocated ramdrive space for cache or application memory -- much more efficient than having the empty space go to waste.
I know what you're going to say: "You can't boot from it." True. "It loses its contents when you shut off the computer." True. But a battery-backed DIMM isn't permanent either, at best you could only have your system off for a number of hours. I honestly don't think many people would trust their sole copy of any data to such a system. What if there was an extended power outage? What if your computer's power supply failed? Don't forget, these ordinary DIMMs are not designed for low power (rather for speed), and with a few gigs worth of RAM, you are looking at much more than a trickle of power. I estimate around 15-20 watts of power, worst case, for each gigabyte of RAM. At that rate, even with a number of large batteries I'd be surprised if it could last overnight. I certainly wouldn't expect PDA-like battery life.
By creating the ramdisk you enforce the condition that a nonvolatile backup exists. If booting from solid state media is one of your objectives, then buy a relatively small Flash drive to boot from, and then copy whatever is necessary from the HD to the ramdrive. I'm sure you'd come out ahead speed wise over the HD-only solution.
Also: Solar Realms Elite and Operation Overkill (II?) Those rocked. As a sysop I would often take the modem off-hook and play OOII in local mode. This was of course before multitasking worked well. DESQview was pretty good though.
But, I can understand the desire to not start listing every multiplayer game but rather the first or most influential ones. Otherwise, it would read like a boring list of BBS door games.
It already has, go to Korea some time. They have cable TV channels dedicated to broadcasting game competitions. There are clans of players with equivalent status to pro sports teams, they are celebreties. Read about it here as well as the associated slashdot discussion. From the article:
a sudo [sic] package you can install, which depends on all the LSB stuff (thus gets them installed, with some caveats)
For all of you out there wondering what the hell the 'sudo' command has to do with the LSB, I believe the poster meant a pseudo-package.
Example: 10 spams get the word 'blunderbuss' but he has no regular email with that word. Therefore, any future email may be rejected because of the word 'blunderbuss', even though there is no basis to know whether the word CAN be used legitamately.
Not likely. Remember, the algorithm only considers the top 15 most interesting words of the whole email. Interesting means words that are close to either extreme in percentage. If only 10 spams contained 'blunderbuss' (out of however many thousands in the "spam corpus" used to establish the wordlist) then its percentage would be near the middle, since it was only present in 10 out of thousands of spams. So it will probably not be one of the 15 most interesting words -- if it is a legitimate email there will certainly be a lot of low-score words (near zero, i.e. common to many legit emails) and these are what are considered when judging the message.
In order for 'blunderbuss' to cause a message to be marked as spam, 'blunderbuss' would had to have been present in thousands of previous emails known to be spam, and the message would've had to have a near absense of any words common to thousands of legit emails. If this was the case then it probably was indeed spam, and the algorithm predicted correcly.
If it's never been seen before, an authentication message is sent to the sender asking them to reply to it to authorize themselves. If that authmessage is bounced back, a db entry is made as "denied".
It's unfortunate that you do this, since almost all spam emails have falsified 'From:' lines. Most of the time it's probably a nonexistant account on a large provider (@hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.), but sometimes the spammers put a legitimate email address (that of one of their hated foes) on their 'From:' lines, since they know that innocent person will receive hundreds if not thousands of nasty "don't spam me you bastard" replies. I realize that this step is crucial to your method, since the occasional legit correspondant would need to be notified that their mail hadn't gone through and they need to whitelist themselves. But if everyone did what you did, then any poor sap who the spammers dislike would get flooded with thousands of "Please respond if you wish to communicate" autoreplies when a spammer used their address in one of their emails.
It's another example of something that doesn't hurt the spammers one bit (in that they never supply a valid return address) and costs ordinary regular people time and/or money.
His algorithm works because spam uses the same repetive syntax. Because so many spam/emails are sent out - it can be flagged by pattern recognition... based on the assumption that it is written in English!
Huh? Where do you get that? The algorithm has NO KNOWLEDGE of syntax or structure. It knows only the presence (or absense) of words in the message, nothing of how they are grouped, positioned, ordered, related, structured, etc. There is zero grammar / pattern recognition as far as I can tell. As long as your corpus or database of reference mail is in the same language as the emails you wish to test, then the algorithm would work just fine. Perhaps you were thinking it used Markov chains?
No, that's not necessary. They can use MIME multipart encoding (base64) to include the images. Often these days the entire email is just a block of encoded goo. Do a "view source" (or whatever your mail client calls it) on some spam, and chances are it'll be a solid hunk of base64 encoded content.
.EXE (using MIME) into some server created error message, and then get the code to execute as local user. End result: system compromised with rootkit simply by viewing a webpage.)
(in fact there was a recent explot of IE6 posted to BugTraq that used something similar to this: It turns out you can encode an arbirary
If I've already got a windows machine, in theory, why can't I just install the same OS license on the new box and throw away the old one?
If it was a bundled copy of Windows (i.e. came with the machine) then you can't do this. The OEM license specifically binds the software to the particular machine, so that if you build or buy a new machine, you need a new license, even if you put the old box in a dumpster. I know, pretty stupid; but that's how it's written.
I wonder how many people are in violation of this. Actually, there's probably a whole spectrum. On one extreme you've got the people who are too cool to pay for stuff they use, and have a handful of various pirated Windows installations on several machines. Somewhere near the middle you've got those people who paid for 'n' different upgrade versions but never the full price. Sometimes this chain of upgrades is based on an original ancient OEM license on long-dead hardware (and is therefore technically illegal.) On the far end of the spectrum are your average Gateway/Dell types that don't worry about this sort of thing and just use whatever came with the hardware, buying a new machine and license every so often.
And this costs, what two bucks? Three dollars? WTF?
You are basically getting highly sugared water (about 5 teaspoons per can) and 80mg of caffeine, which is not that much. If this is your thing, then all the more power to you, but there are vastly cheaper ways to go about it. Personally I just go down to Kmart and buy caffeine pills: each of those is 200mg and you can buy a package of 90 of them for a few dollars. Avoid the brand names, they cost a lot more. And if it's sugar that you crave, then soda should do the trick.
So that just leaves us with these mysterious ingredients taurine and glucuronolactone. Here is where we encounter the manufacturer's (and anyone hocking these three dollar sugar shots) claims of all sorts of "revitalization." Yeah, whatever. I have not the medical knowledge to debunk this load, but just consider that taurine is often an ingredient in baby milk formulas and that when Coca Cola was still a young company they often touted "the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nut" and the "invigorating" power of its mysterious ingredients -- the secret is that there is no secret.
So if you're truly athletic and drink Red Bull for performance, then go read a book on nutrition or sports medicine. How could a drink that's a diuretic and contains only a sip of water possibly be a good sports drink?
Ah, the club crowd -- the company's bread and butter, although they claim otherwise (see the linked article below for a direct quote from a company representative.) Drinking alcohol with Red Bull is a poor man's speedball, caffeine's upper to alcohol's downer. I'm sure it lets you stay awake longer and drink more, and it's oh-so-trendy. I have no problem with this, but just realize that there's nothing magical or special in that $3 can.
An excellent article on Red Bull's company background and marketing tactics, including their fling with extreme-style sports.
After you chew him out, at least point him to Usenet and a binary slurper, so that he can enjoy years and years of quality, ad-free pr0n fishing like it was meant to be.
Yeah, or just (A*2^24) + (B*2^16) + (C*2^8) + D, for IP A.B.C.D.
I think there's another variation in which one specifies the numbers in octal...
how does the named karma level breakdown work
the breakpoints are:
-10 Terrible
-1 Bad
0 Neutral
12 Positive
25 Good
99999 Excellent
Or at least those are the values in the slashcode CVS, which we think are what Slashdot is running. The 50 cap is still in place, you just don't see it.
See also Taco's journal entry. There was also a discussion thread where Taco talked about it but since it was not associated with an article ("user created sid") the posts have since expired (two week threshold.)