along the lines of "you fscking idot don't try that at home". Well, that's totally against the hacker spirit of learning how to do it yourself, hopefully without killing yourself.
I've wired up several additional circuits in my home and my office and it's not that hard. All I needed was a little common sense, a copy of the Ugly's book, and the local home depot. In your case though, if the main drop coming in from the pole is bad, you need to have the power company turn off your service drop so you can replace it.
If the main lines coming in are safely insulated and do not need to be replaced, then what you can do is shut off the main breaker, unscrew all the circuits coming in to the individual breakers, and replace all your house wiring and perhaps all the breakers as well. This is not a job for the faint of heart, but I wouldn't say it's incredibly skill-intensive. Just takes some patience to wire up all that stuff and not slip with your hand/screwdriver and hit the main lugs. If they're exposed where they connect to the main breaker, then you might want to cover them up with cardboard and tape while you're working.
Oh, and don't blame me if you kill yourself. I'm not an electrician - an electrician would tell you to hire an electrician. I'm just telling you where *I* would start.
I stopped using my cell phone about a year ago when I realized that I could get by in life just fine without being on call 24x7. To be fair, before that I was running an ISP and *did* need to be on call but anyway...
I went about six months paying the bill on the thing, thinking that the next time I go on a business trip it'd come in handy. Last month I needed to go to Europe, so I figured no problem - I'll just go upgrade my plan and switch to the GSM phone. But could I just upgrade my plan, NO! They needed my social security number to run a new credit check, they insisted that I needed the model with a 4" color screen that played video games, and they said that even the base model would cost me $400 ust to get started. AND I'd have to sign a NEW two-year contract to get that special price. I just left my old phone on the counter and walked out. Called Xingular when I got back to the office and cancelled my service.
I will sign up fora cell phone again when I can get my choice of a flat monthly rate or a per-minute-only rate on a phone that works everywhere in the world with no long term contracts. And don't pull stupid shit like subsidizing the service with the price of the phone and vice versa. I don't insist that it be "dirt cheap". I know it costs $$$$ to build a world-wide cellular network, but there is a fair and reasonable way to charge for it and nobody's offering that.
I'm afraid your argument only bolsters the parent's point that spam laws are retarded. Slashdot DOES NOT have rules about what you can and can't say, beyond simple junk filters. Neither should email.
We can solve these problems with technology instead of legislation. I am certain that automated filters + sender-side storage + encryption can solve all of the current problems with email. The *only* challenge is uprooting the established SMTP protocol. I believe that's infeasible. We just have to introduce a new email infrastructure and let people start using it while the old one slowly dies.
No regulations, let alone an idiotic local US state law, will improve the spam situation.
I never studied much chemistry, but I hope someone can answer a couple questions:
According to the article, the "natural" elemements "run out" at 92.
1) What does this mean exactly? 2) Is it not possible for us to discover other natural elements? 3) Is it inconceivable that our "new" elements could also be produced under similar conditions in nature? 4) Have all of these new elements only existed in very small quantities for short periods of time, under controlled conditions?
It's hard to imagine how that statement could be true - throw out 15+ years of OS development to start anew?
However, Apple managed to do it by standing on the shoulders of giants, and using the time-tested Unix architecture while finding clever ways to support existing apps. MSFT could do it too, but I'd much rather see them continue down this path until they're toast. Preemptive multitasking and multiple users (done right) is the only way to go.
You know how you sort of laugh at the Linux n00b who always logs in as root so he doesn't get those pesky permission errors? Well guess what - that's what 99.99% of the Windows world is doing now. But it's not just the users - it's practically every damn thing running on their system.
One way to check if a machine has a keylogger is to type some stuff like "yakyak", reboot and do a search for text files containing that term.
Also, look behind it for something like this but keep in mind it's also very easy to install something like that inside the case, even to the back-side of the motherboard where youn can't readily see it.
Let's face it, if somebody wants to steal YOUR identity, it's so fucking easy there's really nothing you can do to prevent it short of living like the unabomber and having no identity to steal.
The best you can do is try to prevent yourself from ending up in a lot of databases, and try to avoid using your credit card in places like grovery stores and gas stations where it's just going to pile up in a stack of receipts behind the counter, guarded by some punnk making 4.75 who doesn't give a shit about your AMEX with the $100000 limit. Most identify theft is not targeted - these guys harvest stacks of receipts and computer printouts, test which identies or credit cards are useable, and go from there.
No, they said that they rolled their own software in lieu of using a commercially available solution - that's all they said. If anything, this further undermines their argument in that their predetermined choice of OS simply ruled out readily available softwar0e (irrespective of cost).
"My experience with Windows is limited. I have been a Linux user since 1993 and I have considerable experience in programming in that environment," Ferguson said. "In any case, I don't think that I would have undertaken a task like this, where a computer is on the road, using anything but a robust operating system."
I mean, is it *really* that much harder to grab some video in Windows vs Linux? Having never programmed in Windows, perhaps someone can enlighten me, but I would expect that software like this is 99% image processing, and the choice of OS makes little or no difference. I can understand, all thing being equal, using the OS you're more comfortable with... but jesus they make it sound like Linux saved the day here, when that's their only argument.
We always make fun of the retarded M$-funded cost-of-ownership studies. How about posting some stories that show the REAL benefit of OSS in everyday applications?
It simply stops serving images at anything but a really slow rate
What's the point? Either way you're slashdotted.
Besides, I think in the case of server overload (as opposed to network overload), throttling will only exacerbate the problem by increasing the number of slow clients you have to deal with. This is the #1 bottleneck in web servers, the more clients you have, the longer it takes to deal with each one of them. Losts of processes to switch between, long arrays in an out of select(), etc.
Also, when a user doesn't get a page in his browser, what does he do? He clicks the link again and again.... even more connections to handle.
Really the only way to cure an overloaded server is to drop incoming SYNs. Any other measure is just pouring gasoline on the fire.
My server has been slashdotted a few times and I can tell you it's pretty simple to not get overloaded.
The first time I learned my lesson. The server was on a T1 line that was 2/3 full already, and slashdot linked to a page full of large photos. That'll kill your link pretty quickly. Low-budget solution: sign up for a burstable web hosting account somewhere and just put all your large images there.
Later when we got some actual office space for the business, I moved the main server up to a colo facility in fremont. All slahdottable content is hosted there on a fast server with a 100mbps ethernet link. Other oddball services that need their own machine are hosted from the other end of a point-to-point T1 line going directly back to the office from the colo.
So depending on your budget it's really not hard to set up your site to survive a slashdotting. If you don't have a lot of dough to spend but you want to run your own server for configurability/security reasons, just host the static stuff somewhere else. Or if you're serving enough to make it economical, get a colo account with a burstable link.
There's a widespread misconception here that slashdotting is caused by server overload. In reality this is almost never the case. It's caused by insufficient bandwith. This in turn may cause server overload because of too many slow clients being connected, but that is purely a secondary effect.
Indeed, what kind of dingbat throws out all that "sophisticated" stuff above the link layer and tries to estimate throughput using "real math"? The only way to get REAL numbers is by simply measuring the actual transfer. Not that it's impossible to model TCP's behavior mathemtically but jesus why bother for this?
Anyway on a slight tangent here... one thing that's interesting about TCP is that on very low latency media like an ethernet or 802.11 LAN, usually TCP actually performs *better* when you limit its window to as little as one or two segments. Otherwise it's just bumping up against the ceiling all the time and causing timeouts (doubling cwnd when you're already at the max usually loses enough packets that you don't get a fast retransmit). During initial startup of the connection the timeouts are quite long, which is why file transfers on a local LAN usually start out slow and don't get fast until they've been running for several seconds.
when you hook up that 10baseT card, it slows down the rest of the hub to 10 baseT.
Not at all. An auto-sensing hub (does anyone still make these?) is actually a 10mbps segment bridged to a 100mbps segment. Each port connects to whichever segment it can talk to, and they're switched together internally. The whole thing does *not* drop to 10mbps when any 10mbps devices are present.
It would be nice if B and G played that nicely in the same spectrum, but they don't.
That's all well and good if the nature of the game is just killing things and advancing to the next level. I'm neither a gamer nor an economist, but it's obvious to me that the instant you introduce things of value whch can be traded among participants, the game becomes an economic system like any other - not only will you develop currencies within the game, but an exchange rate will naturally be established with the "real world".
I just don't get it - if the point of playing the game is to escape real life, why are you playing a game modeled after it?
Last year I moved to a city right next to mine, where there are no street lights at all. It is wonderful. Coming home at the end of the day to sorta-darkness just feels a lot more normal and peaceful. Having a streetlight near your house is just one more reminder that you're packed into a crowded suburb. Alright, there are still a few people with lights in their driveway, and there is still a hazy orange glow visible over San Jose, and there is still the occasional car going by, but just having it a *little* darker is so much nicer.
From Desolation Wildernes, near lake Tahoe, I have seen the sky so dark that when I would lie perfectly still I could see the tiny orange reflection of one of our satellites moving ever so slowly across the stars. It's incredible what you can see with your pupils dilated, like they never are at home.
If you post, you make the comments that make the pages that carry the ads. Even if you don't post, you read the ads and maybe click once in a while. You're not freeloading here if you don't pay.
ROTFLMAO that joke is so damn funny! Because that's exactly what happens if you're reading the web over dialup and you get disconnected. I mean, there you were in the middle of your post and BOOM, some garbage and then no carrier!
"After running our RenderMan benchmarks, we can now say that the G5 is the fastest desktop in the world"
Regardless of whether the G5 is the fastest CPU for RenderMan, it is not per-CPU performance that matters. If you're setting up a rendering farm, you're buying n computers to render m frames per hour. At the end of the day, what matters is minimising $$$$$$ per m, not n, and I'll bet dollars to doughtnuts that commondity Intel/AMD whips a G5 mac in terms of rendered frames per dollar. Remember, Apple's CEO == Pixar's CEO.
Finally, for what it's worth, I'm a Mac user and a big OSX fan. But I know what my dollars are paying for and it ain't CPU cycles.
Slashdot Mirror
along the lines of "you fscking idot don't try that at home". Well, that's totally against the hacker spirit of learning how to do it yourself, hopefully without killing yourself.
I've wired up several additional circuits in my home and my office and it's not that hard. All I needed was a little common sense, a copy of the Ugly's book, and the local home depot. In your case though, if the main drop coming in from the pole is bad, you need to have the power company turn off your service drop so you can replace it.
If the main lines coming in are safely insulated and do not need to be replaced, then what you can do is shut off the main breaker, unscrew all the circuits coming in to the individual breakers, and replace all your house wiring and perhaps all the breakers as well. This is not a job for the faint of heart, but I wouldn't say it's incredibly skill-intensive. Just takes some patience to wire up all that stuff and not slip with your hand/screwdriver and hit the main lugs. If they're exposed where they connect to the main breaker, then you might want to cover them up with cardboard and tape while you're working.
Oh, and don't blame me if you kill yourself. I'm not an electrician - an electrician would tell you to hire an electrician. I'm just telling you where *I* would start.
1. Go into a supermarket 2. Fork over 20 euro/dollar/pounds 3. Get a pay-as-you-go phone
I figured there must be somebody at heathrow leasing phones, but I couldn't find any. Do you know of someplace in/near the airport, for next time?
Hear hear!
I stopped using my cell phone about a year ago when I realized that I could get by in life just fine without being on call 24x7. To be fair, before that I was running an ISP and *did* need to be on call but anyway...
I went about six months paying the bill on the thing, thinking that the next time I go on a business trip it'd come in handy. Last month I needed to go to Europe, so I figured no problem - I'll just go upgrade my plan and switch to the GSM phone. But could I just upgrade my plan, NO! They needed my social security number to run a new credit check, they insisted that I needed the model with a 4" color screen that played video games, and they said that even the base model would cost me $400 ust to get started. AND I'd have to sign a NEW two-year contract to get that special price. I just left my old phone on the counter and walked out. Called Xingular when I got back to the office and cancelled my service.
I will sign up fora cell phone again when I can get my choice of a flat monthly rate or a per-minute-only rate on a phone that works everywhere in the world with no long term contracts. And don't pull stupid shit like subsidizing the service with the price of the phone and vice versa. I don't insist that it be "dirt cheap". I know it costs $$$$ to build a world-wide cellular network, but there is a fair and reasonable way to charge for it and nobody's offering that.
I'm afraid your argument only bolsters the parent's point that spam laws are retarded. Slashdot DOES NOT have rules about what you can and can't say, beyond simple junk filters. Neither should email.
We can solve these problems with technology instead of legislation. I am certain that automated filters + sender-side storage + encryption can solve all of the current problems with email. The *only* challenge is uprooting the established SMTP protocol. I believe that's infeasible. We just have to introduce a new email infrastructure and let people start using it while the old one slowly dies.
No regulations, let alone an idiotic local US state law, will improve the spam situation.
I never studied much chemistry, but I hope someone can answer a couple questions:
According to the article, the "natural" elemements "run out" at 92.
1) What does this mean exactly?
2) Is it not possible for us to discover other natural elements?
3) Is it inconceivable that our "new" elements could also be produced under similar conditions in nature?
4) Have all of these new elements only existed in very small quantities for short periods of time, under controlled conditions?
They need to start over.
It's hard to imagine how that statement could be true - throw out 15+ years of OS development to start anew?
However, Apple managed to do it by standing on the shoulders of giants, and using the time-tested Unix architecture while finding clever ways to support existing apps. MSFT could do it too, but I'd much rather see them continue down this path until they're toast. Preemptive multitasking and multiple users (done right) is the only way to go.
You know how you sort of laugh at the Linux n00b who always logs in as root so he doesn't get those pesky permission errors? Well guess what - that's what 99.99% of the Windows world is doing now. But it's not just the users - it's practically every damn thing running on their system.
I say bring on the virii!
One way to check if a machine has a keylogger is to type some stuff like "yakyak", reboot and do a search for text files containing that term.
Also, look behind it for something like this but keep in mind it's also very easy to install something like that inside the case, even to the back-side of the motherboard where youn can't readily see it.
Let's face it, if somebody wants to steal YOUR identity, it's so fucking easy there's really nothing you can do to prevent it short of living like the unabomber and having no identity to steal.
The best you can do is try to prevent yourself from ending up in a lot of databases, and try to avoid using your credit card in places like grovery stores and gas stations where it's just going to pile up in a stack of receipts behind the counter, guarded by some punnk making 4.75 who doesn't give a shit about your AMEX with the $100000 limit. Most identify theft is not targeted - these guys harvest stacks of receipts and computer printouts, test which identies or credit cards are useable, and go from there.
Thanks for the "Troll" mod, guys. Yes, let's all suppress objective discourse to make room for the WHEE LINUX posts.
No, they said that they rolled their own software in lieu of using a commercially available solution - that's all they said. If anything, this further undermines their argument in that their predetermined choice of OS simply ruled out readily available softwar0e (irrespective of cost).
I LOVE OSS, BUT THIS ARTICLE IS TRIPE.
... but this artice is pretty ridiculous:
"My experience with Windows is limited. I have been a Linux user since 1993 and I have considerable experience in programming in that environment," Ferguson said. "In any case, I don't think that I would have undertaken a task like this, where a computer is on the road, using anything but a robust operating system."
I mean, is it *really* that much harder to grab some video in Windows vs Linux? Having never programmed in Windows, perhaps someone can enlighten me, but I would expect that software like this is 99% image processing, and the choice of OS makes little or no difference. I can understand, all thing being equal, using the OS you're more comfortable with... but jesus they make it sound like Linux saved the day here, when that's their only argument.
We always make fun of the retarded M$-funded cost-of-ownership studies. How about posting some stories that show the REAL benefit of OSS in everyday applications?
if you just drop the syns the hosts will keep retrying. you have to deny the connections... send out a fin.
I think you mean a RST, but in any case yes, that's another way which avoids generating any state server side. But it does generate outgoing traffic.
With web connections, the user's just going to keep trying anyway so it doesn't make much difference.
It simply stops serving images at anything but a really slow rate
What's the point? Either way you're slashdotted.
Besides, I think in the case of server overload (as opposed to network overload), throttling will only exacerbate the problem by increasing the number of slow clients you have to deal with. This is the #1 bottleneck in web servers, the more clients you have, the longer it takes to deal with each one of them. Losts of processes to switch between, long arrays in an out of select(), etc.
Also, when a user doesn't get a page in his browser, what does he do? He clicks the link again and again.... even more connections to handle.
Really the only way to cure an overloaded server is to drop incoming SYNs. Any other measure is just pouring gasoline on the fire.
My server has been slashdotted a few times and I can tell you it's pretty simple to not get overloaded.
The first time I learned my lesson. The server was on a T1 line that was 2/3 full already, and slashdot linked to a page full of large photos. That'll kill your link pretty quickly. Low-budget solution: sign up for a burstable web hosting account somewhere and just put all your large images there.
Later when we got some actual office space for the business, I moved the main server up to a colo facility in fremont. All slahdottable content is hosted there on a fast server with a 100mbps ethernet link. Other oddball services that need their own machine are hosted from the other end of a point-to-point T1 line going directly back to the office from the colo.
So depending on your budget it's really not hard to set up your site to survive a slashdotting. If you don't have a lot of dough to spend but you want to run your own server for configurability/security reasons, just host the static stuff somewhere else. Or if you're serving enough to make it economical, get a colo account with a burstable link.
There's a widespread misconception here that slashdotting is caused by server overload. In reality this is almost never the case. It's caused by insufficient bandwith. This in turn may cause server overload because of too many slow clients being connected, but that is purely a secondary effect.
Indeed, what kind of dingbat throws out all that "sophisticated" stuff above the link layer and tries to estimate throughput using "real math"? The only way to get REAL numbers is by simply measuring the actual transfer. Not that it's impossible to model TCP's behavior mathemtically but jesus why bother for this?
Anyway on a slight tangent here... one thing that's interesting about TCP is that on very low latency media like an ethernet or 802.11 LAN, usually TCP actually performs *better* when you limit its window to as little as one or two segments. Otherwise it's just bumping up against the ceiling all the time and causing timeouts (doubling cwnd when you're already at the max usually loses enough packets that you don't get a fast retransmit). During initial startup of the connection the timeouts are quite long, which is why file transfers on a local LAN usually start out slow and don't get fast until they've been running for several seconds.
when you hook up that 10baseT card, it slows down the rest of the hub to 10 baseT.
Not at all. An auto-sensing hub (does anyone still make these?) is actually a 10mbps segment bridged to a 100mbps segment. Each port connects to whichever segment it can talk to, and they're switched together internally. The whole thing does *not* drop to 10mbps when any 10mbps devices are present.
It would be nice if B and G played that nicely in the same spectrum, but they don't.
That's all well and good if the nature of the game is just killing things and advancing to the next level. I'm neither a gamer nor an economist, but it's obvious to me that the instant you introduce things of value whch can be traded among participants, the game becomes an economic system like any other - not only will you develop currencies within the game, but an exchange rate will naturally be established with the "real world".
I just don't get it - if the point of playing the game is to escape real life, why are you playing a game modeled after it?
Last year I moved to a city right next to mine, where there are no street lights at all. It is wonderful. Coming home at the end of the day to sorta-darkness just feels a lot more normal and peaceful. Having a streetlight near your house is just one more reminder that you're packed into a crowded suburb. Alright, there are still a few people with lights in their driveway, and there is still a hazy orange glow visible over San Jose, and there is still the occasional car going by, but just having it a *little* darker is so much nicer.
From Desolation Wildernes, near lake Tahoe, I have seen the sky so dark that when I would lie perfectly still I could see the tiny orange reflection of one of our satellites moving ever so slowly across the stars. It's incredible what you can see with your pupils dilated, like they never are at home.
If you post, you make the comments that make the pages that carry the ads. Even if you don't post, you read the ads and maybe click once in a while. You're not freeloading here if you don't pay.
Don't try to charge someone more than it'll cost to have you killed.
Sorry, I forget the exact quote or where I heard it.
I just use SLIP through my shell account instead of spending another $20 for PPP access!
Flash memory has two things which make it unique, slow erasures, and limited numbers of cycles.
Obviously, it's been a while since you've bought a hard drive!
DRM inconveniences ONLY the people who are paying.
India is holding their entire election online, and I can't even get cable modem service in Silicon Valley. Christ almighty.
I think I'll try it out quickly, hang on a sec.
$%£$%$£%$CVASg...NO CARRIER
ROTFLMAO that joke is so damn funny! Because that's exactly what happens if you're reading the web over dialup and you get disconnected. I mean, there you were in the middle of your post and BOOM, some garbage and then no carrier!
So brilliant!!!
Regardless of whether the G5 is the fastest CPU for RenderMan, it is not per-CPU performance that matters. If you're setting up a rendering farm, you're buying n computers to render m frames per hour. At the end of the day, what matters is minimising $$$$$$ per m, not n, and I'll bet dollars to doughtnuts that commondity Intel/AMD whips a G5 mac in terms of rendered frames per dollar. Remember, Apple's CEO == Pixar's CEO.
Finally, for what it's worth, I'm a Mac user and a big OSX fan. But I know what my dollars are paying for and it ain't CPU cycles.