Another one that may be only applicable to the town of Spearfish is that if there are three Native Americans walking together, you may declare them a war party and shoot them.
Great. So if you're a native in The Dakotas, don't start a spam company, or someone is likely to take advantage of wierd statutes. For the rest of us, however, I don't think that this is much of an issue. (and I'm not willing to shoot someone just for sending me some spam) ______
In the meantime, I think that it's probably about time to start UDP'ing large chunks of the Asia Pacific netblocks. Those guys have shitloads of Spamvertized sites, and they're not going to do anything about it until it starts costing them traffic.
Sending these spam-friendly ISPs complaints doesn't do any good. They just let the email pile up until their mailboxes fill up and start bouncing.
It's not going to do us any good to wait for our local governments to come to an agreement with China about proescuting something that isn't even a crime over here. It's time for us the users of the internet to use our own marketing clout and technical expertise to lock down people who put hundreds of spams into our mailboxes and force us to spend time and cycles wading through this garbage.
When these foreign ISPs start to realize that letting spammers onto their net makes their IPs useless, then they'll start getting pro-active about the problem.
Face it. It's funny. Unfortunately it's a kind of funny that generates a knee-jerk reaction in those who don't get the joke . (kinda like 'Buffy'). The troll aspect of this joke is a necessary component of the joke. If you think that the parent is a troll, I'd suggest that you just let it be and presume that you just didn't get the joke. (Either that, or just stop and try to think of it as funny.)
My grade 10 math teacher dropped this one on us. He started with A=B which makes the 0/0 thing a bit less obvious. It actually
got me into doing some real thinking.
The interesting thing about this proof is the step that
goes from
(a+a)(a-a)=a(a-a) to
(a+a)=a
You essentially have to divide both sides by a-a.
(this proof is more interesting if you start with A=B because you end up dividing by A-B)
In any case, you end up with 0/0.
X=0/0
Ignoring, for a moment, that your math teacher always tells you to never play with '0/0', and pull the 0 over to the other side....
It turns out that you're looking for a value of X that satisfies the equation:
X*0=0
Anything satisfies this equation... Real numbers imaginary numbers, etc.
That's actually why this mess of a proof 'works'.
When I took an honors calculus course, the whole thing fell together. Calculus spins around the concept of getting as close as possible to 0/0 without actually being there. More specifically:
Calculus is based on the premise that 0/0 can be anything you want, depending on how you approach it.
We've got legal consul that doesn't know jack about code trying to, possibly, enforce somehting that they know nothing to little about.
Rosen already took exception to this, but I'd like to say a bit more.
Getting into law school requires at least above-average cognitave abilities. Working with legalities also requires some creativity about using available rules to achieve a wanted end.
In my rather limited legal experience, I've managed to transfer my programming knowledge into the legal world. It worked well enough that just about every lawyer I dealt with (including my opponents) suggested that I go to law school -- and I was dealing with relatively high-grade lawyers (one is now a judge, one is now the Attorney General of BC and another was one of the government's constitutional experts).
In any case, I'd expect that lawyers who spend a good deal of time working with computer issues to learn about computer systems by osmosis and/or originally come from a computer systems background. As another example: I never took a biochemistry course in University, but 5 years working in a biochem research lab left me able to read many biochemistry papers without getting completely lost (but please don't ask me for the equations needed to resolve X-Ray difraction patterns of protein crystals).
There are, of course, lawyers who know jack about computing (just as there are programmers who know jack about law). I would expect, however, that someone dedicated to computing issues in law would learn something about computers if only out of self defence.
That having been said, lawyers don't need to know everything about whatever they're litigating. That's part of the reason why they employ expert witnesses (and expert consultants).
I guess that i should have said "whether a melting ice cube raises the water" rather than how much.
Actually, my guess is that, while an ice cube in fresh water won't raise the level as it melts, an ice cube in sea water probably would (but a good bit less), since fresh water is less dense than sea water -- but it would be far less than the 10% expansion of ice when it freezes -- but I'd have to test that guess to be sure.. That and thermal expansion of water as it warms can have an effect on sea levels.
Remember that the ocean is hundreds (and thousands) of feet deep, so a 0.1% overall thermal expansion would have a pretty noticable effect on sea levels.
The real threat to sea levels, however, comes from the antarctic ice cap which is not floating. When that sucker melts, we'll be in deep trouble (if you'll excuse the pun).
If you followed the talk about how much a melting ice cube raises the water in a glass, consider the other effect of the melting ice.
What happens when the ice finishes melting?? The water temperature rises.
Ice acts as a thermal buffer. It keeps the water temperature near freezing... When it gets too cold, freezing ice releases heat as it freezes. When it gets too warm, melting ice eats a lot of thermal energy.
As the size of the ice drops, it's ability to regulate the temperature lessens. Temperature swings in the northern hemisphere are going to get larger and generally go towards the warmer. (I'm guessing that this has something to do with the already noted amplification of global warming in the far north).
Of course, Europe could be the ones that get royally worked over in the long run.... if the predictions mentioned on slashdot some time ago come true about the shrinking icecap messing up the ocean currents that keep europe unusually warm for their latitude.....
Great: You can get from Japan to Europe far faster, but most of the farms in Europe are now frozen over for most of the year. (kinda like the George Karlin skit: "The good news is that you'll live to a ripe old age, but you'll be bleeding from both eyes for the whole time")
Polar bears are both drowning and starving. The lack of ice near land is messing up their fishing process. Sometimes it means that they're out on icebergs in open water far more often. More than that, though is the problems it's causing them in being able to fish.
It's not so much the melting icecap. It's the melting shore ice. It's far too thin far to much of the time. It's also messing up the eskimoes because more and more of the permafrost is no longer permanently frosted. It's a lot harder (also colder and more dangerous) slogging through cold mud than it is walking on permafrost.
Why not just fit your PC out with 4GB of fast DDR RAM and do it that way? That memory would be far cheaper than this card.
For a lot of the suggested uses, a (software) RAM drive would be about as good this thing.
About the only thing that this drive provides that makes it better than a software drive is the fact that it's got it's own power supply. This means that the data on the hardware ramdrive will survive a system crash/power cycle. Unfortunately, their prices don't (seem to) include a separate battery backup, so you should budget an extra couple hundred dollars for a UPS dedicated to the drive. I'd actually pay for that, even if I already have a UPS for my computer because -- if you're paying the extra hundreds (or thousands) for this box, you'd better be paying for the persistant data feature. If that's the case, the last thing you want to happen is for your data to be lost the first time you had a blackout long enough to outlast the UPS.
My expectation is that this machine doesn't eat much power.. In other words, even a small power supply should supply it for a day or more if it's not also powering a computer.
Now for the reasons why this card isn't too useful for most data:
Programs: Why store programs on this drive? At that price, I'll just use a startup script that populates a software RAM drive whenever I boot up. Unless you have a program that absolutely must be running as fast as possible after boot, that extra wait isn't going to hurt most people.
Cache data: especially with transient cached data, a software RAM drive gives you most of what you need.
Temp Data: (e.g. scratch files for compilers, etc). Same as Cache data.
read-mostly Databases: Once the data is first accessed, you're better off to pay for a few gigabytes of regular RAM and assign it to your database cache. If your database doesn't have a decent data caching algorithm then you'd better find yourself a better database.
read-write databases: This is one place where this works nicely -- between the fast access and data persistence across a reboot, it might be worthwhile -- but I'd reiterate the comment about putting the RAM drive on it's own UPS. Remember that if you have a hardware failure that requires a motherboard replacement, you won't be able to unplug the board's power cable until you've backed up the data. (heh, heh).
A well designed board would emulate a regular drive controller. That way, you'd be able to use it as a normal disk -- including being able to boot from it. As it is now, you'll need dedicated drivers for this thing -- including for Solaris and Linux. In other words, a lot of the most promising markets for this card are closed
BTW:
Hardware RAM drives aren't new. There have been implementations of those things floating around for years.
Linux has a really good disk cache system. Among other things it makes it really difficult to test the I/O subsystem on a machine with 6GB of RAM (had to do that once). You end up needing a program to flush the disk cache after every run.
And it's free (in both senses of the word)!
Win2K and XP and forward currently go to Microsoft for authentication, right???
This means that those OSs also alow microsoft to keep a better tag on who's using how many copies of their software. They should now be able to track use by system ID -- comparing system activations to application activations. If you have a wrong pattern of activations or use too many copies, they just send a bill (or a lawyer named bill).
Also: by refusing to work for win9[58], they also lock out wine, don't they?
I can mount the root partition on a SUN without the root password. It takes a bit more work, but I've done it a number of times. I teach solaris. From time to time a student will change the root password and forget what (s)he changed it to. I have two solutions to that problem: a backdoor root account, and the install CDs.
I"ve also done the same with NeXt's and older SGIs (haven't used IRIX for a while, so I can't vouch for current systems).
I'm betting that I could do it on a Mac, too, if I really had to.
Everything NASA does could have been accomplished much cheaper and better by a private company, with very little corruption, inefficiency, and wasted resources.
And everything that Enron or Worldcom does could have been done by a government organization with "very little corruption, inefficiency, and wasted resources." The two are simply different ways of doing things. Neither is really intrinsicly better than the other. In both cases, a decent method of oversight is needed.
It should be noted, however, that it is very unlikely that one could have convinced a private company to do what NASA is doing in terms of basic exploration -- especially basic exploration where the resulting knowledge is available to the public.
Yes we could have paid a public corporation to create a probe like Galileo, but that is essentially what NASA did. Much of what Nasa does is chose which company is going to be making the probes, the Shuttle, etc.
On the other hand, What private corporation with a sane mind would have seriously considered taking on what NASA has done?
it's taken decades of ($Billions++ ) net-loss basic research and exploration to get us to the point where private corporations are taking a serious look at doing their own space research. Without NASA we would not have the basic technology and space knowledge needed for a company to seriously consider such an effort.
My experience was doing this with Solaris boxes... I'll say up front: The setup caused more failures than it prevented. Tread carefully.
In our case, we used Fibre Channel, but SCSI doesn't see anything interesting about controller vs device, so you should be able to have multiple machines connected to one SCSI chain. Machines at the end of a chain should be properly terminated.
We also used 'canned' failover software It basically had a committed channel between the two boxes where they talked to each other and fibured out who was up and who was was 'active' (kinda like the protocol used by timed (( BSD protocol before ntpd)). If the 'active' box died, then the backup box would take over as the server -- this included stealing the MAC and IP addresses and the disks.
Obviously, if the backup machine thought that the primary was dead when it wasn't, then all hell would break loose (yes, I had it happen to me).
Should you accept this mission, a journaling FS is obviously the better idea (faster FSCK before restarting the disks). -- and you REALLY want to make sure that the other machine is really down before the backup system grabs hold of the disks. IMHO, you're better off to err on the side of caution... Far easier to recover from the backup machine backing off from failover than trying to figure out what got destroyed by both machines writing to the same disks.
My best suggestion is to find some hardware hack to allow the two machines to pull each other's reset lines low. That way you can avoid the pathalogical case where the primary machine stalls long enough for the secondary to think it's dead, then coming to life thinking that it's still primary (zombie servers -- appropriate for halloween night, don't you think?)...... Instant toasted disks.
Beyond making sure you don't end up with zombie servers, there shouldn't be anything special for Linux to do... Just FSCK the disks and mount them.
Yes the patch should (also) be done in Linux.. In the meantime, however, a workaround in userspace can be valuable from a security point of view.
For some reason people are often wary about the idea of loading new versions of the kernel into running servers. and new kernel releases can take longer to test and propogate than (relatively) simple userspace programs.
How long do you want to wait for a patch to a security problem?
(Perhaps I should have used a proprietary Kernel as an example --- they're likely to take much longer to come out with a patch).
Some time ago a group of us were wandering around in costume. I had a 3/4" plexiglass walking stick (formerly a staff) with a light in it. It turns out that someone mistook the light of the staff for a metalic glint and called me in as a kook waving a gun around the crowd.
The police stopped us and 'asked' me to get into their cruiser (they refused to answer my questions as to why). One member of our group was a new lawyer. He tried to remind the officers that when they take someone into custody they have to say why.
The hard part about this was trying to simultaneously keep the cops from seeing the (rather realistic) broadsword he had in his belt.
Some years ago, I saw someone who did a "Terminator" costume for a Science fiction convention (BanffCon 1). It was an excelently done outfit with the ripped up face and hanging out eyeball. As he was soing his act on the stage, a little kid (about 6 or so) ran up to him and yelled "shoot something".
The terminator turned mechanically to stare at the kid. The kid suddenly realized that he was the most obvious target. The look on his face went from excitement to fear and he quietly backed into the arms of his parents (who could barely keep from laughing).
I built this many years ago as part of a wizard's outfit. It was a magical 'glass' staff that was lit.
To start with, I bought the staff. I went to an industrial plexiglass supplier and bought a 5' length of 2cm (3/4") plexiglass dowel. Having had some experience with it, 2cm plexiglass was fine for a 'wand', but it was too thin for a staff. If I were to do it again, I'd probably use 2.5~3cm plexiglass for a staff.
To create the effect I needed minimal hardware on the staff itself. I originally considered building a battery into the staff but quickly came into two major problems:
Any battery small enough to hide wouldn't provide very much power for the light.
A replacable battery holder would add difficulty.
My alternative plan turned out to be much nicer. The ingredients were as follows:
One 3V flashlight battery.
A roll of bell wire.
One foot of 16 gauge stranded wire (just about any gauge wire will actually do).
A roll of soldering braid
Plexiglass rod (5' for a staff. 2' for a wand)
extra fine sandpaper.
soldering iron. (two would be better -- one for soldering, one for plexiglass work)
A small amount of solder.
One knit-fabric glove -- wool or wool look-alike. Black is perferred (hides the wiring better).
one large sewing needle
one two-battery battery holder (AA is fine).
good ventilation (plexiglass smoke stinks and is probably not healthy to breath in)
Put on the glove and grab the staff near it's end with your thumb resting along the staff. This should be a fairly natural grip, because it's the grip that you're going to be using to power the staff.
Mark where the the main digit of the thumb and the base of the thumb touch the staff. Mark these positions on both the staff and the glove. (sewing needles will do fine on the glove.. an overhead marker for the staff).
Peel the insulation off of the stranded wire, and use the needle to weave it into the fabric of the glove in two random patches (about 3/4" to 1" in diamater) where the glove touched the staff when you were holding it.
Cut two lengths of bell wire about 4 feet long each. Use the sandpaper to scrap off the last two inches of insulation from one end of each wire. Insert the wire into the cuff of the glove (near the palm side) pull the wire through the fabric of the glove. One wire to each patch.
The other end of the wire will be soldered to the battery holder. If you have heat shrink, put this around the solder joints -- otherwise electrical or duct tape will do fine to unsulate this. (once again, remember to scrape the insulation off of the bell wire ends.
Scrape the insulation off of one end of two pieces of bell wire (about one foot each). Solder the wire to the flashlight bulb. (one piece of wire to each 'pole' of the bulb)
Use the soldering iron to Melt a hole in one end of the staff. This hole will need to be big enough to fit the bulb.
Stick the bulb in the hole, and melt the plexiglass back behind the bulb to fill in the rest of the hole.
as an alternative (I haven't tried this, but you could probably get a similar results) you might try drilling the hole and back-filling with epoxy.
Use the soldering iron to heat the wire and melt it into the end of the staff -- (the wires should go out at 180 degrees to each other. If you use epoxy to fill the hole, you should do this before you fill the hole. (burning epoxy smells worse than burning plexiglass).
Run one wire to each of the points where the contact points of your glove touch the staff. Use the soldering iron to push the wire below the surface of the staff, then smooth the plexiglass over the 'trench'.
At each touch point, one of the wires will come back to the surface. Measure off about 2" of wire and cut off the remainder.scrape the insulation off of the wire sticking above the surface.
Starting about 1/4" below each touch point wind the desoldering braid around the staff. Each loop should go under the loop before it (I believe that this is known as a 'clove hitch'). Use the soldering iron to push the braid into the plexiglass (but don't cover the braid with plexiglass).
When you get to the wire from the bulb, wrap the wire around the braid.. You want a good contact here because this is going to power the bulb.
Continue wrapping until you get 1/4" above the wire.
At this point you should have your magic wand. Put the batteries into the battery holder, put the glove on and grab the wand so that each of the contact points on the glove touch one of the bands of desoldering braid. This should close the connection and provide power to the bulb.
You should be able to turn the staff on and off by simply moving your thumb or shifting your grip.
Run the wire within the sleve of your costume to a pocket where you can place the battery pack. If you have no pocket, try buying a traveller's wallet/ money belt.
Enjoy.
In my experience, the wand worked fine... It was quite fun having people try to guess how it worked. This is where the bell wire comes in handy.. It's thick enough to carry the current to the bulb, but the insulation keeps the wire as thin as possible (and it seems to be reasonably sturdy).
3/4" plexiglass is fine for a wand, but it's too thin to make a sturdy staff.I started with a 5' staff and ended up with a wand, a walking stick and a couple of other assorted bits of plexiglass. one-inch rod (3cm) should work much better for a staff
Qmail's security is more theoretical than actual. From what I can tell, Bernstein wrote Qmail more to prove that he can design and write secure software than to provide a service to the public. He disclaims responsibility for problems that come from outside his source code.
If somebody finds a bug in, say Linux, that can be exploited against both Sendmail and Qmail, the Sendmail folk will fall all over themselves to find and distribute a workaround. Bernstein, on the other hand, will likely just smile and say "not qmail's fault". This doesn't do much good for people who are actually using qmail in the field and will need to create and distribute their own patches on the back-channels -- and then integrate them with the myriad of patches out there.
I really believe that Qmail's license was and is the biggest barrier to it's more widespread adoption.
Part of the reason why the $500 security guarantee hasn't been claimed is that -- as far as I can tell -- very few people use it unpatched. If someone were to find a bug, they would have to revert to an unpatched version and then recreate the error there. Not many people have the time and energy to do this -- and it doesn't do them much good if the problem is in the patch.
As far as I can tell, DJB refuses to incorporate any of the many patches into his software, so the security of his unpatched sources is of limited value. This also makes using qmail a royal pain in the ass. It can sometimes take hours to figure out which patches you want and then find and download them. As much as I like some of the ideas behind the design and implementation of the software, the license discourages me from using it (even though I generally get paid by the hour when I install it!)
Slashdot Mirror
Great. So if you're a native in The Dakotas, don't start a spam company, or someone is likely to take advantage of wierd statutes. For the rest of us, however, I don't think that this is much of an issue. (and I'm not willing to shoot someone just for sending me some spam)
______
In the meantime, I think that it's probably about time to start UDP'ing large chunks of the Asia Pacific netblocks. Those guys have shitloads of Spamvertized sites, and they're not going to do anything about it until it starts costing them traffic.
Sending these spam-friendly ISPs complaints doesn't do any good. They just let the email pile up until their mailboxes fill up and start bouncing.
It's not going to do us any good to wait for our local governments to come to an agreement with China about proescuting something that isn't even a crime over here. It's time for us the users of the internet to use our own marketing clout and technical expertise to lock down people who put hundreds of spams into our mailboxes and force us to spend time and cycles wading through this garbage.
When these foreign ISPs start to realize that letting spammers onto their net makes their IPs useless, then they'll start getting pro-active about the problem.
Face it. It's funny. Unfortunately it's a kind of funny that generates a knee-jerk reaction in those who don't get the joke . (kinda like 'Buffy'). The troll aspect of this joke is a necessary component of the joke. If you think that the parent is a troll, I'd suggest that you just let it be and presume that you just didn't get the joke. (Either that, or just stop and try to think of it as funny.)
My grade 10 math teacher dropped this one on us. He started with A=B which makes the 0/0 thing a bit less obvious. It actually got me into doing some real thinking. The interesting thing about this proof is the step that goes from
(a+a)(a-a)=a(a-a)
to
(a+a)=a
You essentially have to divide both sides by a-a. (this proof is more interesting if you start with A=B because you end up dividing by A-B) In any case, you end up with 0/0.
X=0/0
Ignoring, for a moment, that your math teacher always tells you to never play with '0/0', and pull the 0 over to the other side....
It turns out that you're looking for a value of X that satisfies the equation:
X*0=0
Anything satisfies this equation... Real numbers imaginary numbers, etc.
That's actually why this mess of a proof 'works'.
When I took an honors calculus course, the whole thing fell together. Calculus spins around the concept of getting as close as possible to 0/0 without actually being there. More specifically:
Calculus is based on the premise that 0/0 can be anything you want, depending on how you approach it.
Rosen already took exception to this, but I'd like to say a bit more.
Getting into law school requires at least above-average cognitave abilities. Working with legalities also requires some creativity about using available rules to achieve a wanted end.
In my rather limited legal experience, I've managed to transfer my programming knowledge into the legal world. It worked well enough that just about every lawyer I dealt with (including my opponents) suggested that I go to law school -- and I was dealing with relatively high-grade lawyers (one is now a judge, one is now the Attorney General of BC and another was one of the government's constitutional experts).
In any case, I'd expect that lawyers who spend a good deal of time working with computer issues to learn about computer systems by osmosis and/or originally come from a computer systems background. As another example: I never took a biochemistry course in University, but 5 years working in a biochem research lab left me able to read many biochemistry papers without getting completely lost (but please don't ask me for the equations needed to resolve X-Ray difraction patterns of protein crystals).
There are, of course, lawyers who know jack about computing (just as there are programmers who know jack about law). I would expect, however, that someone dedicated to computing issues in law would learn something about computers if only out of self defence.
That having been said, lawyers don't need to know everything about whatever they're litigating. That's part of the reason why they employ expert witnesses (and expert consultants).
Actually, my guess is that, while an ice cube in fresh water won't raise the level as it melts, an ice cube in sea water probably would (but a good bit less), since fresh water is less dense than sea water -- but it would be far less than the 10% expansion of ice when it freezes -- but I'd have to test that guess to be sure.. That and thermal expansion of water as it warms can have an effect on sea levels.
Remember that the ocean is hundreds (and thousands) of feet deep, so a 0.1% overall thermal expansion would have a pretty noticable effect on sea levels.
The real threat to sea levels, however, comes from the antarctic ice cap which is not floating. When that sucker melts, we'll be in deep trouble (if you'll excuse the pun).
What happens when the ice finishes melting?? The water temperature rises.
Ice acts as a thermal buffer. It keeps the water temperature near freezing... When it gets too cold, freezing ice releases heat as it freezes. When it gets too warm, melting ice eats a lot of thermal energy.
As the size of the ice drops, it's ability to regulate the temperature lessens. Temperature swings in the northern hemisphere are going to get larger and generally go towards the warmer. (I'm guessing that this has something to do with the already noted amplification of global warming in the far north).
Of course, Europe could be the ones that get royally worked over in the long run.... if the predictions mentioned on slashdot some time ago come true about the shrinking icecap messing up the ocean currents that keep europe unusually warm for their latitude.....
Great: You can get from Japan to Europe far faster, but most of the farms in Europe are now frozen over for most of the year. (kinda like the George Karlin skit: "The good news is that you'll live to a ripe old age, but you'll be bleeding from both eyes for the whole time")
It's not so much the melting icecap. It's the melting shore ice. It's far too thin far to much of the time. It's also messing up the eskimoes because more and more of the permafrost is no longer permanently frosted. It's a lot harder (also colder and more dangerous) slogging through cold mud than it is walking on permafrost.
Obviously, the people at Dolby would agree with your evaluation.
(How much did they (promise to) pay you for that opinion?)
For a lot of the suggested uses, a (software) RAM drive would be about as good this thing.
About the only thing that this drive provides that makes it better than a software drive is the fact that it's got it's own power supply. This means that the data on the hardware ramdrive will survive a system crash/power cycle. Unfortunately, their prices don't (seem to) include a separate battery backup, so you should budget an extra couple hundred dollars for a UPS dedicated to the drive. I'd actually pay for that, even if I already have a UPS for my computer because -- if you're paying the extra hundreds (or thousands) for this box, you'd better be paying for the persistant data feature. If that's the case, the last thing you want to happen is for your data to be lost the first time you had a blackout long enough to outlast the UPS.
My expectation is that this machine doesn't eat much power.. In other words, even a small power supply should supply it for a day or more if it's not also powering a computer.
Now for the reasons why this card isn't too useful for most data:
- Programs: Why store programs on this drive? At that price, I'll just use a startup script that populates a software RAM drive whenever I boot up. Unless you have a program that absolutely must be running as fast as possible after boot, that extra wait isn't going to hurt most people.
- Cache data: especially with transient cached data, a software RAM drive gives you most of what you need.
- Temp Data: (e.g. scratch files for compilers, etc). Same as Cache data.
- read-mostly Databases: Once the data is first accessed, you're better off to pay for a few gigabytes of regular RAM and assign it to your database cache. If your database doesn't have a decent data caching algorithm then you'd better find yourself a better database.
-
read-write databases: This is one place where this works nicely -- between the fast access and data persistence across a reboot, it might be worthwhile -- but I'd reiterate the comment about putting the RAM drive on it's own UPS. Remember that if you have a hardware failure that requires a motherboard replacement, you won't be able to unplug the board's power cable until you've backed up the data. (heh, heh).
A well designed board would emulate a regular drive controller. That way, you'd be able to use it as a normal disk -- including being able to boot from it. As it is now, you'll need dedicated drivers for this thing -- including for Solaris and Linux. In other words, a lot of the most promising markets for this card are closedBTW:
And it's free (in both senses of the word)!
This means that those OSs also alow microsoft to keep a better tag on who's using how many copies of their software. They should now be able to track use by system ID -- comparing system activations to application activations. If you have a wrong pattern of activations or use too many copies, they just send a bill (or a lawyer named bill).
Also: by refusing to work for win9[58], they also lock out wine, don't they?
I"ve also done the same with NeXt's and older SGIs (haven't used IRIX for a while, so I can't vouch for current systems). I'm betting that I could do it on a Mac, too, if I really had to.
And everything that Enron or Worldcom does could have been done by a government organization with "very little corruption, inefficiency, and wasted resources." The two are simply different ways of doing things. Neither is really intrinsicly better than the other. In both cases, a decent method of oversight is needed.
It should be noted, however, that it is very unlikely that one could have convinced a private company to do what NASA is doing in terms of basic exploration -- especially basic exploration where the resulting knowledge is available to the public.
Yes we could have paid a public corporation to create a probe like Galileo, but that is essentially what NASA did. Much of what Nasa does is chose which company is going to be making the probes, the Shuttle, etc.
On the other hand, What private corporation with a sane mind would have seriously considered taking on what NASA has done? it's taken decades of ($Billions++ ) net-loss basic research and exploration to get us to the point where private corporations are taking a serious look at doing their own space research. Without NASA we would not have the basic technology and space knowledge needed for a company to seriously consider such an effort.
In our case, we used Fibre Channel, but SCSI doesn't see anything interesting about controller vs device, so you should be able to have multiple machines connected to one SCSI chain. Machines at the end of a chain should be properly terminated.
We also used 'canned' failover software It basically had a committed channel between the two boxes where they talked to each other and fibured out who was up and who was was 'active' (kinda like the protocol used by timed (( BSD protocol before ntpd)). If the 'active' box died, then the backup box would take over as the server -- this included stealing the MAC and IP addresses and the disks.
Obviously, if the backup machine thought that the primary was dead when it wasn't, then all hell would break loose (yes, I had it happen to me).
Should you accept this mission, a journaling FS is obviously the better idea (faster FSCK before restarting the disks). -- and you REALLY want to make sure that the other machine is really down before the backup system grabs hold of the disks. IMHO, you're better off to err on the side of caution... Far easier to recover from the backup machine backing off from failover than trying to figure out what got destroyed by both machines writing to the same disks.
My best suggestion is to find some hardware hack to allow the two machines to pull each other's reset lines low. That way you can avoid the pathalogical case where the primary machine stalls long enough for the secondary to think it's dead, then coming to life thinking that it's still primary (zombie servers -- appropriate for halloween night, don't you think?)...... Instant toasted disks.
Beyond making sure you don't end up with zombie servers, there shouldn't be anything special for Linux to do... Just FSCK the disks and mount them.
A small puddle of slime, a pair of shoes and the frayed ends of a pair of pant legs.
And, perhaps, some police tape. ...
Doing MetaMod would have been murder....
Hell, I do it all the time.
(Kinda like the Vikings that discovered America... or the indians who discovered it before them.)
For some reason people are often wary about the idea of loading new versions of the kernel into running servers. and new kernel releases can take longer to test and propogate than (relatively) simple userspace programs.
How long do you want to wait for a patch to a security problem?
(Perhaps I should have used a proprietary Kernel as an example --- they're likely to take much longer to come out with a patch).
The police stopped us and 'asked' me to get into their cruiser (they refused to answer my questions as to why). One member of our group was a new lawyer. He tried to remind the officers that when they take someone into custody they have to say why.
The hard part about this was trying to simultaneously keep the cops from seeing the (rather realistic) broadsword he had in his belt.
Forgot to set your postings to HTML formatted???? This appears to be the correct URL
The terminator turned mechanically to stare at the kid. The kid suddenly realized that he was the most obvious target. The look on his face went from excitement to fear and he quietly backed into the arms of his parents (who could barely keep from laughing).
And while I'm at it: Remember Calvin and Hobbes?
To start with, I bought the staff. I went to an industrial plexiglass supplier and bought a 5' length of 2cm (3/4") plexiglass dowel. Having had some experience with it, 2cm plexiglass was fine for a 'wand', but it was too thin for a staff. If I were to do it again, I'd probably use 2.5~3cm plexiglass for a staff.
To create the effect I needed minimal hardware on the staff itself. I originally considered building a battery into the staff but quickly came into two major problems:
My alternative plan turned out to be much nicer. The ingredients were as follows:
- Put on the glove and grab the staff near it's end with your thumb resting along the staff. This should be a fairly natural grip, because it's the grip that you're going to be using to power the staff.
- Peel the insulation off of the stranded wire, and use the needle to weave it into the fabric of the glove in two random patches (about 3/4" to 1" in diamater) where the glove touched the staff when you were holding it.
- Cut two lengths of bell wire about 4 feet long each. Use the sandpaper to scrap off the last two inches of insulation from one end of each wire. Insert the wire into the cuff of the glove (near the palm side) pull the wire through the fabric of the glove. One wire to each patch.
- The other end of the wire will be soldered to the battery holder. If you have heat shrink, put this around the solder joints -- otherwise electrical or duct tape will do fine to unsulate this. (once again, remember to scrape the insulation off of the bell wire ends.
- Scrape the insulation off of one end of two pieces of bell wire (about one foot each). Solder the wire to the flashlight bulb. (one piece of wire to each 'pole' of the bulb)
- Use the soldering iron to Melt a hole in one end of the staff. This hole will need to be big enough to fit the bulb.
- Stick the bulb in the hole, and melt the plexiglass back behind the bulb to fill in the rest of the hole.
- as an alternative (I haven't tried this, but you could probably get a similar results) you might try drilling the hole and back-filling with epoxy.
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Use the soldering iron to heat the wire and melt it into the end of the staff -- (the wires should go out at 180 degrees to each other. If you use epoxy to fill the hole, you should do this before you fill the hole. (burning epoxy smells worse than burning plexiglass).
- Run one wire to each of the points where the contact points of your glove touch the staff. Use the soldering iron to push the wire below the surface of the staff, then smooth the plexiglass over the 'trench'.
- At each touch point, one of the wires will come back to the surface. Measure off about 2" of wire and cut off the remainder.scrape the insulation off of the wire sticking above the surface.
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Starting about 1/4" below each touch point wind the desoldering braid around the staff. Each loop should go under the loop before it (I believe that this is known as a 'clove hitch'). Use the soldering iron to push the braid into the plexiglass (but don't cover the braid with plexiglass).
- When you get to the wire from the bulb, wrap the wire around the braid.. You want a good contact here because this is going to power the bulb.
Continue wrapping until you get 1/4" above the wire.
At this point you should have your magic wand. Put the batteries into the battery holder, put the glove on and grab the wand so that each of the contact points on the glove touch one of the bands of desoldering braid. This should close the connection and provide power to the bulb.Mark where the the main digit of the thumb and the base of the thumb touch the staff. Mark these positions on both the staff and the glove. (sewing needles will do fine on the glove.. an overhead marker for the staff).
You should be able to turn the staff on and off by simply moving your thumb or shifting your grip.
Run the wire within the sleve of your costume to a pocket where you can place the battery pack. If you have no pocket, try buying a traveller's wallet/ money belt.
Enjoy.
In my experience, the wand worked fine... It was quite fun having people try to guess how it worked. This is where the bell wire comes in handy.. It's thick enough to carry the current to the bulb, but the insulation keeps the wire as thin as possible (and it seems to be reasonably sturdy).
3/4" plexiglass is fine for a wand, but it's too thin to make a sturdy staff.I started with a 5' staff and ended up with a wand, a walking stick and a couple of other assorted bits of plexiglass. one-inch rod (3cm) should work much better for a staff
If that was the case, they wouldn't be using Microsoft products :-)
If somebody finds a bug in, say Linux, that can be exploited against both Sendmail and Qmail, the Sendmail folk will fall all over themselves to find and distribute a workaround. Bernstein, on the other hand, will likely just smile and say "not qmail's fault". This doesn't do much good for people who are actually using qmail in the field and will need to create and distribute their own patches on the back-channels -- and then integrate them with the myriad of patches out there.
I really believe that Qmail's license was and is the biggest barrier to it's more widespread adoption.
As far as I can tell, DJB refuses to incorporate any of the many patches into his software, so the security of his unpatched sources is of limited value. This also makes using qmail a royal pain in the ass. It can sometimes take hours to figure out which patches you want and then find and download them. As much as I like some of the ideas behind the design and implementation of the software, the license discourages me from using it (even though I generally get paid by the hour when I install it!)