You obviously don't live in one of the plains states. The forecasts of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that the NWS provides save lives by allowing people the extra minutes they need to take proper shelter.
No, we can't stop tornadoes, but if we have sufficient advance warning, we can take steps to protect ourselves. This is by far, IMHO, the most valuable service the NWS provides, and it is critically important.
Actually, Trojan is exactly right. A Trojan Horse is a program which has an unintended payload and may or may not contain self-propagation code.
Any program which installs itself on your computer without your consent would, in fact, be a Trojan, by definition.
You are, of course, correct in that it is neither a virus nor a worm. People seem to forget that the reason there are three names is that these are three distinct classes of malware.
It's actually quite simple, really. We're a small business which is hiring both EE's and programmers. However, we don't advertise that
we're looking, because we'll get swamped with headhunters (no thanks!) and people who inflate
their resumes and actually know very little about the job they're taking on.
We hire from two groups of people: those who are members of the local LUG (Linux Users Group) and the local 2600.
My advice is to join your local user groups and contribute (e.g. demonstrate your skill by adding features to the group website). This is where you can subtly network (in the people sense) and find your next great job.
You're incorrect. I do understand virtual memory. What you apparently do not understand is how an OS is prompted to swap a page of memory back from disk (in terms of the machine architecture).
The problem here is that virtual memory is mapped one-for-one onto physical memory (this is only true when your physical memory matches the maximum amount of addressable memory -- on 32 bit systems, 4GB). Unless you have unavailable memory pages which can be 'stepped on' (which triggers a page fault), you could certainly swap memory out to disk, but there would be no page fault signal to trigger that memory to be swapped back into physical memory.
To clarify, this is not about Operating Systems or Unix, this is about the underlying processor architecture. You simply cannot have page faults if physical memory equals virtual memory!
Nope, can't help past 4GB. That's the maximum addressable on a 32-bit system. Any allocation beyond that is wasted space (if you can call 2GB wasted space on a 200GB drive, that is).
Unless you're on a 64-bit platform, or something that can manage more than 32-bit memory (i.e. Xeon), 5GB of swap is unnecessary. It's also wasteful, although wasting 1GB of disk space is hardly notable, given how much other diskspace you have.
Why is it wasteful? Because on 32-bit systems, you have a maximum 4GB of memory. That's the maximum that is addressable, period. There aren't any more addressable pages of memory, so there's no way to have a page fault (which triggers the OS to load the swapped page of memory) beyond 4GB.
In fact, if you have 4GB of memory on a 32-bit system, you do not need swap, as it will simply be unused! (no page faults possible)
P.S. Some of you may be wondering about the Xeon comment above. Xeon uses a trick that allows it to address (IIRC) 36-bit memory, which would give it a maximum of 64GB of memory.
Because until relatively recently, Linux used a very slow filesystem by default: ext2fs. This is, for example, why ext2 filesystems are always mounted asynchronously, as attempting to wait for each disk operation to sync would slow down the system dramatically. You'd have to be concerned with swap not going to disk immediately (just moving into disk cache, waiting to be synced to disk, which can take up to 30 seconds!).
Now with more advanced filesystems that can be mounted synchronously, using a swapfile is less of a problem -- it certainly could be done, but you still get a performance hit by having to manage a filesystem entry, rather than swapping to raw disk.
BTW, a number of databases use raw disk for exactly this reason -- to avoid the performance hit of managing a filesystem. And yes, it will make a difference to the overall performance of your database.
Move to the solution that we have at our company: all faxes are received via computer fax modem, are reviewed by personnel, and printed if we want them. The fax image (if real business) can be additionally archived online, which has helped us out quite a bit, as paper faxes have a tendency to get lost or misplaced over time. (Also helps when the fax is received at the Tennessee office and needs to be reviewed in California after the Tennessee folks have gone home for the day).
No, it won't solve the problem of junk faxes, but it does reduce the cost of dealing with them. Junk faxes get deleted and do not waste toner/paper.
I'll second on this one. After only a few minutes waiting, the download is going quite well. I'd otherwise still be waiting for "Connecting to peers" on the official bittorrent.
The patent is not for sending multiple messages with the same text. It's for altering messages to fool hashes. I hadn't seen that technique employed by spammers until at least 2001 or 2002.
Then again, I suppose I'm lucky that I block only 200 spam messages a day, with only about 5 getting through.
Except that prior art only comes into play if it is found prior to the FILING of the patent, not the granting of the patent. The filing of the patent probably predates the earliest spam archive, so it's unlikely anybody has prior art available (and even if they do, are they likely to release it to stop an anti-spamming organization?).
Not necessarily. Prior art only overrides a patent if found prior to the filing of the patent. Note that patents typically take several years to be granted, so AT&T could have a legitimate patent on their hands here.
The DMCA only covers protection mechanisms designed to protect access to a copyrighted work, not just any protection mechanism. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is probably more applicable to spam, although you'd still need to get a judge to agree with you on that one.
My last beleif is that if everybody had guns, this country would be a lot more polite, and there'd be much less crime.
Take a look at inner city ghettos some time. Indeed, many people have guns there, but those neighborhoods are neither more polite, nor is there less crime there. Hence, your supposition is, on its face, easily disproved.
Forgotten how we got that freedom of speech and expression, have we?
We sure didn't do it by allowing psychos to have AK-47s, that's for sure. If anything, knowing that a psycho might blow your head off for saying something he disagrees with dampens freedom of speech and expression.
And just to clear up the notion, we got those freedoms because we have a strong system of Constitutional rights, which are not easily overridden and a judiciary which is willing to strike down laws in conflict with those rights.
Does anyone honestly believe that having a full gun cabinet does anything to enhance their constitutional free speech rights?
Even so, given their figure of $3.0 million for the computer, that's $810,000 per teraflop versus VT's computer at $295,000 per teraflop. The G5's are still nearly 3 times cheaper.
Oh, great. Another article written by an armchair politician; and this is supposed to contravene a scientific study? Your article also says that the global temperature has increased by only one degree in the past 100 years and half of that was before the human population could possibly have done anything about it.
Read some of the research and you'll find that one degree is an awful lot for just a single century. And in terms of half of that degree being before humans could have contributed to it, I suggest you look at US History, specifically the Industrial Revolution, which took place prior to the beginning of the last century. Many of the industries during that period contributed greatly to the atmosphere in terms of what we now know are greenhouse gases.
First, the processor ran at 2.8MHz, although the speed was sometimes said to be only 2.5MHz, accounting for the drag of the 1MHz system bus speed -- remember, the IIgs had no processor cache.
Second, as always when comparing two different architectures, as when comparing 65xxx to xxx86, you have to take some of the measurements with a grain of salt. The 4X figure was drawn from the time it took to load a register from memory; the xxx86 processors took 4X longer than the 65xxx processors to do this operation. Obviously, there is far more to the operation of a computer than simply loading memory into a register.
Actually, it was Microsoft's code, licensed by Apple. If you examine the BASIC interpreter, you'll find 10 bytes near the end which aren't being used for anything:
a6 d3 c1 c8 d4 c8 d5 c4 ce ca
If you XOR these digits with 0x87 (the character code for the BEL on the Apple II) and reverse the order, you'll get "MICROSOFT!"
The BASIC code included in the earlier Apple ][ and Apple ][+ contained Integer BASIC, which was written by Steve Wozniak. You may be confusing Integer BASIC (no floating point) with Applesoft BASIC (with floating point).
Probably because GNU is itself a recursive acronym (GNU's Not Unix), it might make sense that their license abbreviation would also itself be recursive.
Obviously, it's not, but that might be the cause of the confusion.
Because Photoshop has been highly optimized for the G3/G4/G5
So, uh, the G5 computer has been out, what, a couple hours, and magically, Photoshop is optimized for it? Riiiiiiiight.
And you also believe that Photoshop is NOT optimized for P3/P4? Riiiiiiiiight.
Adobe isn't stupid. They tweak Photoshop's performance, so it works well on both architectures. And they certainly have tweaked performance for the G3 and G4. But that's not the same as tweaking performance for a new processor that they've never seen yet.
But you're right. This is precisely why the Photoshop test is so influential. It's a little easier to wrap your mind around, given that you probably have seen Photoshop in operation. Most of us don't run benchmarks on our computer "just because". But we do run applications and seeing those applications at work is certainly one way to compare performance.
Personally, though, what I do most is write programs. There isn't that much performance difference between vim on a 2GHz G5 system and vim on a 133MHz Pentium MMX. I suspect the same is true for many of Slashdot's readers.:-)
Actually, no, it doesn't. I'm on Comcast cable and I get much the same in my logs, except that it occurs much faster, like a difference of under a second. Note that the MAC address differs only by the last octet, which means the two cards were manufactured at roughly the same time and are probably physically located in the same machine or group of machines. It seems that BSD boxes detect this swapping, though Linux boxes either don't detect it or don't log it.
Now, if you look up the IP addresses for a dozen different sites, and you keep getting back the same three addresses, then, I think, you might have a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we can't stop tornadoes, but if we have sufficient advance warning, we can take steps to protect ourselves. This is by far, IMHO, the most valuable service the NWS provides, and it is critically important.
Actually, Trojan is exactly right. A Trojan Horse is a program which has an unintended payload and may or may not contain self-propagation code.
Any program which installs itself on your computer without your consent would, in fact, be a Trojan, by definition.
You are, of course, correct in that it is neither a virus nor a worm. People seem to forget that the reason there are three names is that these are three distinct classes of malware.
We hire from two groups of people: those who are members of the local LUG (Linux Users Group) and the local 2600.
My advice is to join your local user groups and contribute (e.g. demonstrate your skill by adding features to the group website). This is where you can subtly network (in the people sense) and find your next great job.
The problem here is that virtual memory is mapped one-for-one onto physical memory (this is only true when your physical memory matches the maximum amount of addressable memory -- on 32 bit systems, 4GB). Unless you have unavailable memory pages which can be 'stepped on' (which triggers a page fault), you could certainly swap memory out to disk, but there would be no page fault signal to trigger that memory to be swapped back into physical memory.
To clarify, this is not about Operating Systems or Unix, this is about the underlying processor architecture. You simply cannot have page faults if physical memory equals virtual memory!
Nope, can't help past 4GB. That's the maximum addressable on a 32-bit system. Any allocation beyond that is wasted space (if you can call 2GB wasted space on a 200GB drive, that is).
Why is it wasteful? Because on 32-bit systems, you have a maximum 4GB of memory. That's the maximum that is addressable, period. There aren't any more addressable pages of memory, so there's no way to have a page fault (which triggers the OS to load the swapped page of memory) beyond 4GB.
In fact, if you have 4GB of memory on a 32-bit system, you do not need swap, as it will simply be unused! (no page faults possible)
P.S. Some of you may be wondering about the Xeon comment above. Xeon uses a trick that allows it to address (IIRC) 36-bit memory, which would give it a maximum of 64GB of memory.
Now with more advanced filesystems that can be mounted synchronously, using a swapfile is less of a problem -- it certainly could be done, but you still get a performance hit by having to manage a filesystem entry, rather than swapping to raw disk.
BTW, a number of databases use raw disk for exactly this reason -- to avoid the performance hit of managing a filesystem. And yes, it will make a difference to the overall performance of your database.
No, it won't solve the problem of junk faxes, but it does reduce the cost of dealing with them. Junk faxes get deleted and do not waste toner/paper.
I'll second on this one. After only a few minutes waiting, the download is going quite well. I'd otherwise still be waiting for "Connecting to peers" on the official bittorrent.
"Oh, hell, another hour of angles!"
Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom, on the other hand, are strong companies and could never be better.
Then again, I suppose I'm lucky that I block only 200 spam messages a day, with only about 5 getting through.
Except that prior art only comes into play if it is found prior to the FILING of the patent, not the granting of the patent. The filing of the patent probably predates the earliest spam archive, so it's unlikely anybody has prior art available (and even if they do, are they likely to release it to stop an anti-spamming organization?).
Not necessarily. Prior art only overrides a patent if found prior to the filing of the patent. Note that patents typically take several years to be granted, so AT&T could have a legitimate patent on their hands here.
The DMCA only covers protection mechanisms designed to protect access to a copyrighted work, not just any protection mechanism. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is probably more applicable to spam, although you'd still need to get a judge to agree with you on that one.
Take a look at inner city ghettos some time. Indeed, many people have guns there, but those neighborhoods are neither more polite, nor is there less crime there. Hence, your supposition is, on its face, easily disproved.
We sure didn't do it by allowing psychos to have AK-47s, that's for sure. If anything, knowing that a psycho might blow your head off for saying something he disagrees with dampens freedom of speech and expression.
And just to clear up the notion, we got those freedoms because we have a strong system of Constitutional rights, which are not easily overridden and a judiciary which is willing to strike down laws in conflict with those rights.
Does anyone honestly believe that having a full gun cabinet does anything to enhance their constitutional free speech rights?
Even so, given their figure of $3.0 million for the computer, that's $810,000 per teraflop versus VT's computer at $295,000 per teraflop. The G5's are still nearly 3 times cheaper.
Read some of the research and you'll find that one degree is an awful lot for just a single century. And in terms of half of that degree being before humans could have contributed to it, I suggest you look at US History, specifically the Industrial Revolution, which took place prior to the beginning of the last century. Many of the industries during that period contributed greatly to the atmosphere in terms of what we now know are greenhouse gases.
First, the processor ran at 2.8MHz, although the speed was sometimes said to be only 2.5MHz, accounting for the drag of the 1MHz system bus speed -- remember, the IIgs had no processor cache.
Second, as always when comparing two different architectures, as when comparing 65xxx to xxx86, you have to take some of the measurements with a grain of salt. The 4X figure was drawn from the time it took to load a register from memory; the xxx86 processors took 4X longer than the 65xxx processors to do this operation. Obviously, there is far more to the operation of a computer than simply loading memory into a register.
Actually, it was Microsoft's code, licensed by Apple. If you examine the BASIC interpreter, you'll find 10 bytes near the end which aren't being used for anything:
a6 d3 c1 c8 d4 c8 d5 c4 ce ca
If you XOR these digits with 0x87 (the character code for the BEL on the Apple II) and reverse the order, you'll get "MICROSOFT!"
The BASIC code included in the earlier Apple ][ and Apple ][+ contained Integer BASIC, which was written by Steve Wozniak. You may be confusing Integer BASIC (no floating point) with Applesoft BASIC (with floating point).
Consider what NVIDIA's binary-only driver is for: XFree86. See the XFree86 License. Note that it is not the GPL.
Obviously, it's not, but that might be the cause of the confusion.
So, uh, the G5 computer has been out, what, a couple hours, and magically, Photoshop is optimized for it? Riiiiiiiight.
And you also believe that Photoshop is NOT optimized for P3/P4? Riiiiiiiiight.
Adobe isn't stupid. They tweak Photoshop's performance, so it works well on both architectures. And they certainly have tweaked performance for the G3 and G4. But that's not the same as tweaking performance for a new processor that they've never seen yet.
But you're right. This is precisely why the Photoshop test is so influential. It's a little easier to wrap your mind around, given that you probably have seen Photoshop in operation. Most of us don't run benchmarks on our computer "just because". But we do run applications and seeing those applications at work is certainly one way to compare performance.
Personally, though, what I do most is write programs. There isn't that much performance difference between vim on a 2GHz G5 system and vim on a 133MHz Pentium MMX. I suspect the same is true for many of Slashdot's readers. :-)
Now, if you look up the IP addresses for a dozen different sites, and you keep getting back the same three addresses, then, I think, you might have a problem.