heat it above the curie temperature (300-380 for Fe-Nd alloys)... you still have a working drive.
You didn't specify units, but unless you were quoting degrees Farenheit, I can't believe you'd still have a working drive after heating it to that temperature. 380C is over 700F... at the very least, you're going to burn all the plastic in the drive, or at least start to melt/soften it, and probably melt out all the solder from the PCBs.
And that's assuming you can get that sort of temperature in anything but spot heating at home. Most residential food-grade ovens don't get that hot -- most of them top out around 500-600F, except on the self-cleaning cycle. I suppose you could put your drive in there, and then run it (that would be a neat experiment for someone with an oven they didn't care too much about...), but once the oven gets above around 600F, the door lock is going to engage and you can't really stop it after that. Only other thing I can think of that gets that hot is a charcoal or propane grill; that might get you the right heat, if you put it on there for long enough with the lid on, and just baked the hell out of it.
Yes, from what I understand, it's similar to what OO.o does -- but OpenOffice's behavior is really an emulation of Microsoft Word/Works behavior.
Basically, people complained that OO took longer to launch than Word. When the OO devs looked at Word, they realized that Windows automatically preloads parts of Word into memory on boot, making the program seem a lot more lightweight than it actually is. In order to make OO competitive, they implemented (optional, but on-by-default) similar behavior.
Personally, I'm skeptical of it; I think it's a crummy hack to make a program faster without actually doing it the "right way" (through optimization, better coding), but I suppose it's better than just being slow.
I admit the boot-time figure isn't anything to obsess too hard about, but things like application-launch times certainly are. How quickly an application launches adds a lot to how often I use it and how reluctant I am to open it. If I know that launching it is going to take a minute or two (like Photoshop used to on my old PowerMac), I'm not going to click that sucker without a damn good reason. In fact I'm probably going to find some other tool to do the job, if I have a lot of quick tasks to accomplish.
Similarly, if an app takes a long time to save a document, and it blocks the user from doing other things during this process, that's pretty obnoxious. Most people save frequently (or at least they should), and if it takes longer than a second or two at most, you've just interrupted their workflow.
UI responsiveness is definitely king, I'm firmly with you there, but speed in other areas shouldn't just be written off. Applications and system software needs to be designed to do what the user wants, while getting in the way as little as possible. Sometimes I think that gets forgotten by developers, from time to time.
I find it a little hard to get worked up over this. I don't find the idea of watermarking particularly offensive, as long as it's not done in such a way as to degrade the content (which all "analog preservable" watermarking does), and it's not part of a DRM scheme (e.g. 'no copy' flag). Watermarking that only identifies a user and can be used to track down someone sharing files after the fact... I can live with that.
The difference to me is that it's not trying to stop someone from doing something illegal, before they even do it. That I find very offensive, and is the whole point of DRM. I believe that the computer should let you do anything you damn well please, even if it's illegal, but that you should take the consequences later. Trading DRM for watermarking would be a huge step up, since the watermarking really doesn't affect anyone who isn't putting their tracks on P2P networks. However, we also need to realize that watermarks can't be viewed as inherently trustworthy -- what's to keep me from framing you by putting your account information on a bunch of music and then sharing it? Practically, I'm not sure how useful watermarking really is. But if it's the price for getting rid of DRM -- which treats everyone like criminals, regardless of whether they're doing anything illegal or not -- it's OK by me.
Not sure it's relevant, but at one point, IBM did have some sort of internal-only Linux desktop environment going. Don't think they were distributing it externally, though.
IIRC it was RedHat based. I knew some people who got their hands on it because it was all set up for running on ThinkPads.
This doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Why would customer's email address be sitting out on a server that "other people can see and may gain access to"?
There's a word for that, it's 'incompetence.'
If they're they stupid about handling email addresses, what makes you think that the rest of your personal information is being protected any better? There's absolutely no reason why this should be happening. Something is very, very wrong at Ameritrade, and as evidenced by the fact that they haven't done anything, my suspicion is that they either can't, or don't know how to. That's not a good thing.
Protip: if you run your own mail server generate a whack of aliases (ie: bogus000 through bogus999) so you always have a disposable address available.
Even easier: just go to Spamgourmet.com and set up an account there (takes about 15 seconds, seriously), and then you can use all the addresses you want of the form [someword].youremail@spamgourmet.com.
E.g., if you're signing up for Ameritrade, you could use the address "ameritradesucks.kadin@spamgourmet.com" (or any other of about 10 different domains, it's not just limited to spamgourmet).
After each address has forwarded a set number of emails through to your real, hidden address, it will shut off and all further messages will be "eaten." (You can re-activate emails if you want, or set up whitelists so that all email from ameritrade.com gets through.)
It's a pretty brilliant system, and it's completely free. If you set up an account and use Spamgourmet dummy addresses everywhere, you can almost totally prevent spam arriving directly to your inbox. Also, you can go in later and see which addresses have been flooded with spam (some of mine have received thousands of messages) and see exactly what services are selling out out. Very cool.
An anonymous reader clues us that the wildly litigious Canadian Wayne Crookes, who has been suing the Internet for defamation
Man, I feel bad for the process server who got that assignment.
Here's the Cliffs' Notes version
on
DNS Complexity
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Basically, Vixie's point in the whole article really isn't to rehash how DNS works (although he does basically do that), but to make a rather interesting point about complex systems.
His point is that large systems can become unimaginably complex, even when they begin with a very simple set of rules. Particularly when those rules are vague.
Although he doesn't say it explicitly, I think there are probably some similarities between neutral networks and DNS -- both begin with very simple rules, and then the complexity comes out of the sheer number of connections when you scale it up. Likewise, with DNS, you can have a very simple implementation (say, for a home office) that's quite easy to understand and use. Everything makes sense. It's basically understandable. But then, take that same protocol, even some of the same software, and scale it up to a few billion nodes or whatever DNS has these days, and suddenly the whole thing is so complex, nobody can even begin to really understand it in its entirety. You can't even predict, exactly, how it's going to react to any change -- it's very much like a complex organic system at that point. You can perform experiments on it, and make hypotheses, but even though it's an entirely deterministic system (or ought to be), it acts mysteriously.
That's the IETF Way
on
DNS Complexity
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, it was written by Paul Vixie, better known for writing a whole bunch of RFCs... they're not known for being exactly graphics-heavy, either.
(Although some of them do have some neat ASCII art.)
You might try Knoppmyth; it's a Debian semi-equivalent to MythDora. I have a PVR-150 and I'm in the process of getting it set up with the remote. It's not quite out-of-the-box ready, you still need to do some tweaking for the PVR-150s receiver and blaster, but it's not too bad (or so I've heard).
They have some decent support forums too, although unfortunately they're not open to the public (you have to register even to read, for reasons I don't quite get -- bandwidth, maybe). There should be a HOWTO in there on setting up the PVR-150's remote on the latest version.
Alternately, you could just get a StreamZap remote. For $30 it works straight out of the box, plug in and restart, no screwing around at all. I have that on my other MythTV box (that PVR-150 didn't come with a remote) and if I can't get the Hauppauge remote working in two or three hours I'm just going to buy another one. My sanity is worth it, and MythTV is the sort of thing that will drive you up a wall if you let it.
I think it's a case of letting the market that can pay for it pay for it, but still getting something rather than nothing out of the other markets. The average wages in HK is much lower, they aren't going to pay the same prices.
The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call.
You want to give them a shout-out? I'm always looking for recommendations for solid hosting providers. (I used to recommend FatCow, and they really are nice guys there, but you have to pay a year in advance to get their $8.25/mo rate.)
So does that make a parabola "infinitely elliptical"?
I'd guess so, in a way. But it's a tough question to answer, because although parabolas have some ellipse-ish properties in terms of shape, an ellipse is by definition a closed surface (it's a conic section, the shape you'd get by slicing a cone with a plane), while a parabola isn't.
On the other end of the extreme though, a circle is just an ellipse where the two foci are placed at the same point. But when they're infinitely far apart, I'm not sure whether you can say that you've created a parabola, or just a really big ellipse. (I suspect the latter.)
A 2" screen at 12" away isn't that bad. It's only slightly smaller, in terms of FOV, than a 36" TV viewed at 15', which I think is fairly typical for most non-geek, non-home-theater people.
Some cocktail-napkin math: FOV of an iPod screen: 2*arctan(1/12) ~= 9.5 degrees FOV of an "average"-ish TV: 2*arctan(18/180) ~= 11.4 degrees
The factor of 2 is in there, along with half of the screen size, because in the case of the iPod in particular, I think the distance is too small for the "small angle approximation" to really apply. But arctan(2/12) isn't terrible, either.
Depends on the temperature and pressure. Under some conditions, it's possible to take common ice (Ice Ih, "one - H") and force it back into water by applying pressure to it. Hence the thin film of water underneath an ice-skater's skates, or under a thin blade or wire strung over an ice block. (As an interesting demonstration, you can take a piece of piano wire, put it over an ice block, and weight either end -- the wire will descend into the ice block without leaving a "cut" behind, because the water will re-freeze behind it, if it's cold enough.)
However, at other combinations of temperature and pressure, you can create other types of ice, many of which don't really resemble the "ice" that we commonly think of. IMO, we really shouldn't refer to these other forms of solidified water as "ice," instead reserving that term only for the common Ih state. But the rest of the physics community seems to disagree, and I suppose "ice" is less ponderous than "solid water" to write over and over.
We are circular? that's news to me. We are also elliptical around the sun.
I think they mean "more elliptical." Or rather, orbits where the foci of the ellipse are much, much further apart.
I guess the assumption is that a very elliptical orbit would produce too much variation in the planet's climate to sustain live and allow it to evolve very far, although I'm not sure what the basis for that is. Seems that, with the right ingredients, you could get all sorts of interesting forms of life that could withstand dramatic freeze/thaw cycles, as long as they weren't dramatic enough to boil the planet's water or atmosphere away. Here on Earth we have ample examples of creatures with very long reproductive cycles (e.g. 17-year cicadas), so I don't think we should rule anything out.
That multilingual message is OS X's kernel panic screen. There's not much information given, because there's not really anything to say that would be useful to an average user. (Though if you want, you can usually pull up the Console after you reboot and get the error log output preceding the crash, which is what you'd get on most *NIX machines.) I mean, what else do you want it to say? There's no point in confusing people, the message tells them what they need to know: restart your computer. Maybe it could be improved by saying "You're totally fucked -- restart your computer," but I suspect that wouldn't go over well. It's pretty clear from context that Something Bad has happened (the screen just freezes with that message, there's no cursor, etc.), I don't think you need to treat the user like a complete retard and say "This is an error!" (No shit, Sherlock; even my mother can tell it's an error -- the important part is what they're supposed to do about it.)
It's been years since I've gotten one of those screens, though. I think the last time was when I was playing around with some sketchy USB peripherals. Back around 10.0 and the Public Beta before it, kernel panics were a lot more common...there were a few really terrible early point releases where I remember getting one every few weeks, sometimes more frequently.
The car-crash sound effect in OS 8 or 9 (maybe it was only on some models) was fairly amusing, though -- I wouldn't mind if they brought that back. Also, the 'chimes of death' were neat, and although I never want to actually hear them, I think they were cooler than the hardware-failure notification Apple uses now.
Snobbish distinctions between "just a book" and "Literature" don't make you an artistic authority. Just because it has lots of pages (Dickens), horribly written, stilted dialog (Hemmingway), or insultingly artificial characters (JFCooper) does not automatically make it more worthy than something that's actually pleasant and entertaining to read, like Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, or the Da Vinci Code.
Give it a few hundred years, and the "OMG literature!!1!" people will be over-analyzing Harry Potter, just like they now do to Dickens' work.
The reason that intellectuals don't like recent books is because it's a lot harder to stuff words in the author's mouth, when the author is still alive. Once they're safely dead for a while...let the flogging commence.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much.
From "man touch":For those who missed out on the big release party, V7 UNIX dates to 1979.
From "utimes:"Wikipedia says 1983 for 4.2, although I'm sure people can find older implementations of the same thing.
There's nothing new here, the people in TFA are just lamenting that now, every script kiddie can do it. Welcome to life, guys.
You didn't specify units, but unless you were quoting degrees Farenheit, I can't believe you'd still have a working drive after heating it to that temperature. 380C is over 700F
And that's assuming you can get that sort of temperature in anything but spot heating at home. Most residential food-grade ovens don't get that hot -- most of them top out around 500-600F, except on the self-cleaning cycle. I suppose you could put your drive in there, and then run it (that would be a neat experiment for someone with an oven they didn't care too much about...), but once the oven gets above around 600F, the door lock is going to engage and you can't really stop it after that. Only other thing I can think of that gets that hot is a charcoal or propane grill; that might get you the right heat, if you put it on there for long enough with the lid on, and just baked the hell out of it.
At 192k I start not to be less annoyed.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
Yes, from what I understand, it's similar to what OO.o does -- but OpenOffice's behavior is really an emulation of Microsoft Word/Works behavior.
Basically, people complained that OO took longer to launch than Word. When the OO devs looked at Word, they realized that Windows automatically preloads parts of Word into memory on boot, making the program seem a lot more lightweight than it actually is. In order to make OO competitive, they implemented (optional, but on-by-default) similar behavior.
Personally, I'm skeptical of it; I think it's a crummy hack to make a program faster without actually doing it the "right way" (through optimization, better coding), but I suppose it's better than just being slow.
I admit the boot-time figure isn't anything to obsess too hard about, but things like application-launch times certainly are. How quickly an application launches adds a lot to how often I use it and how reluctant I am to open it. If I know that launching it is going to take a minute or two (like Photoshop used to on my old PowerMac), I'm not going to click that sucker without a damn good reason. In fact I'm probably going to find some other tool to do the job, if I have a lot of quick tasks to accomplish.
Similarly, if an app takes a long time to save a document, and it blocks the user from doing other things during this process, that's pretty obnoxious. Most people save frequently (or at least they should), and if it takes longer than a second or two at most, you've just interrupted their workflow.
UI responsiveness is definitely king, I'm firmly with you there, but speed in other areas shouldn't just be written off. Applications and system software needs to be designed to do what the user wants, while getting in the way as little as possible. Sometimes I think that gets forgotten by developers, from time to time.
And it's a rather lucrative business to get into if you want to screw people out of their homes, too.
Yeah, but the government really hates competition in that area...
Not that it's stopped a few people from trying over the years. It's a good way to end up at the end of a rope.
I find it a little hard to get worked up over this. I don't find the idea of watermarking particularly offensive, as long as it's not done in such a way as to degrade the content (which all "analog preservable" watermarking does), and it's not part of a DRM scheme (e.g. 'no copy' flag). Watermarking that only identifies a user and can be used to track down someone sharing files after the fact ... I can live with that.
The difference to me is that it's not trying to stop someone from doing something illegal, before they even do it. That I find very offensive, and is the whole point of DRM. I believe that the computer should let you do anything you damn well please, even if it's illegal, but that you should take the consequences later. Trading DRM for watermarking would be a huge step up, since the watermarking really doesn't affect anyone who isn't putting their tracks on P2P networks. However, we also need to realize that watermarks can't be viewed as inherently trustworthy -- what's to keep me from framing you by putting your account information on a bunch of music and then sharing it? Practically, I'm not sure how useful watermarking really is. But if it's the price for getting rid of DRM -- which treats everyone like criminals, regardless of whether they're doing anything illegal or not -- it's OK by me.
Why the hell don't these free market aficionados also become interested in efficiency.
Who says he isn't?
This is clearly the most efficient way possible of getting a lot of campaign contributions from the big telco/cableco monopolies.
Not sure it's relevant, but at one point, IBM did have some sort of internal-only Linux desktop environment going. Don't think they were distributing it externally, though.
IIRC it was RedHat based. I knew some people who got their hands on it because it was all set up for running on ThinkPads.
"It's a trap!"
This doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Why would customer's email address be sitting out on a server that "other people can see and may gain access to"?
There's a word for that, it's 'incompetence.'
If they're they stupid about handling email addresses, what makes you think that the rest of your personal information is being protected any better? There's absolutely no reason why this should be happening. Something is very, very wrong at Ameritrade, and as evidenced by the fact that they haven't done anything, my suspicion is that they either can't, or don't know how to. That's not a good thing.
It's inexcusable.
Protip: if you run your own mail server generate a whack of aliases (ie: bogus000 through bogus999) so you always have a disposable address available.
Even easier: just go to Spamgourmet.com and set up an account there (takes about 15 seconds, seriously), and then you can use all the addresses you want of the form [someword].youremail@spamgourmet.com.
E.g., if you're signing up for Ameritrade, you could use the address "ameritradesucks.kadin@spamgourmet.com" (or any other of about 10 different domains, it's not just limited to spamgourmet).
After each address has forwarded a set number of emails through to your real, hidden address, it will shut off and all further messages will be "eaten." (You can re-activate emails if you want, or set up whitelists so that all email from ameritrade.com gets through.)
It's a pretty brilliant system, and it's completely free. If you set up an account and use Spamgourmet dummy addresses everywhere, you can almost totally prevent spam arriving directly to your inbox. Also, you can go in later and see which addresses have been flooded with spam (some of mine have received thousands of messages) and see exactly what services are selling out out. Very cool.
An anonymous reader clues us that the wildly litigious Canadian Wayne Crookes, who has been suing the Internet for defamation
Man, I feel bad for the process server who got that assignment.
Basically, Vixie's point in the whole article really isn't to rehash how DNS works (although he does basically do that), but to make a rather interesting point about complex systems.
His point is that large systems can become unimaginably complex, even when they begin with a very simple set of rules. Particularly when those rules are vague.
Although he doesn't say it explicitly, I think there are probably some similarities between neutral networks and DNS -- both begin with very simple rules, and then the complexity comes out of the sheer number of connections when you scale it up. Likewise, with DNS, you can have a very simple implementation (say, for a home office) that's quite easy to understand and use. Everything makes sense. It's basically understandable. But then, take that same protocol, even some of the same software, and scale it up to a few billion nodes or whatever DNS has these days, and suddenly the whole thing is so complex, nobody can even begin to really understand it in its entirety. You can't even predict, exactly, how it's going to react to any change -- it's very much like a complex organic system at that point. You can perform experiments on it, and make hypotheses, but even though it's an entirely deterministic system (or ought to be), it acts mysteriously.
Well, it was written by Paul Vixie, better known for writing a whole bunch of RFCs ... they're not known for being exactly graphics-heavy, either.
(Although some of them do have some neat ASCII art.)
You might try Knoppmyth; it's a Debian semi-equivalent to MythDora. I have a PVR-150 and I'm in the process of getting it set up with the remote. It's not quite out-of-the-box ready, you still need to do some tweaking for the PVR-150s receiver and blaster, but it's not too bad (or so I've heard).
They have some decent support forums too, although unfortunately they're not open to the public (you have to register even to read, for reasons I don't quite get -- bandwidth, maybe). There should be a HOWTO in there on setting up the PVR-150's remote on the latest version.
Alternately, you could just get a StreamZap remote. For $30 it works straight out of the box, plug in and restart, no screwing around at all. I have that on my other MythTV box (that PVR-150 didn't come with a remote) and if I can't get the Hauppauge remote working in two or three hours I'm just going to buy another one. My sanity is worth it, and MythTV is the sort of thing that will drive you up a wall if you let it.
I think it's a case of letting the market that can pay for it pay for it, but still getting something rather than nothing out of the other markets. The average wages in HK is much lower, they aren't going to pay the same prices.
In other words, price fixing.
The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call.
You want to give them a shout-out? I'm always looking for recommendations for solid hosting providers. (I used to recommend FatCow, and they really are nice guys there, but you have to pay a year in advance to get their $8.25/mo rate.)
Well, this should allow us to finally answer the long-standing question: "Is GoDaddy better than a bunch of thieving incompetents?"
So does that make a parabola "infinitely elliptical"?
I'd guess so, in a way. But it's a tough question to answer, because although parabolas have some ellipse-ish properties in terms of shape, an ellipse is by definition a closed surface (it's a conic section, the shape you'd get by slicing a cone with a plane), while a parabola isn't.
On the other end of the extreme though, a circle is just an ellipse where the two foci are placed at the same point. But when they're infinitely far apart, I'm not sure whether you can say that you've created a parabola, or just a really big ellipse. (I suspect the latter.)
A 2" screen at 12" away isn't that bad. It's only slightly smaller, in terms of FOV, than a 36" TV viewed at 15', which I think is fairly typical for most non-geek, non-home-theater people.
Some cocktail-napkin math:
FOV of an iPod screen: 2*arctan(1/12) ~= 9.5 degrees
FOV of an "average"-ish TV: 2*arctan(18/180) ~= 11.4 degrees
The factor of 2 is in there, along with half of the screen size, because in the case of the iPod in particular, I think the distance is too small for the "small angle approximation" to really apply. But arctan(2/12) isn't terrible, either.
Depends on the temperature and pressure. Under some conditions, it's possible to take common ice (Ice Ih, "one - H") and force it back into water by applying pressure to it. Hence the thin film of water underneath an ice-skater's skates, or under a thin blade or wire strung over an ice block. (As an interesting demonstration, you can take a piece of piano wire, put it over an ice block, and weight either end -- the wire will descend into the ice block without leaving a "cut" behind, because the water will re-freeze behind it, if it's cold enough.)
However, at other combinations of temperature and pressure, you can create other types of ice, many of which don't really resemble the "ice" that we commonly think of. IMO, we really shouldn't refer to these other forms of solidified water as "ice," instead reserving that term only for the common Ih state. But the rest of the physics community seems to disagree, and I suppose "ice" is less ponderous than "solid water" to write over and over.
We are circular? that's news to me. We are also elliptical around the sun.
I think they mean "more elliptical." Or rather, orbits where the foci of the ellipse are much, much further apart.
I guess the assumption is that a very elliptical orbit would produce too much variation in the planet's climate to sustain live and allow it to evolve very far, although I'm not sure what the basis for that is. Seems that, with the right ingredients, you could get all sorts of interesting forms of life that could withstand dramatic freeze/thaw cycles, as long as they weren't dramatic enough to boil the planet's water or atmosphere away. Here on Earth we have ample examples of creatures with very long reproductive cycles (e.g. 17-year cicadas), so I don't think we should rule anything out.
That multilingual message is OS X's kernel panic screen. There's not much information given, because there's not really anything to say that would be useful to an average user. (Though if you want, you can usually pull up the Console after you reboot and get the error log output preceding the crash, which is what you'd get on most *NIX machines.) I mean, what else do you want it to say? There's no point in confusing people, the message tells them what they need to know: restart your computer. Maybe it could be improved by saying "You're totally fucked -- restart your computer," but I suspect that wouldn't go over well. It's pretty clear from context that Something Bad has happened (the screen just freezes with that message, there's no cursor, etc.), I don't think you need to treat the user like a complete retard and say "This is an error!" (No shit, Sherlock; even my mother can tell it's an error -- the important part is what they're supposed to do about it.)
It's been years since I've gotten one of those screens, though. I think the last time was when I was playing around with some sketchy USB peripherals. Back around 10.0 and the Public Beta before it, kernel panics were a lot more common...there were a few really terrible early point releases where I remember getting one every few weeks, sometimes more frequently.
The car-crash sound effect in OS 8 or 9 (maybe it was only on some models) was fairly amusing, though -- I wouldn't mind if they brought that back. Also, the 'chimes of death' were neat, and although I never want to actually hear them, I think they were cooler than the hardware-failure notification Apple uses now.
Snobbish distinctions between "just a book" and "Literature" don't make you an artistic authority. Just because it has lots of pages (Dickens), horribly written, stilted dialog (Hemmingway), or insultingly artificial characters (JFCooper) does not automatically make it more worthy than something that's actually pleasant and entertaining to read, like Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, or the Da Vinci Code.
Give it a few hundred years, and the "OMG literature!!1!" people will be over-analyzing Harry Potter, just like they now do to Dickens' work.
The reason that intellectuals don't like recent books is because it's a lot harder to stuff words in the author's mouth, when the author is still alive. Once they're safely dead for a while...let the flogging commence.