Take a look at SVGames.com. This is an outfit that sells, among other things, PDFs of old TSR AD&D books (the PDF were obtaining by scanning the books). The PDFs are a few bucks each and are sold only through download.
The neat thing is that they offer a temporary download URL that allows you to redo a download wihin a few days if the first one failed. You don't even need to bookmark the temp URL, you just reenter your name and CC number for authentication and can redo the download (without being charged twice, obviously). This is a very cool feature. I suggest your site adopt a similar functionality.
-- SysKoll
It's Gbit/s, not Gbps -- And it's a big problem!
on
10Gbps Wireless Transfers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Journalists are fond of using dumbed-down abreviations such as Gbps or other acronyms. But I encourage technical writers to use the correct term, which is Gbit/s. Just as Mbit/s, Kbit/s.
There is something weird with computer science. People in this discipline badly need a common linguo because the field is evolving so fast. And yet, most CS practitionners couldn't be bothered to use the generally accepted vocabulary or abbreviations to describe their domain's problems. They invent their own, or incorrectly reuse existing jargon swiped from other disciplines.
Even worse, each branch of CS reuses general vague terms and overloads them with a different meaning. What's a "server"? What's a "page"? Depends who's talking.
As a result, CS is full of islands of disconnected knowledge and of specialists that cannot communicate with each other. Ever tried to have an OO programmer and a database admin talk to each other?
Mathematicians don't speak each other's linguo. But they carefully avoid using overlapping terms to define different things. That's what we should aim to do.
CS will keep being a cottage industry and a craftman discipline akin to voodoo, with cancelled project when wizardry fails, as long as all CS won't agree to speak a common language. Or at least a language where precision removes the overlapping meaning.
Granted, a precise vocabulary will not cure all the ills of CS. It not a sufficient condition for clear communication. But it's one of the necessary conditions.
So do your part. Write Gbit/s, not GBPS or other atrocities.
Even better: a kid with a laser pointer, sitting in front of me, almost ruined LOTR (a movie I was dying to see!). I was ready to rip his throat with my bare teeth, but unfortunately, just as I was standing up, the theater manager entered and threatened the little dimwit with expulsion, which made him stop being a nuisance.
This kid's behavior is similar to defecating on a diner table. It deserves flogging (for the example) and castration (to prevent the idiot from spreading his defective genome).
So I am demanding that the MPAA dispatch security guards in every theater, armed with a whip and a pair of scissors. Since their are gonna do it anyway to prevent people from capturing the movie on camcorders, we honest filmgoers might as well get something out of it.
Your storied made me laugh incrontrollably. I don't know if you embellished them but they have this pleasant yet slightly uncomfortable ring of truth (uncomfy 'cause it could happen to the reader!).
I really suggest you submit these stories to one of the sysadmin humor sites. You will make readers happy.
Were are moderation points when you need them? Sheesh...
-- SysKoll
Re:Intel relies on compiler, Turing says it's fool
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
LC, thanks a lot for the interesting pointer.
Re:Intel relies on compiler, Turing says it's fool
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As a matter of fact, some people say RISC means Reject Important Stuff into Compiler.
That's quite true for some architectures. However, note that the PowerPC CPU, for example, does a lot of optimizations at execution time with branch caching, speculative execution and other predictive techniques. This, on a code that has been somewhat optimized at compilation.
The question is not whether the IA-64 is the only processor to do these compile-time optimize. The question is whether it's wise to rely mainly on compile-time static optimization when you hope to be a performance leader. Turing says that you cannot, because static optimization, obtained by guessing the execution code path, is always inferior to dynamic optimization generated from the actual code path with the actual data.
Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?
-- SysKoll
Intel relies on compiler, Turing says it's foolish
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Itanium relies heavily on exceedingly good compilers that will perform for the IA64 the same level of optimization that regular, on-the-fly predictive optimization do in RISC chips.
The main obstacle with this method is that Turing's theorem says static compile-time optimization will never work as well as dynamic optimization. This is because, roughly, the only way to guess what a program will do with a given set of input data is to execute it with its actual data set. Here is a
link where a reader of The Register addressed this concern in 1999.
Is anyone aware of how well the limits predicting by Turing can apply to the compile-time IA64 algorithms?
Too bad the above was posted as AC, because it's absolutely right: The laser-to-dump-heat is against the laws of thermodynamics.
You cannot generate power from ambiant heat. You need to transfer it between its source (here, the star) and a heat sink. The heat sink is normally a radiator warmer than the ambiant temperature, but you can use a body with a high specific heat coefficient (in clear, something that needs a lot of heat, expressed in Joules or in Watt.hours, to be warmed up by one degree, like the liquid fuel tank in the JSF case).
However, in that Uplift novel, the starship clearly cannot get a radiator warmer than the star, which is why they need this laser thing. But they can't use a laser either, 'cause first they'd need a heat transfer process, hence a heat sink.
So the author was, err, not living up to his hard-science credibility pretenses. It would have been better to fit the ship with some pure unobtainium heat shield or force field.
Yes, dear devout followers of the Penguin, now is our historical opportunity to prove, once and for all, that 200 monkeys banging on 200 keyboards can produce a better OS than Windows 2000!
We need to send them keyboards now. What's their address?
Asked by one lateral-thinking MVP whether Microsoft planned to offer applications software on Linux, Ballmer said no. "We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."
As usual, Ballmer is either lying or deluded. I recently fielded a call for a large Wall Street company that is deploying IBM software for Linux. Considering the size of the lunch tabs picked by the IBM sales person, I can tell you this is not a small contract.
IBM sells complex, expensive products such as DB2 and WebSphere for Linux. These pieces of software are certainly not free (nor open-source) and they seem to sell very well.
Please don't start a flame war against the closed-source nature of DB2. That's not the point. The point is that Ballmer does not have a clue.
Actually, the first powered, heavier-than-air flight occured way before 1903. It was achieved by Clément Ader, a wealthy French electrical engineer, who made the first piloted powered takeoff in history, at Armainvilliers, France, in October 1890. He was piloting the Eole, a bat-winged, steam-powered aircraft (with a 10-HP steam engine!). Although he covered a distance of only 165 ft (50 meters), this was enough for the French Army to
encourage further experiments and fund Ader's work.
The French Army, not famed for its farsightedness and its vision, threatened to rip apart the fabric of reality by taking a bold, inspired bet on an unproven concept! But read on.
The distance of the first flight wasn't much, but compare to Wright's 12 seconds in the air. Clément Ader's mistake was to take off in the same direction as the wind instead of against it. Nevertheless, Ader persevered.
Ader build several new aircrafts. He claims that he achieved a successful, straight line flight on the Avion III prototype in 1897, a machine still lacking controllability. However, the French Army, its sponsor, wanted a fully maneuverable craft able to transport troops and bombds right away. The Army lost patience and cut Ader's funding. The temporary threat to the natural order of the universe was quashed, and equilibrium was
restored. Whew.
Hmmm, last time I checked, I didn't see to many hydrogen wells around Texas or Dar-el-Salam.
A fuel cell needs either hydrogen or ethanol. In both cases, you need to manufacture the fuel. Ethanol can be manufactured from cellulose, but large, automotive-market sized production would certainly require a process starting from hydrocarbides (i.e., fossil fuels).
As for hydrogen, it is a way to store energy, not a source of energy. You have to manufacture the stuff. You basically need 120-150 Wh of energy to store 100 Wh worth of hydrogen, in the best case. I'd be pleasantly surprised by any process with an overall efficiency better than 50%.
So we'd still need to expand a LOT of energy to manufacture the fuel for fuel-cell cars.
The US could resume funding fusion power, but this research has been cancelled for all practical purposes.
So forget about dreams of not relying on fossil fuels. Unless the US finally resume building nuclear power plants and stop burning rotten dino juice. Japan and Europe rely on nuclear power and aren't glowing in the dark...
A friend of mine lived in Provence (Southern France). His mom used to cook with a lot of thyme (an aromatic herb) collected from her garden.
The French denied that the radioactive clouds emitted by the Chernobyl explosions ever crossed the border (that ole' Maginot line is vairee effective, Monsieur!). The French government never sent any serious warning.
My friend developed a thyroid cancer. He now sports a beautiful throat scar but he's alive. The surgeon's professional opinion is that thyme and other aromatics concentrate radioisotopes, and that eating stuff grown in a Provence garden from 1986 to 1990 or so was asking for trouble. He said he had already seen a lot of case and had never been so busy with new thyroid cancer cases.
Curiously, right after the Chernobyl events, the French government reclassified Geiger counters as restricted military items unavailable to civilians...
So as you can see, the French managed to keep a lid on truth even better than the Soviets. The sad fact is that while the babushkas were controlled in Moscow, nobody in France had sent a warning about checking certain crops for radiations.
The truth is not going to be easy to unearth in that case because the subject is
highly political.
I dunno about you, but whenever I see a web page with the magical.asp suffix, I carefully avoid to even turn on cookies. Much less give them my name and CC number. Because I know that it's only a question of time before they get hacked, owner and stripped from their customer files.
Well, here is what I just tried, apparently with success (boldfaced lines are user-typed commands):
telnet naam.pair.com 25
Trying 209.68.1.237...
Connected to naam.pair.com (209.68.1.237).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 naam.pair.com ESMTP HELO test.lextext.com
250 naam.pair.com mail from: randomuser@test.lextext.com
250 ok rcpt to: bret@lextext.com
250 ok DATA
354 go ahead Hello Mr. Fausett,
your mail server is wide open. please fix it. .
250 ok quit
221 naam.pair.com
Connection closed by foreign host.
So it seems the article published in New Architect is wrong. It is defamatory and it is claiming that the guy is innocent while he's guilty as sin.
I guess that's what passes for lawyers nowadays...
Please DO NOT flood the poor guy with email. He's enough trouble already: He's a lawyer, he's been caught pants down after claiming he wore belts and suspenders, he's a lawyer, he's been blacklisted, and he's a lawyer.
Yeah, them terrorists are really clever. They started littering every US airport with clueless people dressed in an intimidating uniform, who boldly search you, frisk you and detain you at the drop of a hat. They
forced a honest woman to drink her own breast milk, they pulled a women from a plane coming back from Vegas
because of a sex toy...
Their cluelessness and hardnosedness turns even the shortest travel into a horrendous wasted-day experience, from which exhausted, humiliated passengers emerge swearing they'll drive next time.
And it's working too. Look, three US airline companies are currently under Chapter 11. The damage to the US economy is staggering. Airline losses are piling up, already amounting to tens of billions of dollars.
Oh, wait. The people who turned fast-food joint rejects into unfireable Federal agents are actually the gummint, not Muslim mujahidins. Ahem. Never mind.
According to the article, the SMS spams wouldbe limited to political messages only.
Yeah, sure, I can see it now..
Dear registered Democrat voter,
Your support in the upcoming election is crucial. You can't let Jesse Helmes get reelected *again*, can you? Help us get rid of him! Our plan is to send him a kit comprising our patented Herbal Viagra, our Miracle Penis Enlargement pill and our Female Attractor Pheromone After-Shave. Pretty soon the old geezer will be too busy to leave home, and then he'll die of sheer exhaustion.
But we need to test the kit first. That's why we're offering it to you for only $199.99. We figured that as it is, you probably don't get much. Why else would you be a registered Democrat voter?
Don't delay, act now, call 1-800-SMS-SPAM.
See why I have my doubts about the political message only exemption?
-- SysKoll
P.S. I could have picked Hillary and the Republicans. Nothing personal.
Oy. When we Nooyoykers first named the towns here, we tried to use name ending in "hug" and "fuzzy", but the freakin' Vermont and California "sensitive" cuties beat us and copyrighted the names.
Now all our town names end in KILL and MAIM and WAR and TAXES and it's all their fault!.
Educating the companies: persuasion and death
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 2
It used to be that honest companies would cluelessly decide to use spam. Once, in 1994 or so, I got a spam email from a flower shop in a foreign country. It had legit contact info. I called long distance to tell them it was the most despicable way of advertising, and this mom-and-pop shop was not even aware that their son was spamming on their behalf. They were the kind of people that needed education. But these days are over except for rare exceptions. Spammers are not naive, misguided-but-honest people anymore.
Nowadays, the huge majority of spams comes from people who push illegal or fraudulent goods and services. I'm afraid a mere law against them would not be very effective, because what they sell is often illegal in the first place. One would need a federal law making it easy to trace a spammer from the Post Office box or telephone numbers he provides.
Even so, you still have totally anonymous spams just spreading misleading info such as stock schemes.
So I am afraid educating the companies is not going to solve the problem. To get an accurate image, picture an illegal drug lab that needs to get rid of its toxic waste. Spammers are akin to people offering to dump this toxic waste in a reservoir lake for a dime a ton. They already know the lab is illegal, they don't care. These people don't need education, they need jail time and enormous fines.
As for China's open SMTP relays, I suggest the US Dept of Commerce should insist that the guys maintaining open relays should be considered as commiting economic sabotage. In China, the punishment for this is the death penalty. That would solve the Chinese open relay problem quickly.
Of course, spammers from Singapore would then promptly set an operation for selling the organs harvested from all these executed Chinese spammers...
Here we are, in 2004. I listened to Microsoft, I made sure my new PC has a Palladium chip integrated on the motherboard. This way, I'm told, my PC will run only cryptographically signed programs, which will prevent these evil virus to execute.
But since I cannot afford to buy a key from MS each time I write a Word macro, I'll have to allow them to run.
And since Outlook cannot be removed from my Windows 2003 PPPP (Palladium-Protected Professional Plus), I use it for all my email. I use macros there, too, because I need Outlook to update my calendar when my boss sends me a meeting invitation.
And Outlook 2003 PPPP and Word 2003 PPPP are Palladium-signed applications. So they're safe, right?
I am sure nobody will ever find any buffer overflow or format string vulnerability in these apps, and that none will ever use them to create another of these worms that propagate using the deadly Word+Outlook combo, and can be activated
merely by previewing the message.
This is such a nice improvement over the current situation. So who care if I have to insert my credit card in the MS PPPP Card Reader and pay $1.50 each time I want to read the news on MSNBCNN? That's definitely worth the price.
Indeed. You need to sacrifice at least the mythical all-redhair goat if you want to get 3 days of uptime with NT5.0 a.k.a. Win2000
I saw a sig saying:
Taking software security advice from Microsoft is like taking airline security advice from Bin Laden.
I disagree. Bin Laden proved that he knew a lot about airline security (and how to defeat it).
For all its self-congratulation, MS still does not know how to achieve code quality in a large software project. They do a lot of wide-and-shallow useability studies, but they pay as much attention to reliability testing as Hollywood pays attention to scriptwriters (i.e., not a lot. Remember the old joke? "How do you spot a blonde would-be actress in a movie cast? She sleeps with the writer.")
The Wattenburg method is a modern variant of the chain roller, an antique minefield clearing vehicle that had long chains attached to a horizontal roll rotating a few feet above the ground in front of the armored vehicle. The ends of the long chains would hit the ground with enough force to trigger their explosion, 10 to 15 meters ahead. So the concept is definitely proven.
If you really want to trigger a surface-laid mine or ammunition from far away, it is much cheaper to just fire at it using a
20-mm cannon. But of course that would be a cheap solution. Way too cheap, probably.
Extrapolating a trend to 50 years is plain dumb when you are targeting an industrialized society. Frist, we aren't insect. If we start drowning in our own refuse, we'll adapt.
Second, God only knows what technologies will appear in the next half-century. Some of them could even be (gasp, argh!) beneficial to the environment.
As a reminder of past extrapolations gone all wrong, here is an excerpt from
"The history of Taxicabs" -- note the reference to the next fifty years.
In 1900 there were 11,000 registered cabs in London and well over double that now (that's not counting minicabs) Motorised taxis appeared in London in 1904 and got the name 'taxi' from the taxometer that standardised the fares from counting revolutions of their wheels. A statistician about ten years before that had seriously predicted that, at the 'current' rate of expansion and increase of population, horse manure would cover every street in London from wall to wall, even covering windows, within fifty years. Thank you Henry Ford.
I am fully aware of the constant progression of power density within processors. It's a problem in PowerPC and graphical chipsets, too.
But Intel is in a unique position to tackle the PC cooling problem from a system-wide point of view. Consider this: Intel is one of the largest motherboard suppliers in the world. They sell chipsets, mobos and assemblies. And they never started designing a system-wide cooling solution, in spite of owning many of the critical parts (CPU, bridges, minority stake in DRAM makers). No other actor is in such a position to set standards. Not Dell, not Compaq, not AMD.
That's why I believe Intel's relunctance to tackle this problem is plaguing the whole industry.
It's rather ironic that IBM and other large systems makers have
spent millions of $$ to get rid of water cooling in their systems. The
good old water-cooled TCM (Thermal Conduction Module) of IBM's 1990
mainframes was a very impressive piece of mechanical and thermal
engineering. If you worry about the heat generated by a single CPU,
imaging what it was like to cool one of these
babies.
TCMs included spring-loaded copper pistons to maintain good thermal
contacts on the chips. The thing was a plumber's nightmare. I remember
an IBM field engineer who had to improvise a pipe soldering the night
before a computer show because 1) there was no water cooling at the
stands (geez, what an oversight), 2) IBM had to require a fire permit
to let the plumber light a soldering torch, 3) by the time the fire
permit came in, the unionized plumber was home while the on-salary,
no-family-life engineer was getting ready for a looong night. Those
were the days, when computers were freakin' huge and had to be watered
like thirsty dinosaurs.
As a side note, the need for TCM was considered a
nuisance. Customers released a collective sigh of relief when IBM
dropped their fast but power-hungry bipolar technology in favor of
cheaper, easier to cool CMOS chips. It's a shame that Intel's sloppy
designs force an entire industry to go back to watering the dinos.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at SVGames.com. This is an outfit that sells, among other things, PDFs of old TSR AD&D books (the PDF were obtaining by scanning the books). The PDFs are a few bucks each and are sold only through download.
The neat thing is that they offer a temporary download URL that allows you to redo a download wihin a few days if the first one failed. You don't even need to bookmark the temp URL, you just reenter your name and CC number for authentication and can redo the download (without being charged twice, obviously). This is a very cool feature. I suggest your site adopt a similar functionality.
Journalists are fond of using dumbed-down abreviations such as Gbps or other acronyms. But I encourage technical writers to use the correct term, which is Gbit/s. Just as Mbit/s, Kbit/s.
There is something weird with computer science. People in this discipline badly need a common linguo because the field is evolving so fast. And yet, most CS practitionners couldn't be bothered to use the generally accepted vocabulary or abbreviations to describe their domain's problems. They invent their own, or incorrectly reuse existing jargon swiped from other disciplines.
Even worse, each branch of CS reuses general vague terms and overloads them with a different meaning. What's a "server"? What's a "page"? Depends who's talking.
As a result, CS is full of islands of disconnected knowledge and of specialists that cannot communicate with each other. Ever tried to have an OO programmer and a database admin talk to each other?
Mathematicians don't speak each other's linguo. But they carefully avoid using overlapping terms to define different things. That's what we should aim to do.
CS will keep being a cottage industry and a craftman discipline akin to voodoo, with cancelled project when wizardry fails, as long as all CS won't agree to speak a common language. Or at least a language where precision removes the overlapping meaning.
Granted, a precise vocabulary will not cure all the ills of CS. It not a sufficient condition for clear communication. But it's one of the necessary conditions.
So do your part. Write Gbit/s, not GBPS or other atrocities.
Even better: a kid with a laser pointer, sitting in front of me, almost ruined LOTR (a movie I was dying to see!). I was ready to rip his throat with my bare teeth, but unfortunately, just as I was standing up, the theater manager entered and threatened the little dimwit with expulsion, which made him stop being a nuisance.
This kid's behavior is similar to defecating on a diner table. It deserves flogging (for the example) and castration (to prevent the idiot from spreading his defective genome).
So I am demanding that the MPAA dispatch security guards in every theater, armed with a whip and a pair of scissors. Since their are gonna do it anyway to prevent people from capturing the movie on camcorders, we honest filmgoers might as well get something out of it.
Your storied made me laugh incrontrollably. I don't know if you embellished them but they have this pleasant yet slightly uncomfortable ring of truth (uncomfy 'cause it could happen to the reader!).
I really suggest you submit these stories to one of the sysadmin humor sites. You will make readers happy.
Were are moderation points when you need them? Sheesh...
LC, thanks a lot for the interesting pointer.
That's quite true for some architectures. However, note that the PowerPC CPU, for example, does a lot of optimizations at execution time with branch caching, speculative execution and other predictive techniques. This, on a code that has been somewhat optimized at compilation.
The question is not whether the IA-64 is the only processor to do these compile-time optimize. The question is whether it's wise to rely mainly on compile-time static optimization when you hope to be a performance leader. Turing says that you cannot, because static optimization, obtained by guessing the execution code path, is always inferior to dynamic optimization generated from the actual code path with the actual data.
Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?
The Itanium relies heavily on exceedingly good compilers that will perform for the IA64 the same level of optimization that regular, on-the-fly predictive optimization do in RISC chips.
The main obstacle with this method is that Turing's theorem says static compile-time optimization will never work as well as dynamic optimization. This is because, roughly, the only way to guess what a program will do with a given set of input data is to execute it with its actual data set. Here is a link where a reader of The Register addressed this concern in 1999.
Is anyone aware of how well the limits predicting by Turing can apply to the compile-time IA64 algorithms?
Too bad the above was posted as AC, because it's absolutely right: The laser-to-dump-heat is against the laws of thermodynamics.
You cannot generate power from ambiant heat. You need to transfer it between its source (here, the star) and a heat sink. The heat sink is normally a radiator warmer than the ambiant temperature, but you can use a body with a high specific heat coefficient (in clear, something that needs a lot of heat, expressed in Joules or in Watt.hours, to be warmed up by one degree, like the liquid fuel tank in the JSF case).
However, in that Uplift novel, the starship clearly cannot get a radiator warmer than the star, which is why they need this laser thing. But they can't use a laser either, 'cause first they'd need a heat transfer process, hence a heat sink.
So the author was, err, not living up to his hard-science credibility pretenses. It would have been better to fit the ship with some pure unobtainium heat shield or force field.
Fellow Linux lovers, this is our chance.
Yes, dear devout followers of the Penguin, now is our historical opportunity to prove, once and for all, that 200 monkeys banging on 200 keyboards can produce a better OS than Windows 2000!
We need to send them keyboards now. What's their address?
As usual, Ballmer is either lying or deluded. I recently fielded a call for a large Wall Street company that is deploying IBM software for Linux. Considering the size of the lunch tabs picked by the IBM sales person, I can tell you this is not a small contract.
IBM sells complex, expensive products such as DB2 and WebSphere for Linux. These pieces of software are certainly not free (nor open-source) and they seem to sell very well.
Please don't start a flame war against the closed-source nature of DB2. That's not the point. The point is that Ballmer does not have a clue.
Actually, the first powered, heavier-than-air flight occured way before 1903. It was achieved by Clément Ader, a wealthy French electrical engineer, who made the first piloted powered takeoff in history, at Armainvilliers, France, in October 1890. He was piloting the Eole, a bat-winged, steam-powered aircraft (with a 10-HP steam engine!). Although he covered a distance of only 165 ft (50 meters), this was enough for the French Army to encourage further experiments and fund Ader's work.
The French Army, not famed for its farsightedness and its vision, threatened to rip apart the fabric of reality by taking a bold, inspired bet on an unproven concept! But read on.
The distance of the first flight wasn't much, but compare to Wright's 12 seconds in the air. Clément Ader's mistake was to take off in the same direction as the wind instead of against it. Nevertheless, Ader persevered.
Ader build several new aircrafts. He claims that he achieved a successful, straight line flight on the Avion III prototype in 1897, a machine still lacking controllability. However, the French Army, its sponsor, wanted a fully maneuverable craft able to transport troops and bombds right away. The Army lost patience and cut Ader's funding. The temporary threat to the natural order of the universe was quashed, and equilibrium was restored. Whew.
You can read more on Clément Ader here. Technical specs of Ader's machines can be found here. Engineering students of Ecole Centrale de Paris constructed a scale model of the Eole that was able to fly.
Hmmm, last time I checked, I didn't see to many hydrogen wells around Texas or Dar-el-Salam.
A fuel cell needs either hydrogen or ethanol. In both cases, you need to manufacture the fuel. Ethanol can be manufactured from cellulose, but large, automotive-market sized production would certainly require a process starting from hydrocarbides (i.e., fossil fuels).
As for hydrogen, it is a way to store energy, not a source of energy. You have to manufacture the stuff. You basically need 120-150 Wh of energy to store 100 Wh worth of hydrogen, in the best case. I'd be pleasantly surprised by any process with an overall efficiency better than 50%.
So we'd still need to expand a LOT of energy to manufacture the fuel for fuel-cell cars.
The US could resume funding fusion power, but this research has been cancelled for all practical purposes.
So forget about dreams of not relying on fossil fuels. Unless the US finally resume building nuclear power plants and stop burning rotten dino juice. Japan and Europe rely on nuclear power and aren't glowing in the dark...
A friend of mine lived in Provence (Southern France). His mom used to cook with a lot of thyme (an aromatic herb) collected from her garden.
The French denied that the radioactive clouds emitted by the Chernobyl explosions ever crossed the border (that ole' Maginot line is vairee effective, Monsieur!). The French government never sent any serious warning.
My friend developed a thyroid cancer. He now sports a beautiful throat scar but he's alive. The surgeon's professional opinion is that thyme and other aromatics concentrate radioisotopes, and that eating stuff grown in a Provence garden from 1986 to 1990 or so was asking for trouble. He said he had already seen a lot of case and had never been so busy with new thyroid cancer cases.
Curiously, right after the Chernobyl events, the French government reclassified Geiger counters as restricted military items unavailable to civilians...
So as you can see, the French managed to keep a lid on truth even better than the Soviets. The sad fact is that while the babushkas were controlled in Moscow, nobody in France had sent a warning about checking certain crops for radiations.
The truth is not going to be easy to unearth in that case because the subject is highly political.
Geez, I wonder how the Online Data Corp web site got hacked so easily... Let's see on Netcraft...
Yep, "The site www.onlinedatacorp.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000" (and with an uptime of less than a day at that).
And what about the vendor with a guessed password? Netcraft it again... You, ahem, guessed it: The site TalkingTP.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
I dunno about you, but whenever I see a web page with the magical .asp suffix, I carefully avoid to even turn on cookies. Much less give them my name and CC number. Because I know that it's only a question of time before they get hacked, owner and stripped from their customer files.
telnet naam.pair.com 25
.
Trying 209.68.1.237...
Connected to naam.pair.com (209.68.1.237).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 naam.pair.com ESMTP
HELO test.lextext.com
250 naam.pair.com
mail from: randomuser@test.lextext.com
250 ok
rcpt to: bret@lextext.com
250 ok
DATA
354 go ahead
Hello Mr. Fausett,
your mail server is wide open. please fix it.
250 ok
quit
221 naam.pair.com
Connection closed by foreign host.
So it seems the article published in New Architect is wrong. It is defamatory and it is claiming that the guy is innocent while he's guilty as sin.
I guess that's what passes for lawyers nowadays...
Please DO NOT flood the poor guy with email. He's enough trouble already: He's a lawyer, he's been caught pants down after claiming he wore belts and suspenders, he's a lawyer, he's been blacklisted, and he's a lawyer.
Yeah, them terrorists are really clever. They started littering every US airport with clueless people dressed in an intimidating uniform, who boldly search you, frisk you and detain you at the drop of a hat. They forced a honest woman to drink her own breast milk, they pulled a women from a plane coming back from Vegas because of a sex toy...
Their cluelessness and hardnosedness turns even the shortest travel into a horrendous wasted-day experience, from which exhausted, humiliated passengers emerge swearing they'll drive next time.
And it's working too. Look, three US airline companies are currently under Chapter 11. The damage to the US economy is staggering. Airline losses are piling up, already amounting to tens of billions of dollars.
Oh, wait. The people who turned fast-food joint rejects into unfireable Federal agents are actually the gummint, not Muslim mujahidins. Ahem. Never mind.
According to the article, the SMS spams wouldbe limited to political messages only.
Yeah, sure, I can see it now..
Dear registered Democrat voter,
Your support in the upcoming election is crucial. You can't let Jesse Helmes get reelected *again*, can you? Help us get rid of him! Our plan is to send him a kit comprising our patented Herbal Viagra, our Miracle Penis Enlargement pill and our Female Attractor Pheromone After-Shave. Pretty soon the old geezer will be too busy to leave home, and then he'll die of sheer exhaustion.
But we need to test the kit first. That's why we're offering it to you for only $199.99. We figured that as it is, you probably don't get much. Why else would you be a registered Democrat voter?
Don't delay, act now, call 1-800-SMS-SPAM.
See why I have my doubts about the political message only exemption?
P.S. I could have picked Hillary and the Republicans. Nothing personal.
Oy. When we Nooyoykers first named the towns here, we tried to use name ending in "hug" and "fuzzy", but the freakin' Vermont and California "sensitive" cuties beat us and copyrighted the names.
Now all our town names end in KILL and MAIM and WAR and TAXES and it's all their fault!.
It used to be that honest companies would cluelessly decide to use spam. Once, in 1994 or so, I got a spam email from a flower shop in a foreign country. It had legit contact info. I called long distance to tell them it was the most despicable way of advertising, and this mom-and-pop shop was not even aware that their son was spamming on their behalf. They were the kind of people that needed education. But these days are over except for rare exceptions. Spammers are not naive, misguided-but-honest people anymore.
Nowadays, the huge majority of spams comes from people who push illegal or fraudulent goods and services. I'm afraid a mere law against them would not be very effective, because what they sell is often illegal in the first place. One would need a federal law making it easy to trace a spammer from the Post Office box or telephone numbers he provides.
Even so, you still have totally anonymous spams just spreading misleading info such as stock schemes.
So I am afraid educating the companies is not going to solve the problem. To get an accurate image, picture an illegal drug lab that needs to get rid of its toxic waste. Spammers are akin to people offering to dump this toxic waste in a reservoir lake for a dime a ton. They already know the lab is illegal, they don't care. These people don't need education, they need jail time and enormous fines.
As for China's open SMTP relays, I suggest the US Dept of Commerce should insist that the guys maintaining open relays should be considered as commiting economic sabotage. In China, the punishment for this is the death penalty. That would solve the Chinese open relay problem quickly.
Of course, spammers from Singapore would then promptly set an operation for selling the organs harvested from all these executed Chinese spammers...
Here we are, in 2004. I listened to Microsoft, I made sure my new PC has a Palladium chip integrated on the motherboard. This way, I'm told, my PC will run only cryptographically signed programs, which will prevent these evil virus to execute.
But since I cannot afford to buy a key from MS each time I write a Word macro, I'll have to allow them to run.
And since Outlook cannot be removed from my Windows 2003 PPPP (Palladium-Protected Professional Plus), I use it for all my email. I use macros there, too, because I need Outlook to update my calendar when my boss sends me a meeting invitation.
And Outlook 2003 PPPP and Word 2003 PPPP are Palladium-signed applications. So they're safe, right?
I am sure nobody will ever find any buffer overflow or format string vulnerability in these apps, and that none will ever use them to create another of these worms that propagate using the deadly Word+Outlook combo, and can be activated merely by previewing the message.
This is such a nice improvement over the current situation. So who care if I have to insert my credit card in the MS PPPP Card Reader and pay $1.50 each time I want to read the news on MSNBCNN? That's definitely worth the price.
** N ** O ** T ** ! **
Indeed. You need to sacrifice at least the mythical all-redhair goat if you want to get 3 days of uptime with NT5.0 a.k.a. Win2000
I saw a sig saying: Taking software security advice from Microsoft is like taking airline security advice from Bin Laden.
I disagree. Bin Laden proved that he knew a lot about airline security (and how to defeat it).
For all its self-congratulation, MS still does not know how to achieve code quality in a large software project. They do a lot of wide-and-shallow useability studies, but they pay as much attention to reliability testing as Hollywood pays attention to scriptwriters (i.e., not a lot. Remember the old joke? "How do you spot a blonde would-be actress in a movie cast? She sleeps with the writer.")
I'm out of points, so someone please mod this up.
The Wattenburg method is a modern variant of the chain roller, an antique minefield clearing vehicle that had long chains attached to a horizontal roll rotating a few feet above the ground in front of the armored vehicle. The ends of the long chains would hit the ground with enough force to trigger their explosion, 10 to 15 meters ahead. So the concept is definitely proven.
If you really want to trigger a surface-laid mine or ammunition from far away, it is much cheaper to just fire at it using a 20-mm cannon. But of course that would be a cheap solution. Way too cheap, probably.
Extrapolating a trend to 50 years is plain dumb when you are targeting an industrialized society. Frist, we aren't insect. If we start drowning in our own refuse, we'll adapt.
Second, God only knows what technologies will appear in the next half-century. Some of them could even be (gasp, argh!) beneficial to the environment.
As a reminder of past extrapolations gone all wrong, here is an excerpt from "The history of Taxicabs" -- note the reference to the next fifty years.
In 1900 there were 11,000 registered cabs in London and well over double that now (that's not counting minicabs) Motorised taxis appeared in London in 1904 and got the name 'taxi' from the taxometer that standardised the fares from counting revolutions of their wheels. A statistician about ten years before that had seriously predicted that, at the 'current' rate of expansion and increase of population, horse manure would cover every street in London from wall to wall, even covering windows, within fifty years. Thank you Henry Ford.
True, it's not just Intel's fault.
I am fully aware of the constant progression of power density within processors. It's a problem in PowerPC and graphical chipsets, too.
But Intel is in a unique position to tackle the PC cooling problem from a system-wide point of view. Consider this: Intel is one of the largest motherboard suppliers in the world. They sell chipsets, mobos and assemblies. And they never started designing a system-wide cooling solution, in spite of owning many of the critical parts (CPU, bridges, minority stake in DRAM makers). No other actor is in such a position to set standards. Not Dell, not Compaq, not AMD.
That's why I believe Intel's relunctance to tackle this problem is plaguing the whole industry.
Thanks for your answer,
It's rather ironic that IBM and other large systems makers have spent millions of $$ to get rid of water cooling in their systems. The good old water-cooled TCM (Thermal Conduction Module) of IBM's 1990 mainframes was a very impressive piece of mechanical and thermal engineering. If you worry about the heat generated by a single CPU, imaging what it was like to cool one of these babies.
TCMs included spring-loaded copper pistons to maintain good thermal contacts on the chips. The thing was a plumber's nightmare. I remember an IBM field engineer who had to improvise a pipe soldering the night before a computer show because 1) there was no water cooling at the stands (geez, what an oversight), 2) IBM had to require a fire permit to let the plumber light a soldering torch, 3) by the time the fire permit came in, the unionized plumber was home while the on-salary, no-family-life engineer was getting ready for a looong night. Those were the days, when computers were freakin' huge and had to be watered like thirsty dinosaurs.
As a side note, the need for TCM was considered a nuisance. Customers released a collective sigh of relief when IBM dropped their fast but power-hungry bipolar technology in favor of cheaper, easier to cool CMOS chips. It's a shame that Intel's sloppy designs force an entire industry to go back to watering the dinos.