The top-end racing cars use pneumatic valves. There's no float, because all the movement is positive, i.e. no "let the spring push it back to rest", but rather "push in the air to open, suck out the air to close".
And in response to the sibling posts: sure, they only run for 200-500 miles at a time, but they run at very close to the absolute limits of the engine the whole time. Also, many of the top-end racing leagues have a limit on the number of engines a car is allowed to go through per season; to my understanding, most of those numbers are in the very low single digits.
Communism and fascism are two very different things. Fascism basically says "everybody who's not like us, sucks, and shall be removed from society" (mechanism of removal unspecified). Communism, in theory, is basically "everybody is the same, no matter whoever or whatever they are". Politically, communism is far-left, and fascism is far-right.
Totalitarianism is totalitarianism, which is probably where you're getting caught. Any form of government can be totalitarian. Trying to imagine, say, a totalitarian democracy may sound a little weird, but it seems possible.
Sure, the online backup services seem pretty convenient, but what happens if you need the data NOW, and say your DSL line got destroyed, or the cable company blew away? No connectivity for you; guess you'll have to wait. Even if your connection is up, how many other users are downloading their backup data at the same time? You'll be waiting for a long time as bandwidth is stretched to the limit. Basically what I'm saying here is: don't depend on somebody else, or if you do, make SURE there's as little that can go wrong with their part as possible. Remember, there's all sorts of drama going on if you're trying to recover from a disaster, and you don't want to add to it if you can help it.
Doing your own backups, and storing them in secure sites (like Iron Mountain, as other posters have suggested - they do this kind of thing for a living, and that's ALL they do) is the only way to go. Your backups are local, and you can generally lay your hands on them in hours. Which means you can begin the restore process in hours, not days or weeks. And as another poster noted, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. Tape drives are expensive, but the loss of an entire business because somebody wanted to cheap it out, well, you know the rest.
Now if only they could allow using of key bindings which users expect. Sure, windows users expect the windows-style key bindings, but for Unix-heads, many (dare I say most?) probably expect the emacs-style bindings in a text box, because that's what Moz used, and Netscape before that, and there is a whole history of Unix GUI programs which have offered those same key bindings for YEARS. I switched to Konq because of it.
Let's hear it for the principle of least surprise. Or not.
Well said! If I had mod points, you'd surely get 'em.
To take your point a little further, emotion is the wrong mindset to have when dealing with any problems, not just security problems - as you way, it just clouds judgement, and causes mistakes.
I am a system admin, formerly a programmer, and I see this in my everyday work. Some "programmers" and "system admins" I deal with get really upset if I tell them, always as constructively as I can, their solutions are impractical, or will take too much manual maintenance, or are just plain too complex. I always try to offer alternatives when I can. Yet they generally take my criticism very personally, and it's quite clear that's all it is, personal animosity. Most of the time, their solutions are houses of cards, and fall down with regularity. And they'll never admit that there could be a better way to do things, because that would also be admitting that, what, they are not the best?
I try to be as dispassionate as I can while at work. I don't care about who's better than the other guys, I care about correctness of function and ease of maintenance, and I call it the way I see it. It's motivated self-interest - whatever keeps my pager from going off in the middle of the night is a Good Thing(tm).
They write a client that finds the SHA1 hashes of files they want to poison. Then they report that they have file foo.mpg, with SHA1 hash of , which they've found out from other hosts which have the actual file (likely a simple task). Then when some host requests a piece of foo.mpg from the poisoning host, they send output from/dev/random, instead of the real data. Easy.
Dunno if Bittorrent does hashing of the individual chunks, but I know that Gnutella only computes the hash (also SHA1, IIRC) of the whole file.
OMG, the text of this patent is some of the most ridiculous stuff I've ever read! Claims 1 and 18 are somewhat legit (it's a roundish crustless sammich made in a specific way, and crimped at the edge), but the rest of it is pure comedy. The really funny stuff starts at around claim 35.
Can anybody tell me why there are a lot of claims (like claims 2-17) which seem to be repeated, but along two "distinct" lines of "reasoning" which actually seem to be identical?
Sure, but you don't need to go to such lengths. You can see the bottles of iron and copper he used in one of the pics, that's the first step. The second step is to get some of the rusting agent that is made by the same company (you can find both the metal paint and the rusting agent at craft stores), and bada-bing, rust. Check this other rusted box project for a little simpler view of how it works. And, as another poster mentioned, the rust does come off very easily, so you need to clear coat the heck out of it or something.
I toyed around with a copper-patina box (Statue-of-Liberty green), but it wasn't working too well. I ran out of patina agent halfway through, and really need to do the whole thing over, but haven't gotten back to it yet.
The middle mouse thing is really drag & drop, with the advantage that you can rearrange the windows and open/iconize them between when you "drag" and when you "drop", and also the advantage that it is trivial to "abort a drag". Unfortunatley the original X programs thought drag & drop was sufficient and did not do clipboard, which is the source of complaints.
It's amazing how backwards you got this. The select/middle-click copy/paste operation of X has NOTHING to do with drag-n-drop. In fact, you have to do NO programming at all to make it work. It just works all by itself. And the little xclipboard program, which allows you to manage X's last N selections, has come with X for longer than I've been using it (like '96 or so). Sure, being an Athena-widget-using program, it's not pretty, but it's simple and it works great.
Drag-n-drop, OTOH, requires a pretty large scaffolding of programming behind it to do much of anything. You have to decide what types you will supply, or what types you will accept, and register yourself as a drop site or drag source, and the drag source even has to handle any data conversion that might be necessary (if you're not just moving plain-text); it's quite more complicated than the no-op of making cut-n-paste work.
Apparently they do mind that I scrape one Usenet group, for maybe 5k articles a week (not much, in the grand scheme, certainly less than you), and actually read a handful of non-binary discussion groups. Sometime in late December, article download speeds went in the tank, and not just for RR's Usenet host. I've got a Supernews account through another provider, and it slowed down at just the same time. A couple of my friends noticed the slowdown as well. It's pretty annoying.
There's native speakers, and then there's native speakers. Not too long ago, Sun moved all their Remote Monitoring callcenter stuff to a place in Scotland. I'm a native USian speaker, and some of those Scots are damn hard to understand - and theoretically we're native speakers of the same language. And before all you Scots jump on me, a buddy of mine from Bristol, England (and I occasionally have to have him repeat things too) agreed that many Scots are hard to understand.
Surely he must be aware of it. Perhaps he thinks the world is so materialistic that everyone would simply buy his argument.
I've noticed that people's perceptions of "the way things are" are heavily colored by the way they are. For instance, at a development house I used to work for, we didn't have a legal piece of software in the house (the BSA would have had a field day with that place!). So the CEO was extra-concerned about piracy with everything we produced - "is it copyable, can we keep it to ourselves" kinda thing. He was a software pirate, so he figured everybody else was too. The general Slashdot opinion is that OSS and FS are good things, and that how could anybody possibly think they aren't? Darl's just the same, except he wants to make boatloads of money on his supposedly-copyrighted stuff, and why wouldn't everybody else want to do the same? It's all about what motivates you, which colors your world view.
Nah, that quote actually proves that SCO has no idea what the Eldred decision was actually about. The clause "for a limited time" was the crux of the case, not whether or not Congress had the power to create copyrights. Remember that the case challenged the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act, and also called into question some of the previous copyright-term extension legislation.
Congress is explicitly allowed to create copyrights, and they have done so; this is in the Constitution. The "limited time", as it stands right now, is basically unlimited for purposes of the lifespan of a single person. Your (very old) grandchildren might have free access to use a copyrighted work which was originally published today.
Skip step 2, and you're golden. Oh, and instead of ctrl-v being the paste operation, middle-button on the mouse is (or a 2-button chord, for those without a third button). There are clipboard programs which will allow you to manage many different "cuttings", and switch between them. Matter of fact, one of these programs comes with the base X installation (xclipboard).
The Truevision Targa cards would do 24 bit color, IIRC. They were available at least from the early 90s, and probably back into the late 80s. They took the phrase "ridiculously expensive" to new heights. Mostly they got used in high-end PCs running CAD/CAE and image processing. Like what the SGIs of old were used for.
Bush got along wonderfully (as much as can be expected) as governer of Texas.
Comments like this just make me chuckle. Most people, even Texans, have no idea that the Texas governorship is the biggest cake job in the world. You have all sorts of prestige, without any power. The lieutenant governor has WAY more power than the governor does, and the legislature has ALL the rest. About all the governor can do is pardon death row prisoners. The people who drew up the constitution under which Texas was readmitted to the United States after the Civil War, wanted to have a powerless governor, so any actions of the state government (like cecession, for instance) would theoretically be a bit more thought out (note that I said "theoretically"). Many state laws in Texas actually require a constitutional amendment. For an example, they wanted to increase the speed limit on some tollways in Houston, but couldn't do it because the Texas legislature wasn't in session, and the change required altering the Texas constitution.
In short, being the Texas governor doesn't mean anything. House plants could be effective governors of Texas.
Peanut butter and jelly sammiches? Man, I'm screwed! I best get a license, pronto!
The best idiotic patent I've seen yet was patented by Penn & Teller (yeah, the comedy guys), and it was a method for using a hottub to pick up chicks. Sweet!
Because there's no reason that you should have to. If the printer were decently well-made enough to live for 10 years, you wouldn't have to buy a new one every 6 months or year. But because they're either cheaply engineered or cheaply manufactured, they do break down very quickly, and aren't worth saving. It's all part of the consumption ethic of modern society: if you aren't buying stuff, you aren't a good person. I'm not pointing fingers here; my favorite pastime of late is surfing ebay for cool shit.:)
I've used basically 3 printers over the entire time I've been using computers. The first was an old Epson MX100, purchased in about '81 - the wide-carriage, 9-pin dot matrix printer that's probably still working today. Then we got an HP Laserjet 4L, a solid, if feature-free and memory-light printer; still in service to this day. The last one I've gotten is a Lexmark Optra S 1255N, which I've had for about 5 years, I'd guess. I finally had to replace the toner cart a few months ago, but other than that, it's been service-free.
And to contrast, my g/f bought a computer the other year, and got some Canon bubblejet printer or other, which was a lump of worthless trash about 3 months later. Why? It was more of a pain to trash it and have to set up a new one, so I eventually just said screw it and set her up with the networked Lexmark. Never had another problem.
While a lot of people will disagree with me because their X + KDE runs smooth on their Athlon 2000
I've got a dual-headed dual-333MHz system with a pair of ancient #9 I128 cards, and I'll disagree with you. My system runs X and KDE pretty snappily, with plenty of applications on top. The only thing that repaints or moves slowly is Moz, but that seems to be the fault of Moz (from some other posters in this story).
Ah yes, I remember the first time I ever saw Myst. One of my buddies had been playing, and he was having trouble getting the rocket ship to move. He called me up for help (I'm cursed with perfect pitch), and I was immediately hooked. The immersion in the world was the most compelling part of the game; you can truly lose contact with the real world (and definitely real time) with games like this.
I'm curious if RealMyst was as good as I think it could/should have been, as I haven't played it (don't run windoze). Anybody have any comments?
I also really like going to another world in the movies. Stargate, Mad Max, Tron, Blade Runner, Dune (movie and miniseries), Children of Dune, and even the horrid Waterworld all had fantastic worlds, even if, in a couple cases, the stories left a bit to be desired.
Slashdot Mirror
The top-end racing cars use pneumatic valves. There's no float, because all the movement is positive, i.e. no "let the spring push it back to rest", but rather "push in the air to open, suck out the air to close".
And in response to the sibling posts: sure, they only run for 200-500 miles at a time, but they run at very close to the absolute limits of the engine the whole time. Also, many of the top-end racing leagues have a limit on the number of engines a car is allowed to go through per season; to my understanding, most of those numbers are in the very low single digits.
Communism and fascism are two very different things. Fascism basically says "everybody who's not like us, sucks, and shall be removed from society" (mechanism of removal unspecified). Communism, in theory, is basically "everybody is the same, no matter whoever or whatever they are". Politically, communism is far-left, and fascism is far-right.
Totalitarianism is totalitarianism, which is probably where you're getting caught. Any form of government can be totalitarian. Trying to imagine, say, a totalitarian democracy may sound a little weird, but it seems possible.
Sure, the online backup services seem pretty convenient, but what happens if you need the data NOW, and say your DSL line got destroyed, or the cable company blew away? No connectivity for you; guess you'll have to wait. Even if your connection is up, how many other users are downloading their backup data at the same time? You'll be waiting for a long time as bandwidth is stretched to the limit. Basically what I'm saying here is: don't depend on somebody else, or if you do, make SURE there's as little that can go wrong with their part as possible. Remember, there's all sorts of drama going on if you're trying to recover from a disaster, and you don't want to add to it if you can help it.
Doing your own backups, and storing them in secure sites (like Iron Mountain, as other posters have suggested - they do this kind of thing for a living, and that's ALL they do) is the only way to go. Your backups are local, and you can generally lay your hands on them in hours. Which means you can begin the restore process in hours, not days or weeks. And as another poster noted, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. Tape drives are expensive, but the loss of an entire business because somebody wanted to cheap it out, well, you know the rest.
Now if only they could allow using of key bindings which users expect. Sure, windows users expect the windows-style key bindings, but for Unix-heads, many (dare I say most?) probably expect the emacs-style bindings in a text box, because that's what Moz used, and Netscape before that, and there is a whole history of Unix GUI programs which have offered those same key bindings for YEARS. I switched to Konq because of it.
Let's hear it for the principle of least surprise. Or not.
Well said! If I had mod points, you'd surely get 'em.
To take your point a little further, emotion is the wrong mindset to have when dealing with any problems, not just security problems - as you way, it just clouds judgement, and causes mistakes.
I am a system admin, formerly a programmer, and I see this in my everyday work. Some "programmers" and "system admins" I deal with get really upset if I tell them, always as constructively as I can, their solutions are impractical, or will take too much manual maintenance, or are just plain too complex. I always try to offer alternatives when I can. Yet they generally take my criticism very personally, and it's quite clear that's all it is, personal animosity. Most of the time, their solutions are houses of cards, and fall down with regularity. And they'll never admit that there could be a better way to do things, because that would also be admitting that, what, they are not the best?
I try to be as dispassionate as I can while at work. I don't care about who's better than the other guys, I care about correctness of function and ease of maintenance, and I call it the way I see it. It's motivated self-interest - whatever keeps my pager from going off in the middle of the night is a Good Thing(tm).
They write a client that finds the SHA1 hashes of files they want to poison. Then they report that they have file foo.mpg, with SHA1 hash of , which they've found out from other hosts which have the actual file (likely a simple task). Then when some host requests a piece of foo.mpg from the poisoning host, they send output from /dev/random, instead of the real data. Easy.
Dunno if Bittorrent does hashing of the individual chunks, but I know that Gnutella only computes the hash (also SHA1, IIRC) of the whole file.
So what you're saying, is that if we, uh, "take care of" that small number of in-duh-viduals (heh), that most of our spam will go away?
Only one possible response to that: get a rope.
OMG, the text of this patent is some of the most ridiculous stuff I've ever read! Claims 1 and 18 are somewhat legit (it's a roundish crustless sammich made in a specific way, and crimped at the edge), but the rest of it is pure comedy. The really funny stuff starts at around claim 35.
Can anybody tell me why there are a lot of claims (like claims 2-17) which seem to be repeated, but along two "distinct" lines of "reasoning" which actually seem to be identical?
Sure, but you don't need to go to such lengths. You can see the bottles of iron and copper he used in one of the pics, that's the first step. The second step is to get some of the rusting agent that is made by the same company (you can find both the metal paint and the rusting agent at craft stores), and bada-bing, rust. Check this other rusted box project for a little simpler view of how it works. And, as another poster mentioned, the rust does come off very easily, so you need to clear coat the heck out of it or something.
I toyed around with a copper-patina box (Statue-of-Liberty green), but it wasn't working too well. I ran out of patina agent halfway through, and really need to do the whole thing over, but haven't gotten back to it yet.
The middle mouse thing is really drag & drop, with the advantage that you can rearrange the windows and open/iconize them between when you "drag" and when you "drop", and also the advantage that it is trivial to "abort a drag". Unfortunatley the original X programs thought drag & drop was sufficient and did not do clipboard, which is the source of complaints.
It's amazing how backwards you got this. The select/middle-click copy/paste operation of X has NOTHING to do with drag-n-drop. In fact, you have to do NO programming at all to make it work. It just works all by itself. And the little xclipboard program, which allows you to manage X's last N selections, has come with X for longer than I've been using it (like '96 or so). Sure, being an Athena-widget-using program, it's not pretty, but it's simple and it works great.
Drag-n-drop, OTOH, requires a pretty large scaffolding of programming behind it to do much of anything. You have to decide what types you will supply, or what types you will accept, and register yourself as a drop site or drag source, and the drag source even has to handle any data conversion that might be necessary (if you're not just moving plain-text); it's quite more complicated than the no-op of making cut-n-paste work.
Apparently they do mind that I scrape one Usenet group, for maybe 5k articles a week (not much, in the grand scheme, certainly less than you), and actually read a handful of non-binary discussion groups. Sometime in late December, article download speeds went in the tank, and not just for RR's Usenet host. I've got a Supernews account through another provider, and it slowed down at just the same time. A couple of my friends noticed the slowdown as well. It's pretty annoying.
There's native speakers, and then there's native speakers. Not too long ago, Sun moved all their Remote Monitoring callcenter stuff to a place in Scotland. I'm a native USian speaker, and some of those Scots are damn hard to understand - and theoretically we're native speakers of the same language. And before all you Scots jump on me, a buddy of mine from Bristol, England (and I occasionally have to have him repeat things too) agreed that many Scots are hard to understand.
I cried all night.
As in "I laughed, I cried, I kissed eight bucks goodbye"? That's the only possible explanation.
Surely he must be aware of it. Perhaps he thinks the world is so materialistic that everyone would simply buy his argument.
I've noticed that people's perceptions of "the way things are" are heavily colored by the way they are. For instance, at a development house I used to work for, we didn't have a legal piece of software in the house (the BSA would have had a field day with that place!). So the CEO was extra-concerned about piracy with everything we produced - "is it copyable, can we keep it to ourselves" kinda thing. He was a software pirate, so he figured everybody else was too. The general Slashdot opinion is that OSS and FS are good things, and that how could anybody possibly think they aren't? Darl's just the same, except he wants to make boatloads of money on his supposedly-copyrighted stuff, and why wouldn't everybody else want to do the same? It's all about what motivates you, which colors your world view.
Nah, that quote actually proves that SCO has no idea what the Eldred decision was actually about. The clause "for a limited time" was the crux of the case, not whether or not Congress had the power to create copyrights. Remember that the case challenged the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act, and also called into question some of the previous copyright-term extension legislation.
Congress is explicitly allowed to create copyrights, and they have done so; this is in the Constitution. The "limited time", as it stands right now, is basically unlimited for purposes of the lifespan of a single person. Your (very old) grandchildren might have free access to use a copyrighted work which was originally published today.
Skip step 2, and you're golden. Oh, and instead of ctrl-v being the paste operation, middle-button on the mouse is (or a 2-button chord, for those without a third button). There are clipboard programs which will allow you to manage many different "cuttings", and switch between them. Matter of fact, one of these programs comes with the base X installation (xclipboard).
The Truevision Targa cards would do 24 bit color, IIRC. They were available at least from the early 90s, and probably back into the late 80s. They took the phrase "ridiculously expensive" to new heights. Mostly they got used in high-end PCs running CAD/CAE and image processing. Like what the SGIs of old were used for.
Bush got along wonderfully (as much as can be expected) as governer of Texas.
Comments like this just make me chuckle. Most people, even Texans, have no idea that the Texas governorship is the biggest cake job in the world. You have all sorts of prestige, without any power. The lieutenant governor has WAY more power than the governor does, and the legislature has ALL the rest. About all the governor can do is pardon death row prisoners. The people who drew up the constitution under which Texas was readmitted to the United States after the Civil War, wanted to have a powerless governor, so any actions of the state government (like cecession, for instance) would theoretically be a bit more thought out (note that I said "theoretically"). Many state laws in Texas actually require a constitutional amendment. For an example, they wanted to increase the speed limit on some tollways in Houston, but couldn't do it because the Texas legislature wasn't in session, and the change required altering the Texas constitution.
In short, being the Texas governor doesn't mean anything. House plants could be effective governors of Texas.
Peanut butter and jelly sammiches? Man, I'm screwed! I best get a license, pronto!
The best idiotic patent I've seen yet was patented by Penn & Teller (yeah, the comedy guys), and it was a method for using a hottub to pick up chicks. Sweet!
Because there's no reason that you should have to. If the printer were decently well-made enough to live for 10 years, you wouldn't have to buy a new one every 6 months or year. But because they're either cheaply engineered or cheaply manufactured, they do break down very quickly, and aren't worth saving. It's all part of the consumption ethic of modern society: if you aren't buying stuff, you aren't a good person. I'm not pointing fingers here; my favorite pastime of late is surfing ebay for cool shit. :)
I've used basically 3 printers over the entire time I've been using computers. The first was an old Epson MX100, purchased in about '81 - the wide-carriage, 9-pin dot matrix printer that's probably still working today. Then we got an HP Laserjet 4L, a solid, if feature-free and memory-light printer; still in service to this day. The last one I've gotten is a Lexmark Optra S 1255N, which I've had for about 5 years, I'd guess. I finally had to replace the toner cart a few months ago, but other than that, it's been service-free.
And to contrast, my g/f bought a computer the other year, and got some Canon bubblejet printer or other, which was a lump of worthless trash about 3 months later. Why? It was more of a pain to trash it and have to set up a new one, so I eventually just said screw it and set her up with the networked Lexmark. Never had another problem.
Two words: sleep optional.
Dude, I would so play that game.
Did anybody play the Blade Runner game that came out a year or two (or more?) ago? Any good?
Either that, or rolling dice...
Yeah, loaded dice.
While a lot of people will disagree with me because their X + KDE runs smooth on their Athlon 2000
I've got a dual-headed dual-333MHz system with a pair of ancient #9 I128 cards, and I'll disagree with you. My system runs X and KDE pretty snappily, with plenty of applications on top. The only thing that repaints or moves slowly is Moz, but that seems to be the fault of Moz (from some other posters in this story).
Ah yes, I remember the first time I ever saw Myst. One of my buddies had been playing, and he was having trouble getting the rocket ship to move. He called me up for help (I'm cursed with perfect pitch), and I was immediately hooked. The immersion in the world was the most compelling part of the game; you can truly lose contact with the real world (and definitely real time) with games like this.
I'm curious if RealMyst was as good as I think it could/should have been, as I haven't played it (don't run windoze). Anybody have any comments?
I also really like going to another world in the movies. Stargate, Mad Max, Tron, Blade Runner, Dune (movie and miniseries), Children of Dune, and even the horrid Waterworld all had fantastic worlds, even if, in a couple cases, the stories left a bit to be desired.