I used to salvage all sorts of gear from my job, saving rackmount gear that would otherwise have been junked.
However, as my rack (a small 22U unit) tended to get rather full, and it was generating a lot of heat and noise, I eventually looked to consolidate. Now, I keep one physical server that runs a couple of VMs, cisco router, switch, UPS, and the remaining space contains a shelf and a sliding drawer to keep spare parts, hard disks, etc. Now it's much more quiet, and doesn't heat my house all through the summer.:)
I really feel it was a combination. It was dramatically over-hyped, but at the same time that did serve to increase awareness and thus diminish the overall impact, much like the Y2K issue as mentioned.
The article correctly calls it a panic, IMHO.
I think also the virus was much less effective than people realized for a few important reasons:
1. Back then people were a lot less likely to have the internal clock set properly on their computers.
2. When and if the payload would trigger, the virus would eliminate itself. Much like a biological virus, if it kills the host, it ruins its chances for further infections.
Of course I found it amusing that some of the more interesting viruses saw a lot less press. Such as "Casino", which would trash your disk's system area, but it would restore it from a backup in RAM if you could win in the slot-machine game it popped up. That's much more evil and amusing.:)
I set up a large display on the front of my house, in what little space I have. But the only real technological bit, other than lights and flickering LEDs, and a Flying Crank Ghost, is a set of talking skulls. I use the "Scary Terry" servo control system, which is sold as a kit from Cowlacious.
I'm glad people are pointing out that there's really nothing special going on here. Eliza and other similar chat bot programs have been around for a very long time, and this certainly isn't the first time anyone has had two of them talk to each other. The only difference being that this one has visible avatars and speech synthesis, recorded for all of youtube to enjoy. It's amusing and worth sharing for that reason, but there's no breakthrough here.
The conversation strikes me as actually quite typical for this sort of chatbot, not unlike transcripts easily available for the last couple of decades. Many of the Loebner Prize competitors have much more natural conversations. And I should know, my entry in the competition many years ago failed horrendously.:)
Even static-IP VPS solutions are under fire for this. I host my own mail, and had been using my VPS for out-bound mail for quite a while, but I was increasingly having mail delayed for hours or blocked completely by some of the larger ISPs. My only solution was to add a static route to use comcasts outbound mail servers instead of my VPS, since I'm behind a comcast business line.
For a small business mail server, apparently your best bet is to use your ISP's mail server with a static mail route, unfortunately. And don't forget to set up SPF records with a proper include.
Actually, a 3m dish would work well as a small radio telescope. A lot of hobbyists use them for SETI, in fact, since a small diameter dish has a wider field of view than larger dishes.
That's a very good point (in reference to the anti-glare surface), and it probably has to boil down to personal preference. Even on typical matte-finish screens, individual pixels are still pretty clearly defined. Personally, I wouldn't describe the difference with a glossy screen using the word "vivid", but perhaps more "sharp".
But in my case, I find the reflections far more distracting and problematic than the mild loss of image quality that an anti-glare matte surface provides.
I've never gotten why people think glossy screens are inherently more vivid. I think you're right about it just being coincidental that they're also newer displays.
The underlying LCD isn't necessarily any different between a glossy or matte finish in front of it. So why do people prefer to see reflections in their screen? I've gone to considerable effort at times to position displays so as to reduce glare and reflections, so I certainly have no desire to make the problem worse by design.
I still have yet to see an argument in favor of glossy screens that seems valid.
I'm glad someone mentioned Starflight! This game was truly ahead of its time. Back when PC games were clunky with non-intuitive interfaces, this game reduced the controls to simple menu-based systems using the arrow keys and spacebar, and yet was robust enough to have a level of depth as a space RPG game that had never been seen before.
At the time, I played it on an original 4.77MHz IBM PC. The game was on two 360K floppies (and you could benefit greatly from having 2 drives to use both disks simultaneously).
The universe was fractal generated, allowing for over 800 unique planets with explorable surface maps.
It was highly influential on many games to come, including Star Control II which was another excellent game.
I was about to say that this was a well-thought out post, one I might have written about UO myself, until I got to the part about "a screenshot comic series", and then thought maybe I _did_ write this in my sleep or something.:)
Hey there Delusion, good to see you. Long time no see! I was Bones Dragon, in another life.:)
I urge everyone here to read Delusion's post if you want to understand UO and its player-base, in the context of the nascent 1997 MMO community. He really nails it.
VPS is rapidly becoming *the* most popular hosting method used by non bot herder spammers.
Or C. Neither. Thanks for assuming I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm referring to Linode.com. It's possible that it's getting abused by spammers occasionally, but I'm not aware of such complaints, it's a relatively small operation, and the staff seems pretty on-the-ball. The times that UCE-protect has added us to their blacklist that I'm aware of, it has been entirely due to IPs outside the Linode ranges as far as I could tell (which is supported by their arguments on the forum). I could be wrong, of course.
Whether it's a fair world or not, blacklisting entire blocks and not just the bot-infected or spammer hosts does more harm than good, especially when you're talking about blocking entire netblocks that cross multiple businesses full of non-spammer customers.
I am a mail admin, and I'm aware of VPS reputation, but that's not what this is about. I wouldn't use UCE-protect because I see it as nothing but a source of false-positives. Stopping spam is an important service to your users, but getting their legit mail through is more important.
You're complaining about SORBS but you use uceprotect? Yikes.
Uceprotect is one of those zealots that blocks entire/16 blocks because of a few spam sources, across entire ISPs.
On the VPS service I use, we occasionally get blocked because of some spammer IPs on an entirely different service, because further up the chain we share a common provider. To make it even more ridiculous, if we complain about this amongst ourselves on the VPS service's forum, the uceprotect folks come into the forum (they don't use the VPS service themselves as far as I know) and ARGUE WITH US, trying to tell us why WE'RE TO BLAME, as customers of a VPS service whose datacenter's ISP is shared by a few bots somewhere in the chain.
I'm not defending SORBS, but if you're going to complain about poor practices, you need to unclude uceprotect too.
You can start with one of the other TLD alternatives, and get the.com from the squatter later. Possibly for free.
This worked for me once-- I owned a.org and happily operated it with the.com variant already held by a squatter. As the.com came close to its expiration date, they approached me with an offer that was higher than I was willing to pay. A week later it expired and they renewed, they lowered the price, and I still ignored it. A few days later, during the renewal "grace period", they canceled their renewal, and the domain was up for grabs. So I got it from GoDaddy for about $10.
If you're patient enough, and they realize you're the only potential serious buyer, they may eventually give up.
Absolutely agreed. I've been content to allow ads through for years, but finally I saw one too many flashing ad, and one too many weight-loss ad with a protruding gut. I have one of my own, I don't need to see them when reading articles.
I've never been bothered by articles in printed magazines. It's these flashing and animated ones that drive me batty, and make me not want to even visit the websites in the first place!
In a way it was double-dipping. However, that was the edge that they provided over Netflix, considering that Blockbuster has historically charged more for the same level of service from Netflix.
The advantage was that you could watch more movies while waiting for the new ones to arrive through the mail. That advantage has now been reduced to having quicker access to movies in the short-term only, since it now delays the ones you would receive through the mail.
I wouldn't mind the change in the rules, except that Blockbuster is notorious for intermittently and inconsistently sitting on the returned movies for a week or so before mailing your next ones out. Being able to exchange them locally in the meantime took the sting out of that. Now it's only going to make it worse.
I recall someone mentioning at a previous job that there was an announcement about removal of an rdist that had been in use for quite some time. It was called 'prints'.
The memo referred to the rdist formally known as 'prints'...:)
lol, I got moderated down for being redundant even though I was one of the first to post attempting to redirect it to swap instead of "virtual memory"... heh, whatever.:)
Well, yes and no. For linux that's certainly true to a point. If you know exactly how much memory the specific services and applications will need for the tasks that the box is assigned to, and allocate RAM accordingly such that you always have sufficient cache and buffer space, you could do away with swap altogether and do just fine. This generally works best in a server or embedded environment where you know precisely what the requirements are for the job. The system simply won't be prepared to handle any significant deviations.
With a Windows machine, which I'm assuming will be a desktop for this case, I don't think you can accurately predict your needs. Then again, I'm not sure how efficient it is at handling swap (or I guess paging, as they call it), and thus needlessly swapping application memory to disk.
However, if you're like me, and tend to restrict the paging file to a specific size to avoid fragmentation (say, 4GB), then simply installing 8GB in your machine and deactivating swap altogether provides the same overall amount of virtual memory space, none of which touches disk. This can be a win, if you're willing to spend the $$$ for the extra RAM.
I think the more relevant question is why use swap if you have enough ram? If you're 100% certain that everything you do will always fit inside physical memory, technically you can do away with swap. I'm not sure how Windows will deal with this however.
Yes, the age at which males are having offspring has increased. I think the geneticist is talking about the average age, rather than starting age.
As the article mentions, in previous centuries, relatively few offspring would survive to adulthood. This required adults to have numerous offspring, having children starting at an early age and continuing into late adulthood. Today, most people have a few children and stop. So even though they're starting later, they're not continuing to have kids at the age of 50 anymore.
I think he has a point, but the article is incomplete. This narrower time frame in which adults are procreating also contributes to the reduction in natural selection (one of the more obvious contributors to this is modern medicine). For instance, if a male starts having offspring at the age of 16, and continues until the age of 60, he could not have had any life-threatening maladaptive traits. Compare two such males, and the one with more adaptive traits will have a higher chance of continuing to breed over that sort of time scale, and will thus be more genetically successful.
In modern society, people can die at the age of 32 from something that they were genetically predisposed to, and it probably won't affect their contribution to the genepool since they've already stopped reproducing.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to salvage all sorts of gear from my job, saving rackmount gear that would otherwise have been junked.
However, as my rack (a small 22U unit) tended to get rather full, and it was generating a lot of heat and noise, I eventually looked to consolidate. Now, I keep one physical server that runs a couple of VMs, cisco router, switch, UPS, and the remaining space contains a shelf and a sliding drawer to keep spare parts, hard disks, etc. Now it's much more quiet, and doesn't heat my house all through the summer. :)
I really feel it was a combination. It was dramatically over-hyped, but at the same time that did serve to increase awareness and thus diminish the overall impact, much like the Y2K issue as mentioned.
The article correctly calls it a panic, IMHO.
I think also the virus was much less effective than people realized for a few important reasons:
1. Back then people were a lot less likely to have the internal clock set properly on their computers.
2. When and if the payload would trigger, the virus would eliminate itself. Much like a biological virus, if it kills the host, it ruins its chances for further infections.
Of course I found it amusing that some of the more interesting viruses saw a lot less press. Such as "Casino", which would trash your disk's system area, but it would restore it from a backup in RAM if you could win in the slot-machine game it popped up. That's much more evil and amusing. :)
I set up a large display on the front of my house, in what little space I have. But the only real technological bit, other than lights and flickering LEDs, and a Flying Crank Ghost, is a set of talking skulls. I use the "Scary Terry" servo control system, which is sold as a kit from Cowlacious.
Test of my routine during assembly
Same routine, deployed into the display (gradual echo effect was accidental)
My display's web gallery
I'm glad people are pointing out that there's really nothing special going on here. Eliza and other similar chat bot programs have been around for a very long time, and this certainly isn't the first time anyone has had two of them talk to each other. The only difference being that this one has visible avatars and speech synthesis, recorded for all of youtube to enjoy. It's amusing and worth sharing for that reason, but there's no breakthrough here.
The conversation strikes me as actually quite typical for this sort of chatbot, not unlike transcripts easily available for the last couple of decades. Many of the Loebner Prize competitors have much more natural conversations. And I should know, my entry in the competition many years ago failed horrendously. :)
Even static-IP VPS solutions are under fire for this. I host my own mail, and had been using my VPS for out-bound mail for quite a while, but I was increasingly having mail delayed for hours or blocked completely by some of the larger ISPs. My only solution was to add a static route to use comcasts outbound mail servers instead of my VPS, since I'm behind a comcast business line.
For a small business mail server, apparently your best bet is to use your ISP's mail server with a static mail route, unfortunately. And don't forget to set up SPF records with a proper include.
Actually, a 3m dish would work well as a small radio telescope. A lot of hobbyists use them for SETI, in fact, since a small diameter dish has a wider field of view than larger dishes.
That's a very good point (in reference to the anti-glare surface), and it probably has to boil down to personal preference. Even on typical matte-finish screens, individual pixels are still pretty clearly defined. Personally, I wouldn't describe the difference with a glossy screen using the word "vivid", but perhaps more "sharp".
But in my case, I find the reflections far more distracting and problematic than the mild loss of image quality that an anti-glare matte surface provides.
I've never gotten why people think glossy screens are inherently more vivid. I think you're right about it just being coincidental that they're also newer displays.
The underlying LCD isn't necessarily any different between a glossy or matte finish in front of it. So why do people prefer to see reflections in their screen? I've gone to considerable effort at times to position displays so as to reduce glare and reflections, so I certainly have no desire to make the problem worse by design.
I still have yet to see an argument in favor of glossy screens that seems valid.
I'm glad someone mentioned Starflight! This game was truly ahead of its time. Back when PC games were clunky with non-intuitive interfaces, this game reduced the controls to simple menu-based systems using the arrow keys and spacebar, and yet was robust enough to have a level of depth as a space RPG game that had never been seen before.
At the time, I played it on an original 4.77MHz IBM PC. The game was on two 360K floppies (and you could benefit greatly from having 2 drives to use both disks simultaneously).
The universe was fractal generated, allowing for over 800 unique planets with explorable surface maps.
It was highly influential on many games to come, including Star Control II which was another excellent game.
I was about to say that this was a well-thought out post, one I might have written about UO myself, until I got to the part about "a screenshot comic series", and then thought maybe I _did_ write this in my sleep or something. :)
Hey there Delusion, good to see you. Long time no see! I was Bones Dragon, in another life. :)
I urge everyone here to read Delusion's post if you want to understand UO and its player-base, in the context of the nascent 1997 MMO community. He really nails it.
Occasionally? Apparently you either:
A. Are a spammer, or
B. Are completely clueless
VPS is rapidly becoming *the* most popular hosting method used by non bot herder spammers.
Or C. Neither. Thanks for assuming I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm referring to Linode.com. It's possible that it's getting abused by spammers occasionally, but I'm not aware of such complaints, it's a relatively small operation, and the staff seems pretty on-the-ball. The times that UCE-protect has added us to their blacklist that I'm aware of, it has been entirely due to IPs outside the Linode ranges as far as I could tell (which is supported by their arguments on the forum). I could be wrong, of course.
Whether it's a fair world or not, blacklisting entire blocks and not just the bot-infected or spammer hosts does more harm than good, especially when you're talking about blocking entire netblocks that cross multiple businesses full of non-spammer customers.
I am a mail admin, and I'm aware of VPS reputation, but that's not what this is about. I wouldn't use UCE-protect because I see it as nothing but a source of false-positives. Stopping spam is an important service to your users, but getting their legit mail through is more important.
Full STOP yourself.
You're complaining about SORBS but you use uceprotect? Yikes.
Uceprotect is one of those zealots that blocks entire /16 blocks because of a few spam sources, across entire ISPs.
On the VPS service I use, we occasionally get blocked because of some spammer IPs on an entirely different service, because further up the chain we share a common provider. To make it even more ridiculous, if we complain about this amongst ourselves on the VPS service's forum, the uceprotect folks come into the forum (they don't use the VPS service themselves as far as I know) and ARGUE WITH US, trying to tell us why WE'RE TO BLAME, as customers of a VPS service whose datacenter's ISP is shared by a few bots somewhere in the chain.
I'm not defending SORBS, but if you're going to complain about poor practices, you need to unclude uceprotect too.
You can start with one of the other TLD alternatives, and get the .com from the squatter later. Possibly for free.
This worked for me once-- I owned a .org and happily operated it with the .com variant already held by a squatter. As the .com came close to its expiration date, they approached me with an offer that was higher than I was willing to pay. A week later it expired and they renewed, they lowered the price, and I still ignored it. A few days later, during the renewal "grace period", they canceled their renewal, and the domain was up for grabs. So I got it from GoDaddy for about $10.
If you're patient enough, and they realize you're the only potential serious buyer, they may eventually give up.
For a life-size R2 droid, one need not look any further than here in the US (and Europe), with the R2-Builders club.
astromech.net is just one associated website.
Absolutely agreed. I've been content to allow ads through for years, but finally I saw one too many flashing ad, and one too many weight-loss ad with a protruding gut. I have one of my own, I don't need to see them when reading articles.
I've never been bothered by articles in printed magazines. It's these flashing and animated ones that drive me batty, and make me not want to even visit the websites in the first place!
No more need for 365 pairs of underwear to get through the year. We can get away with 52.
In a way it was double-dipping. However, that was the edge that they provided over Netflix, considering that Blockbuster has historically charged more for the same level of service from Netflix.
The advantage was that you could watch more movies while waiting for the new ones to arrive through the mail. That advantage has now been reduced to having quicker access to movies in the short-term only, since it now delays the ones you would receive through the mail.
I wouldn't mind the change in the rules, except that Blockbuster is notorious for intermittently and inconsistently sitting on the returned movies for a week or so before mailing your next ones out. Being able to exchange them locally in the meantime took the sting out of that. Now it's only going to make it worse.
I recall someone mentioning at a previous job that there was an announcement about removal of an rdist that had been in use for quite some time. It was called 'prints'.
The memo referred to the rdist formally known as 'prints'... :)
lol, I got moderated down for being redundant even though I was one of the first to post attempting to redirect it to swap instead of "virtual memory"... heh, whatever. :)
Well, yes and no. For linux that's certainly true to a point. If you know exactly how much memory the specific services and applications will need for the tasks that the box is assigned to, and allocate RAM accordingly such that you always have sufficient cache and buffer space, you could do away with swap altogether and do just fine. This generally works best in a server or embedded environment where you know precisely what the requirements are for the job. The system simply won't be prepared to handle any significant deviations.
With a Windows machine, which I'm assuming will be a desktop for this case, I don't think you can accurately predict your needs. Then again, I'm not sure how efficient it is at handling swap (or I guess paging, as they call it), and thus needlessly swapping application memory to disk.
However, if you're like me, and tend to restrict the paging file to a specific size to avoid fragmentation (say, 4GB), then simply installing 8GB in your machine and deactivating swap altogether provides the same overall amount of virtual memory space, none of which touches disk. This can be a win, if you're willing to spend the $$$ for the extra RAM.
I think the more relevant question is why use swap if you have enough ram? If you're 100% certain that everything you do will always fit inside physical memory, technically you can do away with swap. I'm not sure how Windows will deal with this however.
Well, at least they didn't show any household uses for the lightsaber that I've already covered. :)
Lightsaber Uses for the Everyday Dark Lord
Yes, the age at which males are having offspring has increased. I think the geneticist is talking about the average age, rather than starting age.
As the article mentions, in previous centuries, relatively few offspring would survive to adulthood. This required adults to have numerous offspring, having children starting at an early age and continuing into late adulthood. Today, most people have a few children and stop. So even though they're starting later, they're not continuing to have kids at the age of 50 anymore.
I think he has a point, but the article is incomplete. This narrower time frame in which adults are procreating also contributes to the reduction in natural selection (one of the more obvious contributors to this is modern medicine). For instance, if a male starts having offspring at the age of 16, and continues until the age of 60, he could not have had any life-threatening maladaptive traits. Compare two such males, and the one with more adaptive traits will have a higher chance of continuing to breed over that sort of time scale, and will thus be more genetically successful.
In modern society, people can die at the age of 32 from something that they were genetically predisposed to, and it probably won't affect their contribution to the genepool since they've already stopped reproducing.
Domesday was a long tome ago... :)
I'd love to read it, but... what's with all these pay-to-read links lately?
$8 for an article? Most magazines cost less.