The evil that it does bring is in the form of anti-Free networking, where Linux boxes are used to form cheap routers and gateways, without a Cisco(R)-Symantec(R) licensed monitoring system
Don't worry, I'm sure there will eventually be a patch for Linux's iptables, so it can detect the evil bit.
Your linux firewill could have something like this: /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags SYN,EVIL SYN,EVIL -j DROP
Anyone know of a battery that can provide 3.5V @ 3W and only weighs.4 grams?
Here's a commodity cell that's close.
It weights 0.32 grams and has a capacity of 112 mW-h, which would give the robot a flight time of about 2.2 minutes. Granted, you'd need a charge pump to get the required voltage, but that isn't really big deal. And you'd need to get the impedance down to get enough current. But it's not inconceivable.
My point? Even for people who keep their computers forever, even for old retired folks who only check their email on Sunday, even for the iMac's target demographic, the iMac doesn't make sense.
Well, my parents' last computer was an all-in-one Mac LC520. They used it for eight years, at which point it was replaced by an iMac (the only reason it was replaced at all is because Netscape 4 on a 68030 was starting to suck). And we were not crying over the loss of the integrated display, because it only has 480x640 resolution! Even if it wasn't integrated we would not have kept it.
Your point seems to be that my parents should have bought a Mac IIsi with a 21" CRT. In 1992 that probably would have cost $5000, when we paid just $1600 for the Mac LC. Now who's making sense?
No-one should be able to find offence in a 4 or 5 -rated slashdot post. The system works.
The moderation system is irrelevant. I personally like to read replies to my posts, which pretty much requires me to lower my threshold. Presumably, since you are addressing the parent poster, you expect her to read your post - yet it is moderated +1 as I write this! In order to read your post, one has to wade through several other abusive replies with the same score.
Reading at +4 would work if all you wanted to do was read the comments. But if you actually want post, reply, and participate in something, you are exposed to the crapflooders. The deeply nested comments are generally never moderated at all.
I have used systems that don't tolerate abusive posters and crapflooders. But it generally comes at the cost of privacy - they work by having very high standards of accountability, and require you to verify your real identity before getting an account (you can be pseudonymous to the other participants, but the operators must know your real identity). Abusers are swiftly booted (and their posts deleted), and it is sufficiently difficult to get another account that people don't.
Bilbo - no, it isn't compressed. It's not an actual file, I just made it up. The point I was trying to make is that it's possible to put an XML wrapper around a proprietary data format. The data is still just as unaccessable as always, only now they can say "Look! It's XML, an open standard!".
Anyway, it was just a joke - presumably this is not what they've done, or it wouldn't really be newsworthy.
If you read the description of how you write to these things, it sounds a lot like an FPGA (blowing certain gates, etc). That would mean they have to be recorded one at a time - sort of like CD-R (compared to regular CD's that can be pressed en masse). While the chips could become cheap, the duplication cost could easily be more than CDs.
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
Public-key crypto might be a good idea for this... although it would depend on Ritz's ability to keep the secret key secret. All it would take is one bored, low-wage camera shop employee to leak the secret key, and all would be lost.
I suppose you could take steps to physically control access to the PC's doing the decryption, so that a cashier couldn't extract the key, but the technicians would still have to be able to access it.
I'm not sure if this was a serious suggestion or not, but this is exactly how I do it! I use this method to clone linux cluster nodes, but it would work for windows as well.
I use a boot floppy, with the grub bootloader (you could skip the floppy entirely if your hardware supports PXE booting, and you feel like messing with it). The bootloader grabs a kernel and ramdisk image from a tftp server. Then, a shell script creates a fifo, connect it to the tftp server, uses dd to copy to/from the image.
Here's an example of the shell script to make a backup (just do the reverse to restore):
tftp_server=192.168.0.253 mknod img0001 p tftp ${tftp_server} <<-EOT & binary put img0001 EOT dd if=/dev/sda1 > img0001
This method was adapted from the clone HOWTO, which has more in-depth instructions.
Re:It's a half-frame. Focal length issues.
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yeah, I think the 1.6x focal length multiplier pretty much makes it a non-starter. Almost all of the DSLRs have this problem, except for the super high end (Kodak DCS 14n, (14 megapixels, christ!), Contax, and Canon 1D).
Overall, the notion of trying to make digital cameras use the 35mm lenses isn't such a great idea. Either you have to use an image sensor that's too small, and as a result have the focal length multiplier. This makes it much harder to have wide angle lenses, plus the camera body is filled with stray light - not good.
Or, you try really hard to make a huge, full-frame image sensor, at great expense, and in the end it doesn't work as well. Sensors work best if the light hits at a high angle of incidence, and with a big sensor the angle is too low at the edges.
Personally, I really like Olympus's "four thirds" system, which is a new "standard" for DSLR lenses based on a 4/3" image sensor. I don't know that this system is gaining much popularity, though. But it's a great system - all the benefits of interchangable lenses, but it's lighter and smaller than 35mm cameras, and you don't have to make all the compromises attendant in trying to kludge the old lens systems onto a digital camera.
Anyway, that's what I'm waiting for - an affordable, standardized, interchangable lens system made for digital photography. In the meantime, I can afford to buy a lot of film for my old Olympus OM-2 with the $7000 I'm not spending on a DSLR.;)
My favorite is a large piece of paper and a bingo marker. If you MUST, you could put it on heavy paper and run it through an optical scanner
This is more or less what we do in Iowa (and it's been this way for a long time). The ballots are marked with a No. 2 pencil, and scanned by machine. The results of our elections are available within minutes of the election's end. But, the ballots are very clear and easy to hand-count, should it be necessary. Here is an example of what the ballots look like.
NOTE: the 2.9 million shares is just an estimate based on scox's share price over the last 5 days. If scox share price falls to $8.50/share; then scox will owe baystar almost 6 million shares.
I think this is an error, the press release on BayStar's page says the conversion price is fixed.
OK, I'm in a similar position - I haven't used windows since about '98. But Rob's first complaint is that it's difficult to copy and past in XP? Is this a joke?
I love Linux, and for all its virtues, the ability to copy and paste is not one of them. I can occasionally copy and paste text between applications in Linux (if, for example, they share the same windowing toolkit, the planets are aligned correctly, and I haven't forgotten my vitamin pill). But other media types? How about copying images, sounds, styled text, or icons? Forget it!
Again, I haven't used Windows in a long time, but it can't possibly be worse than Linux at copying and pasting.
so what does a watt of electricy cost delivered these days, like from the power company?
According to some folks at Alliant Energy (one of their reps recently gave a lecture at my engineering college), it costs about $1.00/watt to build a coal power plant. In other words, building a 500 MW coal plant would cost $500 million. Also keep in mind about 50% of that power is lost as heat during transmission - so the cost to the end user is really about twice that.
Interestingly, in our area large wind turbines cost about the same (a buck a watt) - and the power companies are becoming more interested. Despite what you might think, they actually hate to build new large power plants. It's a huge chuck of cash for them to lay out, especially when the full capacity of a large plant may not be needed for another 10-20 years.
Yes, this is true. Why do you think every report dicussing the safety of human exposure to microwave radiation claims "no non-thermal effects"? (Although more recently, there has been evidence that microwaves can break DNA.)
I used to do this in college during exams (a trick I learned from a biochemist friend). Wear lightweight clothes and take your shoes off, to keep your core temp down (I feel sleepy if my core temp gets too high), and a warm hat to keep your brain slightly warmer. It really is like overclocking your brain!
While it isn't mentioned in the writeup, the firewire bridges will not make the drives appear as one. The OS will still see 6 different drives. OS X pretty easily supports software RAID and LVM, so he's almost certainly using one of those methods.
And yes, if any one of those drives dies, he's SOL, although as somebody else mentioned a RAID 5 would help this situation.
Instead of fixed caps, why not implement some sort of traffic-shaping based on past usage?
I help administer a mid-size linux cluster, and we use PBS Pro to handle job scheduling. In many ways, allocating cluster resources is similar to bandwith:
The resource in finite, and expensive
It needs to be shared fairly between a lot of users
It's a "perishable" commodity. A lot of proponents of metered bandwith compare it to other utilities, like water, power, etc; however unused bandwidth (like CPU cycles) cannot be stored for later use. It helps nobody to restrict usage when there is extra to spare. Contrast this to other metered utilities, where the surplus water, coal, gas, etc can be saved and used another day.
The scheduling algorithm we use on the cluster is called "fair share". I think it would also work to share bandwith, and it works like this:
Usage is tracked with an exponential half-life of 24 hours. For example, someone who used 20 cpu-hours today and 20 hours two days ago would have a total usage 20 * 2**0 + 20*2**-2 = 25 hours. A user's priority in the queue is based on their past usage, and optionally their number of shares (users can be given an unequal number of shares, if desired).
To apply this to bandwith, you could track the bandwith usage the same way. During peak usage times, when the lines are congested, a traffic-shaping router would give a lower priority to packets from the "bandwidth hogs".
It seems to me that customers and ISPs would both benefit from a scheme like this. I'm not exactly a networking guru, so I'd be interested in what other people think about it. Is there hardware out there that has this capability? Could it be done with Linux's iptables?
I think if he buys the song then when he sells it he deletes his copy, This would be a fair use and trading. But if he downloads the song and sells many copies or keeps the original. Then that is moving into the range of illegal.
Remember, the iTunes files are in a DRM-enabled AAC format. In order to enable the purchaser to use the song, he'll have to "de-authorize" it from all his computers (and probably give up is user id/password, which the purchaser would change to prevent future access from the seller).
Imagine if I sold my Slashdot account on eBay, and gave the userid/passwd to the purchaser. There's no way I'd be able to sell it to anyone else, because I no longer have control of the account!
Even if he keeps the file, the file would be useless. He can't sell it to anyone else, and he can't listen to it anymore. That's exactly the point of the DRM technology, otherwise you could trade these files on P2P networks just like any other.
Certainly, the DRM can be circumvented (by burning to CD and re-encoding, for example), but that is not this guy's intentions - he's explicitly stated he will not transcode it.
Votes for "Do not recall Davis, we want to keep him": 49.9%
Votes for Larry Flynt: 30%
Flynt wins!
I agree that it seems likely that the winner will have a very small pecentage of the votes. I actually wouldn't be surprised if someone wins with <20% of the vote.
Perhaps the best thing that will come out of this recall election is that the nation will have a dramatic example of why plurality voting sucks so badly. Perhaps there will be more interest in implementing instant runoff voting.
Why the sudden reversal from Ryan Lackey?
on
HavenCo In Trouble?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While I'm not surprised that HavenCo is in trouble, I find it weird just one month ago there was a slashdot headline proclaming HavenCo Doing Well. And Lackey himself posted some interesting comments about his upcoming DecCon talk. So rdl, if you're out there, what's changed?
BLUE LASER with +20G is worth waiting a bit longer for, IMHO. That's large enough to be useful for movies (easily) and backing up data in chunks as needed. SPEED will be key or else it'll take too damn long. 4x at a minimum to start.
Hrrmmm, 4X what? Won't the first generation of drives be 1X, by definition?
1X CD is about 175 kB/sec, IIRC, which is the data rate for playback of an audio CD. 1X DVD is defined around 1350 kB/sec, although I wonder if this isn't a little arbitrary, since the MPEG2 streams are encoded at variable bitrates.
Get one at Wal-Mart and when the ink runs out - return it and get a new one, complete with a new ink cartridge
This is brilliant, although I'd skip the "lame-ass excuse". You don't need it. Their store policy is 90 days satisfaction guaranteed. The magic words are "I wasn't satisfied". Be vague, be evasive, you don't need any other reason than that. If you are pressed for details, or asked if it's defective, say "No, it just didn't meet my expectations" or "it doesn't fulfill my needs". Just keep restating the same thing in different ways until they give in.
As the poster said, the Wal-Mart "associates" usually don't care, and won't need a lot of convincing.
A lot of people have replied that this is illegal or immoral; I'm not so sure. As long as you don't lie about it I think you'd be ok. Remember that Wal-Mart will not bear the cost in any case, they'll make Lexmark or HP pay for the replacement. If they have to handle too many returns they may eventually decide to stop selling those brands - wouldn't that be a kick in the ass!
Slashdot Mirror
The evil that it does bring is in the form of anti-Free networking, where Linux boxes are used to form cheap routers and gateways, without a Cisco(R)-Symantec(R) licensed monitoring system
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags SYN,EVIL SYN,EVIL -j DROP
Don't worry, I'm sure there will eventually be a patch for Linux's iptables, so it can detect the evil bit.
Your linux firewill could have something like this:
Anyone know of a battery that can provide 3.5V @ 3W and only weighs .4 grams?
Here's a commodity cell that's close. It weights 0.32 grams and has a capacity of 112 mW-h, which would give the robot a flight time of about 2.2 minutes. Granted, you'd need a charge pump to get the required voltage, but that isn't really big deal. And you'd need to get the impedance down to get enough current. But it's not inconceivable.
My point? Even for people who keep their computers forever, even for old retired folks who only check their email on Sunday, even for the iMac's target demographic, the iMac doesn't make sense.
Well, my parents' last computer was an all-in-one Mac LC520. They used it for eight years, at which point it was replaced by an iMac (the only reason it was replaced at all is because Netscape 4 on a 68030 was starting to suck). And we were not crying over the loss of the integrated display, because it only has 480x640 resolution! Even if it wasn't integrated we would not have kept it.
Your point seems to be that my parents should have bought a Mac IIsi with a 21" CRT. In 1992 that probably would have cost $5000, when we paid just $1600 for the Mac LC. Now who's making sense?
No-one should be able to find offence in a 4 or 5 -rated slashdot post. The system works.
The moderation system is irrelevant. I personally like to read replies to my posts, which pretty much requires me to lower my threshold. Presumably, since you are addressing the parent poster, you expect her to read your post - yet it is moderated +1 as I write this! In order to read your post, one has to wade through several other abusive replies with the same score.
Reading at +4 would work if all you wanted to do was read the comments. But if you actually want post, reply, and participate in something, you are exposed to the crapflooders. The deeply nested comments are generally never moderated at all.
I have used systems that don't tolerate abusive posters and crapflooders. But it generally comes at the cost of privacy - they work by having very high standards of accountability, and require you to verify your real identity before getting an account (you can be pseudonymous to the other participants, but the operators must know your real identity). Abusers are swiftly booted (and their posts deleted), and it is sufficiently difficult to get another account that people don't.
Bilbo - no, it isn't compressed. It's not an actual file, I just made it up. The point I was trying to make is that it's possible to put an XML wrapper around a proprietary data format. The data is still just as unaccessable as always, only now they can say "Look! It's XML, an open standard!".
Anyway, it was just a joke - presumably this is not what they've done, or it wouldn't really be newsworthy.
If you read the description of how you write to these things, it sounds a lot like an FPGA (blowing certain gates, etc). That would mean they have to be recorded one at a time - sort of like CD-R (compared to regular CD's that can be pressed en masse). While the chips could become cheap, the duplication cost could easily be more than CDs.
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
Public-key crypto might be a good idea for this... although it would depend on Ritz's ability to keep the secret key secret. All it would take is one bored, low-wage camera shop employee to leak the secret key, and all would be lost.
I suppose you could take steps to physically control access to the PC's doing the decryption, so that a cashier couldn't extract the key, but the technicians would still have to be able to access it.
I'm not sure if this was a serious suggestion or not, but this is exactly how I do it! I use this method to clone linux cluster nodes, but it would work for windows as well.
I use a boot floppy, with the grub bootloader (you could skip the floppy entirely if your hardware supports PXE booting, and you feel like messing with it). The bootloader grabs a kernel and ramdisk image from a tftp server. Then, a shell script creates a fifo, connect it to the tftp server, uses dd to copy to/from the image.
Here's an example of the shell script to make a backup (just do the reverse to restore):
This method was adapted from the clone HOWTO, which has more in-depth instructions.
Yeah, I think the 1.6x focal length multiplier pretty much makes it a non-starter. Almost all of the DSLRs have this problem, except for the super high end (Kodak DCS 14n, (14 megapixels, christ!), Contax, and Canon 1D).
;)
Overall, the notion of trying to make digital cameras use the 35mm lenses isn't such a great idea. Either you have to use an image sensor that's too small, and as a result have the focal length multiplier. This makes it much harder to have wide angle lenses, plus the camera body is filled with stray light - not good.
Or, you try really hard to make a huge, full-frame image sensor, at great expense, and in the end it doesn't work as well. Sensors work best if the light hits at a high angle of incidence, and with a big sensor the angle is too low at the edges.
Personally, I really like Olympus's "four thirds" system, which is a new "standard" for DSLR lenses based on a 4/3" image sensor. I don't know that this system is gaining much popularity, though. But it's a great system - all the benefits of interchangable lenses, but it's lighter and smaller than 35mm cameras, and you don't have to make all the compromises attendant in trying to kludge the old lens systems onto a digital camera.
Anyway, that's what I'm waiting for - an affordable, standardized, interchangable lens system made for digital photography. In the meantime, I can afford to buy a lot of film for my old Olympus OM-2 with the $7000 I'm not spending on a DSLR.
My favorite is a large piece of paper and a bingo marker. If you MUST, you could put it on heavy paper and run it through an optical scanner
This is more or less what we do in Iowa (and it's been this way for a long time). The ballots are marked with a No. 2 pencil, and scanned by machine. The results of our elections are available within minutes of the election's end. But, the ballots are very clear and easy to hand-count, should it be necessary. Here is an example of what the ballots look like.
NOTE: the 2.9 million shares is just an estimate based on scox's share price over the last 5 days. If scox share price falls to $8.50/share; then scox will owe baystar almost 6 million shares.
I think this is an error, the press release on BayStar's page says the conversion price is fixed.
OK, I'm in a similar position - I haven't used windows since about '98. But Rob's first complaint is that it's difficult to copy and past in XP? Is this a joke?
I love Linux, and for all its virtues, the ability to copy and paste is not one of them. I can occasionally copy and paste text between applications in Linux (if, for example, they share the same windowing toolkit, the planets are aligned correctly, and I haven't forgotten my vitamin pill). But other media types? How about copying images, sounds, styled text, or icons? Forget it!
Again, I haven't used Windows in a long time, but it can't possibly be worse than Linux at copying and pasting.
so what does a watt of electricy cost delivered these days, like from the power company?
According to some folks at Alliant Energy (one of their reps recently gave a lecture at my engineering college), it costs about $1.00/watt to build a coal power plant. In other words, building a 500 MW coal plant would cost $500 million. Also keep in mind about 50% of that power is lost as heat during transmission - so the cost to the end user is really about twice that.
Interestingly, in our area large wind turbines cost about the same (a buck a watt) - and the power companies are becoming more interested. Despite what you might think, they actually hate to build new large power plants. It's a huge chuck of cash for them to lay out, especially when the full capacity of a large plant may not be needed for another 10-20 years.
Anyway, $0.20/watt would be cheap!
Heating the brain a little is how it does it.
Yes, this is true. Why do you think every report dicussing the safety of human exposure to microwave radiation claims "no non-thermal effects"? (Although more recently, there has been evidence that microwaves can break DNA.)
I used to do this in college during exams (a trick I learned from a biochemist friend). Wear lightweight clothes and take your shoes off, to keep your core temp down (I feel sleepy if my core temp gets too high), and a warm hat to keep your brain slightly warmer. It really is like overclocking your brain!
While it isn't mentioned in the writeup, the firewire bridges will not make the drives appear as one. The OS will still see 6 different drives. OS X pretty easily supports software RAID and LVM, so he's almost certainly using one of those methods.
And yes, if any one of those drives dies, he's SOL, although as somebody else mentioned a RAID 5 would help this situation.
I help administer a mid-size linux cluster, and we use PBS Pro to handle job scheduling. In many ways, allocating cluster resources is similar to bandwith:
The scheduling algorithm we use on the cluster is called "fair share". I think it would also work to share bandwith, and it works like this:
Usage is tracked with an exponential half-life of 24 hours. For example, someone who used 20 cpu-hours today and 20 hours two days ago would have a total usage 20 * 2**0 + 20*2**-2 = 25 hours. A user's priority in the queue is based on their past usage, and optionally their number of shares (users can be given an unequal number of shares, if desired).
To apply this to bandwith, you could track the bandwith usage the same way. During peak usage times, when the lines are congested, a traffic-shaping router would give a lower priority to packets from the "bandwidth hogs".
It seems to me that customers and ISPs would both benefit from a scheme like this. I'm not exactly a networking guru, so I'd be interested in what other people think about it. Is there hardware out there that has this capability? Could it be done with Linux's iptables?
Starting? When was this article written 1993?
Well, the woman in the stock photo is using what looks like at Apple IIe display...
I think if he buys the song then when he sells it he deletes his copy, This would be a fair use and trading. But if he downloads the song and sells many copies or keeps the original. Then that is moving into the range of illegal.
Remember, the iTunes files are in a DRM-enabled AAC format. In order to enable the purchaser to use the song, he'll have to "de-authorize" it from all his computers (and probably give up is user id/password, which the purchaser would change to prevent future access from the seller).
Imagine if I sold my Slashdot account on eBay, and gave the userid/passwd to the purchaser. There's no way I'd be able to sell it to anyone else, because I no longer have control of the account!
Even if he keeps the file, the file would be useless. He can't sell it to anyone else, and he can't listen to it anymore. That's exactly the point of the DRM technology, otherwise you could trade these files on P2P networks just like any other.
Certainly, the DRM can be circumvented (by burning to CD and re-encoding, for example), but that is not this guy's intentions - he's explicitly stated he will not transcode it.
Votes for "Do not recall Davis, we want to keep him": 49.9%
Votes for Larry Flynt: 30%
Flynt wins!
I agree that it seems likely that the winner will have a very small pecentage of the votes. I actually wouldn't be surprised if someone wins with <20% of the vote.
Perhaps the best thing that will come out of this recall election is that the nation will have a dramatic example of why plurality voting sucks so badly. Perhaps there will be more interest in implementing instant runoff voting.
While I'm not surprised that HavenCo is in trouble, I find it weird just one month ago there was a slashdot headline proclaming HavenCo Doing Well. And Lackey himself posted some interesting comments about his upcoming DecCon talk. So rdl, if you're out there, what's changed?
And here's the message, just send it in on STDIN:
Dear Robin,
Thanks for the link to Google! What a neat site. I never would have found it without slashdot.
BLUE LASER with +20G is worth waiting a bit longer for, IMHO. That's large enough to be useful for movies (easily) and backing up data in chunks as needed. SPEED will be key or else it'll take too damn long. 4x at a minimum to start.
Hrrmmm, 4X what? Won't the first generation of drives be 1X, by definition?
1X CD is about 175 kB/sec, IIRC, which is the data rate for playback of an audio CD. 1X DVD is defined around 1350 kB/sec, although I wonder if this isn't a little arbitrary, since the MPEG2 streams are encoded at variable bitrates.
Get one at Wal-Mart and when the ink runs out - return it and get a new one, complete with a new ink cartridge
This is brilliant, although I'd skip the "lame-ass excuse". You don't need it. Their store policy is 90 days satisfaction guaranteed. The magic words are "I wasn't satisfied". Be vague, be evasive, you don't need any other reason than that. If you are pressed for details, or asked if it's defective, say "No, it just didn't meet my expectations" or "it doesn't fulfill my needs". Just keep restating the same thing in different ways until they give in.
As the poster said, the Wal-Mart "associates" usually don't care, and won't need a lot of convincing.
A lot of people have replied that this is illegal or immoral; I'm not so sure. As long as you don't lie about it I think you'd be ok. Remember that Wal-Mart will not bear the cost in any case, they'll make Lexmark or HP pay for the replacement. If they have to handle too many returns they may eventually decide to stop selling those brands - wouldn't that be a kick in the ass!