Iron Poisoning is one of the most frequent causes of poisoning death in children.
That article is talking about children overdosing on iron pills. You'd have to eat a lot of dirt to get that kind of iron into your system from the ground.
In the case of SoBig, you've got an advantage that you don't necessarily get from other worms.
According to Symantec, SoBig uses its own SMTP engine to propagate. And according to my analyses of the headers, it appears that it attempts direct-to-MX sending.
This gives you two advantages.
First off, it means that the first Received: header in the mail will contain the IP address of the infected machine. This will give you enough information to inform the ISP (who can then inform his customer) if you're so inclined. Or at minimum, you have an address you can temporarily block until the storm dies down.
The second advantage is that you can keep it from spreading beyond your own network if you block your customers from port 25 (and force them to send all mail through your mail server.) While this may annoy a few customers, most probably won't even notice, and it will keep any infected customers from spreading the virus to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about all the bounces caused by other people that are spewing the virus with forged headers. I found that (for myself, anyway), the easiest way is to mark the bounces as spam with Mozilla, and let the Baysian filtering move them out of my way. But this doesn't do much good if you're looking to protect a mail server.
Reminds me of an exhibit at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York that I visited many years ago. It was all about the history of video games and featured an arcade of games showcasing the evolution of the genre. All but two of the games (Computer Space and Pong) were playable (for quarters, of course.)
Although that exhibit is no longer in place, much of the content still exists in the form of a web page.
... I picked up a Jaguar box and read that highly restrictive license....
Interesting. Now I've got to go and read that box.
I bought a Jaguar about three months after it was discontinued. Got a console and about 10 games for $200. A great deal, IMO, since I still play some of those titles on a regular basis (I think Tempest 2000 is a great game even by today's standards.)
It's a real pity that Atari was never able to market their way back into the mainstream. While the 5200 had its share of problems (mostly related to the controller design), the 7800 and Jaguar were excellent systems.
But by the time these systems came out, Atari had lost their momentum, and in order to get it back, you can't just match the competition - you have to blow it away. And Atari was never able to develop to that extreme.
developers spend almost no time typing code... the majority being spent on activities such as design, debugging and documentation
I don't know about where you work, but where I am, design and documentation usually involve creating a lot of design/architecture documents, which means lots of typing into word processors.
Fast typing has helped enormously here.
And it hasn't hurt my coding time either. Especially since well-written code involves long, descriptive names and lots of comments. It's not nearly so annoying to follow these guidelines if you're a fast typist.
It also doesn't hurt if you post to newsgroups a lot:-)
If we're talking about ancient typing programs, who else learned on Typing Tutor II on the Apple ][ platform?
I wasted a lot of free time in high school playing with this program. But it paid off. When I was looking for a temp job during one summer in college, I clocked in at 50wpm and managed to work almost every week.
Funny, everything I've read says that they slow the film down to 23.976fps and then telecine to 29.97fps. Problem solved.
What process are you referring to? I've only seen this mentioned for transferring of home movies - where you're typically aiming a video camera at a projection. But this kind of technique adds artifacts from the projector and camera.
Any kind of professional transfer (like when a publisher releases a major motion picture on DVD) is going to do it by individually digitizing each frame of film (similar to how they digitize film in order to apply special effects in modern post production), and then duplicating frames as necessary to match the output format.
As far as I can tell, Adobe has come up with some sort of reverse Moore's Law, where each new version of Reader takes twice as long to start up... at least on Macs.
Windows too. When I upgraded from 5.1 to 6, the startup time became unbearably slow on my P2/300 system. It's only barely acceptable on my P3/667 system. (Both running Win2K with 256M RAM.)
Availability? I just did a quick search on PriceWatch and nobody is selling 1G PC3200 modules. All of the listings for that capacity are actually selling "kits" consisting of a matched pair of 512M modules.
The fastest memory listed there that comes in 1G sizes is PC2700. The dual-2GHz G5 systems need PC3200.
Of course, to be fair, I did notice that Apple seems to have access to 1G PC3200 modules. Systems ordered from the Apple Store with 2G or more RAM have them installed.
The real reason they aren't maxing them out probably has a lot to do with the software they plan on running. Depending on the application and the data set, they may not gain anything in the move from 4G to 8G. And it greatly increases the cost (using Apple Store pricing, 8G costs $2600 more than 4G.)
I wouldn't buy a car that could drive itself unless that was all there was - I just like driving too much.
Interesting that I agree for the exact opposite reason.
I hate to drive and would love it if someone/something else could do it for me. But I work with software for a living and I know all about software bugs. There's no way I want to trust my life to a piece of software. (Yes, I'm aware of all the software that's already in modern cars. I am not comforted by that thought.)
Video Phones were released by AT&T in the 90s, but they required both parties to have one. The display screen was very small and the frames per second were horrible.
I had the opportunity to try one of those, back when they were still sold. You're right that the FPS sucked over normal phone lines, but it was awesome over ISDN.
Unfortunately, ISDN never went very far in the US either, so that wasn't much of a selling point.
In the USA, Canada and a few other countries, TV is 29.97 two-field frames per second, or 50.94 field per second (NTSC).
For color. For black-and-white, it's 30 frames (or 60 fields). When color was invented, they had a design goal of keeping it backward-compatible with B&W, which meant they couldn't increase the bandwidth of the signal. So they made a slight reduction in the frame rate in order to make room for the colorburst signal.
Unfortunately, this screwball frame rate causes real problems when you convert film to color video. Instead of simply duplicating every 4th frame (to expand 24 fps into 30fps) you have to add an extra rule to not duplicate every 1000th frame.
If you're converting a B&W movie, you have to know if the resulting video will be on a color carrier (with a colorburst signal) or on a B&W carrier (without the colorburst signal). You need to know whether or not to include the "don't duplicate every 1000th frame" rule. If you pick the wrong one, the the audio will drift out of sync from the video.
Does anyone know if HDTV still has this nonsense? Or does it use a nice round number (like 24, 25 or 30fps) for everything?
I don't consider those to be video phones. Perhaps there are some more compact setups, but the ones I've used have multiple large screen TVs, remote controlled cameras...
There are some compact video conference systems out there. For example, the PolycomViewStation is a very compact unit containing the computer and camera. Attach to any TV you like to complete the package.
At work, we use these over our corporate LAN. They also work over ISDN. (Ordinary phone lines don't have enough bandwidth, unfortunately.)
They're not what I'd consider consumer devices, since they're a bit expensive, but they're available and seem to be popular in corporate environments.
Heinlein had already anticipated this problem back in the 50s or 60s and incorporated a solution--such as shock, horror! being able to turn the screen off.
Or what nearly every camera already comes with - a lens cap.
Except for the paralell drive that got the click of death, but the media didn't get corrupted.
Then you got lucky. Most of the time, inserting good media into a click-of-death drive would result in damaged media. And damaged in such a way that insertion into a new drive would damage it (resulting in more click-of-death.)
I personally have never had click-of-death problems in my Zip drives (I own four, and regularly use 6 or 7 - mostly 100M drives, but one is a 250.) I once had the drive click a lot on a disc's insertion, but it appears to have been the result of dust in the drive. There was no visible damage to the drive heads or the media, and the problem didn't recur after blowing air into the drive and re-inserting the media.
In my personal experience, I've found the most reliable backup storage medium to be magnetic media. It can be hard drives, tapes, Zip disks, SyQuest, whatever.
In my personal experience, all of them have been more reliable than optical or flash media.
Since you're talking about less than 128M per backup, I'd seriously consider a Zip-250 drive. They're fast and
You should also be able to get an inexpensive tape drive. The old DAT/DDS-1 standard stores 1.3GB on a cheap 60m tape, which more than enough storage.
Heck, even an ancient DC-600 QIC drive will do it (600M per tape) although the tapes are a bit too large for me to find convenient. You can probably find one of these for free at a flea market (but I wouldn't trust critical corporate data to a drive I got for free at a flea market.)
You're seriously trying to tell me that production routers would use slow flash rather than battery backed-up SDRAM?
Absolutely. They all do. If you were making high-end routers, you would do.
Do you think AT&T (or any other big service provider) would buy a router that might lose all of its configuration data as a result of a dead battery? Do you think they could afford the maintenance costs of routinely checking and replacing batteries in all of their routers worldwide? We're talking thousands of routers in hundreds of locations here.
I didn't make the comment, but I know what he's talking about.
Sweetwater Sound, a seller of professional studio audio equipment has written several articles in their InSync newsletter, including this one.
They don't give a technical reason why, but their experience (which I trust) is that different burn speeds produce different bit-level error rates (BLERs) and most drives seem to have their lowest BLERs at 2x speeds (surprisingly, not 1x). These shouldn't affect data discs, since ISO-9660 incorporates error correction, but it does sometimes have a noticeable effect on audio discs. (And a high BLER on a master disc can cause a duplicator to reject it.)
I realize that Sweetwater is talking about audio media and their article is aimed at recording engineers, but I think it's also relevant to computer users.
(FWIW, I record my data discs at the drive's top speed, but I record my audio discs at 4x (since my setup doesn't seem to allow 2x burning.))
Someone dropping their suit against you typically means they realize they have no case.
Or they decide that the benefits of winning aren't enough to offset the losses (legal fees and bad PR) that will result from continuing to fight. Actually having a case doesn't necessarily factor into the equation.
Look the recent cases involving DirecTV lawsuits. Lots of people are settling out of court. Does this mean they all bthey are guilty? Or does it mean that they can't afford to fight the case, even if they will ultimately end up winning it?
This is an old subject. Far older than most SlashDotters (myself included.)
Go and read some old sci-fi. Try some Isaac Asimov, and then try some Edgar Rice Burroughs. Try reading Arthur C. Clarke and compare it with E. E. "Doc" Smith.
Some authors (usually those with scientific backgrounds, but not always) try to keep their sci-fi as scientific as possible. If it's necessary to bend or break a law of physics to tell the story, they will keep their changes as small as possible, and they will make sure that the story-physics remains completely consistent within that framework.
And then some authors throw up their hands and say "to hell with it" and just tell their stories without regard to how many physical laws are being violated in every scene.
And you know what? For most of us it doesn't matter at all. We care about a good story foremost and above all else. If the characters are believable and the plot is engaging and all the story threads get resolved, we usually don't give a rat's arse about how accurate the science is. (Unless, of course, the science is key to the plot, but even then we tend to forgive a lot.)
Bad science won't ruin a great story, and good science won't make a poor story, and this debate can probably be traced all the back to the first caveman who decided to tell a story to his fellow cavemen. (And if you want to say that primitive men didn't live in caves, I don't care - the image works to get my point across and that's all that really matters.)
However, the wires still connect the ground of the computer to the ground of the audio device. This could cause groundloops via analog output between the external audio device and the receiver or amplifier to which analog signal is destined.
Yeah, this is a possibility. But I would consider it a very poor design for an audio device if its power-ground, data-ground and audio-ground planes weren't isolated from each other.
And I have seen several such poor designs, including (I think) Apple's 17" PowerBook. A friend of mine uses his in his car for traveling music. If he uses both a cigarette-lighter power adaptor and a line from the computer's headphone jack to the stero's aux-in jack at once, he gets some really bad noise - noise which varies in proportion with engine speed. Obviously, noise from the car's electrical system (carried through the cigarette lighter) is going into the Mac's power-in jack and is being carried straight to the line-out jack. Which I consider poor design. (Fortunately, the noise doesn't come through the built-in speakers.)
At this point, we're looking to see if we can find any cigarette-lighter power adaptors that will filter the power coming in.
Well maybe engineering should get on the stick. They clearly cannot know what the customers want and are too incompetent to finish the project they were hired to do.
Did you even read my reply before firing off a knee-jerk response like this?
If S&M wants to put features on the roadmap in response to customer requests, great. That's what they should do. Inform engineering of what's needed, then egineering can determine how long it takes to implement and come up with a reasonable release date.
But they don't do that. Instead, they simply promise it to the customer, including a contractually-bound hard release date. Only afterwards do they bother telling engineering about it. Now engineering has to stop all their other work and slap out a quick hacked-up version of the feature in order to meet the release date, and then spend months releasing patches in order to fix all the bugs that were introduced because they weren't given any time to research a proper design for it.
This behavior is morally and ethically reprehensible and is the reason so many software products come out as trash.
Who says you have to run XP, rup MP3s or play DVDs to have a useful computer system?
As I said, the dual-PPro 200 works perfectly well for those applictions that I actually have to run - meaning web browsers, mail clients and MS Office.
You seem to think that everybody needs to do what you're doing. Well, they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
I should hope so. It's the key ingredient in hemoglobin, without which, most human and animal life on Earth could not exist.
Eating an entire frying pan in one sitting, however, is most likely bad for you
For more reasons than just the iron content. :-)
That article is talking about children overdosing on iron pills. You'd have to eat a lot of dirt to get that kind of iron into your system from the ground.
According to Symantec, SoBig uses its own SMTP engine to propagate. And according to my analyses of the headers, it appears that it attempts direct-to-MX sending.
This gives you two advantages.
First off, it means that the first Received: header in the mail will contain the IP address of the infected machine. This will give you enough information to inform the ISP (who can then inform his customer) if you're so inclined. Or at minimum, you have an address you can temporarily block until the storm dies down.
The second advantage is that you can keep it from spreading beyond your own network if you block your customers from port 25 (and force them to send all mail through your mail server.) While this may annoy a few customers, most probably won't even notice, and it will keep any infected customers from spreading the virus to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about all the bounces caused by other people that are spewing the virus with forged headers. I found that (for myself, anyway), the easiest way is to mark the bounces as spam with Mozilla, and let the Baysian filtering move them out of my way. But this doesn't do much good if you're looking to protect a mail server.
Although that exhibit is no longer in place, much of the content still exists in the form of a web page.
Interesting. Now I've got to go and read that box.
I bought a Jaguar about three months after it was discontinued. Got a console and about 10 games for $200. A great deal, IMO, since I still play some of those titles on a regular basis (I think Tempest 2000 is a great game even by today's standards.)
It's a real pity that Atari was never able to market their way back into the mainstream. While the 5200 had its share of problems (mostly related to the controller design), the 7800 and Jaguar were excellent systems.
But by the time these systems came out, Atari had lost their momentum, and in order to get it back, you can't just match the competition - you have to blow it away. And Atari was never able to develop to that extreme.
I don't know about where you work, but where I am, design and documentation usually involve creating a lot of design/architecture documents, which means lots of typing into word processors.
Fast typing has helped enormously here.
And it hasn't hurt my coding time either. Especially since well-written code involves long, descriptive names and lots of comments. It's not nearly so annoying to follow these guidelines if you're a fast typist.
It also doesn't hurt if you post to newsgroups a lot :-)
I wasted a lot of free time in high school playing with this program. But it paid off. When I was looking for a temp job during one summer in college, I clocked in at 50wpm and managed to work almost every week.
What process are you referring to? I've only seen this mentioned for transferring of home movies - where you're typically aiming a video camera at a projection. But this kind of technique adds artifacts from the projector and camera.
Any kind of professional transfer (like when a publisher releases a major motion picture on DVD) is going to do it by individually digitizing each frame of film (similar to how they digitize film in order to apply special effects in modern post production), and then duplicating frames as necessary to match the output format.
Windows too. When I upgraded from 5.1 to 6, the startup time became unbearably slow on my P2/300 system. It's only barely acceptable on my P3/667 system. (Both running Win2K with 256M RAM.)
Availability? I just did a quick search on PriceWatch and nobody is selling 1G PC3200 modules. All of the listings for that capacity are actually selling "kits" consisting of a matched pair of 512M modules.
The fastest memory listed there that comes in 1G sizes is PC2700. The dual-2GHz G5 systems need PC3200.
Of course, to be fair, I did notice that Apple seems to have access to 1G PC3200 modules. Systems ordered from the Apple Store with 2G or more RAM have them installed.
The real reason they aren't maxing them out probably has a lot to do with the software they plan on running. Depending on the application and the data set, they may not gain anything in the move from 4G to 8G. And it greatly increases the cost (using Apple Store pricing, 8G costs $2600 more than 4G.)
Interesting that I agree for the exact opposite reason.
I hate to drive and would love it if someone/something else could do it for me. But I work with software for a living and I know all about software bugs. There's no way I want to trust my life to a piece of software. (Yes, I'm aware of all the software that's already in modern cars. I am not comforted by that thought.)
I had the opportunity to try one of those, back when they were still sold. You're right that the FPS sucked over normal phone lines, but it was awesome over ISDN.
Unfortunately, ISDN never went very far in the US either, so that wasn't much of a selling point.
It's one half the standard power frequency (50Hz) that is used throughout Europe.
For color. For black-and-white, it's 30 frames (or 60 fields). When color was invented, they had a design goal of keeping it backward-compatible with B&W, which meant they couldn't increase the bandwidth of the signal. So they made a slight reduction in the frame rate in order to make room for the colorburst signal.
Unfortunately, this screwball frame rate causes real problems when you convert film to color video. Instead of simply duplicating every 4th frame (to expand 24 fps into 30fps) you have to add an extra rule to not duplicate every 1000th frame.
If you're converting a B&W movie, you have to know if the resulting video will be on a color carrier (with a colorburst signal) or on a B&W carrier (without the colorburst signal). You need to know whether or not to include the "don't duplicate every 1000th frame" rule. If you pick the wrong one, the the audio will drift out of sync from the video.
Does anyone know if HDTV still has this nonsense? Or does it use a nice round number (like 24, 25 or 30fps) for everything?
There are some compact video conference systems out there. For example, the Polycom ViewStation is a very compact unit containing the computer and camera. Attach to any TV you like to complete the package.
At work, we use these over our corporate LAN. They also work over ISDN. (Ordinary phone lines don't have enough bandwidth, unfortunately.)
They're not what I'd consider consumer devices, since they're a bit expensive, but they're available and seem to be popular in corporate environments.
Or what nearly every camera already comes with - a lens cap.
Then you got lucky. Most of the time, inserting good media into a click-of-death drive would result in damaged media. And damaged in such a way that insertion into a new drive would damage it (resulting in more click-of-death.)
I personally have never had click-of-death problems in my Zip drives (I own four, and regularly use 6 or 7 - mostly 100M drives, but one is a 250.) I once had the drive click a lot on a disc's insertion, but it appears to have been the result of dust in the drive. There was no visible damage to the drive heads or the media, and the problem didn't recur after blowing air into the drive and re-inserting the media.
In my personal experience, all of them have been more reliable than optical or flash media.
Since you're talking about less than 128M per backup, I'd seriously consider a Zip-250 drive. They're fast and
You should also be able to get an inexpensive tape drive. The old DAT/DDS-1 standard stores 1.3GB on a cheap 60m tape, which more than enough storage.
Heck, even an ancient DC-600 QIC drive will do it (600M per tape) although the tapes are a bit too large for me to find convenient. You can probably find one of these for free at a flea market (but I wouldn't trust critical corporate data to a drive I got for free at a flea market.)
Absolutely. They all do. If you were making high-end routers, you would do.
Do you think AT&T (or any other big service provider) would buy a router that might lose all of its configuration data as a result of a dead battery? Do you think they could afford the maintenance costs of routinely checking and replacing batteries in all of their routers worldwide? We're talking thousands of routers in hundreds of locations here.
Sweetwater Sound, a seller of professional studio audio equipment has written several articles in their InSync newsletter, including this one.
They don't give a technical reason why, but their experience (which I trust) is that different burn speeds produce different bit-level error rates (BLERs) and most drives seem to have their lowest BLERs at 2x speeds (surprisingly, not 1x). These shouldn't affect data discs, since ISO-9660 incorporates error correction, but it does sometimes have a noticeable effect on audio discs. (And a high BLER on a master disc can cause a duplicator to reject it.)
I realize that Sweetwater is talking about audio media and their article is aimed at recording engineers, but I think it's also relevant to computer users.
(FWIW, I record my data discs at the drive's top speed, but I record my audio discs at 4x (since my setup doesn't seem to allow 2x burning.))
Or they decide that the benefits of winning aren't enough to offset the losses (legal fees and bad PR) that will result from continuing to fight. Actually having a case doesn't necessarily factor into the equation.
Look the recent cases involving DirecTV lawsuits. Lots of people are settling out of court. Does this mean they all bthey are guilty? Or does it mean that they can't afford to fight the case, even if they will ultimately end up winning it?
Go and read some old sci-fi. Try some Isaac Asimov, and then try some Edgar Rice Burroughs. Try reading Arthur C. Clarke and compare it with E. E. "Doc" Smith.
Some authors (usually those with scientific backgrounds, but not always) try to keep their sci-fi as scientific as possible. If it's necessary to bend or break a law of physics to tell the story, they will keep their changes as small as possible, and they will make sure that the story-physics remains completely consistent within that framework.
And then some authors throw up their hands and say "to hell with it" and just tell their stories without regard to how many physical laws are being violated in every scene.
And you know what? For most of us it doesn't matter at all. We care about a good story foremost and above all else. If the characters are believable and the plot is engaging and all the story threads get resolved, we usually don't give a rat's arse about how accurate the science is. (Unless, of course, the science is key to the plot, but even then we tend to forgive a lot.)
Bad science won't ruin a great story, and good science won't make a poor story, and this debate can probably be traced all the back to the first caveman who decided to tell a story to his fellow cavemen. (And if you want to say that primitive men didn't live in caves, I don't care - the image works to get my point across and that's all that really matters.)
Yeah, this is a possibility. But I would consider it a very poor design for an audio device if its power-ground, data-ground and audio-ground planes weren't isolated from each other.
And I have seen several such poor designs, including (I think) Apple's 17" PowerBook. A friend of mine uses his in his car for traveling music. If he uses both a cigarette-lighter power adaptor and a line from the computer's headphone jack to the stero's aux-in jack at once, he gets some really bad noise - noise which varies in proportion with engine speed. Obviously, noise from the car's electrical system (carried through the cigarette lighter) is going into the Mac's power-in jack and is being carried straight to the line-out jack. Which I consider poor design. (Fortunately, the noise doesn't come through the built-in speakers.)
At this point, we're looking to see if we can find any cigarette-lighter power adaptors that will filter the power coming in.
Did you even read my reply before firing off a knee-jerk response like this?
If S&M wants to put features on the roadmap in response to customer requests, great. That's what they should do. Inform engineering of what's needed, then egineering can determine how long it takes to implement and come up with a reasonable release date.
But they don't do that. Instead, they simply promise it to the customer, including a contractually-bound hard release date. Only afterwards do they bother telling engineering about it. Now engineering has to stop all their other work and slap out a quick hacked-up version of the feature in order to meet the release date, and then spend months releasing patches in order to fix all the bugs that were introduced because they weren't given any time to research a proper design for it.
This behavior is morally and ethically reprehensible and is the reason so many software products come out as trash.
As I said, the dual-PPro 200 works perfectly well for those applictions that I actually have to run - meaning web browsers, mail clients and MS Office.
You seem to think that everybody needs to do what you're doing. Well, they don't.