Appliances with a plastic earth pin are double-insulated and do not need an earth.
The earth pin is still required on the plug though because it opens the shutters that cover the live and neutral holes on the socket. When these plastic pins break off (and they do sometimes) you can no longer get the plug into the socket.
Yeah. I think it is worse with motoring though. In other situations you sometimes get the opportunity to let people know what you think about their behaviour and sometimes even to restrain it. When driving you almost never get that opportunity and generally if you try to do so it will only create or exacerbate a dangerous situation. (Yes, I'm as guilty as anyone. I must repeat seven times before breakfast: 'the safest place for a tailgater is in front of me'.)
I personally think that cyclists can (and should be able to) eat their cake and keep it. One of the great things about cycling is that you can hop off at a pedestrian zone, walk to the other end, and hop back on. Or hop off at the red lights, walk around, and hop back on on the other side. There is nothing at all wrong with this (except for annoying car drivers who feel slighted at being passed by a cyclist). If you are walking next to a bicycle, you are a pedestrian.
(Of course, if you are still riding, you are not a pedestrian - which I acknowledge is what you and others were moaning about and I agree entirely.)
But is it possible that the entire traffic jam could be both the continuing and end result of a chain reaction set in motion by a single driver who was in too much of a hurry?
No, it isn't possible that a single driver could be the cause. The mechanism described in the article relies also on a large number of other drivers all following too close to the car in front. If enough people kept a safe distance from the car in front, the shock wave caused by the sudden movement of one car would die away instead of being amplified.
Aside: There's no justice in motoring. Responsible drivers just have to get used to the idea that they can help avoid jams and accidents, and they themselves will get less benefit from their own responsible actions than will the idiots who cause the trouble in the first place. The idiots won't even realise they've done anything wrong...
I'd like to know how to report a botnet. I've been to ShadowServer but (a) you have to register to report and (b) they only seem to be interested in the Command-and-Control servers.
I have a list of IP addresses and times of attempts to exploit a mail form with a mail injection attack. It seems to me that the owners of most bot machines would be completely unaware of what is happening, and therefore might even be grateful to be told that there is a problem.
But we need an automated system for submitting IP addresses (and time and date of attack in case it is a dynamic IP address so that it can still be traced to an individual computer). The system would look up who is responsible for the network containing that IP address and ultimately send an email to the best-placed person to get the computer cleaned up.
I'd love to see a standard low voltage DC supply that could be used to supply laptops (amongst many other gadgets).
One important criterion though: It must use a magnetic connector (like the Apple MacBooks). People won't want to settle for the lowest common denominator.
Or maybe this is one reason no such standard exists.
Here's my script. This is an amalgamation of several ideas that I easily found by searching the web. It keeps the last three copies, using links to avoid copying or storing twice any file that hasn't changed.
#!/bin/sh
# To use Apple's rsync switch commented lines below # To use rsyncx: # RSYNC=/usr/local/bin/rsync --eahfs --showtogo # To use built-in rsync (OS X 10.4 and later): RSYNC="/usr/bin/rsync -E -v"
DEST=/Volumes/Backups
# Function for toggling Spotlight indexing spotlight_switch() { /usr/bin/mdutil -i $1/ #/usr/bin/mdutil -i $1/Volumes/Backups }
# sudo runs the backup as root # --eahfs enables HFS+ mode # -a turns on archive mode (recursive copy + retain attributes) # -x don't cross device boundaries (ignore mounted volumes) # -S handle sparse files efficiently # --showtogo shows the number of files left to process # --delete deletes any files that have been deleted locally # $* expands to any extra command line options you may give
# make sure we're running as root # id options are effective (u)ser ID if (( `id -u` != 0 )); then { echo "Sorry, must be root. Exiting..."; exit; } fi;
! test -d $DEST && echo "Please mount the backup drive!" && exit spotlight_switch off
The only 'issue' is that I don't seem to be able to boot from the backup, but this may be no bad thing, given that a backup is not supposed to be a mirror, nor a mirror a backup.
Any suggestions (or flames as to why my backup strategy will fail catastrophically) welcomed!
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I completely agree. I do most of my best thinking in the shower, or on the way across the car park back to my car in the evening...
There is a potentially serious problem though with paying people on results rather than on time spent. While time spent isn't a great metric of effort invested, finding even half-reasonable metrics of results achieved is even more difficult. This is of course particularly acute in research, where there is almost no way of measuring results, and even if there was, the result is rarely commensurate with the effort. Even in more 'routine' disciplines, take programming for instance - what makes a good metric of effort invested? Lines of code produced? Number of bugs fixed? Number of defects discovered? These are all acknowledged as terrible metrics.
I personally think that well-motivated individuals will generally work at about the same intensity (roughly), so time spent is probably not as bad a metric as it first sounded, at least compared to the alternatives.
I second the idea of any music player that mounts as a USB disk. I use an iRiver H340.
For syncing, don't copy files in the Finder - it will litter your disk with.DS_Store.
I use rsync. It is a command-line utility, but you can very easily set it up to run from a script file in the dock if you want. I organise my music files in my own directory structure just as I want them on my music player. Then I have iTunes set up not to make copies of files when I add them to the iTunes library.
That's kind of beside the point, since you don't want to do a by-file copy
I think you missed my point. I was talking about filesystem formats - the fact that most thumb drives come preformatted with FAT32 (or FAT16), which is the real reason they are cross-platform.
(Yes, of course you'd use an archiver for making archives, but I wasn't talking about that.)
One nice thing about these drives is that the filesystems can be read by any OS without hassles.
The reason that most of these drives can be accessed from any OS is that they are usually formatted by the manufacturer with the FAT16 or FAT32 filing system, which is indeed accessible from almost any OS.
Equally, I could take a 250GB USB hard disk, format it with FAT32, and access the files from almost any OS just as I can a thumb drive.
Just to labour the point slightly, I could reformat one of these drives as HFS+ and it would only be readable on a Mac, or as NTFS for Windows only, or ext2 for Linux only. (Yes I know you can read some of these formats across platforms, but the tools are not necessarily installed by default.)
Of course, using the FAT filing system means that most file attributes from other filesystems will get lost when a file is copied there.
I second that. It's not that you can't do everything with standard tools like the GIMP, UFRaw GIMP plug-in, Image Magick, jhead, jpegtran, lcms, etc, but until you've tried an integrated work-flow tool like Bibble, you won't realise how much time you were wasting on the mechanics of the process.
I used to use the GIMP with UFRaw and was pretty happy with it.
I recently bought a copy of Bibble though and I must say I was amazed. It's not that Bibble does anything you can't achieve with the GIMP + UFRaw + other Linux/UNIX tools. But I never realised quite how clunky my workflow before, and how much more streamlined it could have been.
Developing RAW files, removing dust spots, cropping and rotating and fixing the colour balance is now almost enjoyable, rather than just a job that needs doing.
An obvious point, but do make sure if you do go down the blacklist route that everyone affected by it - i.e. every user with an account on your mailserver - agrees to the use of blacklists and is happy with the idea that some non-spam messages will inevitably be blocked, and that they won't be notified when this happens.
Thanks for the clarification. I was thinking of the CD logo, which as you say is the CD-audio logo. Still, CDs with some form of copy protection generally don't carry the logo.
Remember that a shiny music disc that incorporates any kind of DRM is not legally allowed to be called a CD. The reason is that it doesn't conform to the Red Book standard.
Discs with DRM should not carry the CD logo. If you find one that does, you might mention it to Phillips...
Seriously, I've seen people spend more than 29.3 seconds just trying to find their destination folder in the Windows Explorer tree view.
Of course, with more screen estate you can keep both source and destination folders open at the same time and just drag between them. It's much easier to remember the spatial position of something on the screen than the hierarchical position of something in a tree-view. And generally you only have a handful of folders that you frequently move files between anyway, so those folders stay open all of the time. It's all about workflow.
No one should spend the money on a big monitor (or better yet in my opinion, multiple monitors) JUST for dragging and dropping files.
Maybe not just for dragging and dropping, but it is certainly a major reason. I've seen how painfully slow it is when a collegue selects a file, right-click-cuts it, goes back to the tree view, searches through and finally finds the destination folder, and pastes the file into it.
If you compare that with dragging a file from one window to another, the drag and drop wins by a mile.
Of course, people who still work with maximised windows just will not get it...
The point is with multiple monitors, you can afford to keep frequently used folder windows open all of the time (with the tree-view turned off), and still have room to spare for Developer Studio and a few VT100 terminals and command prompts, with no one window obscuring another.
It's true that your particular search example works rather well, but to call my point FUD is a bit strong. My own experience is that there are some searches that work really well, and others where you can wade through page after page of results full of links to parked domains, other search engines, and stores masquarading as review sites.
I find that Google is becoming less and less useful.
The web now has become so large that a simple keyword search just doesn't cut it anymore. Try searching for information about a popular digital camera from someone who isn't trying to sell them. It is next to impossible. (Yes I know about http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ - a good try, but not really addressing the fundamental problem.)
The best way that search could get better in my opinion is to introduce some kind of filtering on the type of organisation that produces the pages you are searching for. Google already does a bit of this with Google Scholar. But we need something far more general, and more to the point, a facility for excluding results of particular types, e.g. blogs, sites trying to sell something,...?
I know that some people will complain that it may be a very subjective judgement whether site X is commercial or not. But search results are never going to be perfect anyway. Let's have the improvements where they are available, and worry about the corner cases later.
Wouldn't it be great if Sainsburys, Asda, Woolworths, etc, all started offering their own branded versions of this same office suite. I can just imagine it:
"My document loads perfectly on Tesco Office, Sainsburys Office and Asda Office. It's only Microsoft Office that mucks up the formatting."
I agree that ISPs should to some extent be held accountable, but to hold them 100% accountable ignores the fact that it is virtually impossible to pre-emptively stop all forms of email abuse.
For example, SORBS have a policy that they will blacklist a server if they receive three or more emails to their spam trap addresses. These addresses are kept secret, so the ISP can't know what these spam trap addresses are. Suppose a malicious client of the ISP discovers (or guesses) one or more of these spam trap addresses. He can then send just three emails, the contents of which need not be 'spammy' in the least. The ISP's server will then be blacklisted for at least 48 hours, but usually much longer. An ISP has absolutely no defence against this kind of thing.
You could easily think of other examples where the ISP has no possible way to recognise that malicious email is being sent until after it has gone out of the door.
But the real issue is that the people who suffer are the other customers. They are completely disempowered, because they will just be ignored if they contact the RBL operator (since they are not the administrator of the blacklisted server). They could in principle find another ISP, but that is usually an unacceptable solution due to the disruption involved. If they don't have their own domain, they lose their email address, which means they will continue to lose emails. They can't win.
ISPs should be fighting against spam, but not with RBLs. The only time it is justified to use an RBL as a single criterion for rejecting email is when the administrator of the filter is also the only consumer of the filtered email. (Or perhaps if you have the explicit approval of all consumers that missing some non-spam emails is acceptable.)
Slashdot Mirror
Appliances with a plastic earth pin are double-insulated and do not need an earth.
The earth pin is still required on the plug though because it opens the shutters that cover the live and neutral holes on the socket. When these plastic pins break off (and they do sometimes) you can no longer get the plug into the socket.
Yeah. I think it is worse with motoring though. In other situations you sometimes get the opportunity to let people know what you think about their behaviour and sometimes even to restrain it. When driving you almost never get that opportunity and generally if you try to do so it will only create or exacerbate a dangerous situation. (Yes, I'm as guilty as anyone. I must repeat seven times before breakfast: 'the safest place for a tailgater is in front of me'.)
I personally think that cyclists can (and should be able to) eat their cake and keep it. One of the great things about cycling is that you can hop off at a pedestrian zone, walk to the other end, and hop back on. Or hop off at the red lights, walk around, and hop back on on the other side. There is nothing at all wrong with this (except for annoying car drivers who feel slighted at being passed by a cyclist). If you are walking next to a bicycle, you are a pedestrian.
(Of course, if you are still riding, you are not a pedestrian - which I acknowledge is what you and others were moaning about and I agree entirely.)
No, it isn't possible that a single driver could be the cause. The mechanism described in the article relies also on a large number of other drivers all following too close to the car in front. If enough people kept a safe distance from the car in front, the shock wave caused by the sudden movement of one car would die away instead of being amplified.
Aside:
There's no justice in motoring. Responsible drivers just have to get used to the idea that they can help avoid jams and accidents, and they themselves will get less benefit from their own responsible actions than will the idiots who cause the trouble in the first place. The idiots won't even realise they've done anything wrong...
I'd like to know how to report a botnet. I've been to ShadowServer but (a) you have to register to report and (b) they only seem to be interested in the Command-and-Control servers.
I have a list of IP addresses and times of attempts to exploit a mail form with a mail injection attack. It seems to me that the owners of most bot machines would be completely unaware of what is happening, and therefore might even be grateful to be told that there is a problem.
But we need an automated system for submitting IP addresses (and time and date of attack in case it is a dynamic IP address so that it can still be traced to an individual computer). The system would look up who is responsible for the network containing that IP address and ultimately send an email to the best-placed person to get the computer cleaned up.
(Yes, I do know about WHOIS.)
I've seen these Shhh cards, but what you did sounds even better.
I've never quite had the nerve. It probably helps if you are just getting off the bus/train/etc...
I'd love to see a standard low voltage DC supply that could be used to supply laptops (amongst many other gadgets).
One important criterion though: It must use a magnetic connector (like the Apple MacBooks). People won't want to settle for the lowest common denominator.
Or maybe this is one reason no such standard exists.
Any suggestions (or flames as to why my backup strategy will fail catastrophically) welcomed!
[[Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 25.1). Aenean orci mi, lacinia varius, varius in, suscipit ut, purus. Donec pharetra lorem nec odio. Mauris accumsan sem non pede. Etiam pulvinar eros at massa. Curabitur consectetuer. Pellentesque imperdiet cursus diam. Sed tincidunt nunc. Donec fermentum, nisl at hendrerit mollis, turpis leo consequat elit, volutpat condimentum velit augue facilisis nisl. Vestibulum dapibus ligula non turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nulla risus lorem, aliquet imperdiet, accumsan id, aliquet vel, tellus. Quisque mi dui, pulvinar ut, iaculis pharetra, rutrum eget, nisl. Aliquam et erat in sem dapibus vehicula. Curabitur rhoncus ipsum id dui. Nullam venenatis. Phasellus vitae sapien quis pede ultrices mollis.]]
I think the name gives it away. "Illuminous." That's a word that people sometimes mistakenly use when they mean "luminous."
I don't think Steve Jobs would want a word that in many people's mind would have connotations of ignorance.
I completely agree. I do most of my best thinking in the shower, or on the way across the car park back to my car in the evening...
There is a potentially serious problem though with paying people on results rather than on time spent. While time spent isn't a great metric of effort invested, finding even half-reasonable metrics of results achieved is even more difficult. This is of course particularly acute in research, where there is almost no way of measuring results, and even if there was, the result is rarely commensurate with the effort. Even in more 'routine' disciplines, take programming for instance - what makes a good metric of effort invested? Lines of code produced? Number of bugs fixed? Number of defects discovered? These are all acknowledged as terrible metrics.
I personally think that well-motivated individuals will generally work at about the same intensity (roughly), so time spent is probably not as bad a metric as it first sounded, at least compared to the alternatives.
I second the idea of any music player that mounts as a USB disk. I use an iRiver H340.
.DS_Store.
For syncing, don't copy files in the Finder - it will litter your disk with
I use rsync. It is a command-line utility, but you can very easily set it up to run from a script file in the dock if you want. I organise my music files in my own directory structure just as I want them on my music player. Then I have iTunes set up not to make copies of files when I add them to the iTunes library.
For me at least, that is problem solved.
I think you missed my point. I was talking about filesystem formats - the fact that most thumb drives come preformatted with FAT32 (or FAT16), which is the real reason they are cross-platform.
(Yes, of course you'd use an archiver for making archives, but I wasn't talking about that.)
The reason that most of these drives can be accessed from any OS is that they are usually formatted by the manufacturer with the FAT16 or FAT32 filing system, which is indeed accessible from almost any OS.
Equally, I could take a 250GB USB hard disk, format it with FAT32, and access the files from almost any OS just as I can a thumb drive.
Just to labour the point slightly, I could reformat one of these drives as HFS+ and it would only be readable on a Mac, or as NTFS for Windows only, or ext2 for Linux only. (Yes I know you can read some of these formats across platforms, but the tools are not necessarily installed by default.)
Of course, using the FAT filing system means that most file attributes from other filesystems will get lost when a file is copied there.
I second that. It's not that you can't do everything with standard tools like the GIMP, UFRaw GIMP plug-in, Image Magick, jhead, jpegtran, lcms, etc, but until you've tried an integrated work-flow tool like Bibble, you won't realise how much time you were wasting on the mechanics of the process.
I used to use the GIMP with UFRaw and was pretty happy with it.
I recently bought a copy of Bibble though and I must say I was amazed. It's not that Bibble does anything you can't achieve with the GIMP + UFRaw + other Linux/UNIX tools. But I never realised quite how clunky my workflow before, and how much more streamlined it could have been.
Developing RAW files, removing dust spots, cropping and rotating and fixing the colour balance is now almost enjoyable, rather than just a job that needs doing.
An obvious point, but do make sure if you do go down the blacklist route that everyone affected by it - i.e. every user with an account on your mailserver - agrees to the use of blacklists and is happy with the idea that some non-spam messages will inevitably be blocked, and that they won't be notified when this happens.
Thanks for the clarification. I was thinking of the CD logo, which as you say is the CD-audio logo. Still, CDs with some form of copy protection generally don't carry the logo.
Remember that a shiny music disc that incorporates any kind of DRM is not legally allowed to be called a CD. The reason is that it doesn't conform to the Red Book standard.
Discs with DRM should not carry the CD logo. If you find one that does, you might mention it to Phillips...
Seriously, I've seen people spend more than 29.3 seconds just trying to find their destination folder in the Windows Explorer tree view.
Of course, with more screen estate you can keep both source and destination folders open at the same time and just drag between them. It's much easier to remember the spatial position of something on the screen than the hierarchical position of something in a tree-view. And generally you only have a handful of folders that you frequently move files between anyway, so those folders stay open all of the time. It's all about workflow.
Maybe not just for dragging and dropping, but it is certainly a major reason. I've seen how painfully slow it is when a collegue selects a file, right-click-cuts it, goes back to the tree view, searches through and finally finds the destination folder, and pastes the file into it.
If you compare that with dragging a file from one window to another, the drag and drop wins by a mile.
Of course, people who still work with maximised windows just will not get it...
The point is with multiple monitors, you can afford to keep frequently used folder windows open all of the time (with the tree-view turned off), and still have room to spare for Developer Studio and a few VT100 terminals and command prompts, with no one window obscuring another.
Thanks - that looks exactly like the sort of thing I was after.
It's true that your particular search example works rather well, but to call my point FUD is a bit strong. My own experience is that there are some searches that work really well, and others where you can wade through page after page of results full of links to parked domains, other search engines, and stores masquarading as review sites.
I find that Google is becoming less and less useful.
...?
The web now has become so large that a simple keyword search just doesn't cut it anymore. Try searching for information about a popular digital camera from someone who isn't trying to sell them. It is next to impossible. (Yes I know about http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ - a good try, but not really addressing the fundamental problem.)
The best way that search could get better in my opinion is to introduce some kind of filtering on the type of organisation that produces the pages you are searching for. Google already does a bit of this with Google Scholar. But we need something far more general, and more to the point, a facility for excluding results of particular types, e.g. blogs, sites trying to sell something,
I know that some people will complain that it may be a very subjective judgement whether site X is commercial or not. But search results are never going to be perfect anyway. Let's have the improvements where they are available, and worry about the corner cases later.
Wouldn't it be great if Sainsburys, Asda, Woolworths, etc, all started offering their own branded versions of this same office suite. I can just imagine it:
"My document loads perfectly on Tesco Office, Sainsburys Office and Asda Office. It's only Microsoft Office that mucks up the formatting."
I agree that ISPs should to some extent be held accountable, but to hold them 100% accountable ignores the fact that it is virtually impossible to pre-emptively stop all forms of email abuse.
For example, SORBS have a policy that they will blacklist a server if they receive three or more emails to their spam trap addresses. These addresses are kept secret, so the ISP can't know what these spam trap addresses are. Suppose a malicious client of the ISP discovers (or guesses) one or more of these spam trap addresses. He can then send just three emails, the contents of which need not be 'spammy' in the least. The ISP's server will then be blacklisted for at least 48 hours, but usually much longer. An ISP has absolutely no defence against this kind of thing.
You could easily think of other examples where the ISP has no possible way to recognise that malicious email is being sent until after it has gone out of the door.
But the real issue is that the people who suffer are the other customers. They are completely disempowered, because they will just be ignored if they contact the RBL operator (since they are not the administrator of the blacklisted server). They could in principle find another ISP, but that is usually an unacceptable solution due to the disruption involved. If they don't have their own domain, they lose their email address, which means they will continue to lose emails. They can't win.
ISPs should be fighting against spam, but not with RBLs. The only time it is justified to use an RBL as a single criterion for rejecting email is when the administrator of the filter is also the only consumer of the filtered email. (Or perhaps if you have the explicit approval of all consumers that missing some non-spam emails is acceptable.)