If you don't plan to handle anything much larger than about 30-50cm in size, I would suggest a clean glove box instead of a room.
I used glove boxes from time to time when I was studying chemisty. You can see a picture of one here.
The ones I was using, where generaly the size of a table, and about 3' high. You accessed your work inside using big rubber gloves, that where attached to the box so that the atmosphere in the box is seperate from the one outside. The front and some of the sides where glass. The glove box had one or more air-locks so you could take things in and out. (More than one lock, because smaller ones cycle quicker).
Chemistry glove boxes are usualy used for experements involving chemicals that are sensitive to oxygen or water vapour, so the atmophere in the box would generaly be dry nitrogen, at positive pressure, with no specal provision to avoid dust. Glove boxes are also used ocasionaly for radioactive compounds, where the box protects the laboratory atmosphere from the experenent, rather than the other way arround.
One of the chemistry departents I studied at had some glove boxes that they had made in-house, and I don't think it would be especaly difficult for you to make one. (They said theirs cost them about 10K to make, including labour).
The main body of the home made box, was made from acrylic pannels bolted together and sealed with silicone. The gloves are avalable from chemistry suppliers for about 10 pounds/pair. The airlock was made from welded sheet steel. The atmosphere in this box was maintained by flushing through with dry nitrogen (boiled off from liquid N2).
Obvously if you plan to use your glove box for electronics, there is no need for an intert atmosphere, but you will have to take precautions to avoid dust, presumably via an air filtration system, which I don't think would be to hard to design. Also, if you are serous about preventing bactera or suchlike from getting into it, I would include a UV lighting system to kill them, that you either switch on when you are not using the box, or filter out through the windows.
If you really think about it, the math behind such an event may not work out....My guess is, there simply aren't enough hosts on the net that are simultaneously A) susceptible to infection B) sitting on static IPs, and C) unmonitored by human eyes. All three conditions must exist in order for the worm to propagate -- If any one of those factors is absent, that particular thread of the superworm is halted. It makes the scenario described in this article practically impossible. Sure, a superworm may exist, but it would be so slow-moving and predictable that it would be no more a threat than any other form of DoS attack.
IMHO, there are plenty of susceptible computers out there.
Most internet servers, both large and small are on static IPs, and only subject to occasional human monitoring. (That is occasional, relative to this worm's speed of propagation, which is estimated to be under a minute).
I would include my home linux box in the category of susceptible computers. It is permanently connected (ADSL), on static IP, and I only use it every day or so. It it became infected with Curious Yellow, I would be unlikely to notice for 12 hours or so, (unless my ISP phoned me), and if the worm was stealthy enough not to monopolise any resource (CPU, disc, bandwidth etc), I might not notice for weeks until someone contacted me. Considering how infectious this hypothetical worm is, 12 hours would be enough to do huge damage.
Ask yourself if the same would apply to any permanently connected computers in your control?
As for "susceptible to infection". Curious Yellow would be designed to use some sort of zero day exploit, so we have no idea which computers are susceptible, and it would be complacent to assume that only windows boxes are. My system runs Debian Stable, and I regularly apply the security patches, but that does not make it completely invulnerable.
A BBC Radio news show has decided to commemorate this by holding a poll of the public's favourite, and least favourite inventions of the last 150 years. The poll closes on Monday 21 October, so vote now.
It is interesting to note that James Dyson chose to highlight as his favourite invention the example of Rubber vulcanisation where (in his opinion) the patent system failed because the inventor Charles Goodyear was refused a patent and died in poverty despite the value of his invention.
The Risks archive liked above appears to be slashdotted, This alternative archive Should be better, and as it is on a UK university site, it should have suficent bandwith.
To clarify, UltraEdit is shareware, and costs $30.
You can download a 45 day timebomed, but otherwise fully functional copy from here where you can also register your copy and get an unlock code with a credit card, via a secure site
I have also found it quite good, and use it for all editing tasks at work (I use emacs under linux at home. Once I registered, I found that the author answered my e-mailed bug reports and questions promptly, and was helpful
The only downside I can think of is that the author appears to be some sort of Christian evangelist, which just rubs me up the wrong way, of course this has no technical impact on the program.
The way I see it, you don't need to backup multiple copies of the entire data set to provide redundancy.
Instead, you do what RAID 5 does, you stripe the data, across multiple peers, with a checksum block on another. This way your data is still safe if one of your peers goes down. More clever striping and checksum algorithms can cope with more than one peer going down, up to some limit.
If a large number of your peers go down at once, then your data is lost, but that is only likely to happen if something catastrophic happens, such as your office building burning down, or being hit by a tornado. In that case it would be time to turn to your of site backups, as no P2P backup strategy would be of any use.
It is worth remembering that the whole point of this system, is to get people back to work as fast as possible, if they accidentally loose a relatively small amount of data. It is designed to complement, not replace, an offsite tape backup strategy.
It is not an issue unique to web pages. It is a potential issue for printing from any application.
Five years ago, when I was an avid user of Acorn RiscOS computers I had a neat applet which solves this problem for printing from any program. (I can't remember the name, and I have done a search).
What it did was to setup a virtual printer that could print arbitrary page sizes by printing tiles through a real printer.
The user would select what size paper they wished to emulate (A1, A0, etc or arbitrary dimensions), and the real printer to print through. The user would then press print from their application. The applet would create and print the tiles, with crop marks etc.
At the time I found the application quite useful, and found it easy to print out A2 or larger posters from any application, through my humble laser jet, and then paste them together.
I am quite surprised that there is no similar feature in CUPS, as IMHO, it would be relatively straight forward to implement, especially for GDI printers, and would be genuinely useful.
What's good for pulling down every file in a group?
If you specifically want to grab every article in a group, and you run a unix like OS, your best bet would be to run your own local news server. I have investigated several, and found that leafnode works well, is much easer to setup than the industrial strength alternatives, and it is perfectly adequate for one or two users, reading a dozen or so groups.
Leafnode can be setup with different download policies for different groups, but the default is to download everything, which for a binary group could suck 100's of MB.
Personally I would recommend it for home linux users reading text groups, but I would recommend caution with binary groups.
In my experience, it is the most fragile of the four common media card formats, and nor is it the cheapest.
I have worked with various types of media card in PDAs & similar small devices, and I have often seen broken Smartmedia cards. The problem appears to be that because they are so thin, they have no structural rigidity, so slight bending can break the electrical traces, and render the card useless.
Also unlike CF, they don't have any internal logic. This means they don't do wear levelling, so your memory card will have a shorter life. Also they don't talk IDE or USB.
I would personally recommend CF, because it is the cheapest, most robust, available in the largest capacities, and you can get Hard drives in that size, or put them in PDAs.
However, I Don't think you should be choosing the card format first, you should choose the camera first, and buy whatever media format it takes.
Of course, if you already have a large investment in Smartmedia cards, my arguments above may not apply, But remember that digital cameras are expensive, and media prices are falling all the time. It would be foolish to buy the wrong camera, just so you can keep using your Smartmedia cards that could be replaced for $20.
As I have said before in a previous post, If you have legitimately purchased the software, and the copy protection is causing you problems, you are IMHO, perfectly entitled to crack the copy protection.
There are essentially two ways to crack the program. (besides just making a CDR copy).
1. Search the web or usenet for a crack, produced by one of the many cracking organisations. This usually works well for teenage games, especially those popular at LAN parties. I don't know if it will work for educational stuff interned for kids.
A google search for "<program name> no-cd crack" should produce results, but be prepared for many annoying pop-ups, pornographic banners, broken links etc.
2. Alternatively you could crack it yourself, as this is often quite easy if you have programming skills.
The usual approach is to run the program under a debugger, tracing the program as it starts up with & without the key disc present. The just patch the executable so that the check is not performed, or the result ignored.
Needless to say, you should only apply such techniques to programs you own, and you should not share the results with anyone who does not also own a legit copy of the software.
A car like this could provide electricity for your home while parked there.
According to the article, the maximum power output of the car's fuel cell is 55kW, which is much more than the peak consumption of most homes (That is 500 Amps @ 110V).
Obviously, this could not be used for all home energy, as some devices (like refrigerators) run while the householder is not home, but it would let many people reduce their dependency on fixed electricity grids.
Where it would be especially useful would be for homes in the back country, especially holiday homes. The home owner would no longer have to choose, between finding a place close enough to mains power infrastructure that electrify could be installed, or virtually camping in very primitive conditions without electric light, TV, AC or refrigeration. By plugging their home into their fuel cell car, it would be possible to own a very isolated holiday cottage, without access to any wired services, and still have modern comforts.
Of course, I don't expect cars to replace conventional electricity infrastructure anywhere when an existing reliable system exists, but I think it will become important where there is none, or mains electricity is unreliable or expensive.
Suppose after the directive is passed I get a spam from china, promising great wealth and free pr0n, what do I do?
Complain to my ISP? - "Sorry sir, we just forward the mail, we don't do filtering."
Complain to the sender? - Like that ever worked.
Complain to some sort of police force? - The most they can do is inform to the spammers' ISP, & get ther account terminated, which I can to myself without any fancy new law.
If this is to work, there will need to be effective, quick, and hash penalties against ISPs that fail to block spam. Something similar to the usenet death penalty might work.
Without enforcement, this kind of directive will have no more effect than when King Knute ordered the tide not to come it.
IMHO, there is another reason why people go looking for cracks.
It is because they are FSCK'ed off with the annoying copy protection on the legal version they have already paid for.
A friend of mine is quite into PC gaming, especial first person shooters, He has brought about 20 games in the last couple of years. (I have seen the retail boxes on his shelves).
He has also downloaded cracks for most of them.
His reason is the original copy protection is inconvenient & annoying. Most games insist that the original CD be in the drive to play, Some require all the CDs to be inserted in succession. Some games don't like his SCSI CD-ROM, and insist that it is disabled (1). When he telephoned tech support for one of the publisher's with this problem, they accused him of being a pirate, and refused to help.
Overall the copy protection detracts from his experience of using the game software, so he improves it by cracking it.
IMHO, my friend has done nothing wrong by cracking software he already owns, but by doing so he has created demand for cracks, and making it more likely that those who have not paid for games will find the cracks they are looking for.
In conclusion, the message for software publishers, is to ease up on copy protection. If users want to copy the software they will find a way, and if the protection is to annoying, ordinary users will want to remove it.
1. Apparently it is possible to create a loop back block device under Win2K using SCSI, and that might be used to emulate a real CD-ROM.
like a Mercedes-Benz (not always good)
on
SuSE 8.0 Now Shipping
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I am a SuSE user. I chose it over other distros, because I read a number of favourable reviews. One memorably refereed to it as "The Mercedes-Benz of Linux Distros".
I would say this is correct, but not necessary in a good way.
Like the car, It works very well when new, but anyone who tries to tweak of modify anything is liable to break it.
I have concluded that this would probably make a good distro for my Dad, who just wants a reliable set-up, and won't try to install the latest hot thing of the net, but for myself, I intend to switch to a more hacker friendly distro, probably Debian.
If bad examiners are no good at spotting prior-art, why not use the web.
My suggestion.
Patents are applied for in HTML (or suchlike).
The examiners perform basic checks only.
Before the patent is granted, it is published on the patent office web site.
The pubic, competing companies, etc examine it & attempt to find prior art.
If no reasonable objection can be found after a specified time (e.g. a year) the patent is granted.
If any is found, a simple e-mail to the patent office, quoting and ISBN number & page number should be sufficient to deny the patent, or cause it to be repealed if it has already been granted.
With this plan, there should be little need for a large army of (poorly) qualified examiners.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't plan to handle anything much larger than about 30-50cm in size, I would suggest a clean glove box instead of a room.
I used glove boxes from time to time when I was studying chemisty. You can see a picture of one here.
The ones I was using, where generaly the size of a table, and about 3' high. You accessed your work inside using big rubber gloves, that where attached to the box so that the atmosphere in the box is seperate from the one outside. The front and some of the sides where glass. The glove box had one or more air-locks so you could take things in and out. (More than one lock, because smaller ones cycle quicker).
Chemistry glove boxes are usualy used for experements involving chemicals that are sensitive to oxygen or water vapour, so the atmophere in the box would generaly be dry nitrogen, at positive pressure, with no specal provision to avoid dust. Glove boxes are also used ocasionaly for radioactive compounds, where the box protects the laboratory atmosphere from the experenent, rather than the other way arround.
One of the chemistry departents I studied at had some glove boxes that they had made in-house, and I don't think it would be especaly difficult for you to make one. (They said theirs cost them about 10K to make, including labour).
The main body of the home made box, was made from acrylic pannels bolted together and sealed with silicone. The gloves are avalable from chemistry suppliers for about 10 pounds/pair. The airlock was made from welded sheet steel. The atmosphere in this box was maintained by flushing through with dry nitrogen (boiled off from liquid N2).
Obvously if you plan to use your glove box for electronics, there is no need for an intert atmosphere, but you will have to take precautions to avoid dust, presumably via an air filtration system, which I don't think would be to hard to design. Also, if you are serous about preventing bactera or suchlike from getting into it, I would include a UV lighting system to kill them, that you either switch on when you are not using the box, or filter out through the windows.
I hope this helps.
When I first saw it, I was amazed that it worked, but I would say it pushed the limits
Code example and discussion in the Jargon File
For a more detailed explation see here.
Can't post the code, due to Lameness filter.
IMHO, there are plenty of susceptible computers out there.
Most internet servers, both large and small are on static IPs, and only subject to occasional human monitoring. (That is occasional, relative to this worm's speed of propagation, which is estimated to be under a minute).
I would include my home linux box in the category of susceptible computers. It is permanently connected (ADSL), on static IP, and I only use it every day or so. It it became infected with Curious Yellow, I would be unlikely to notice for 12 hours or so, (unless my ISP phoned me), and if the worm was stealthy enough not to monopolise any resource (CPU, disc, bandwidth etc), I might not notice for weeks until someone contacted me. Considering how infectious this hypothetical worm is, 12 hours would be enough to do huge damage.
Ask yourself if the same would apply to any permanently connected computers in your control?
As for "susceptible to infection". Curious Yellow would be designed to use some sort of zero day exploit, so we have no idea which computers are susceptible, and it would be complacent to assume that only windows boxes are. My system runs Debian Stable, and I regularly apply the security patches, but that does not make it completely invulnerable.
Don't be complacent, Treat the risk seriously.
...And I tried to submit a story about it at the time. I guess jonerik has more luck than me.
My origonal submission, I think it is still relevant:
Instead of handing around floppies, why not use Infrared or viable light beams instead.
Direct link to the article
The Risks archive liked above appears to be slashdotted, This alternative archive Should be better, and as it is on a UK university site, it should have suficent bandwith.
I hope this is usefull
It's fairly portable. You can reasonably carry a floppy disk in your wallet and pull it out when you need it without fear of destroying it.
I have been carying a 128Mb CF card in my wallet for the past six months. It is much smaller, and makes a great sneakernet meadium.
Most of the computer users I regularly vist have media card readers for digital cameras and the like.
<AOL>Me To</AOL>
To clarify, UltraEdit is shareware, and costs $30.
You can download a 45 day timebomed, but otherwise fully functional copy from here where you can also register your copy and get an unlock code with a credit card, via a secure site
I have also found it quite good, and use it for all editing tasks at work (I use emacs under linux at home. Once I registered, I found that the author answered my e-mailed bug reports and questions promptly, and was helpful
The only downside I can think of is that the author appears to be some sort of Christian evangelist, which just rubs me up the wrong way, of course this has no technical impact on the program.
I hope this is useful
The way I see it, you don't need to backup multiple copies of the entire data set to provide redundancy.
Instead, you do what RAID 5 does, you stripe the data, across multiple peers, with a checksum block on another. This way your data is still safe if one of your peers goes down. More clever striping and checksum algorithms can cope with more than one peer going down, up to some limit.
If a large number of your peers go down at once, then your data is lost, but that is only likely to happen if something catastrophic happens, such as your office building burning down, or being hit by a tornado. In that case it would be time to turn to your of site backups, as no P2P backup strategy would be of any use.
It is worth remembering that the whole point of this system, is to get people back to work as fast as possible, if they accidentally loose a relatively small amount of data. It is designed to complement, not replace, an offsite tape backup strategy.
I hope this helps.
There is also a preview article at AnandTech.
See here (one long page for printing) or here 8 pages
It is not an issue unique to web pages. It is a potential issue for printing from any application.
Five years ago, when I was an avid user of Acorn RiscOS computers I had a neat applet which solves this problem for printing from any program. (I can't remember the name, and I have done a search).
What it did was to setup a virtual printer that could print arbitrary page sizes by printing tiles through a real printer.
The user would select what size paper they wished to emulate (A1, A0, etc or arbitrary dimensions), and the real printer to print through. The user would then press print from their application. The applet would create and print the tiles, with crop marks etc.
At the time I found the application quite useful, and found it easy to print out A2 or larger posters from any application, through my humble laser jet, and then paste them together.
I am quite surprised that there is no similar feature in CUPS, as IMHO, it would be relatively straight forward to implement, especially for GDI printers, and would be genuinely useful.
What's good for pulling down every file in a group?
If you specifically want to grab every article in a group, and you run a unix like OS, your best bet would be to run your own local news server. I have investigated several, and found that leafnode works well, is much easer to setup than the industrial strength alternatives, and it is perfectly adequate for one or two users, reading a dozen or so groups.
Leafnode can be setup with different download policies for different groups, but the default is to download everything, which for a binary group could suck 100's of MB.
Personally I would recommend it for home linux users reading text groups, but I would recommend caution with binary groups.
I hope this is useful
Why do you want to use Smartmedia cards?
In my experience, it is the most fragile of the four common media card formats, and nor is it the cheapest.
I have worked with various types of media card in PDAs & similar small devices, and I have often seen broken Smartmedia cards. The problem appears to be that because they are so thin, they have no structural rigidity, so slight bending can break the electrical traces, and render the card useless.
Also unlike CF, they don't have any internal logic. This means they don't do wear levelling, so your memory card will have a shorter life. Also they don't talk IDE or USB.
I would personally recommend CF, because it is the cheapest, most robust, available in the largest capacities, and you can get Hard drives in that size, or put them in PDAs.
However, I Don't think you should be choosing the card format first, you should choose the camera first, and buy whatever media format it takes.
Of course, if you already have a large investment in Smartmedia cards, my arguments above may not apply, But remember that digital cameras are expensive, and media prices are falling all the time. It would be foolish to buy the wrong camera, just so you can keep using your Smartmedia cards that could be replaced for $20.
I hope this is useful.
As I have said before in a previous post, If you have legitimately purchased the software, and the copy protection is causing you problems, you are IMHO, perfectly entitled to crack the copy protection.
There are essentially two ways to crack the program. (besides just making a CDR copy).
1. Search the web or usenet for a crack, produced by one of the many cracking organisations. This usually works well for teenage games, especially those popular at LAN parties. I don't know if it will work for educational stuff interned for kids.
A google search for "<program name> no-cd crack" should produce results, but be prepared for many annoying pop-ups, pornographic banners, broken links etc.
2. Alternatively you could crack it yourself, as this is often quite easy if you have programming skills.
The usual approach is to run the program under a debugger, tracing the program as it starts up with & without the key disc present. The just patch the executable so that the check is not performed, or the result ignored.
Needless to say, you should only apply such techniques to programs you own, and you should not share the results with anyone who does not also own a legit copy of the software.
A car like this could provide electricity for your home while parked there.
According to the article, the maximum power output of the car's fuel cell is 55kW, which is much more than the peak consumption of most homes (That is 500 Amps @ 110V).
Obviously, this could not be used for all home energy, as some devices (like refrigerators) run while the householder is not home, but it would let many people reduce their dependency on fixed electricity grids.
Where it would be especially useful would be for homes in the back country, especially holiday homes. The home owner would no longer have to choose, between finding a place close enough to mains power infrastructure that electrify could be installed, or virtually camping in very primitive conditions without electric light, TV, AC or refrigeration. By plugging their home into their fuel cell car, it would be possible to own a very isolated holiday cottage, without access to any wired services, and still have modern comforts.
Of course, I don't expect cars to replace conventional electricity infrastructure anywhere when an existing reliable system exists, but I think it will become important where there is none, or mains electricity is unreliable or expensive.
Sounds great, how exactly will this be enforced?
Suppose after the directive is passed I get a spam from china, promising great wealth and free pr0n, what do I do?
Complain to my ISP? - "Sorry sir, we just forward the mail, we don't do filtering."
Complain to the sender? - Like that ever worked.
Complain to some sort of police force? - The most they can do is inform to the spammers' ISP, & get ther account terminated, which I can to myself without any fancy new law.
If this is to work, there will need to be effective, quick, and hash penalties against ISPs that fail to block spam. Something similar to the usenet death penalty might work.
Without enforcement, this kind of directive will have no more effect than when King Knute ordered the tide not to come it.
IMHO, there is another reason why people go looking for cracks.
It is because they are FSCK'ed off with the annoying copy protection on the legal version they have already paid for.
A friend of mine is quite into PC gaming, especial first person shooters, He has brought about 20 games in the last couple of years. (I have seen the retail boxes on his shelves).
He has also downloaded cracks for most of them.
His reason is the original copy protection is inconvenient & annoying. Most games insist that the original CD be in the drive to play, Some require all the CDs to be inserted in succession. Some games don't like his SCSI CD-ROM, and insist that it is disabled (1). When he telephoned tech support for one of the publisher's with this problem, they accused him of being a pirate, and refused to help.
Overall the copy protection detracts from his experience of using the game software, so he improves it by cracking it.
IMHO, my friend has done nothing wrong by cracking software he already owns, but by doing so he has created demand for cracks, and making it more likely that those who have not paid for games will find the cracks they are looking for.
In conclusion, the message for software publishers, is to ease up on copy protection. If users want to copy the software they will find a way, and if the protection is to annoying, ordinary users will want to remove it.
1. Apparently it is possible to create a loop back block device under Win2K using SCSI, and that might be used to emulate a real CD-ROM.
See: How To Write Unmaintainable Code by Roedy Green
Every time I read it, I laugh from all the crazy examples of how not to do things:
eg:
16: Names From Mathematics:
Choose variable names that masquerade as mathematical operators, e.g.:
openParen = (slash + asterix) / equals;
Or as a single page instead of 12 try here
I am a SuSE user. I chose it over other distros, because I read a number of favourable reviews. One memorably refereed to it as "The Mercedes-Benz of Linux Distros".
I would say this is correct, but not necessary in a good way.
Like the car, It works very well when new, but anyone who tries to tweak of modify anything is liable to break it.
I have concluded that this would probably make a good distro for my Dad, who just wants a reliable set-up, and won't try to install the latest hot thing of the net, but for myself, I intend to switch to a more hacker friendly distro, probably Debian.
If bad examiners are no good at spotting prior-art, why not use the web.
My suggestion.
With this plan, there should be little need for a large army of (poorly) qualified examiners.
Any thoughts?