I hate to use the so often used refrain in "ask Slashdot" questions but Try Google (tm).
The thing you are most concerned with is the input device - everything else can be in a sealed box so type into Google "industrial keyboards" and hunt to your heart's content.
You might, for example, discover on the first page of returns the MGR Keymate 2 which is "a sealed keyboard featuring a smooth membrane ideal for food and beverage and medical applications where wash down / sterilization is needed." (emphasis mine).
You may even discover that many of these keyboards are rated for use in explosive environments, say where you have things like ether, oxygen and alcohol though I can't possibly think of such a place at the moment.
They released info on the critical uber-flaw one day AFTER they announced that they had received a big contract from the Department of Homeland Security.
Wrong. What is true is that people get immersed in their own areas of expertise and when they look up they are "amazed" that there is more to the world. Just look at todays/. story about TRON. How many IT people do you think have heard of that? Almost none (till today), I'd wager. That doesn't change the fact that there are billions of copies in use.
The mainframe is far from dead. There are lots of jobs that are better handled by something other than sticking a bunch of x86 processors in a room together and many of those jobs are better handled by mainframes.
Microsoft is not staffed by dummies - they are able to research the literature. In this instance it appears that they screwed up or they lied.
Maybe nobody was reading Slashdot on Sunday: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/ 13/132250 &mode=thread&tid=130&tid=185&tid=1 90
Re:Zero-G likely matters not
on
RAID for Zero-G?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The vibration is more of an issue; however, if the drives are parked.. it shouldn't matter too much..
Maybe not to the drives but the whole system must be considered. Drives don't work well when the power or data cables shake off or the raid board or CPU on the system comes loose.
Machines exist to shake 'n' bake equipment (NASA or its contractors will have them). I wouldn't send up an experiment unless it passes a ground simulation of the vibration, G-loads, temperature, etc. that it will experience on liftoff, reentry and orbit.
Wait a friggin minute
on
RAID for Zero-G?
·
· Score: 3, Redundant
You are sending up an experiment on shuttle mid-deck which I would hope implies that the experiment is worth the significant risk to human life and great expense that this requires.
But no, you are looking to cheap-out on the drives that are undoubtedly critical to the success of the experiment. That's pretty damn penny wise and pound foolish.
Having vented...
I suspect that NASA has specs and requirements for experiments on spacecraft if not for protecting the integrity of the experiments then at least to protect the astronauts and shuttle. What do those specs dictate?
If you can use COTS hardware then I suspect that laptop drives are your best bet for not only ruggedness but also weight, power draw, and size.
I have no problem at all with my Logitech wireless optical wheel mouse running through my Belkin 4-port switch.
Did you bother with the Linksys support site? Perhaps this is the problem you are having.
The Linksys product description says, "Because they donâ(TM)t use software, the ProConnect Compact KVM Switches are compatible with all major desktop and note-book computers." One might read into that statement that the switch is not altering the electrical signals and that the switch is compatible with all mice. Sadly, that appears not to be the case and although a known limitation they don't mention it in the description. I'd send it back and buy from a company that makes KVM switches that work properly.
While I find the blocking software providers a secretive and sleazy bunch and the blocklist rather suspect, I'm not sure that this law will be all that bad.
The terminals I've seen at libraries require a card or login anyway. Since the law is aimed at kids, just issue adult/minor cards or IDs that are, by default, unrestricted or restricted. (I think that parents must sign for kids library cards anyway - minors can't sign legal documents promising to return the books - so determining who is a minor is just part of the process anyway.)
Since adult logins are never blocked there should be no issue of embarassment over requesting removal of the filter. If a kid "needs" unfiltered access he can bring his parent to log in. It's sort of like an R rated movie.
Sure, IDs or cards can be lost or stolen but they can also be deactivated. It seems that this would fulfill the requirement of the law in a nearly transparent way (of course I haven't read the actual law in detail so I could be wrong).
One last note: If you are looking for failure, you will surely find it. Why are you looking for failure?
We learn from failure and ignore it at our peril. Read some books like "To Engineer is Human" and "Why Buildings Fall Down" to see how much more we learn from failure than from just keeping on doing things the old way.
Well, there's Microsoft switching from FreeBSD to Windows. But does that really count as a failure of open source? After all, other than during the many failed attempts at transitioning to Windows, Hotmail ran extremely well. And the cost factor is rather skewed when you get as many copies of Windows as you need for free. And it was corporate pride/image, not technology, that drove the change. Still, they did finally change. ('course then they blew up their DNS and ended up outsourcing to someone running it on *nix so I guess there is balance in the universe.)
Theory is nice but real-world experience is essential. Nobody wants a product that works only in theory. One of the most amusing things I watched was the other students in CS150 which, back when I took it, was a required course for both CS and EE students. You had to design and build small digital circuits. The pure CS track and the EE track students started out the same but there was a sharp split when they found the circuits they had assembled didn't work.
The CS students started to anguish over their logic diagrams and search for the flaws. The EEs did a once-over of the logic, grabbed a scope and a couple capacitors. A couple of well placed capacitors across critical power supply leads usually fixed the problem.
The CS students' built circuits that worked "in theory," the EE students built circuits that worked.
Seriously, I remember helping my dad (an electrical engineer) making a batch of soap. Of course this involved many side tracks like measuring the temperature changes when the lye was added to the water and testing various ways to improve the purity of the fat.
In 5th grade a bunch of my class visited to learn how soap was made.
My dad stopped when he realized that he had enough to last the rest of his life (it is quite hard unlike store-bought and each bar lasts quite a while).
He still delivers a bag when he visits so it's the soap I still use as well.
I have noticed the same thing - cost for disk space seems way out of line but the answer in part is that it costs that much because people are willing to pay for it.
But don't assume that raw disk cost is the most important factor. ISPs generally host lots of sites on a bunch of pretty generic standardized boxes.
Here are some other factors that will drive the cost up:
Good hardware: RAID/hot-swap/SCSI is going to cost a lot more than a discount IDE drive.
Maintenance: It's not just the cost of a single drive - it's the parts and labor cost of replacing failed units as well.
Backups: Whatever you store they have to backup so they have to consider all the costs associated with data protection.
Machine capacity: If they have sized their standard machine to host, say, 200 sites and partitioned out the data space accordingly then you can think of someone who uses 10 times the normal data quota as really using up 10 users worth of capacity on that machine as a whole. Where there are bandwidth guarantees a similar situation exists.
I'm sure there are other considerations as well but considering the price pressure on ISPs these days I'm sure that you could find plenty who would offer cheap disk space to get you as a customer if they would make money doing it.
This article makes it appear to be a lot of work to avoid...work.
It seems like it would be a lot more exhausting trying to appear to work and worrying about getting caught - especially since a lot of the "avoidance" such as checking and responding to email and voicemail actually IS work - than it would be to just work at the office.
I guess some people just need to feel that they are getting away with something.
"...a feedback card in the August 2002 statewide primaries found that 99 percent of voters were pleased with their Diebold machines."
Isn't that the same percentage of people who "voted" for Saddam Hussein in the last Iraq "election". I wonder if the "feedback" was tallied on a Diebold machine.
I work in market research and I have never, ever seen 99% of people polled agree on anything. This 99% of the vote statement should give anyone considering e-lections the willies.
I heard the good professor interviewed on NPR this afternoon and one of the questions was "do you really think this will work or is it just a mental exercise" to which he responded that there are no blueprints, and it is basically a mental exercise but that you have to start generating the ideas somewhere.
Oops, make that 30 years.
on
Remembering Skylab
·
· Score: 3, Informative
So my fingers don't always aim right before my first cup of coffee. The "2" should have been a "3".
Now that I've made my "off by one" error for the day I can safely proceed with real work.
It's a bit like saying "we just shipped 5000 thingies last month using 3 vehicles". Um, 5000 beanie babies or 5000 tractor engines? Was the vehicle a rowboat or a train?"
Every site is different. I don't really care that the servers are 1U at the expense of telling us things like how large the database is and is it mostly cached reads or read-write activity? How big is the pipe? What is the CPU speed and RAM size? What is the speed and type of disk? How many bytes are transferred?
Incidentally, a much more important number is peak capacity, ie. what is your 5 minute peak load? Whatever you can reasonably handle for 5-10 minutes you can probably handle constantly but a supposedly high-volume site can melt down when the site gets flashed up on the morning news or Slashdot.
The more "low hanging fruit" you pick off the less your computationally expensive filters have to do. For example, if the other system greets you with: EHLO your.machine.ip.address or EHLO your.machine.name then it IS a spammer. Reject now. There are some patches and configurations for Postfix so you can declare that RCPT from certain domains like yahoo and hotmail be verified to have a hotmail EHLO that properly resolves. This is more expensive as a dns lookup is required but this will probably be cached locally pretty quickly.
You can also unceremoniously drop any connection that starts pipelining before you say it is OK to pipeline and any EHLO that has an illegal hostname.
This, at least, reduces the work your scanning engines will have to do. Still, even if you catch nearly all the spam with the easy checks you will only reduce your mail volume by ~40% (current estimated overall spam volume) so that leaves you with 60% to scan.
I suppose your main MX could do the easy checks then send the remainder off to as many round-robin scanners as necessary which in turn could pass the mail on for delivery.
One starts to realize why some places just roll over and pay tens of thousands of dollars to someone else to do it for them.
...has the world become too lazy to make email delivery, easier?
I don't know of any specific RFC that requires reverse DNS for SMTP but the RFCs do require that the HELO/EHLO be 1) fully qualified and 2) resolvable.
I strongly recommend enforcing that rule even though you will be amazed at the number of mailservers that are not configured properly to follow this basic requirement of RFC2821.
Naturally it's not a bad idea to then look up the EHLO domain and make sure it resolves back to the connecting IP. Something like 25% of the mail I reject is rejected for greeting me with my own IP or hostname.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing you are most concerned with is the input device - everything else can be in a sealed box so type into Google "industrial keyboards" and hunt to your heart's content.
You might, for example, discover on the first page of returns the MGR Keymate 2 which is "a sealed keyboard featuring a smooth membrane ideal for food and beverage and medical applications where wash down / sterilization is needed." (emphasis mine).
You may even discover that many of these keyboards are rated for use in explosive environments, say where you have things like ether, oxygen and alcohol though I can't possibly think of such a place at the moment.
They released info on the critical uber-flaw one day AFTER they announced that they had received a big contract from the Department of Homeland Security.
Not that I'm suggesting anything...
Wrong. What is true is that people get immersed in their own areas of expertise and when they look up they are "amazed" that there is more to the world. Just look at todays /. story about TRON. How many IT people do you think have heard of that? Almost none (till today), I'd wager. That doesn't change the fact that there are billions of copies in use.
The mainframe is far from dead. There are lots of jobs that are better handled by something other than sticking a bunch of x86 processors in a room together and many of those jobs are better handled by mainframes.
Microsoft is not staffed by dummies - they are able to research the literature. In this instance it appears that they screwed up or they lied.
dd if=/dev/zero of=patentedbyMS bs=1024k count=1024 /mnt/priorart
mke2fs -b 1024 -F patentedbyMS
mount -t ext2 -o rw,loop=/dev/loop patentedbyMS
Same Story Different Spin
/ 13/132250 &mode=thread&tid=130&tid=185&tid=1 90
Maybe nobody was reading Slashdot on Sunday:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07
Maybe not to the drives but the whole system must be considered. Drives don't work well when the power or data cables shake off or the raid board or CPU on the system comes loose. Machines exist to shake 'n' bake equipment (NASA or its contractors will have them). I wouldn't send up an experiment unless it passes a ground simulation of the vibration, G-loads, temperature, etc. that it will experience on liftoff, reentry and orbit.
You are sending up an experiment on shuttle mid-deck which I would hope implies that the experiment is worth the significant risk to human life and great expense that this requires.
But no, you are looking to cheap-out on the drives that are undoubtedly critical to the success of the experiment. That's pretty damn penny wise and pound foolish.
Having vented...
I suspect that NASA has specs and requirements for experiments on spacecraft if not for protecting the integrity of the experiments then at least to protect the astronauts and shuttle. What do those specs dictate?
If you can use COTS hardware then I suspect that laptop drives are your best bet for not only ruggedness but also weight, power draw, and size.
No problem, thousands of readers stand at the ready.
I have no problem at all with my Logitech wireless optical wheel mouse running through my Belkin 4-port switch.
Did you bother with the Linksys support site? Perhaps this is the problem you are having.
The Linksys product description says, "Because they donâ(TM)t use software, the ProConnect Compact KVM Switches are compatible with all major desktop and note-book computers." One might read into that statement that the switch is not altering the electrical signals and that the switch is compatible with all mice. Sadly, that appears not to be the case and although a known limitation they don't mention it in the description. I'd send it back and buy from a company that makes KVM switches that work properly.
You must be expecting some very tight prose in the Pentium 4 reference manual.
While I find the blocking software providers a secretive and sleazy bunch and the blocklist rather suspect, I'm not sure that this law will be all that bad.
The terminals I've seen at libraries require a card or login anyway. Since the law is aimed at kids, just issue adult/minor cards or IDs that are, by default, unrestricted or restricted. (I think that parents must sign for kids library cards anyway - minors can't sign legal documents promising to return the books - so determining who is a minor is just part of the process anyway.)
Since adult logins are never blocked there should be no issue of embarassment over requesting removal of the filter. If a kid "needs" unfiltered access he can bring his parent to log in. It's sort of like an R rated movie.
Sure, IDs or cards can be lost or stolen but they can also be deactivated. It seems that this would fulfill the requirement of the law in a nearly transparent way (of course I haven't read the actual law in detail so I could be wrong).
We learn from failure and ignore it at our peril. Read some books like "To Engineer is Human" and "Why Buildings Fall Down" to see how much more we learn from failure than from just keeping on doing things the old way.
Well, there's Microsoft switching from FreeBSD to Windows. But does that really count as a failure of open source? After all, other than during the many failed attempts at transitioning to Windows, Hotmail ran extremely well. And the cost factor is rather skewed when you get as many copies of Windows as you need for free. And it was corporate pride/image, not technology, that drove the change. Still, they did finally change. ('course then they blew up their DNS and ended up outsourcing to someone running it on *nix so I guess there is balance in the universe.)
Theory is nice but real-world experience is essential. Nobody wants a product that works only in theory. One of the most amusing things I watched was the other students in CS150 which, back when I took it, was a required course for both CS and EE students. You had to design and build small digital circuits. The pure CS track and the EE track students started out the same but there was a sharp split when they found the circuits they had assembled didn't work.
The CS students started to anguish over their logic diagrams and search for the flaws. The EEs did a once-over of the logic, grabbed a scope and a couple capacitors. A couple of well placed capacitors across critical power supply leads usually fixed the problem.
The CS students' built circuits that worked "in theory," the EE students built circuits that worked.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Wired News."
You know, the Simple Object Access Protocol?
Seriously, I remember helping my dad (an electrical engineer) making a batch of soap. Of course this involved many side tracks like measuring the temperature changes when the lye was added to the water and testing various ways to improve the purity of the fat.
In 5th grade a bunch of my class visited to learn how soap was made.
My dad stopped when he realized that he had enough to last the rest of his life (it is quite hard unlike store-bought and each bar lasts quite a while).
He still delivers a bag when he visits so it's the soap I still use as well.
I have noticed the same thing - cost for disk space seems way out of line but the answer in part is that it costs that much because people are willing to pay for it.
But don't assume that raw disk cost is the most important factor. ISPs generally host lots of sites on a bunch of pretty generic standardized boxes.
Here are some other factors that will drive the cost up:
Good hardware: RAID/hot-swap/SCSI is going to cost a lot more than a discount IDE drive.
Maintenance: It's not just the cost of a single drive - it's the parts and labor cost of replacing failed units as well.
Backups: Whatever you store they have to backup so they have to consider all the costs associated with data protection.
Machine capacity: If they have sized their standard machine to host, say, 200 sites and partitioned out the data space accordingly then you can think of someone who uses 10 times the normal data quota as really using up 10 users worth of capacity on that machine as a whole. Where there are bandwidth guarantees a similar situation exists.
I'm sure there are other considerations as well but considering the price pressure on ISPs these days I'm sure that you could find plenty who would offer cheap disk space to get you as a customer if they would make money doing it.
their update site converts all those machines to Linux?
This article makes it appear to be a lot of work to avoid...work.
It seems like it would be a lot more exhausting trying to appear to work and worrying about getting caught - especially since a lot of the "avoidance" such as checking and responding to email and voicemail actually IS work - than it would be to just work at the office.
I guess some people just need to feel that they are getting away with something.
Isn't that the same percentage of people who "voted" for Saddam Hussein in the last Iraq "election". I wonder if the "feedback" was tallied on a Diebold machine.
I work in market research and I have never, ever seen 99% of people polled agree on anything. This 99% of the vote statement should give anyone considering e-lections the willies.
I heard the good professor interviewed on NPR this afternoon and one of the questions was "do you really think this will work or is it just a mental exercise" to which he responded that there are no blueprints, and it is basically a mental exercise but that you have to start generating the ideas somewhere.
So my fingers don't always aim right before my first cup of coffee. The "2" should have been a "3".
Now that I've made my "off by one" error for the day I can safely proceed with real work.
It's a bit like saying "we just shipped 5000 thingies last month using 3 vehicles". Um, 5000 beanie babies or 5000 tractor engines?
Was the vehicle a rowboat or a train?"
Every site is different. I don't really care that the servers are 1U at the expense of telling us things like how large the database is and is it mostly cached reads or read-write activity? How big is the pipe? What is the CPU speed and RAM size? What is the speed and type of disk? How many bytes are transferred?
Incidentally, a much more important number is peak capacity, ie. what is your 5 minute peak load? Whatever you can reasonably handle for 5-10 minutes you can probably handle constantly but a supposedly high-volume site can melt down when the site gets flashed up on the morning news or Slashdot.
The more "low hanging fruit" you pick off the less your computationally expensive filters have to do. For example, if the other system greets you with:
EHLO your.machine.ip.address
or
EHLO your.machine.name then it IS a spammer. Reject now. There are some patches and configurations for Postfix so you can declare that RCPT from certain domains like yahoo and hotmail be verified to have a hotmail EHLO that properly resolves. This is more expensive as a dns lookup is required but this will probably be cached locally pretty quickly.
You can also unceremoniously drop any connection that starts pipelining before you say it is OK to pipeline and any EHLO that has an illegal hostname.
This, at least, reduces the work your scanning engines will have to do. Still, even if you catch nearly all the spam with the easy checks you will only reduce your mail volume by ~40% (current estimated overall spam volume) so that leaves you with 60% to scan.
I suppose your main MX could do the easy checks then send the remainder off to as many round-robin scanners as necessary which in turn could pass the mail on for delivery.
One starts to realize why some places just roll over and pay tens of thousands of dollars to someone else to do it for them.
I don't know of any specific RFC that requires reverse DNS for SMTP but the RFCs do require that the HELO/EHLO be 1) fully qualified and 2) resolvable.
I strongly recommend enforcing that rule even though you will be amazed at the number of mailservers that are not configured properly to follow this basic requirement of RFC2821.
Naturally it's not a bad idea to then look up the EHLO domain and make sure it resolves back to the connecting IP. Something like 25% of the mail I reject is rejected for greeting me with my own IP or hostname.