Took a CS class where weekly quizzes were multiple choice. The teacher was too lazy to grade, so instead we had to enter our answers in an Excel spreadsheet, which would then grade our quiz, and we'd print a hardcopy to turn in.
This was all rather silly (and I was acing the class), so one day I decided to figure out how the automatic grading worked. While the teacher was passing out the quizzes, I entered =Z1 in box A1 and then dragged it down 20 rows. Clicked score and then printed. My perfect score was coming out of the printer as the teacher handed me my quiz.
Come on... let's be serious here. Has Trend Micro never heard of SQL Slammer? The worm that melted the internet in 15 minutes? Meanwhile, several DAYS after this worm was released, it's just barely starting to make the news, and that only because the news agencies themselves got hit.
Or perhaps the story summary is just making up stuff. The links provided have no quote from TM saying such silliness.
The way I see it, the goal of the sysadmin is to make the users forget (s)he exists.
Really a lot goes into the system design -- if you design your setup well, it's not that hard to maintain. But very few sysadmins have design skills, which is why it turns into such a beast of a job.
If they attempt to reconnect before X minutes have elapsed they will be blacklisted
Either you're wrong, or greylisting is incredibly stupid.
Most MTAs (sendmail, for example) process their queue at regular intervals. If a message is tempfailed, it goes into the queue. Let's say I try mailing you, and you tempfail me due to your greylisting setup. If I just happened to mail you at 11:59, and my queue gets processed again at noon, then I've connected a second time only a minute later. Oh noes, you blacklisted me!
You need to realize that no mailservers actually look at the random "5 mins" crap you're telling them and decide to retry exactly 5 mins later. They retry whenever they feel like it. In the end, it's you that suffers. One of the many reasons that greylisting is a Bad Idea.
I think they said something like 2 miles was as close as you could get.
My dad used to get press credentials to it. The nearest press site is 3 miles away. You need special credentials, and they prefer you to not have a family. (If the shuttle blows up on the ground, you're dead.)
There's another press site 10-12 miles away. That one's a bit easier to get into. If it blows up on the ground, you have time to dive for cover before the blast reaches you. Even there, it's quite loud.
You know, after the previous poster accused me of not being creative enough, I got to thinking what could be the worst non-fatal failure mode. Initially I'd been thinking falling down backwards was it, because it's something the passengers know is not supposed to happen, and they're going backwards, and they're totally thinking they're gonna die.
But that's only for a couple seconds. So maybe they'd be stopped again before anyone was seriously traumatized (too fast to realize you're gonna die).
So then I started thinking about whether it could get stuck at the top. Couldn't see any reason why not....
Reminds me of a time I was in a centrifuge, along with about 30 other people. You know, the things that spin the room around really fast so you feel the G forces? Everyone stands lining the walls of a circular room, which is then spun (operator stays in the center, where he can keep an eye on everyone). Anyway, while we were spinning at around 3 or 4 G's, a girl sneezed. About 1/2 second later, I heard about 20 people go "ewwww...".
Although I'm sure the Mormons would welcome a fixed, formalized family tree, most of the information I have is far lower-level than they might be interested in. There's a little data like, "Jehod begat Ezekial begat Fred", but most of it is like "John Smith owned 12 acres in Norfolk County in 1728."
Although they might not be able to take that level of detail into their central database, I think they would welcme info like that at a more local level. At the local levels, they often have small libraries of genealogical data relevant to that specific locality. This way, a researcher can simply contact the local family history library and look up any information they might want.
Definitely look up The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in your phonebook and give them a call. Most areas have a local genealogy expert that can help you.
Not sure how you got modded "informative" with that troll.
Here's a hint: The original RedHat linux (version 9) and Fedora Core are not supposed to be used in the enterprise. They have RHEL for that. Which, incidentally, does not change. Patches get backported, which ensures stability.
If you were really trying to run a production system on Fedora, then you deserve what you got. Which, hopefully, was fired.
A flaw is found in zlib - no trouble, just run the normal update program that comes with your distribution, 'yum update' or whatever, the centrally installed zlib library will be updated, and all applications will start using it.
Ah, but when? Do they start using it immediately, or do running programs cache the old library, and therefore need a restart? And, if you don't know which programs are running it, then you have to reboot, right?
I agree that it's useful to patch one library rather than several programs, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're safe just from updating the library. You also need to restart all the programs that use it.
First of all, the page redirects him to a page he wants as his homepage, not to google.
Second of all, it really doesn't matter if google finds the URL. When the laptop is stolen, it's pretty trivial to filter out "googlebot" from the browser strings. Or do you really think people are going to google for "... I really can't imagine any search terms to put here" and then follow the link, causing false positives at just the time the laptop is stolen?
I've done basically the same thing for some customers -- I set their browser homepage to my site, which just instantly redirects them to their desired homepage. The user doesn't notice any delay, or even remember I'm doing this. But if his laptop is ever stolen, I can start watching logs for connections.
On the linux side I have it wget that page as part of the init scripts. So if it boots when attached to the network, it will phone home.
Obviously this doesn't protect against thieves that wipe the drive before going online. But I think most casual thieves wouldn't, since then they'd have to reinstall Windows, Office software, etc.
Been doing this for years... hardly anything new or exciting. And no, I don't spy. Seeing how often he opens a browser or goes to his home page isn't exactly interesting info anyway.
I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?
Letting them know what the opposition knows isn't the problem -- it's letting them know what the opposition does NOT know. If you really know all possible tactics, then it's a great idea, as they'll just give up. But if you're forgetting something, that's what they'll focus on. So, how sure are you that you know everything about this game?
As a side note, I'm left wondering whether this rumor was based on reality at all. Yes, I emailed my senator, but was it wasted effort? I worry that they don't even need to propose the bill anytime soon. Just spread rumors once a month for a year to wear everyone out from fighting it, without even having anything to fight against. A year from now, when everyone gets tired of the EFF "crying wolf", they would get an easy, and unnoticed, pass.
IAAP, and just skimmed the PRL on this. I'm a bit surprised to see they have only found (for $\lambda\approx 200nm$) that $\alpha\leq 10^{12}$. Here it's defined through $V(r)=V_N(r)[1+\alpha e^{-r/\lambda}]$ where V_N(r) is the expected Newtonian gravity.
So, as I see it, they've shown that this "other" interaction is less than a million million times stronger than Newtonian gravity, right? Until $\alpha \approx 1$, I wouldn't say they've "shown that gravity behaves exactly as Isaac Newton predicted". This is interesting, of course, but there's a long way to go. Fortunately they conclude their Letter by saying they expect to be able to get limits on $\alpha$ down to 10^6 with $\lambda\approx 100nm$. We'll be looking forward to it.
As a side note, it'd be really nice if/. learned to render TeX for any non-physicists who might be reading this.
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
The bottom line is, just because you don't have any symptoms now doesn't mean that you won't sometime soon. Trust me, you'll be quite surprised if it happens.
Here's a story for you:
After about 15 years of typing experience, and the ability to type at about 70 WPM, I realized one day that I was having severe pain in my left wrist. I couldn't put any pressure on it. Rolling over in my sleep would touch it, and I'd wake up.
After a few days, I got pretty scared, and went to a doctor. He told me I had carpal tunnel, and that I needed to stop typing. Which came as quite a shock to me, as I didn't believe in all that RSI hype.
Thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized that my right hand (mouse hand) was fine, so it was pretty unlikely that my left hand would have RSI problems. I pointed this out to the doc, but of course he's not a computer user, so he didn't understand.
In the end, I told him he was wrong, and reduced my typing to a bare minimum (did pencil/paper stuff for a while). After about a week, the pain was gone, and I went back to full speed. Never had a problem since.
For those wondering, there is an explanation for all of this. About a day before I noticed the pain, I had been walking a friend's (large) dog. At one point during that walk, the dog noticed a rabbit and took off after it (until hitting the end of the leash, of course). I didn't think anything of it at the time, but it's pretty clear that the sudden impact of a leash, and not my extensive typing, was the source of my pain.
I'd guess you had a similar cause. Oh, and for the record, I still don't believe in any of that RSI stuff. (I'm still young enough to think I'm invincible.;)
My email is always open, and the most recently received messages typically serve as a to-do list. So I set up at(1) or cron(8) jobs to email me reminders to do stuff. This has worked particularly well when I carry a text pager, as the computer can page me before appointments.
Another odd technique I used was to set an alarm on my HP48GX calculator. It will tell me of the alarm condition when I turn it on. Useful for that old flame whose birthday you've forgotten a few too many times. Set the alarm for a week in advance, and you'll have time to notice it and get a card in the mail.
In particular, most power stations can't exactly "shut down" at night, when the demand reduces. (Think of a hydroelectric station, for example.) They produce the same amount of power, and it's just a matter of whether it gets used or not.
Point being, if you charge your electric cars at night, the overall efficiency goes way up.
Until these people start going into withdrawal when they stop checking their email, don't call it addiction.
Agreed. I *am* addicted, and I find it insulting when others claim to be just because they check it a few times a day. Me, I check it every time it beeps. And I get 100 messages/day, so that's a lot.
And yes, I go through withdrawal also. Usually after being away for an hour or two. Last year I was vacationing with family in South-East Asia, and had to pay to get my "fix". Upon discovering the internet cafe in northern Cambodia had lost their net connection, I became violently ill. First time I'd thrown up in 15 years.
Now, you might say I just ate some bad food. But I know it was the email outage....
I had a keyboard with that arrow-key layout once. The "center" of the plus produced a space. It also had the corners, which were supposedly "diagonal", but in reality just produced up-left, up-right, etc. Which is fine, except when you would have wanted left-up instead of up-left. Oh well... still useful.
Re:Too many keyboard layouts
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Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
On my laptop (toshiba tecra 8200) it's to the right of the right Alt key (I tap it by curling my right thumb under my palm, then pressing down). Sadly, I've become so used to typing on this laptop I occasionally become confused when the key is in the proper place....
6. They sue you for distributing your key. (After all, you've proven that you were the one that purchased the key that is circulating around the internet.)
Back in high school, a group of us slept over at a friend's house one weekend. And they were chewing tobacco, and spitting into a cup. Then someone knocked the cup over -- right into the keyboard.
We figured we'd clean up the mess in the morning. Turns out, by morning the spit had eaten its way through the plastic membrane that forms the circuitry in cheap keyboards. Nothing there to clean off -- the circuits were gone. Kinda reminds me of a "stainless carpet" ad, where they admit that their carpet can't withstand battery acid, and show a picture of the holes it will cause.
Coffee is another annoying substance, though not for a keyboard. If you spill it near your case, it will seep up into the groove between the case base and cover. And then dry, forming a very good seal. I once spent about 1/2 hour with a knife trying to cut that seal open.
Slashdot Mirror
Took a CS class where weekly quizzes were multiple choice. The teacher was too lazy to grade, so instead we had to enter our answers in an Excel spreadsheet, which would then grade our quiz, and we'd print a hardcopy to turn in.
This was all rather silly (and I was acing the class), so one day I decided to figure out how the automatic grading worked. While the teacher was passing out the quizzes, I entered =Z1 in box A1 and then dragged it down 20 rows. Clicked score and then printed. My perfect score was coming out of the printer as the teacher handed me my quiz.
Is it cheating if you make it that obvious?
Or perhaps the story summary is just making up stuff. The links provided have no quote from TM saying such silliness.
The way I see it, the goal of the sysadmin is to make the users forget (s)he exists.
Really a lot goes into the system design -- if you design your setup well, it's not that hard to maintain. But very few sysadmins have design skills, which is why it turns into such a beast of a job.
Either you're wrong, or greylisting is incredibly stupid.
Most MTAs (sendmail, for example) process their queue at regular intervals. If a message is tempfailed, it goes into the queue. Let's say I try mailing you, and you tempfail me due to your greylisting setup. If I just happened to mail you at 11:59, and my queue gets processed again at noon, then I've connected a second time only a minute later. Oh noes, you blacklisted me!
You need to realize that no mailservers actually look at the random "5 mins" crap you're telling them and decide to retry exactly 5 mins later. They retry whenever they feel like it. In the end, it's you that suffers. One of the many reasons that greylisting is a Bad Idea.
My dad used to get press credentials to it. The nearest press site is 3 miles away. You need special credentials, and they prefer you to not have a family. (If the shuttle blows up on the ground, you're dead.)
There's another press site 10-12 miles away. That one's a bit easier to get into. If it blows up on the ground, you have time to dive for cover before the blast reaches you. Even there, it's quite loud.
But that's only for a couple seconds. So maybe they'd be stopped again before anyone was seriously traumatized (too fast to realize you're gonna die).
So then I started thinking about whether it could get stuck at the top. Couldn't see any reason why not....
Thanks for your post ;)
Reminds me of a time I was in a centrifuge, along with about 30 other people. You know, the things that spin the room around really fast so you feel the G forces? Everyone stands lining the walls of a circular room, which is then spun (operator stays in the center, where he can keep an eye on everyone). Anyway, while we were spinning at around 3 or 4 G's, a girl sneezed. About 1/2 second later, I heard about 20 people go "ewwww...".
Although they might not be able to take that level of detail into their central database, I think they would welcme info like that at a more local level. At the local levels, they often have small libraries of genealogical data relevant to that specific locality. This way, a researcher can simply contact the local family history library and look up any information they might want.
Definitely look up The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in your phonebook and give them a call. Most areas have a local genealogy expert that can help you.
Here's a hint: The original RedHat linux (version 9) and Fedora Core are not supposed to be used in the enterprise. They have RHEL for that. Which, incidentally, does not change. Patches get backported, which ensures stability.
If you were really trying to run a production system on Fedora, then you deserve what you got. Which, hopefully, was fired.
Ah, but when? Do they start using it immediately, or do running programs cache the old library, and therefore need a restart? And, if you don't know which programs are running it, then you have to reboot, right?
I agree that it's useful to patch one library rather than several programs, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're safe just from updating the library. You also need to restart all the programs that use it.
Second of all, it really doesn't matter if google finds the URL. When the laptop is stolen, it's pretty trivial to filter out "googlebot" from the browser strings. Or do you really think people are going to google for "... I really can't imagine any search terms to put here" and then follow the link, causing false positives at just the time the laptop is stolen?
On the linux side I have it wget that page as part of the init scripts. So if it boots when attached to the network, it will phone home.
Obviously this doesn't protect against thieves that wipe the drive before going online. But I think most casual thieves wouldn't, since then they'd have to reinstall Windows, Office software, etc.
Been doing this for years... hardly anything new or exciting. And no, I don't spy. Seeing how often he opens a browser or goes to his home page isn't exactly interesting info anyway.
Letting them know what the opposition knows isn't the problem -- it's letting them know what the opposition does NOT know. If you really know all possible tactics, then it's a great idea, as they'll just give up. But if you're forgetting something, that's what they'll focus on. So, how sure are you that you know everything about this game?
As a side note, I'm left wondering whether this rumor was based on reality at all. Yes, I emailed my senator, but was it wasted effort? I worry that they don't even need to propose the bill anytime soon. Just spread rumors once a month for a year to wear everyone out from fighting it, without even having anything to fight against. A year from now, when everyone gets tired of the EFF "crying wolf", they would get an easy, and unnoticed, pass.
So, as I see it, they've shown that this "other" interaction is less than a million million times stronger than Newtonian gravity, right? Until $\alpha \approx 1$, I wouldn't say they've "shown that gravity behaves exactly as Isaac Newton predicted". This is interesting, of course, but there's a long way to go. Fortunately they conclude their Letter by saying they expect to be able to get limits on $\alpha$ down to 10^6 with $\lambda\approx 100nm$. We'll be looking forward to it.
As a side note, it'd be really nice if /. learned to render TeX for any non-physicists who might be reading this.
That's not an equation... THIS
\int d\eta_1^+d\eta_1\cdots d\eta_N^+d\eta_N e^{-\sum_{i,j} \eta_j^+A_{ji}\eta_i} \eta_{j_1}\eta_{i_1}^+\cdots\eta_{j_n}\eta_{i_n}^+ = \det A \sum_{k_1\cdots k_n} \epsilon_{j_1j_2\cdots j_n}^{k_1k_2\cdots k_n} A_{k_1i_1}^{-1} \cdots A_{k_ni_n}^{-1}
is an equation!
Apologies... Crocodile Dundee was on TV today.
Here's a story for you:
After about 15 years of typing experience, and the ability to type at about 70 WPM, I realized one day that I was having severe pain in my left wrist. I couldn't put any pressure on it. Rolling over in my sleep would touch it, and I'd wake up.
After a few days, I got pretty scared, and went to a doctor. He told me I had carpal tunnel, and that I needed to stop typing. Which came as quite a shock to me, as I didn't believe in all that RSI hype.
Thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized that my right hand (mouse hand) was fine, so it was pretty unlikely that my left hand would have RSI problems. I pointed this out to the doc, but of course he's not a computer user, so he didn't understand.
In the end, I told him he was wrong, and reduced my typing to a bare minimum (did pencil/paper stuff for a while). After about a week, the pain was gone, and I went back to full speed. Never had a problem since.
For those wondering, there is an explanation for all of this. About a day before I noticed the pain, I had been walking a friend's (large) dog. At one point during that walk, the dog noticed a rabbit and took off after it (until hitting the end of the leash, of course). I didn't think anything of it at the time, but it's pretty clear that the sudden impact of a leash, and not my extensive typing, was the source of my pain.
I'd guess you had a similar cause. Oh, and for the record, I still don't believe in any of that RSI stuff. (I'm still young enough to think I'm invincible. ;)
Another odd technique I used was to set an alarm on my HP48GX calculator. It will tell me of the alarm condition when I turn it on. Useful for that old flame whose birthday you've forgotten a few too many times. Set the alarm for a week in advance, and you'll have time to notice it and get a card in the mail.
Point being, if you charge your electric cars at night, the overall efficiency goes way up.
Agreed. I *am* addicted, and I find it insulting when others claim to be just because they check it a few times a day. Me, I check it every time it beeps. And I get 100 messages/day, so that's a lot.
And yes, I go through withdrawal also. Usually after being away for an hour or two. Last year I was vacationing with family in South-East Asia, and had to pay to get my "fix". Upon discovering the internet cafe in northern Cambodia had lost their net connection, I became violently ill. First time I'd thrown up in 15 years.
Now, you might say I just ate some bad food. But I know it was the email outage....
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist, not a cryptographer.
I had a keyboard with that arrow-key layout once. The "center" of the plus produced a space. It also had the corners, which were supposedly "diagonal", but in reality just produced up-left, up-right, etc. Which is fine, except when you would have wanted left-up instead of up-left. Oh well... still useful.
On my laptop (toshiba tecra 8200) it's to the right of the right Alt key (I tap it by curling my right thumb under my palm, then pressing down). Sadly, I've become so used to typing on this laptop I occasionally become confused when the key is in the proper place....
6. They sue you for distributing your key. (After all, you've proven that you were the one that purchased the key that is circulating around the internet.)
We figured we'd clean up the mess in the morning. Turns out, by morning the spit had eaten its way through the plastic membrane that forms the circuitry in cheap keyboards. Nothing there to clean off -- the circuits were gone. Kinda reminds me of a "stainless carpet" ad, where they admit that their carpet can't withstand battery acid, and show a picture of the holes it will cause.
Coffee is another annoying substance, though not for a keyboard. If you spill it near your case, it will seep up into the groove between the case base and cover. And then dry, forming a very good seal. I once spent about 1/2 hour with a knife trying to cut that seal open.