Mating triggers the development of new neurons in the smell centre of the brain
My god, this is genius! Finally, the missing link in the mystery of why lonely, sexless geeks often go for days or weeks without showering. Of course! They can't smell their own manfunk. It's all coming together....
I have not looked at the Spam-bait program you use to generate the fake email addresses, but it's it a bit irresponsible to string together random characters and assume that they constitute invalid email addresses? Especially in the.com domain suffix, since pretty much every three, four, five, and probably six letter domain name is registered to somebody, or at least it was before the bubble broke. And, a lot of domains will accept mail addressed to (anything)@domain, and store it in a catch-all account.
All I'm saying is you should have an algorithm that's slightly smarter than a random number generator.
Got news for you, now ISP does that. Not unless we're talking about a T1 or fractional T1 -- in that case you're guaranteed the bandwidth. Otherwise, if you're paying $25 - $75 to an ILEC, CLEC, or cable company, you are using shared bandwidth. A true T1 costs hundreds of dollars a month for 1.5Mbit both ways, how in fuck's sake do you think an ISP could possibly turn around and offer that bandwidth for $50? They can't. They rely on a low overall duty cycle and things like transparent web caches to make the financials work.
I know they advertise it as "unlimited" but that's really not true. You get burstable high speeds, but on the whole if you try to saturate the link they will eventually notice and probably try to cut you off. Again, if you want to complain about "using what you pay for" then get a T1 with a SLA (service level agreement) which is the only guaranteed bandwidth out there. Anything else is a toy and you should be happy that you can get burstable high speeds for $40/month. Not so long ago we were all content to pay $20/mo for 28.8kbps service.
Is this a HPT370 based controller? I had a very similar thing happen to me a year or two ago. The RAID controller just "forgot" its stripe config, which I think is stored on a very small reserved segment of the disc. Anyway, there's a utility called raidrb (google on raidrb.zip) that I used which fixed the problem without data loss. This used to be covered in an excellent FAQ that was on viahardware.com, but apparently it's gone now.
Re:Google contest ideas?
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ummm, the speed is 15 meters a minute, in English measurements, that's almost 50 feet in one minute's time... Almost 3 times the speed of the Asimo robot...The average geek is fortunate if they can manage that speed on foot... Needless to say, it's hardly a crawl...
Oh please. I would in fact call that a crawl. 15 m/min is 0.82 ft/s, or 0.56 MPH. I know you can walk faster than 0.56 MPH. If you can walk a mile in 20 minutes (which is not that hard at all) that's 3 MPH.
If the drives are so reliable (MTBF of a million years my ass!), then the extra cost would be $0.00 per unit.
False. There are several reasons why offering a three year warranty on a perfect drive still costs money.
If you read the statements from the drive manufacturers, the majority of RMA units that they receive failed because of improper shipping. Somone didn't properly pack the drive in dense-cell foam, or the case of an assembled system was not properly insulated from shock when the nice man in brown throws the package around. There really isn't much the drive manufacturer can do about this, other than refuse to accept drives that are not packed properly. But they still have no control of how the drive was handled before it was RMA'd.
Another problem is that many times people return drives that have not failed. You would think that anyone smart enough to have the case open would be smart enough to tell the difference between defective hardware and a botched install of an operating system (or a broken boot sector, etc.) but never underestimate the level of stupiditiy in this world. Sometimes, combined with poor packing (say, bubble-wrap) or other improper handling, this causes a drive that is otherwise OK to be defective by the time it arrives at the manufacturer.
The point is, there are certainly drive failures, but there's also a significant amount of incompetance out there. Offering a 3 year warranty means dealing with a lot of such issues.
You might be referring to the Magix Box hoax, where a Florida man got millions of dollars in investments (from folks like Blockbuster, Intel, and Ted Turner's son) for this mysterious device that supposedly transmitted data over regular phone lines at very fast rates. There was also a Slashdot story about the device.
Haven't you seen that informercial for the AutoLock, or whatever it's called -- the one that locks on your brake or clutch pedal? They show that a guy with a small hacksaw can cut through the steering wheel and remove the Club in about 3 seconds. Now, I'm not saying anyone should draw any conclusions of fact from an infomercial. But consider that steering wheels are necessarily soft, as is the dashboard and all other objects you are likely to come into contact with in an accident -- certainly more vulnerable than the metal of the club.
Mod parent down
on
Net Vegas
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Christ, at least two idiots with mod points gave that informative? It's a troll link that posts "fuck you, this site sucks" on some random bulletin board. Sheesh, don't mod a link without checking it first, dilhole!
My interpretation of this article is that the spammers are setting their client's "Referer:" header field to their porn site, and then retrieving pages from the blogs. The result is that links to the porn/spam sites appear in the Apache referer log file on the blog site. The spammers do this because they know the blog operators pay extra attention to their referer logs and are likely to follow those links (either out of curiosity or out of the desire to maintain reciprocity with other blogs that may link to them.) Apparently the bloggers have scripts that automatically harvest all the URLs from these referer logs to make this process easier.
I don't think the spammer would bother creating an actual link on their porn/spam site to the blog, although this would work as well. It's silly though since it's more work and it still requires that someone actually click on the link for the porn URL to make it into the referer log. Why bother when they could just run an automated script to hit the blog with the forged "Referer:" and then discard the results. The only possible reason to do it this way is that the spam URL would be sent multiple times from different IP addresses, and hence harder to filter or ignore.
The confusing bit is that the article mentions that this might prop up the blog's SearchRank relevancy. This would only be the case with the latter method (creating an actual link) whereas the more straightforwad way would have no such effect.
Symbolic representation - Power supplies might not catch fire, but you can certainly burn them out.
In THG's not-so-great tradition of faking pictures, I wouldn't be surprised if matches and lighter fluid were used to enhance those photos, to "drive the point home."
Thus, if you consider the complete cycle (growing sugar cane, distilling, burning), no CO2 will be released in the atmosphere.
Yeah, that is, except for all the diesel fuel burned by the farming machinery and the coal fuel burned to produce the electricity for the refinement process. Sure, zero sum it is.
This is good because it's cheap(er) for poor farmers, not because it's good for the environment.
When I go to work, I leave my front door unlocked and slightly ajar. The other day when I got back, I found vagrants sleeping on my sofa and defecating in my sink. Other than closing and locking my door when I leave, how can I get rid of them? Has this ever happened to you? Also, can I sue my landlord over this? Thanks.
First of all, I think you'd need few more options than "3.3, 5, and 12V"... say, for example 9V. But ignoring that, I fail to see the point of this if it's not universal. What good is it if it only powers the most common devices? The poster mentioned speakers, and those generally require either a split rail (-12, 0, 12) or something higher than 12V, such as 24V. So right there, that's one thing for which you need an extra (and quite large) power lump.
My overall point was that if this is not universally standard, it's just another brick, and doesn't really solve anything. Giving it limited functionality will not help its adoption at all.
And re: wasted energy in power bricks (the small magnetization current in the iron cores of transformers.) Sorry, that will always be a problem until you can make switching power supplies cheaper. It's starting to happen, especially in cell phone rechargers, but don't expect any fast changes. The vast majority of people who buy consumer electronics don't know nor give a flip about what kind of power supply it has. They just want whatever's cheapest.
First of all, the manufacturer would not save any money in this scenario. People have come to expect to be able to purchase a device, and for the most part, receive everything they need for it to function. A manufacturer that left out the traditional "power brick" would be asking for customer dissatisfaction when people realize that they also need an additional accessory to power it. It's not worth it to exclude the cheap wall-wart, which probably adds $5 or less to the bottom line. This also means that the people who are interested in this idea get to pay twice: once for the built in conventional design and again for the sophisticated (and hardly inexpensive) power hub.
"Well, that may be, but wait until it's ubiquitous, then they can stop including the conventional power supply."
This is true to some degree, but there are plenty of situations where it would be inconvenient to require a power hub. Sometimes you only have one DC-powered device in an outlet or a given area. In fact, I would say the majoriry of the time this is the case. Certainly, most people could think of a situation where they have more than two wall-warts, but outside of the computer room these cases become more rare. And your whole argument is based on ubiquity, that everything would use this universal standard. I don't think that's necessarily practical. You may be tempted to imagine a range of power hubs, so that you can choose a "lite" version for just these situations. I submit that the wall-wart is exactly this, and that trying to sell as a seperate device that which has always been included (at a higher price, no doubt) is just asking for customer dissatisfaction.
"But surely, as the ueber-nerd that I am, it would eliminate a big mess?"
It would help, no doubt. But really, does it buy you that much? Every device still has a power cord. Yes, you would not have to deal with a number of smaller "power bricks", but you still have to deal with one rather large power brick. Don't expect this device to be small and slim like your network hubs. Instead envision something along the lines of a computer power supply. So you save some weight, and some volume, but in the end all that you're really getting is not worrying about how to make all those wall-warts fit onto power strips. And again, the people to whom this will be most useful (those with a number of devices) will likely already have a large number of power strips, since they're power users anyway. For the more modest installation of one or two devices it's nearly as bulky and doesn't gain you much.
There's also the issue of whether such a device is even practical to build. It would obviously have to support a number of output voltages, which complicates things a great deal. On top of that, since this is a general device, you cannot make assumptions about the relative output strengths required. On a computer power supply, you optimize the design for the 3.3V and 5V outputs since those provide a great deal more current than -12V and -5V supplies, which are mere trickles in comparison. For your "power hub" you can really make no such assumption -- remember that the point is to be able to run anything and everything from this device. And that's the real kicker, it will have to be rather beefy, since it runs everything. Things like modems may not draw much, but things like speakers certainly can. Yes, you could make these things in a range of varying output levels. But again, if you're going to have a "lightweight" version for only a couple of devices, you're better off from a marketing and price standpoint to just continue using wall-warts. So much for ubiquity...
Let's not even get started on the issues of who makes the standards, since after all, every consumer electronics manufacturer has to agree on a standard (and then follow through on it) to make this useful.
So, to summarize:
Nontrivial engineering to provide arbitrary outputs
Only really benefits a minority of "power users" (ugh! bad pun) yet requires universal acceptance
Implies industry-wide cooperation and adherance to a standard (yeah right)
Does not lower product cost (in fact it increases total cost significantly for those who adopt it)
In the best case, reduces clutter marginally
I'm sorry, it's a nice idea but I don't think it's realistic.
That's for the entire amount of antimatter produced in a year. Presumably they make more than a single batch of the stuff.
And what good would this super-duper fuel be if you must dissipate a significant amount of energy to contain it? You could "bleed a little off" to sustain the containment perhaps, but that seems like a pile of hand-waving right there.
Incorrect. The algorithm only looks at the top 10 (or 15, I forget) "most interesting" words in the message, where interesting is defined as a score close to 1 or close to 0. So only words that very strongly indicate spam or non-spam are considered. Words that have never been seen before are given a score of 0.4 (or something like that, I don't remember) which makes it all but impossible for them to be considered "interesting."
Slashdot Mirror
Mating triggers the development of new neurons in the smell centre of the brain
My god, this is genius! Finally, the missing link in the mystery of why lonely, sexless geeks often go for days or weeks without showering. Of course! They can't smell their own manfunk. It's all coming together....
I have not looked at the Spam-bait program you use to generate the fake email addresses, but it's it a bit irresponsible to string together random characters and assume that they constitute invalid email addresses? Especially in the .com domain suffix, since pretty much every three, four, five, and probably six letter domain name is registered to somebody, or at least it was before the bubble broke. And, a lot of domains will accept mail addressed to (anything)@domain, and store it in a catch-all account.
All I'm saying is you should have an algorithm that's slightly smarter than a random number generator.
Got news for you, now ISP does that. Not unless we're talking about a T1 or fractional T1 -- in that case you're guaranteed the bandwidth. Otherwise, if you're paying $25 - $75 to an ILEC, CLEC, or cable company, you are using shared bandwidth. A true T1 costs hundreds of dollars a month for 1.5Mbit both ways, how in fuck's sake do you think an ISP could possibly turn around and offer that bandwidth for $50? They can't. They rely on a low overall duty cycle and things like transparent web caches to make the financials work.
I know they advertise it as "unlimited" but that's really not true. You get burstable high speeds, but on the whole if you try to saturate the link they will eventually notice and probably try to cut you off. Again, if you want to complain about "using what you pay for" then get a T1 with a SLA (service level agreement) which is the only guaranteed bandwidth out there. Anything else is a toy and you should be happy that you can get burstable high speeds for $40/month. Not so long ago we were all content to pay $20/mo for 28.8kbps service.
Is this a HPT370 based controller? I had a very similar thing happen to me a year or two ago. The RAID controller just "forgot" its stripe config, which I think is stored on a very small reserved segment of the disc. Anyway, there's a utility called raidrb (google on raidrb.zip) that I used which fixed the problem without data loss. This used to be covered in an excellent FAQ that was on viahardware.com, but apparently it's gone now.
No, I don't think this has anything to do with the Google programming contest. The winner and honorable mentions are listed on this page, and they have nothing really to do with the Google labs features announced recently. You can also read slashdot's coverage of the announcement as well as the announcement of the winners if you're interested.
For your viewing please, the Nerd Watch Museum. On that same site you may also want to check out the Walkman Museum, the Boombox Mueeum, and the miscellaneous gadgets of the 70s and 80s.
Ummm, the speed is 15 meters a minute, in English measurements, that's almost 50 feet in one minute's time... Almost 3 times the speed of the Asimo robot...The average geek is fortunate if they can manage that speed on foot... Needless to say, it's hardly a crawl...
Oh please. I would in fact call that a crawl. 15 m/min is 0.82 ft/s, or 0.56 MPH. I know you can walk faster than 0.56 MPH. If you can walk a mile in 20 minutes (which is not that hard at all) that's 3 MPH.
If the drives are so reliable (MTBF of a million years my ass!), then the extra cost would be $0.00 per unit.
False. There are several reasons why offering a three year warranty on a perfect drive still costs money.
If you read the statements from the drive manufacturers, the majority of RMA units that they receive failed because of improper shipping. Somone didn't properly pack the drive in dense-cell foam, or the case of an assembled system was not properly insulated from shock when the nice man in brown throws the package around. There really isn't much the drive manufacturer can do about this, other than refuse to accept drives that are not packed properly. But they still have no control of how the drive was handled before it was RMA'd.
Another problem is that many times people return drives that have not failed. You would think that anyone smart enough to have the case open would be smart enough to tell the difference between defective hardware and a botched install of an operating system (or a broken boot sector, etc.) but never underestimate the level of stupiditiy in this world. Sometimes, combined with poor packing (say, bubble-wrap) or other improper handling, this causes a drive that is otherwise OK to be defective by the time it arrives at the manufacturer.
The point is, there are certainly drive failures, but there's also a significant amount of incompetance out there. Offering a 3 year warranty means dealing with a lot of such issues.
You might be referring to the Magix Box hoax, where a Florida man got millions of dollars in investments (from folks like Blockbuster, Intel, and Ted Turner's son) for this mysterious device that supposedly transmitted data over regular phone lines at very fast rates. There was also a Slashdot story about the device.
Haven't you seen that informercial for the AutoLock, or whatever it's called -- the one that locks on your brake or clutch pedal? They show that a guy with a small hacksaw can cut through the steering wheel and remove the Club in about 3 seconds. Now, I'm not saying anyone should draw any conclusions of fact from an infomercial. But consider that steering wheels are necessarily soft, as is the dashboard and all other objects you are likely to come into contact with in an accident -- certainly more vulnerable than the metal of the club.
Christ, at least two idiots with mod points gave that informative? It's a troll link that posts "fuck you, this site sucks" on some random bulletin board. Sheesh, don't mod a link without checking it first, dilhole!
My interpretation of this article is that the spammers are setting their client's "Referer:" header field to their porn site, and then retrieving pages from the blogs. The result is that links to the porn/spam sites appear in the Apache referer log file on the blog site. The spammers do this because they know the blog operators pay extra attention to their referer logs and are likely to follow those links (either out of curiosity or out of the desire to maintain reciprocity with other blogs that may link to them.) Apparently the bloggers have scripts that automatically harvest all the URLs from these referer logs to make this process easier.
I don't think the spammer would bother creating an actual link on their porn/spam site to the blog, although this would work as well. It's silly though since it's more work and it still requires that someone actually click on the link for the porn URL to make it into the referer log. Why bother when they could just run an automated script to hit the blog with the forged "Referer:" and then discard the results. The only possible reason to do it this way is that the spam URL would be sent multiple times from different IP addresses, and hence harder to filter or ignore.
The confusing bit is that the article mentions that this might prop up the blog's SearchRank relevancy. This would only be the case with the latter method (creating an actual link) whereas the more straightforwad way would have no such effect.
In THG's not-so-great tradition of faking pictures, I wouldn't be surprised if matches and lighter fluid were used to enhance those photos, to "drive the point home."
Thus, if you consider the complete cycle (growing sugar cane, distilling, burning), no CO2 will be released in the atmosphere.
Yeah, that is, except for all the diesel fuel burned by the farming machinery and the coal fuel burned to produce the electricity for the refinement process. Sure, zero sum it is.
This is good because it's cheap(er) for poor farmers, not because it's good for the environment.
I can't be the only one who read the headline for this story and was like, "<shrug> If it's a long flight and I have an aisle seat
Dear Slashdot,
When I go to work, I leave my front door unlocked and slightly ajar. The other day when I got back, I found vagrants sleeping on my sofa and defecating in my sink. Other than closing and locking my door when I leave, how can I get rid of them? Has this ever happened to you? Also, can I sue my landlord over this? Thanks.
Yours,
Confused in Cleveland
First of all, I think you'd need few more options than "3.3, 5, and 12V"... say, for example 9V. But ignoring that, I fail to see the point of this if it's not universal. What good is it if it only powers the most common devices? The poster mentioned speakers, and those generally require either a split rail (-12, 0, 12) or something higher than 12V, such as 24V. So right there, that's one thing for which you need an extra (and quite large) power lump.
My overall point was that if this is not universally standard, it's just another brick, and doesn't really solve anything. Giving it limited functionality will not help its adoption at all.
And re: wasted energy in power bricks (the small magnetization current in the iron cores of transformers.) Sorry, that will always be a problem until you can make switching power supplies cheaper. It's starting to happen, especially in cell phone rechargers, but don't expect any fast changes. The vast majority of people who buy consumer electronics don't know nor give a flip about what kind of power supply it has. They just want whatever's cheapest.
"Well, that may be, but wait until it's ubiquitous, then they can stop including the conventional power supply."
This is true to some degree, but there are plenty of situations where it would be inconvenient to require a power hub. Sometimes you only have one DC-powered device in an outlet or a given area. In fact, I would say the majoriry of the time this is the case. Certainly, most people could think of a situation where they have more than two wall-warts, but outside of the computer room these cases become more rare. And your whole argument is based on ubiquity, that everything would use this universal standard. I don't think that's necessarily practical. You may be tempted to imagine a range of power hubs, so that you can choose a "lite" version for just these situations. I submit that the wall-wart is exactly this, and that trying to sell as a seperate device that which has always been included (at a higher price, no doubt) is just asking for customer dissatisfaction.
"But surely, as the ueber-nerd that I am, it would eliminate a big mess?"
It would help, no doubt. But really, does it buy you that much? Every device still has a power cord. Yes, you would not have to deal with a number of smaller "power bricks", but you still have to deal with one rather large power brick. Don't expect this device to be small and slim like your network hubs. Instead envision something along the lines of a computer power supply. So you save some weight, and some volume, but in the end all that you're really getting is not worrying about how to make all those wall-warts fit onto power strips. And again, the people to whom this will be most useful (those with a number of devices) will likely already have a large number of power strips, since they're power users anyway. For the more modest installation of one or two devices it's nearly as bulky and doesn't gain you much.
There's also the issue of whether such a device is even practical to build. It would obviously have to support a number of output voltages, which complicates things a great deal. On top of that, since this is a general device, you cannot make assumptions about the relative output strengths required. On a computer power supply, you optimize the design for the 3.3V and 5V outputs since those provide a great deal more current than -12V and -5V supplies, which are mere trickles in comparison. For your "power hub" you can really make no such assumption -- remember that the point is to be able to run anything and everything from this device. And that's the real kicker, it will have to be rather beefy, since it runs everything. Things like modems may not draw much, but things like speakers certainly can. Yes, you could make these things in a range of varying output levels. But again, if you're going to have a "lightweight" version for only a couple of devices, you're better off from a marketing and price standpoint to just continue using wall-warts. So much for ubiquity...
Let's not even get started on the issues of who makes the standards, since after all, every consumer electronics manufacturer has to agree on a standard (and then follow through on it) to make this useful.
So, to summarize:
Nontrivial engineering to provide arbitrary outputs
Only really benefits a minority of "power users" (ugh! bad pun) yet requires universal acceptance
Implies industry-wide cooperation and adherance to a standard (yeah right)
Does not lower product cost (in fact it increases total cost significantly for those who adopt it)
In the best case, reduces clutter marginally
I'm sorry, it's a nice idea but I don't think it's realistic.
If they ever decide to make a movie of this, I think Tim Robbins sure would play a good Larry Lessig...
Parent is a copy-and-paste karma whore.
My girfried has benifited from all the training I've gotten with my Thinkpad
Now if only IBM had given it a more creative name...like Compact Laptop Interface Tool.
Well dunno, i used to think slashdot being fast on news but was very selective...
What in god's name ever gave you that impression?
That's for the entire amount of antimatter produced in a year. Presumably they make more than a single batch of the stuff.
And what good would this super-duper fuel be if you must dissipate a significant amount of energy to contain it? You could "bleed a little off" to sustain the containment perhaps, but that seems like a pile of hand-waving right there.
Incorrect. The algorithm only looks at the top 10 (or 15, I forget) "most interesting" words in the message, where interesting is defined as a score close to 1 or close to 0. So only words that very strongly indicate spam or non-spam are considered. Words that have never been seen before are given a score of 0.4 (or something like that, I don't remember) which makes it all but impossible for them to be considered "interesting."