Take a kitchen "lighter". One that produces sparks once you press it.
Take a copper wire and make it into two loops. Attach one end to the outside, and allow the other end to come close to the center "zapper". Make sure that the sparks now go through the loop.
This is for sure enough to make a CPU skip a cylcle, but may not be enough to physically damage things too much. Exercise for the reader: Find a way to produce bigger sparks....
The US Patent office gives one year from the date of public disclosure (usually the date it was publicly announced or offered for sale) to file a patent.
Oh. Ok.
Things are different here in Europe: As far as I know: No more patenting if published. (on the other hand, I might have been told that because others might rush in and patent your idea once they read about it in your "publication")
But with PS2, I have no idea what the max current rating is, but 100ma for the fan could be pushing it if you are also using a PS2 mouse and keyboard...
The 5V comes directly from the powersupply, except for a 500ma fuse.....
An extra 0.5W of power from that 350W powersupply should be ok.
I think the only one I got was the "I send you this file in order to have your advice" thing like 6 months ago
Just grepped for those: I got 200 of them.
Roger.
Re:UBE = spam [Re:How ... what is and isn't spam?]
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 1
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Spam/UBE is difficult to define. Really.
There are people who look at my site and then send me an Email: "I've looked at your site, and I think it would benefit from being listed in more searchengines". I've checked: They indeed looked at my site. Once. One page.
They are sending this to lots of people. This was sent to a publicly listed Email address. Is that desirable to be "allowed"?
When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: 'Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process.'" (my emphasis)
So unless the FBI has gotten a court order against the
Ehmm, to me that statement tells me that somehow the current law doesn't prohibit them deploying that new tool...
Roger.
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
·
· Score: 1
The BIOS should be a generic facility that can load any desired operating system.
Although the name may make you think otherwise, LinuxBios is a bios that will load any operating system. However, once that OS is booted, it won't provide extensive eighties-compatibility to allow a windows-like OS to continue booting. It provides just the bare minimum to get the OS up and running. Linux then quickly takes over.
Every student, after going to classes about NP complete problems, wakes up in the middle of the night one day, and thinks: "I've solved the P = NP problem! I can solve NP problem suchandsuch in P time!". I have.
The general pattern is, that this is simply not true.
Note that it's possible to solve NP complete problems in P time using Exponential space. Don't fall for that trap.
The "proof in the pudding is in the eating". Try to write a program that will implement your algorithm. You will quickly find the loop that takes exponential time....
You can improve the code, as long as your improved codec's datastream can still be decoded by a cvs co unmodified decoder.
Right. Usually the smarts are in the encoder.
However, you might figure out a way to compress
the datastream even further. But you do need to be able to specify elements in the datastream that are currently undefined.
They are IMHO doing a good job by requesting that you not publish incompatible versions. Thats something that MicroSoft used in the past to pull market towards themselves.
If you do find a good way to improve (significantly), I'd bet that they will allow you to present your case, and will make a future version that includes your improvement. It's just that these improvements are formally centrallized. You may not like it, but it's best for the world.
By your argument, I could be an olympic athlete in training, and the day before the big event, I could either eat a 2000 calorie salad for dinner, or I could eat 2000 calories of Snicker's bars.
If you run a marathon, eating 2000 calories of snickers is a good thing, about half an hour before the start of the run: Snickers have a mix of glucose (active 15-30 minutes after ingestion), sacharose (active 20-60 minutes after ingestion) and starch (active 45 to 120 minutes after ingestion). And then there are fats which you end up burning a few of near the end of a marathon too. I'm not sure wether fats are "ready for burning" if you didn't eat them weeks before. So the calories contained in the fat in the snickers may be wasted on the marathon runner.
Salad is "good" because it contains fibers and stuff. The day before the "big event" that's no longer going to help you. 2000 calories of Salad is "bad" because a pure vegetable salad is almost calorie free. Thus you'd have to overeat A LOT before you get 2000 calories.
If a hydrogen-burning airplane would've hit the WTC, there would have been a much more fierce explosion at impact. And a Humoungous fireball for the one or two minutes after that. And no more WTC after 3 minutes. (You get an explosion limited by the amount of oxygen that can be provided...)
I think that the impact blast would've been powerful enough to collapse the buildings like now happened after 50-80 minutes.
If the fuel cells would run on say methane, similar things happen. Methane burns cooler. Less violent explosions. But still orders of magnitude more violent than airplane fuel.
If you have a wooden bar, and hit it with a hammer, trying to break it, there is a certain amount of energy required before it will break. If you slowly push it using a jack, you will find that you need almost the same amount of energy to break it.
Breaking the WTC took a certain amount of energy. The airplanes contained that amount of energy, not in their kinetic energy, but combined with their fuel-supply they HAVE the required energy to "break" the WTC in two. Complete destruction was then due to the energy contained in "20 stories of WTC falling down".
An airplane fuelled up for a 10 hour flight simply has enough energy to bring down the WTC.
.... has been slapped with a cease and desist letter, including $500 lawyer bill from Infogrames Germany...... copyright
Guys, Germany has some really weird laws. Anybody can send someone a "you're violating a copyright" letter, and tack along a bill for the effort of writing that letter. I won't be surprised if this is a stupid German Lawyer who started this. (without any need to contact Infogrames).
I can't find any "originals" so... I don't know for sure what's going on....
Depending on the quality of modem you are trying to do, CPU horsepower requirements are huge. A bare-bones V.34 implementation requires around 40 MHz of a Pentium-class CPU, while a robust bells-and-whistles version needs something like 90-95 MHz. Don't expect a 486 to handle the load.
So? You can't run a HSP modem in a 486? So, don't.
HSP makes sense. Suppose you have $150 to buy a CPU plus modem. You can buy a hardware modem for $50 and have $100 left for a 1000MHz Duron. Or you can spend $10 on the softmodem and then have $140 left for the CPU. That $40 on the CPU will give you more than 10% performance increase, leaving you with more performance "while running the softmodem" and even a bigger margin when you're offline (95% of the time).
To be as good as possible on as many platforms as possible, the signal processing code would have to use integer arithmetic instead of floating-point, because the floating-point performance of x86 class processors varies quite a bit from chip type to chip type.
Yeah, so? Set your goals realistically. So for the first version it is very acceptable if the release notes say: "Nothing below 1GHz will work. We still need to optimize a bit." From that point onwards, other people will be able to contribute with different skills.
Yes, you are right, legally, both hardware and software (in case of soft modem) must be certified for connection to phone system. I've been thinking how to handle this (as I definitely won't be able to fund certification of each individual hardware piece+software piece), however, I don't have clear handle on it.
Development and inital deployment will take place on PBXes. Should individual users chose to ignore the warnings that the modem can not legally be connected to the public net with the Linux driver instead of the windows driver, then that could get that user in trouble. Tough luck.
Hopefully, someone will want to make an app in sufficient volume that approval is neccesary and cost-efficient. (e.g. a TIVO like application).
Not only you are right, but also any communication equipment connected to the phone network must be licensed by the local communications agency.
Thunderstorm. Smoke from the telephones. Phones stop working.
Guy from the phone-company comes to fix the stuff. He finds a phone licenced for a different country. "This is what caused it. We'll fix it for free this time, but never ever connect an unlicenced phone again!"
Yeah Sure. There is very little that will withstand a lighting strike. And the licencing for different countries differs in details, but not in the core. So, basically, the official licencing for a country guarantees that it will work in your country provided your telephone company has equipment that conforms to the "central office" part of the specs.
Our local telephone company here in the Netherlands sells ISDNPOTS adapters that provide only 32V as the "at rest" voltage. Turns out some equipment decides that anything below 35 is "not an operational telephone line". The specs say that equipment that acts as if it's a central office or a PBX needs to provide 42-60 Volts as the line voltage in "rest".
With a big "installed base" of ISDNPOTS adapters, the new equipment gets a hard time, because "everything else works just fine"....
Legislation is not what we need to stop spammers. The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us.
Yes, and by outlawing spamming, we have effective ways of costing them more money.
Paper advertizing costs money per-target as you have to print and distribute the materials. Email-advertizing costs almost no money per-target. So where a shop may need 1% of the readers to stop by to buy some item after they dropped the junk-mail in your mailbox, a spammer may need only a 0.01% response rate. Thus they are causing an inconvenience for a much larger group that won't buy their product anyway.
Getting 50% of the users to boycott the spammer's business is easy. 99% of the users are already doing that. It's that last 0.01% that is making the spamming business profitable.
No, really not needed. Actually one of my systems fscks about once a year. (the time-limit is set to six months, but it just never happens to be rebooted around that time... )
Part of getting an academic degree is proving to potential employers that you can do the grunge work. You won't bail out if you have to do some stupid stuff along the way.
So: Go ahead and graduate. Find yourself a job.
You might end up at someplace where you end up writing stupid HTML for the rest of your time there. That's fun for a while. Learn HTML & JavaScript, and look for a new job.
You might end up in a challenging job. Enjoy, make the most of it, stay put.
Actually, if you end up with a poor job first, that's GOOD for you: You always have a MUCH better chance of getting a good salary if you've been through the negotiations once before, and if you're applying while you already have another job.
You're eager to start to work for them, the job looks fine, but.... . Fill in something that is better at your old job. "closer to my home", "nice trees around the office building" anything. That indicates that you need a good compensation for them to "buy you out" of your old job.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is extrapolating WAY too far from what they know.
Now people are ink-jetting integrated circuits onto paper, it's interesting to try that for this application.
Already reasonably useful would be a way to easily identify individual bills once they are back at the bank.
They started putting barcodes on the Dutch notes a while back. This would suffice for that purpose. I'm not sure wether the Euros will have those.
I'm not sure what an RF ID would help. Would every shop suddenly have an RFID tag reader? No.
They also speculate something about recording transactions. Well, it's going to be tricky to hide those batteries and GPS reciever in the banknote....
Roger.
Yes:
Take a kitchen "lighter". One that produces sparks once you press it.
Take a copper wire and make it into two loops. Attach one end to the outside, and allow the other end to come close to the center "zapper". Make sure that the sparks now go through the loop.
This is for sure enough to make a CPU skip a cylcle, but may not be enough to physically damage things too much. Exercise for the reader: Find a way to produce bigger sparks....
Roger.
The US Patent office gives one year from the date of public disclosure (usually the date it was publicly announced or offered for sale) to file a patent.
Oh. Ok.
Things are different here in Europe: As far as I know: No more patenting if published. (on the other hand, I might have been told that because others might rush in and patent your idea once they read about it in your "publication")
The guy lives in Finland.
Roger.
I think he should patent it.
Too late. The second he puts it on the web it becomes unpatentable.
You simply cannot publish something you intend to patent untill you are some way along into the patenting paperwork....
Roger.
But with PS2, I have no idea what the max current rating is, but 100ma for the fan could be pushing it if you are also using a PS2 mouse and keyboard...
The 5V comes directly from the powersupply, except for a 500ma fuse.....
An extra 0.5W of power from that 350W powersupply should be ok.
Roger.
Mom and dad (separated) both decided to have "the kids" on the 26th....
Then it doesn't really matter anymore, I can just as well do some work-things...
Roger.
This also makes it a lot safer to work with, i.e. you won't burn your eyes out if you accidently look into it."
Ehmm. Modern High efficiency LEDs also carry the "don't look directly into this" warnings. And those things are BRIGHT.
Roger.
I think the only one I got was the "I send you this file in order to have your advice" thing like 6 months ago
Just grepped for those: I got 200 of them.
Roger.
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Spam/UBE is difficult to define. Really.
There are people who look at my site and then send me an Email: "I've looked at your site, and I think it would benefit from being listed in more searchengines". I've checked: They indeed looked at my site. Once. One page.
They are sending this to lots of people. This was sent to a publicly listed Email address. Is that desirable to be "allowed"?
Roger
When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: 'Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process.'" (my emphasis)
So unless the FBI has gotten a court order against the
Ehmm, to me that statement tells me that somehow the current law doesn't prohibit them deploying that new tool...
Roger.
The BIOS should be a generic facility that can load any desired operating system.
Although the name may make you think otherwise, LinuxBios is a bios that will load any operating system. However, once that OS is booted, it won't provide extensive eighties-compatibility to allow a windows-like OS to continue booting. It provides just the bare minimum to get the OS up and running. Linux then quickly takes over.
Roger.
Every student, after going to classes about NP complete problems, wakes up in the middle of the night one day, and thinks: "I've solved the P = NP problem! I can solve NP problem suchandsuch in P time!". I have.
The general pattern is, that this is simply not true.
Note that it's possible to solve NP complete problems in P time using Exponential space. Don't fall for that trap.
The "proof in the pudding is in the eating". Try to write a program that will implement your algorithm. You will quickly find the loop that takes exponential time....
Roger.
On the tigerdirect site:
Display: 10.1" HPA flat panel color display
800 x 600 dpi resolution
A 10" screen is about 8x6 inches so at 800x600DPI, that would be a 6400x3600 pixel screen. And at over 1200DPI, clearly better than print.
And I'm staring at a measly 1280x1024...
Roger.
You can improve the code, as long as your improved codec's datastream can still be decoded by a cvs co unmodified decoder.
Right. Usually the smarts are in the encoder.
However, you might figure out a way to compress
the datastream even further. But you do need to be able to specify elements in the datastream that are currently undefined.
They are IMHO doing a good job by requesting that you not publish incompatible versions. Thats something that MicroSoft used in the past to pull market towards themselves.
If you do find a good way to improve (significantly), I'd bet that they will allow you to present your case, and will make a future version that includes your improvement. It's just that these improvements are formally centrallized. You may not like it, but it's best for the world.
Roger.
By your argument, I could be an olympic athlete in training, and the day before the big event, I could either eat a 2000 calorie salad for dinner, or I could eat 2000 calories of Snicker's bars.
If you run a marathon, eating 2000 calories of snickers is a good thing, about half an hour before the start of the run: Snickers have a mix of glucose (active 15-30 minutes after ingestion), sacharose (active 20-60 minutes after ingestion) and starch (active 45 to 120 minutes after ingestion). And then there are fats which you end up burning a few of near the end of a marathon too. I'm not sure wether fats are "ready for burning" if you didn't eat them weeks before. So the calories contained in the fat in the snickers may be wasted on the marathon runner.
Salad is "good" because it contains fibers and stuff. The day before the "big event" that's no longer going to help you. 2000 calories of Salad is "bad" because a pure vegetable salad is almost calorie free. Thus you'd have to overeat A LOT before you get 2000 calories.
If a hydrogen-burning airplane would've hit the WTC, there would have been a much more fierce explosion at impact. And a Humoungous fireball for the one or two minutes after that. And no more WTC after 3 minutes. (You get an explosion limited by the amount of oxygen that can be provided...)
I think that the impact blast would've been powerful enough to collapse the buildings like now happened after 50-80 minutes.
If the fuel cells would run on say methane, similar things happen. Methane burns cooler. Less violent explosions. But still orders of magnitude more violent than airplane fuel.
If you have a wooden bar, and hit it with a hammer, trying to break it, there is a certain amount of energy required before it will break. If you slowly push it using a jack, you will find that you need almost the same amount of energy to break it.
Breaking the WTC took a certain amount of energy. The airplanes contained that amount of energy, not in their kinetic energy, but combined with their fuel-supply they HAVE the required energy to "break" the WTC in two. Complete destruction was then due to the energy contained in "20 stories of WTC falling down".
An airplane fuelled up for a 10 hour flight simply has enough energy to bring down the WTC.
Roger.
Another advantage, which no one seems to have mentioned, is that fuel cells make aircraft far less *explosive*.
Bullshit. They need to carry the same amount of energy stored in "chemicals", as planes previously did.
However, they might fly on "methane" instead of airplane fuel, as that works better in fuel cells.... Catch my drift?
Roger.
.... has been slapped with a cease and desist letter, including $500 lawyer bill from Infogrames Germany. ..... copyright
Guys, Germany has some really weird laws. Anybody can send someone a "you're violating a copyright" letter, and tack along a bill for the effort of writing that letter. I won't be surprised if this is a stupid German Lawyer who started this. (without any need to contact Infogrames).
I can't find any "originals" so... I don't know for sure what's going on....
Roger.
Depending on the quality of modem you are trying to do, CPU horsepower requirements are huge. A bare-bones V.34 implementation requires around 40 MHz of a Pentium-class CPU, while a robust bells-and-whistles version needs something like 90-95 MHz. Don't expect a 486 to handle the load.
So? You can't run a HSP modem in a 486? So, don't.
HSP makes sense. Suppose you have $150 to buy a CPU plus modem. You can buy a hardware modem for $50 and have $100 left for a 1000MHz Duron. Or you can spend $10 on the softmodem and then have $140 left for the CPU. That $40 on the CPU will give you more than 10% performance increase, leaving you with more performance "while running the softmodem" and even a bigger margin when you're offline (95% of the time).
To be as good as possible on as many platforms as possible, the signal processing code would have to use integer arithmetic instead of floating-point, because the floating-point performance of x86 class processors varies quite a bit from chip type to chip type.
Yeah, so? Set your goals realistically. So for the first version it is very acceptable if the release notes say: "Nothing below 1GHz will work. We still need to optimize a bit." From that point onwards, other people will be able to contribute with different skills.
Roger.
Yes, you are right, legally, both hardware and software (in case of soft modem) must be certified for connection to phone system. I've been thinking how to handle this (as I definitely won't be able to fund certification of each individual hardware piece+software piece), however, I don't have clear handle on it.
Development and inital deployment will take place on PBXes. Should individual users chose to ignore the warnings that the modem can not legally be connected to the public net with the Linux driver instead of the windows driver, then that could get that user in trouble. Tough luck.
Hopefully, someone will want to make an app in sufficient volume that approval is neccesary and cost-efficient. (e.g. a TIVO like application).
Roger.
Not only you are right, but also any communication equipment connected to the phone network must be licensed by the local communications agency.
Thunderstorm. Smoke from the telephones. Phones stop working.
Guy from the phone-company comes to fix the stuff. He finds a phone licenced for a different country. "This is what caused it. We'll fix it for free this time, but never ever connect an unlicenced phone again!"
Yeah Sure. There is very little that will withstand a lighting strike. And the licencing for different countries differs in details, but not in the core. So, basically, the official licencing for a country guarantees that it will work in your country provided your telephone company has equipment that conforms to the "central office" part of the specs.
Our local telephone company here in the Netherlands sells ISDNPOTS adapters that provide only 32V as the "at rest" voltage. Turns out some equipment decides that anything below 35 is "not an operational telephone line". The specs say that equipment that acts as if it's a central office or a PBX needs to provide 42-60 Volts as the line voltage in "rest".
With a big "installed base" of ISDNPOTS adapters, the new equipment gets a hard time, because "everything else works just fine"....
Roger.
So if somebody WITHOUT background in signal processing will write the working code he will be not eligible for the award?
The problem with this project is: It sounds so easy. So, his (expert) opinion is that you needn't even try if you don't have a DSP background.
Roger.
So, for example, spammer A gets a message that's appears to be from spammer B's email address.
Someone sent a spam advertizing a sex site. Some 30000 adressees got the version that seemed to come from me. I got the bounces.
So howmany people are going to fall for "that must be the spammers real Email address"? Too many.
Roger.
Legislation is not what we need to stop spammers. The real problem is that spammers actually make money off of spamming us.
Yes, and by outlawing spamming, we have effective ways of costing them more money.
Paper advertizing costs money per-target as you have to print and distribute the materials. Email-advertizing costs almost no money per-target. So where a shop may need 1% of the readers to stop by to buy some item after they dropped the junk-mail in your mailbox, a spammer may need only a 0.01% response rate. Thus they are causing an inconvenience for a much larger group that won't buy their product anyway.
Getting 50% of the users to boycott the spammer's business is easy. 99% of the users are already doing that. It's that last 0.01% that is making the spamming business profitable.
Roger.
Do you still need the every 20th mount fsck???
No, really not needed. Actually one of my systems fscks about once a year. (the time-limit is set to six months, but it just never happens to be rebooted around that time... )
Roger.
Part of getting an academic degree is proving to potential employers that you can do the grunge work. You won't bail out if you have to do some stupid stuff along the way.
.... . Fill in something that is better at your old job. "closer to my home", "nice trees around the office building" anything. That indicates that you need a good compensation for them to "buy you out" of your old job.
So: Go ahead and graduate. Find yourself a job.
You might end up at someplace where you end up writing stupid HTML for the rest of your time there. That's fun for a while. Learn HTML & JavaScript, and look for a new job.
You might end up in a challenging job. Enjoy, make the most of it, stay put.
Actually, if you end up with a poor job first, that's GOOD for you: You always have a MUCH better chance of getting a good salary if you've been through the negotiations once before, and if you're applying while you already have another job.
You're eager to start to work for them, the job looks fine, but
Roger.