gotta admit that the wiring I saw at Monash Clayton was neat, although I only saw the stuff visible to the public. I was there on exchange last semester.
But I have to say that the rest of the system was total rotten spaghetti.. Barely any integration, stupid configurations like 20 MB user disk space (my home uni had 500 in 1998, btw) with the Firefox disk cache set to 50MB (!). see a problem?
Are the 6 round-robbin proxy servers each with a unique IP part of the 200? God damn I hated those things. Broke a lot of secure sites that made the reasonable assumption that the same session would come from the same IP, not to mention the trouble with forcing everything to HTTP. Don't even speak of the kludge that is Permeo (SOCKS proxy). The help desk even had the audacity to tell me that i didn't need SSH to the outside. It was a real pain in the ass to update the websites I was responsible for when there is NO FREAKING WAY TO UPLOAD TO THE OUTSIDE. I had to settle for 1 kb/s using the HTTP-Tunnel program and setting up an upload page that i could POST to. When I got there I was honestly wondering how a major university in a 1st world country can have such a terrible IT system. No wonder that even the CSE people I met couldn't do the most basic things. ITS just in the way of everything.
And god damn, $17/GB??? how in the world can you (or MRS) justify that price in this day and age?
Sorry I had to vent a little. I don't mean to blame anything on you personally, but ITS needs a MAJOR overhaul.
Located in a dark, dark alley (normal for Melbourne..), it has a bar, DJ, and a side room with a big ass projector. Filled with local geeks with the male/female ratio you'd expect from such a group (I didn't help there...)
I was towards the back and didn't have a clear view of the eMac screens, but I didn't think I saw them scrolling.. Ah well. I got there when the C team (i think) finished in around 6:30 with the pic of what looked like Flinders Street to me. I left 2 or 3 teams later, so yeah, I wasn't there that long (meeting peaple later).. Haha, I guess the images weren't all of Melbourne, but the ones when I was there were..
I went to this thing for a little bit, and while nifty, I don't see why thousands of geeks need to know about it...
Anyhow, it went down like this: four machines with an editor common to all of them, with teams of 2-4 people. They were given a 200x200 image file consisting of simple rgb triples. (200 100 50\n100 133 212 etc, real simple). There was a transform done to it that they had to reverse. The ones I saw were some color rotations/swaps and rotations in increments of 90 degrees. The program had to read in the file, invert the transformation, and output the correct image in the same simple format.
The teams could pick whatever language they wanted. I saw C, C++, Python and Java before I got bored and left. The admins had a system set up that it would compile the code at certain intervals and print out the errors on the screen, or the resulting image if it compiled successfully.
The teams didn't really have trouble writing the code. It was no longer than a screen worth, and they seemed to get that in about 2.5-4 minutes. They spent the rest of the time trying to figure out what the transformation was. They'd try 10-15 different color rotations/swaps combos before the time ran out. They didn't get the correct image in advance, but they were all photos from around the Melbourne area and it was easy to tell what it should be.
If I had heard about it with enough time in advance I would have taken some friends and entered... ah well.
My bike's ignition coils go up to 35kV. Over a short distance. Masked by a giant, overarching metal tank. Or giant metal cage around the engine compartment in a car. The other big public sources are everywhere. Radio and TV are ALWAYS there. You get used to them like the hum of a distant highway.
I dont' like airports, but I always assumed it was for other, regular, reasons. Never paid much attention to RF/EF because there are so many other things to pay attention to. But I will try next time I'm at one, thanks for the tip. Though it takes so long to get to one that it would be hard to rule out the psychosomatic possibility.
Need something instant, like, oh, I don't know, WIFI! Something you can turn on and off, and something that has a short enough range that you can walk in and out of it. Maybe that's why people are selective? Selective to things that you are aware of?
You're right, in some cases it is straight away and shoudl be easy to make an experiment like that. Trouble is, I don't know what the conditions are for it and I'd look like somebody trying to make excuses for why it doesn't work in the wrong conditions. Hence I'd rather do some expereimetns myself before I go to other people. I'm sure field strength has something to do with it, but I'm sure frequency does as well. There's probably other factors that I dont' know about, too. Most cell towers don't bug me at all. But that one did. Nastily. Somebody asked if car alternators bug me. I hear they're terribly noisy field wise. But I've worked on my car many times and it hasn't bothered me enough to notice over whatever I was trying to troubleshoot.
I'm not talking about long term disease symptoms. My stuff shows up within a few hours in most cases, though sometimes a lot faster.
I agree with your psychosomatic theory, in that actual symptoms are amplified. I've caught myself doing that several times. But sometimes they weren't. That cell tower? They turned it on while I was away. I came back and literally went through the whole place turning shit off before I realized what it was. I'm also a heavy sleeper and I doubt the sleep thing would be in my head (though I couldn't convince a psychologist of that).
I also met one person who had a linksys router like any other and for some weird reason I could feel it instantly. Plug in or not and it was instantly obvious to me which it was. Unfortunately I had to leave overseas before she had time to do a proper double blind study.. No idea what made that one router/room combination special, but I haven't felt such an obvious difference before or since.
What makes this hard is that it's kindof like people living next to train tracks. They dont' hear the trains anymore. I'm notorious for getting used to extrenious things pretty fast, and it's the case with this too. I just ignore it. It's just that I feel terrible after a few hours. It feels like you're being poisoned in a strange way.
There was another slashdotter who lived in a middle american country (Costa Rica, iirc), in the boonies. Nothing electric around. They'd be in the car with his wife, and she would tell him exactly when he turned the wireless card on. I lost the link now, but that's more or less what I've got. Except I live surrounded by the stuff and am sort of used to it.
I do feel a lot better in front of an LCD than a CRT, though the only places that might make a good comparison are with lots of desktops around (labs, work areas, etc), so it's hard to isolate it. Honestly I have no idea what the difference between electric and magnetic fields is, so I can't really comment on that. Don't hang around big stereos and I've never paid attention to it by an alternator. I'll try one when I'm around one sometime.
It's hard to tell with the sun and power lines because they're there all the time. I'm in a dorm atm and can't shut off circuits. Good idea though. I do unplug everything plugged in my room at night (plug has a switch, I love Australia...) and feel a bit btter. But it is kindof like getting used to a sound that's always there, and I'm notorious for getting used to things like that pretty fast.
But I find that whenever I take runs at 2am through quiet neighborhoods I feel a great tranquility... You know, after the young people go to bed and before the old people wake up..
I guess it doesn't matter if the field is intentional or not. Both WiFi and some cell phone traffic makes me physically sick over the course of the day. In some cases I can even tell if the router is on or not.
Before you laugh, I've had one job where there were two cell repeaters in the building plus an extensive wifi network. There were some rooms where my eyes would water if I entered them, and at the end of each day I'd sit in the car for 10 minutes to "detox". Didn't seem to bother anyone else.
They also installed a cell tower about 100 yards from my apartment last fall. For the remaining 2.5 months that I lived there, I could barely think and it effectively knocked 2 hours off my sleep. I.e. if I slept for 8 hours it would feel like i slept 6 (I usually turn off everything when I go to bed, too. No computer, no cell).
A running computer does the same, but the dose is a lot smaller. For this reason I only use laptops now (lower power usage). I still hate computer labs.
Just a random thought, but I wonder how much that has to do with communism. In the eastern european countries at least, the gender gaps were much smaller just because the communists did make things a lot more equal (everyone suffers equally, blah blah blah). The majority of the doctors I went to as a kid in Poland were women. Lots and lots of women scientists.
I found the big time hog on Eclipse startup to be the anti virus scanner. The eclipse process takes 20 seconds CPU time (P4 ~2GHz, 512MB), while the AV had almost 2 minutes. I guess it's because of the large number of small files to scan.
The second startup just takes 20 seconds. Still not that great, but better than 2 mins.
I think the fisher price look is better than the gray ass world of 2k and earlier. You can tell where the Close button is without looking at it, because the periphery sees color, but can't read. The default background color isn't god awful gray, but a pleasant yellow, which is easier on the eyes (think yellow legal pads). And cleartype alone is worth it.
Aside from the looks, most of the interface is jacked up, i'll give you that. But that's not because of the skin.
They do have access to the source. They were talking about this being the next "official" version of BeOS. IRC, there was another open source project that reimplemented the OS.
That's what I thought, but now I don't think that's universally true. Some LCDs, especially large ones, seem to have a refresh scan as well. The afore mentioned giant IBM one (we have a whole lab of them on campus, but I don't remember the model) is one. If you have the whole screen white and you look for the refresh, you can make it out. I've never seen it on regular laptop or desktop LCDs, though.
Some HP calculators have this too. Main reason I stuck to TI. Figured if they can't put a descent controller in there, I'm not gonna bother with it.
What I don't get is why they make CRT pixels so fast. The old monitors were slow (with ghosting), but they didn't seem as bad. I'm not saying to back to ghosting, but a bit slower would be real helpful.
This doesn't seem to bother most people I talk to, but I can actually see the refresh rate on CRTs. I refuse to work with anything less than 85Hz. 60Hz and a white background make my eyes water.
LCDs on the other hand are still slow enough that they look constant to me. Even at the 60Hz they run at. They even look more constant than a CRT at 100Hz. The only LCD I've seen that I can see refresh is a ginormous IBM LCD with some ungodly resolution.
Just go to a best buy and look at the LCDs and CRTs that they have side by side. Huge difference.
I've never had linux work perfectly out of the box, but it's funny to look at the things that don't work. Differences between different distros (or versions of the same distro) on the same machine are fun:
-Console/X video switching. This hasn't worked right on any distro I tried on my machines since 1999.
- sometimes it takes 4 seconds to switch
- sometimes once you go into X, if you switch to anything else the picture will be irreversably garbled
- sometimes when you go X->console->X, the top 10 rows of pixels are garbled
- sometimes 1400x1050 isn't an achievable resolution (though it's supported)
-IDE driver sometimes just starts priting an error message indefinately, locking access to any IDE device
-PCMCIA/DHCP/Sound/whatever daemon freezing on startup/shutdown. Is it really that hard to background it after a certain amount of time?
-multiple mice in X. This sure was fun until recently.
- kernel thinks the bus speed is 0MHz, and decdides that means it shouldn't run anymore.
- I kid you not: Screen in X shifted up ~200 pixels. I mean wrapped around, so the "bottom" (taskbar) is 200 pixels up, and below it is the "top" of the screen. The mouse is in the correct spot, though. You have to navigate by looking at the icons highlight...
These fuckups are pretty dependable, i.e. not a fucked up install. Each one is unique to a single version of a single distro. The next version has different ones.
I think the current video driver situation on Linux is terrible. There is no such thing as a video driver for Linux. You have to have an X server for a specific card. When XFree was being dropped, everybody was clamoring for nVidia to release X.Org drivers. WTF?
Why can't there be a video driver that works on all of Linux, including the console, whatever X server you like, PicoGUI, or whatever you care to use? Why is it being tied to a specific X server?
Now what do we use?
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
With SHA-1 being MD5's replacement after that was broken, which hash function do we use now?
Probably. But a failure in a poorly designed anti-lock system, or a bad fuel management system could easily make it undriveable.
It's been shown that electronics are more reliable than mechanical control systems.
ABS and systems like that have failsafes. You can yank the fuse disabling them completely, and you can still use your brakes perfectly well.
My car's ECU and fuel injection had no problems at all in 150k miles. Ever try tuning a carburator? Ever have the fuel/air mixture change on you because now it's 50 degrees colder in the winter or the air filter is dirty? Or the brass jets got worn over time and are now larger than they should be? I did on my carburated bike. Never on my computerized car where the oxygen sensor tells the ECU exactly what to do to get the mixture just right.
We can also go back to using points for timing the ignition system. Who cares that the spark can shift a couple degrees back and forth, that could never hurt power or gas mileage...
Slashdot Mirror
The guy's Polish and "sztywny" means stiff.
gotta admit that the wiring I saw at Monash Clayton was neat, although I only saw the stuff visible to the public. I was there on exchange last semester.
But I have to say that the rest of the system was total rotten spaghetti.. Barely any integration, stupid configurations like 20 MB user disk space (my home uni had 500 in 1998, btw) with the Firefox disk cache set to 50MB (!). see a problem?
Are the 6 round-robbin proxy servers each with a unique IP part of the 200? God damn I hated those things. Broke a lot of secure sites that made the reasonable assumption that the same session would come from the same IP, not to mention the trouble with forcing everything to HTTP. Don't even speak of the kludge that is Permeo (SOCKS proxy). The help desk even had the audacity to tell me that i didn't need SSH to the outside. It was a real pain in the ass to update the websites I was responsible for when there is NO FREAKING WAY TO UPLOAD TO THE OUTSIDE. I had to settle for 1 kb/s using the HTTP-Tunnel program and setting up an upload page that i could POST to. When I got there I was honestly wondering how a major university in a 1st world country can have such a terrible IT system. No wonder that even the CSE people I met couldn't do the most basic things. ITS just in the way of everything.
And god damn, $17/GB??? how in the world can you (or MRS) justify that price in this day and age?
Sorry I had to vent a little. I don't mean to blame anything on you personally, but ITS needs a MAJOR overhaul.
Located in a dark, dark alley (normal for Melbourne..), it has a bar, DJ, and a side room with a big ass projector. Filled with local geeks with the male/female ratio you'd expect from such a group (I didn't help there...)
I was towards the back and didn't have a clear view of the eMac screens, but I didn't think I saw them scrolling.. Ah well. I got there when the C team (i think) finished in around 6:30 with the pic of what looked like Flinders Street to me. I left 2 or 3 teams later, so yeah, I wasn't there that long (meeting peaple later).. Haha, I guess the images weren't all of Melbourne, but the ones when I was there were..
I went to this thing for a little bit, and while nifty, I don't see why thousands of geeks need to know about it...
Anyhow, it went down like this: four machines with an editor common to all of them, with teams of 2-4 people. They were given a 200x200 image file consisting of simple rgb triples. (200 100 50\n100 133 212 etc, real simple). There was a transform done to it that they had to reverse. The ones I saw were some color rotations/swaps and rotations in increments of 90 degrees. The program had to read in the file, invert the transformation, and output the correct image in the same simple format.
The teams could pick whatever language they wanted. I saw C, C++, Python and Java before I got bored and left. The admins had a system set up that it would compile the code at certain intervals and print out the errors on the screen, or the resulting image if it compiled successfully.
The teams didn't really have trouble writing the code. It was no longer than a screen worth, and they seemed to get that in about 2.5-4 minutes. They spent the rest of the time trying to figure out what the transformation was. They'd try 10-15 different color rotations/swaps combos before the time ran out. They didn't get the correct image in advance, but they were all photos from around the Melbourne area and it was easy to tell what it should be.
If I had heard about it with enough time in advance I would have taken some friends and entered... ah well.
Gives hard to find yet oh so needed info
My bike's ignition coils go up to 35kV. Over a short distance. Masked by a giant, overarching metal tank. Or giant metal cage around the engine compartment in a car.
The other big public sources are everywhere. Radio and TV are ALWAYS there. You get used to them like the hum of a distant highway.
I dont' like airports, but I always assumed it was for other, regular, reasons. Never paid much attention to RF/EF because there are so many other things to pay attention to. But I will try next time I'm at one, thanks for the tip. Though it takes so long to get to one that it would be hard to rule out the psychosomatic possibility.
Need something instant, like, oh, I don't know, WIFI! Something you can turn on and off, and something that has a short enough range that you can walk in and out of it. Maybe that's why people are selective? Selective to things that you are aware of?
You're right, in some cases it is straight away and shoudl be easy to make an experiment like that. Trouble is, I don't know what the conditions are for it and I'd look like somebody trying to make excuses for why it doesn't work in the wrong conditions. Hence I'd rather do some expereimetns myself before I go to other people. I'm sure field strength has something to do with it, but I'm sure frequency does as well. There's probably other factors that I dont' know about, too. Most cell towers don't bug me at all. But that one did. Nastily. Somebody asked if car alternators bug me. I hear they're terribly noisy field wise. But I've worked on my car many times and it hasn't bothered me enough to notice over whatever I was trying to troubleshoot.
I'm not talking about long term disease symptoms. My stuff shows up within a few hours in most cases, though sometimes a lot faster.
I agree with your psychosomatic theory, in that actual symptoms are amplified. I've caught myself doing that several times. But sometimes they weren't. That cell tower? They turned it on while I was away. I came back and literally went through the whole place turning shit off before I realized what it was. I'm also a heavy sleeper and I doubt the sleep thing would be in my head (though I couldn't convince a psychologist of that).
I also met one person who had a linksys router like any other and for some weird reason I could feel it instantly. Plug in or not and it was instantly obvious to me which it was. Unfortunately I had to leave overseas before she had time to do a proper double blind study.. No idea what made that one router/room combination special, but I haven't felt such an obvious difference before or since.
What makes this hard is that it's kindof like people living next to train tracks. They dont' hear the trains anymore. I'm notorious for getting used to extrenious things pretty fast, and it's the case with this too. I just ignore it. It's just that I feel terrible after a few hours. It feels like you're being poisoned in a strange way.
There was another slashdotter who lived in a middle american country (Costa Rica, iirc), in the boonies. Nothing electric around. They'd be in the car with his wife, and she would tell him exactly when he turned the wireless card on. I lost the link now, but that's more or less what I've got. Except I live surrounded by the stuff and am sort of used to it.
I do feel a lot better in front of an LCD than a CRT, though the only places that might make a good comparison are with lots of desktops around (labs, work areas, etc), so it's hard to isolate it. Honestly I have no idea what the difference between electric and magnetic fields is, so I can't really comment on that.
Don't hang around big stereos and I've never paid attention to it by an alternator. I'll try one when I'm around one sometime.
It's hard to tell with the sun and power lines because they're there all the time. I'm in a dorm atm and can't shut off circuits. Good idea though. I do unplug everything plugged in my room at night (plug has a switch, I love Australia...) and feel a bit btter. But it is kindof like getting used to a sound that's always there, and I'm notorious for getting used to things like that pretty fast.
But I find that whenever I take runs at 2am through quiet neighborhoods I feel a great tranquility... You know, after the young people go to bed and before the old people wake up..
I guess it doesn't matter if the field is intentional or not. Both WiFi and some cell phone traffic makes me physically sick over the course of the day. In some cases I can even tell if the router is on or not.
Before you laugh, I've had one job where there were two cell repeaters in the building plus an extensive wifi network. There were some rooms where my eyes would water if I entered them, and at the end of each day I'd sit in the car for 10 minutes to "detox". Didn't seem to bother anyone else.
They also installed a cell tower about 100 yards from my apartment last fall. For the remaining 2.5 months that I lived there, I could barely think and it effectively knocked 2 hours off my sleep. I.e. if I slept for 8 hours it would feel like i slept 6 (I usually turn off everything when I go to bed, too. No computer, no cell).
A running computer does the same, but the dose is a lot smaller. For this reason I only use laptops now (lower power usage). I still hate computer labs.
So yeah, this stuff is no joke.
Just a random thought, but I wonder how much that has to do with communism. In the eastern european countries at least, the gender gaps were much smaller just because the communists did make things a lot more equal (everyone suffers equally, blah blah blah). The majority of the doctors I went to as a kid in Poland were women. Lots and lots of women scientists.
use the self checkout lanes. Easier to get distracted when you watch 4 people instead of 1.
And yet, a linux driver is either distro dependent (including version), or source (which is too much of a PITA for regular users).
Perhaps if the barrier to entry (and maintenance) of a linux driver was shorter, we'd see more support.
I found the big time hog on Eclipse startup to be the anti virus scanner. The eclipse process takes 20 seconds CPU time (P4 ~2GHz, 512MB), while the AV had almost 2 minutes. I guess it's because of the large number of small files to scan.
The second startup just takes 20 seconds. Still not that great, but better than 2 mins.
Hmm... Good idea
I think the fisher price look is better than the gray ass world of 2k and earlier. You can tell where the Close button is without looking at it, because the periphery sees color, but can't read. The default background color isn't god awful gray, but a pleasant yellow, which is easier on the eyes (think yellow legal pads). And cleartype alone is worth it.
Aside from the looks, most of the interface is jacked up, i'll give you that. But that's not because of the skin.
They do have access to the source. They were talking about this being the next "official" version of BeOS. IRC, there was another open source project that reimplemented the OS.
That's what I thought, but now I don't think that's universally true. Some LCDs, especially large ones, seem to have a refresh scan as well. The afore mentioned giant IBM one (we have a whole lab of them on campus, but I don't remember the model) is one. If you have the whole screen white and you look for the refresh, you can make it out. I've never seen it on regular laptop or desktop LCDs, though.
Some HP calculators have this too. Main reason I stuck to TI. Figured if they can't put a descent controller in there, I'm not gonna bother with it.
What I don't get is why they make CRT pixels so fast. The old monitors were slow (with ghosting), but they didn't seem as bad. I'm not saying to back to ghosting, but a bit slower would be real helpful.
This doesn't seem to bother most people I talk to, but I can actually see the refresh rate on CRTs. I refuse to work with anything less than 85Hz. 60Hz and a white background make my eyes water.
LCDs on the other hand are still slow enough that they look constant to me. Even at the 60Hz they run at. They even look more constant than a CRT at 100Hz. The only LCD I've seen that I can see refresh is a ginormous IBM LCD with some ungodly resolution.
Just go to a best buy and look at the LCDs and CRTs that they have side by side. Huge difference.
People were saying the same thing when IE4 came out. Why would you want win98 when win95 + IE4 was the same thing? 98 seems to have done well anyhow.
I've never had linux work perfectly out of the box, but it's funny to look at the things that don't work. Differences between different distros (or versions of the same distro) on the same machine are fun:
-Console/X video switching. This hasn't worked right on any distro I tried on my machines since 1999.
- sometimes it takes 4 seconds to switch
- sometimes once you go into X, if you switch to anything else the picture will be irreversably garbled
- sometimes when you go X->console->X, the top 10 rows of pixels are garbled
- sometimes 1400x1050 isn't an achievable resolution (though it's supported)
-IDE driver sometimes just starts priting an error message indefinately, locking access to any IDE device
-PCMCIA/DHCP/Sound/whatever daemon freezing on startup/shutdown. Is it really that hard to background it after a certain amount of time?
-multiple mice in X. This sure was fun until recently.
- kernel thinks the bus speed is 0MHz, and decdides that means it shouldn't run anymore.
- I kid you not: Screen in X shifted up ~200 pixels. I mean wrapped around, so the "bottom" (taskbar) is 200 pixels up, and below it is the "top" of the screen. The mouse is in the correct spot, though. You have to navigate by looking at the icons highlight...
These fuckups are pretty dependable, i.e. not a fucked up install. Each one is unique to a single version of a single distro. The next version has different ones.
Ahh Linux, how amusing you are...
I think the current video driver situation on Linux is terrible. There is no such thing as a video driver for Linux. You have to have an X server for a specific card. When XFree was being dropped, everybody was clamoring for nVidia to release X.Org drivers. WTF?
Why can't there be a video driver that works on all of Linux, including the console, whatever X server you like, PicoGUI, or whatever you care to use? Why is it being tied to a specific X server?
With SHA-1 being MD5's replacement after that was broken, which hash function do we use now?
Probably. But a failure in a poorly designed anti-lock system, or a bad fuel management system could easily make it undriveable.
It's been shown that electronics are more reliable than mechanical control systems.
ABS and systems like that have failsafes. You can yank the fuse disabling them completely, and you can still use your brakes perfectly well.
My car's ECU and fuel injection had no problems at all in 150k miles. Ever try tuning a carburator? Ever have the fuel/air mixture change on you because now it's 50 degrees colder in the winter or the air filter is dirty? Or the brass jets got worn over time and are now larger than they should be? I did on my carburated bike. Never on my computerized car where the oxygen sensor tells the ECU exactly what to do to get the mixture just right. We can also go back to using points for timing the ignition system. Who cares that the spark can shift a couple degrees back and forth, that could never hurt power or gas mileage...