Get a multimeter or one of the units that plug into the outlet then your PC plugs into the unit. Find out what the actual change in wattage draw is. Then write it up, post to an obscure news website and submit the article to/. so we can all marvel at the cost of running distributed apps.
Seriously though, it can be surprising how much different devices draw. My old 19" monitor at work pulled about 100 watts when a "typical" desktop is up (3-4 watts when in power-save mode.) My newer 17" LCD (nearly the same viewable) pulls about 15 watts with the same desktop and 1-2 in idle mode.
It sliced through my cat and embedded itself in the oposite wall.
And all this time I always thought the disclaimers on some free software such as "not responsible if this software cauess data loss,... erases your hard drive or kills your cat..." were just a joke. lol
In the computer lab at my school... ave been running Setiathome constantly for at least four years without a hiccup.
Just make sure you get written permission from someone higher up the organizational chart than you. Then, at least if someone else even higher up gets their nose out of joint for running "unauthorized" software it isn't your butt in a sling.
And DO get it in writing.. not verbal. Even if your boss doesn't backpeddal, there is no gaurantee they won't leave or retire. Then you are stuck without proof that you have authorization.
Anybody with the initiative and brains to bother installing SPAM filters is NOT going to fall for the SPAM, filter or not.
You're making the assumption that the spammers want to get around individual spam filters and that the person installing the filter is the final recipient. The spammers are more interested in getting around corporate and ISP spam filtering. You know... those filtering services that so unfairly prevent the spammers from reaching their adoring customers.
It's just too bad that people ever buy ANYTHING from spammers. I recently recieved a spam from a vendor with a product I would have otherwise been interested in. My reply was, "Your product looks great! Just what we need! Too bad you chose to advertise via spam. I don't do business with spammers."
If, like me, you think this sucks and want to cancel your subscription go here before November 8, 2003.
I'm going to sign up and cancel... just to show them that I think it sucks.:) Guess have will have to just stick to Magnatune for now and hope they draw more artists. I must say though... the music-to-noise ratio there is pretty good.
The gov should have built the lines and allowed the most resourceful,best deal to the public to lease the line.
That is what is going on with some community owned cable providers. The lines (often fiber) to the home are pretty much equivelent to the city streets.. owned/maintained by the city.
Some of them provide their own content and services (especially cable TV). Others charge an "access fee" to companies who want to provide services (especially Internet access) over the lines.
One example (from a quick Google search) is this community owned cable in MA. In this case it looks like they provide all services without any competition.
The US goverment changed their mind in the 1980's and that lead to the mess we have in today's US phone system.
It also led to the inexpensive, feature-filled telephones we have.
Wish I had mod points. You always hear what a "disaster" the current telco system is, especially here on Slashdot. I have to belive that most of those griping about it either a) lost a telcom job at Ma Bell, or b) are too young to have paid the phone bill back in the pre-breakup days.
Imagine a bill where $0.20/min was a really good rate for daytime calls. Yeah, I know some places are getting away with charging that much, but that is in today's economy. This was in the 80s! That would be about $0.35/min today.
When we were dating, a phone call from my hometown to my wife's (about 15 minutes apart) was $.15/minute for evening rates. Today it is $.06/CALL! The local phone company held out as long as they knew that a competitor would have to install their own infrastructure. Once they had the threat of a competitor coming in and competing on a per-line basis though, they quickly changed their fee structure.
One thing people who argue "let them put in their own lines" forget is that it is damn expensive. If you are gauranteed a monopoly in an area, then it's not so bad. You can run cables to everyone's house because you know you will have a big initial market.
A competitor coming in to the established monopoly doesn't have that advantage. They would have to install lines without knowing what percentage really will switch to their service. They also have to worry about the incumbent lowering prices right after they've spent all that money to build competing lines.
It's also not an option to just run lines to each house as they sign up. That would be way to expensive. Don't think for a second that it costs the same to send a tech into the field to do 10 houses as it does to send him in 10 times to do 1 house each trip.
As far as I can tell, the only real problems are caused by too many choices for some people to handle. That and the unrelenting push to get you to change long distance providers.
Well, actually if there was no Kinux and no other open source Unix (eg one of the BSD's) took over Linux's mind share, SCO would have had tons more sales.
Sure, and there were no roads, people selling planes would have tons more sales too.
But in the real world, BSD and other alternatives exist for use on x86, and nearly all are better options than UnixWare. It seems like pure arrogance if SCO actually thinks all of the current Linux servers would be running SCO's software instead. Heck, how many would even be running Linux if it hadn't been free to obtain, at least at the testing stage.
I personally really like Linux, but even I wouldn't have messed with it if I would have had to spend $200 just to get a chance to play with it initially. I certainly wouldn't have paid $600 or more for a license of something else "just to try it." And without that initial free exposure, I wouldn't have grown to understand the value of the 'NIX way of doing things and how much power it puts in the hands of administrators.
So being freely available is definately a big help to Linux for getting it's foot in the door. Otherwise, the end result would have been that the servers I manage would all be NetWare and (ugh) Windows servers.
Well, according to SCO, the 2.2 kernel series is non-violating.
Unfortunately these days too many servers require kernel features simply not found in 2.2. Or at the least they would require significant work to move back to a v2.2 kernel. I personally wouldn't want to try to go to v2.2 on all the servers I run.
It has to be a pretty painless update to get mass adoption. Without mass adoption SCO will point to users still on 2.4 kernels and say, "See, look at all the servers which need our code!" Of course, the truth would be that the majorty were due to code not in 2.2 but also not remotely related to SCO.
We need a pretty current 2.4 kernel to keep from breaking too many things.
...that we can't legally force SCO to release their "evidence." I'd love to see a kernel with all "violating" technologies removed. Then see 99% of the Linux servers out there switched to it even if it means something like changing file systems.
Then I want to let SCO try to prove in court that "thier" code was required for Linux to thrive. It would also show a judge that SCO's potential customer base for UnixWare was a tad smaller than SCO likes to claim.
This would be better than replacing the code short term. It would show that the technologies which SCO says customers would have purchased UnixWare to get were in fact virtually irrelevant.
I'd love to know how SCO thinks they would have had tons more sales if not for Linux. Do they actually belive that UnixWare would have been used instead on all the current Linux servers out there?
That doesn't make sence since the vast majority of Linux systems in use don't require any of the features SCO is claiming rights to.
Yeah, this is good news. It's like the good news of the gas companies lowering the price of gas by 20 cents/gal... two weeks after they raised it by 30. You remind me of the guy who's breakroom topic that day is, "Did see the price of gas this morning? It went WAY down!"
Based on my experience, visibility and FUD seem to be the biggest factors. When it came to getting a cert, I've seen otherwise very intelligent people "play it safe" and go with Verisign. The same thing goes for registering domains.
As long as Verisign can get people to believe their 128-bit certs are better than the next guy's 128-bit cert, they'll get the premium. The problem is usually the people who control the money and decide which vendor to use. They're often not the ones who can evaluate based on technical merits and often the ones more susceptible to marketing.
But hey, that's what marketing is for right? Selling something based on perception instead of it's own merits?
it seems the only people who would have had anything to lose in this case would be the porn sites, they take all the misspelled words and wrong domain names and take them as their own.
Actually they don't lose out at all. Requests to domains they hadn't purchased yet don't get to their site anyhow. If anything it might actually increase their traffic. If people get used to the idea that "if I misspell I get an automatic search to show me the right spelling", they might pay even less attention when typing in URLs. So there would be more typos that might go to a port site.
After one year and a million dollars, they were successfull. They had a legal BIOS identical in operation to that of the IBM computer.
In any case, you would think Bill would remember this. He was around. Unless he's getting daft.
But in this case, MS would probably LOVE a bunch of clones of it's new bios... after all then everybody's BIOS would only run Windows. They probably look at this less as of a profit center and more as a means of gaining even more control.
I have cannot remember the last time I received unsolicited marketing material where email headers and the email itself was not fraudulent.
Just today I got an e-mail for a service I actually could have used. But as is my policy, I wrote back that I would have liked to discuss thier product, as it appears to meet a current need. Then I said that I could not, however, do business with a company who chose to use spam to advertise.
Very quickly I got a reply stating "if it was spam would I have time to reply" and that I should "cool down" and then get back to them. That prompted a close look at the mail logs and headers of the initial message.
Ok, finally to the "fraudulent" part: My next reply asked what type of legitimate "non-spam" e-mail has a forged source server name that is the same as my mail server (including domain.) And why, if it was not spam did the logs have a string of e-mails from his domain to a list of users which looked something like cabrams cadams cbernstein chinkle chobledorf... an alphabetical list of our user's e-mail addresses. And why, if these "non-spam" messages were not just a blanket spam, did the list include e-mail addresses that exist only on one of our web pages and never existed on our mail server? And by they way, "we still will never be doing business with your company."
So (SURPRISE) that the guy wasn't overly worried about ethics when he replied to my first message.
Never did hear back after that 2nd message.. bu then again mail from thier domain is blocked now.
either educate users (as well as possible) on good security or require as a matter of policy that they utilize certain security measures
A large company I know of requires any employee who wants access via VPN from home to provide proof of purchase of both a hardware firewall (linksys, netgear, etc.) and antivirus software. The user's VPN access is set to expire at 1 week after expiration of their antivirus updates. Proof of renewal for antivirus updates is required to continue using their VPN connection after that point.
Often the problem of getting blacklisted due to a neighbor is the ISP's fault. Many don't bother with ARIN guidelines.
For example:
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that receive IP address space from ARIN directly or indirectly (as a downstream customer of another ISP)
MUST use either Shared WHOIS Project known as SWIP or a Referral WHOIS server known as RWhois to provide reassignment information for/29 and larger blocks to ARIN.
Sooo.. Any time an ISP gives a block of 8 or more IP addresses (6 usable, only 5 after upstream router IP assignment) they are required to identify who got it. It seems that most don't bother at all.
Charter doesn't seem to break it's addresses down beyond region. So, as happened with us, somebody on a cable modem sends spam and all of your IPs get included right along with the spammer's on the blacklist. If the ISP isn't doing their job, it is hard for the blacklisters to tell who is really responsible. Most error on the extreme side and just block the smallest block which is in RWHOIS/SWIP. In this case with charter that would be over 1 million IP addys.
My experience trying to get off the lists was not too bad. All of them immediately removed me after an e-mail explaining things. But.. trying to confirm that you really are on a list, and finding the right addy to send your request to... that wasn't as easy.
I checked out the site. Found something I liked and even bought the.WAVs so I can burn my own CD (burning as we speek.)
While I would like to have had the option to buy a CD-R pre-burnt and labeled, this still suits me just fine. After listening to some of the selection, I would say they don't like "music that sucks" any more than anybody else. Odds are anybody will find at least one album they want to "buy" on the site.
I don't think "quality control" will be an issue so much in the world of "Shareware Music." People will just gravitate towards sites that do a good job of distinguising between true crap and stuff that just isn't mass-marketable.
The other source for exposure to this stuff is likely to be your friends who share your tastes in music. I trust my best fried's opinion on which CD I would like to hear about much more than I trust a mega-label's marketing dept.
We're definately going to have less "quality control".
I don't have a problem with quality control. Just the selection of the person doing the controling. You can apply "quality control" to things that have (and should have) specific quantifiable attributes. If a bolt needs to hold 500 lbs, you want to be sure it doesn't fail.
I am confident that someone is capable of making an objective decision about whether my car's lug-nuts will fail under load. (And I'm very glad someone is doing that QC at the factory which made them.) But I don't think another person is able to evaluate something as subjective as whether I am going to like a song. Yet major lables are doing that all the time.
Exposure of more bands on this electronic medium is only a good thing. Sure some (maybe many) songs are going to suck according to my personal tastes. But I have the option of ignoring or avoiding them since they are online. Regardless, odds are that I'll find something I like that a music exec would never dream of bankrolling.
The music that really does suck won't make any money. The stuff that only a small % enjoy will at least make "some" money. The those that do buy are probably getting stuff wouldn't have had a chance to hear from some other "evil" label.
And who knows. Maybe a big star will be born because people love their music. And then we'll find out they were previously rejected by all of the big labels as un-marketable.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, it can be surprising how much different devices draw. My old 19" monitor at work pulled about 100 watts when a "typical" desktop is up (3-4 watts when in power-save mode.) My newer 17" LCD (nearly the same viewable) pulls about 15 watts with the same desktop and 1-2 in idle mode.
And all this time I always thought the disclaimers on some free software such as "not responsible if this software cauess data loss,... erases your hard drive or kills your cat..." were just a joke. lol
Just make sure you get written permission from someone higher up the organizational chart than you. Then, at least if someone else even higher up gets their nose out of joint for running "unauthorized" software it isn't your butt in a sling.
And DO get it in writing.. not verbal. Even if your boss doesn't backpeddal, there is no gaurantee they won't leave or retire. Then you are stuck without proof that you have authorization.
You're making the assumption that the spammers want to get around individual spam filters and that the person installing the filter is the final recipient. The spammers are more interested in getting around corporate and ISP spam filtering. You know... those filtering services that so unfairly prevent the spammers from reaching their adoring customers.
It's just too bad that people ever buy ANYTHING from spammers. I recently recieved a spam from a vendor with a product I would have otherwise been interested in. My reply was, "Your product looks great! Just what we need! Too bad you chose to advertise via spam. I don't do business with spammers."
Not if the "some" callers are ones who refuse to respect my request to not be called.
I'm going to sign up and cancel... just to show them that I think it sucks. :) Guess have will have to just stick to Magnatune for now and hope they draw more artists. I must say though... the music-to-noise ratio there is pretty good.
That is what is going on with some community owned cable providers. The lines (often fiber) to the home are pretty much equivelent to the city streets.. owned/maintained by the city.
Some of them provide their own content and services (especially cable TV). Others charge an "access fee" to companies who want to provide services (especially Internet access) over the lines.
One example (from a quick Google search) is this community owned cable in MA. In this case it looks like they provide all services without any competition.
Wish I had mod points. You always hear what a "disaster" the current telco system is, especially here on Slashdot. I have to belive that most of those griping about it either a) lost a telcom job at Ma Bell, or b) are too young to have paid the phone bill back in the pre-breakup days.
Imagine a bill where $0.20/min was a really good rate for daytime calls. Yeah, I know some places are getting away with charging that much, but that is in today's economy. This was in the 80s! That would be about $0.35/min today.
When we were dating, a phone call from my hometown to my wife's (about 15 minutes apart) was $.15/minute for evening rates. Today it is $.06/CALL! The local phone company held out as long as they knew that a competitor would have to install their own infrastructure. Once they had the threat of a competitor coming in and competing on a per-line basis though, they quickly changed their fee structure.
One thing people who argue "let them put in their own lines" forget is that it is damn expensive. If you are gauranteed a monopoly in an area, then it's not so bad. You can run cables to everyone's house because you know you will have a big initial market.
A competitor coming in to the established monopoly doesn't have that advantage. They would have to install lines without knowing what percentage really will switch to their service. They also have to worry about the incumbent lowering prices right after they've spent all that money to build competing lines.
It's also not an option to just run lines to each house as they sign up. That would be way to expensive. Don't think for a second that it costs the same to send a tech into the field to do 10 houses as it does to send him in 10 times to do 1 house each trip.
As far as I can tell, the only real problems are caused by too many choices for some people to handle. That and the unrelenting push to get you to change long distance providers.
Cool, my own "Dr. Who" marathon at my fingertips whenever I don't want to move from the couch for 24 hours (except for bathroom break of course.) lol
Sure, and there were no roads, people selling planes would have tons more sales too.
But in the real world, BSD and other alternatives exist for use on x86, and nearly all are better options than UnixWare. It seems like pure arrogance if SCO actually thinks all of the current Linux servers would be running SCO's software instead. Heck, how many would even be running Linux if it hadn't been free to obtain, at least at the testing stage.
I personally really like Linux, but even I wouldn't have messed with it if I would have had to spend $200 just to get a chance to play with it initially. I certainly wouldn't have paid $600 or more for a license of something else "just to try it." And without that initial free exposure, I wouldn't have grown to understand the value of the 'NIX way of doing things and how much power it puts in the hands of administrators.
So being freely available is definately a big help to Linux for getting it's foot in the door. Otherwise, the end result would have been that the servers I manage would all be NetWare and (ugh) Windows servers.
Unfortunately these days too many servers require kernel features simply not found in 2.2. Or at the least they would require significant work to move back to a v2.2 kernel. I personally wouldn't want to try to go to v2.2 on all the servers I run.
It has to be a pretty painless update to get mass adoption. Without mass adoption SCO will point to users still on 2.4 kernels and say, "See, look at all the servers which need our code!" Of course, the truth would be that the majorty were due to code not in 2.2 but also not remotely related to SCO.
We need a pretty current 2.4 kernel to keep from breaking too many things.
Then I want to let SCO try to prove in court that "thier" code was required for Linux to thrive. It would also show a judge that SCO's potential customer base for UnixWare was a tad smaller than SCO likes to claim.
This would be better than replacing the code short term. It would show that the technologies which SCO says customers would have purchased UnixWare to get were in fact virtually irrelevant.
That doesn't make sence since the vast majority of Linux systems in use don't require any of the features SCO is claiming rights to.
Yeah, this is good news. It's like the good news of the gas companies lowering the price of gas by 20 cents/gal... two weeks after they raised it by 30. You remind me of the guy who's breakroom topic that day is, "Did see the price of gas this morning? It went WAY down!"
As long as Verisign can get people to believe their 128-bit certs are better than the next guy's 128-bit cert, they'll get the premium. The problem is usually the people who control the money and decide which vendor to use. They're often not the ones who can evaluate based on technical merits and often the ones more susceptible to marketing.
But hey, that's what marketing is for right? Selling something based on perception instead of it's own merits?
In any case, you would think Bill would remember this. He was around. Unless he's getting daft.
But in this case, MS would probably LOVE a bunch of clones of it's new bios... after all then everybody's BIOS would only run Windows. They probably look at this less as of a profit center and more as a means of gaining even more control.
Wouldn't they just have to prove you are on /. to prove you want to destroy SCO?
Just today I got an e-mail for a service I actually could have used. But as is my policy, I wrote back that I would have liked to discuss thier product, as it appears to meet a current need. Then I said that I could not, however, do business with a company who chose to use spam to advertise.
Very quickly I got a reply stating "if it was spam would I have time to reply" and that I should "cool down" and then get back to them. That prompted a close look at the mail logs and headers of the initial message.
Ok, finally to the "fraudulent" part:
My next reply asked what type of legitimate "non-spam" e-mail has a forged source server name that is the same as my mail server (including domain.) And why, if it was not spam did the logs have a string of e-mails from his domain to a list of users which looked something like cabrams cadams cbernstein chinkle chobledorf... an alphabetical list of our user's e-mail addresses. And why, if these "non-spam" messages were not just a blanket spam, did the list include e-mail addresses that exist only on one of our web pages and never existed on our mail server? And by they way, "we still will never be doing business with your company."
So (SURPRISE) that the guy wasn't overly worried about ethics when he replied to my first message.
Never did hear back after that 2nd message.. bu then again mail from thier domain is blocked now.
Kenja earns the much coveted: (Score:6, Funny)
A large company I know of requires any employee who wants access via VPN from home to provide proof of purchase of both a hardware firewall (linksys, netgear, etc.) and antivirus software. The user's VPN access is set to expire at 1 week after expiration of their antivirus updates. Proof of renewal for antivirus updates is required to continue using their VPN connection after that point.
For example:
(Bold mine.) - Full Guideline
Sooo.. Any time an ISP gives a block of 8 or more IP addresses (6 usable, only 5 after upstream router IP assignment) they are required to identify who got it. It seems that most don't bother at all.
Charter doesn't seem to break it's addresses down beyond region. So, as happened with us, somebody on a cable modem sends spam and all of your IPs get included right along with the spammer's on the blacklist. If the ISP isn't doing their job, it is hard for the blacklisters to tell who is really responsible. Most error on the extreme side and just block the smallest block which is in RWHOIS/SWIP. In this case with charter that would be over 1 million IP addys.
My experience trying to get off the lists was not too bad. All of them immediately removed me after an e-mail explaining things. But.. trying to confirm that you really are on a list, and finding the right addy to send your request to... that wasn't as easy.
If anonymity is outlawed, then only outlaws will have anonymity.
While I would like to have had the option to buy a CD-R pre-burnt and labeled, this still suits me just fine. After listening to some of the selection, I would say they don't like "music that sucks" any more than anybody else. Odds are anybody will find at least one album they want to "buy" on the site. I don't think "quality control" will be an issue so much in the world of "Shareware Music." People will just gravitate towards sites that do a good job of distinguising between true crap and stuff that just isn't mass-marketable. The other source for exposure to this stuff is likely to be your friends who share your tastes in music. I trust my best fried's opinion on which CD I would like to hear about much more than I trust a mega-label's marketing dept.
I am confident that someone is capable of making an objective decision about whether my car's lug-nuts will fail under load. (And I'm very glad someone is doing that QC at the factory which made them.) But I don't think another person is able to evaluate something as subjective as whether I am going to like a song. Yet major lables are doing that all the time.
Exposure of more bands on this electronic medium is only a good thing. Sure some (maybe many) songs are going to suck according to my personal tastes. But I have the option of ignoring or avoiding them since they are online. Regardless, odds are that I'll find something I like that a music exec would never dream of bankrolling.
The music that really does suck won't make any money. The stuff that only a small % enjoy will at least make "some" money. The those that do buy are probably getting stuff wouldn't have had a chance to hear from some other "evil" label.
And who knows. Maybe a big star will be born because people love their music. And then we'll find out they were previously rejected by all of the big labels as un-marketable.