HDTV isn't quite as important in the UK - in the US they are all jumping on the HDTV bandwagon because their NTSC TV system is (frankly) crap. In comparison to NTSC, PAL is already quite high quality.
Although I don't think the statement "a small amount of energy can accellerate a massive object" was at all wrong - if you apply any energy to an object (whatever the source - moving a gyroscope, hitting it with a metior, firing a thruster, whatever), that energy will be conserved - a light object will accellerate very quickly under the application of that energy, a massive object will accellerate very slowly.
However, if you only need a small accelleration to keep a massive object in a stable orientation then you don't need much energy. (hence you aren't going to need especially heavy or fast gyros).
AFAIK, the only axis a gyro can't be used to control is it's spin axis, so you should only need 2 gyros to control all 3 axis - anyone know why hubble needs 3 to keep it stable?
Remember theres (practically) no friction in space - a small amount of energy can accellerate a massive object (very slowly). I'd guess that the amount of accelleration needed to keep an orbiting body stable is pretty low. Of course if there was a metior strike, etc then it would probably send the station into a spin, but in that case (if there's enough of the station left) you would fire up the thrusters to provide a much bigger accelleration.
Although I'd be quite interested to know how massive the gyros are and how fast they spin. Also, how quickly can they spin up a gyro from stationary - I'd expect they have to do this quite slowly since the torque of spinning up a reasonably massive gyro would have some effect on the spin of the station.
Has anyone tried decoding and encoding the raw 802.11 frames in software and stuffing them into the IP stack? That way you could continue to use the network card while sniffing...
The same thing applies to software security - how many people would leave their doors and windows open 24/7? Compare to how many people happilly plug their unfirewalled, unpatched windows machines into their DSL...
I've said it before, but IMHO one of the reasons for this is that most modern worms and trojans just don't do a whole lot of damage to the infected machine. If people who left their computers open got their drives trashed and had to buy a new copy of windows (because their supplier didn't bother giving them the installation disks) then they would pay far more attention to security (at least once they've been hit once). As it is, their machine gets infected, the worm uses up a bit of their bandwidth, sends out a load of spam... maybe their ISP blocks their connection until they sort it out, but all in all it's only a minor inconvenience, not a complete disaster.
The financial institutions use credit scoring databases to decide if you get a loan, maybe ISPs should work together to keep a database of your compromises - if you keep getting cracked then they just won't let you have a internet connection (or at least you won't get a proper connection, they could provide a "web only" solution for those people). Yes, there is a cost involved with operating such a system and that would be passed on to all the end users, but who knows - maybe the operating costs of the ISPs will go down to compensate when they end up with less wasted bandwidth.
When I was at university back around 1998/99 the university didn't install any secure services - all users _had_ to use telnet. What made things even worse was that the Solaris network (which you could log in remotely to using your username and password) was on the same unswitched network as the Macs... so you sit in the Mac lab running EtherPeek and watch everyone's usernames and passwords fly past! In the end I got sick of doing insecure logins and I ended up installing sshd in my home directory and running it on an unprivalidged port as my own user.
In most cases, the attacker gets access to a machine by cracking or sniffing passwords. Local user accounts are escalated to root privileges by triggering a variety of local exploits
The machines should of course be patched up to date, but I think the real failing here is the sysadmins not enforcing secure protocols - it doesn't take much to disable the telnet and ftp servers and make people use ssh and scp, etc instead. As soon as users are allowed to send authentication details in the clear instead of encrypting them you open up all the local exploits to network attack, and security holes that can be accessed remotely by arbitrary users are far more of a security risk than holes that are only exploitable by users who have legitimate access to the system.
I wasn't complaining - I just said I'd like to see some power consumption estimates. Most people don't realise that the power consumption of the CPU changes depending on the amount of work it's doing. Most modern operating systems do power saving in their idle loops - when idle the OS tells the CPU to essentially power off for short periods of time, and in the case of many laptop CPUs it can also reduce the clock speed. But even if the OS doesn't do any power saving when it's idle, the CPU will use less power than if a process is hammering the FPU with floating point math (which is what ray tracing and probably the likes of SETI will do).
I'd love to see some estimates on how much more electricity the average workstation uses when having all it's idle CPU time being sucked up by these distributed clients. Yes, distributed computing is a nice idea, but I don't see the benefits for the people actually running the client machines since they're not getting paid for their trouble and it's actually costing them for the juice.
The 14" secondary monitor on my home workstation is now about 12 years old and still functioning (yeah, it's crap, but then it was crap when it was new). When I can get a LCD screen running at a decent resolution at a sensible price then maybe I'll upgrade...
They're also not available in sensible resolutions and sizes at sane prices. I use a 21" CRT in 1600x1200 - until I can afford to buy a flat screen that's the same size and will do the same resolution I won't be upgrading. Also, why the complete lack of high resolution widescreen displays? I don't want to get a screen any taller than my monitor, but extra width would be nice (ATM I have a second 14" monitor on each of my workstations).
Re:Like bashing your head against the wall
on
Control-Alt-Recycle
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If anyone has any bright ideas for what to do with really old crap like 386 and 486 era... I can't even get rid of it on ebay.
And we all know what end lusers do when their computer complains mightilly don't we? Yes, thats right - they just keep clicking ok until the annoying popup "you're getting infected with a virus" windows disappear:)
Possibly the major problem with current "viruses" is that none of them do any major damage to the infected machine - they just infect other machines, DDoS servers, open up spam relays, etc. None of which affects the infected user - as far as joe average Windoze user is concerned, it's not doing them any harm so they don't care.
If these "viruses" actually did damage to the computers they infect then the average Windoze user might take more notice (at least after the first time all their files had been wiped, replaced by kiddie porn and their computer phoned the cops for them).
While I'm certainly against malicious software (my inbox gets absolutely flooded with these trojans), I think that "virus" writing has really gone down hill in recent years.
In the good old days, viruses were tightly coded programs that often did cool things (undesirable, but still cool, like making all the letters fall off your screen). They would modify existing programs to become carriers - this is the true meaning of a virus, it modifys legitimate code to allow it to propogate.
Remember the Cascade virus, back in 1988? 1701 bytes of code that sits in memory, modifying.com files to include it's code as they're opened. Compare with current "viruses", which are really no more than trojans. They're several tens of K in size, rely on the user to be stupid and execute it manually and often just add themselves to the list of programs to start on bootup.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a real virus has been written since the late 1990's. All current "viruses" are either trojans or worms.
Virus - modifies existing programs to include it's own code. Trojan - executable file that pretends to be something the luser wants but is really malicious. Worm - self replicating software that uses a network-accessible vulnerability to propogate to other machines on the network (think Code Red, et al)
Yep, I've seen the discussions about that - doesn't help those of us in the UK though.:( I contacted the RadioTimes (where the current UK grabber gets the listings) - they provide a subscription listings-on-your-pda service, but say they are not interested in providing the listings in XML format (I wonder what format the PDA listings come in, although I suspect they're not as detailed). The RadioTimes listings are far from exceptional quality though - lack of descriptions and subtitles on some minor channels and some of the smaller channels have completely the wrong times listed every week.
By the way, for what it's worth, my MythTV 0.14 setup has been the most stable I've ever had.
I'm running a 3-week old CVS version ATM, which has a much better (IMHO) recording scheduler algorithm than 0.14. I need to upgrade it this weekend but generally it's very good. I'm using a BT878 card on an Athlon XP 1900+ and just have one minor issue - sometimes the colours during recording get shifted slightly towards green. Seems to be related to high CPU load and dropped interrupts, but it's not actually a MythTV problem, it's a problem with the BTTV driver.
If you are squeamish about messing with Linux though, do everyone a favor and stick with your lame TiVo.:-)
I couldn't agree more - when I was originally looking for a PVR I thought about getting Tivo or Sky Plus and didn't because:
- Tivo aren't available as new in the UK anymore
- Sky Plus had some reasonably serious bugs in the recordings sheduler which had been an ongoing problem for years and Sky showed no sign of fixing them.
- If I want a new feature on Myth then I can implement it myself
- If there's a bug in Myth I can fix it myself instead of waiting for someone to spend years doing it
- I got to try it out for free by using one of my existing computers before splashing out on dedicated hardware
And now I'm using it, I realise the project is also developing very rapidly, which is really good, and even more amazing is that 99% of the time the CVS versions are almost as good as the release versions:)
(I've been using Myth since I read about it on Slashdot last summer, and love it).
One day everyone will be watching TV like this - I never watch live TV anymore, Myth knows what I like and records it automagically. When I want to watch TV I just sit down and choose something to watch from the 120 hours of assorted programs that are sitting on the box at any time without caring when the show was actually scheduled,
Many MythTV users have asked the listings providers to provide a pay service to get the listings in a sensible format instead of site scraping - the listings providers just don't want to know about it.
XMLTV is also a rapidly developing project - as the listings providers change the format of their websites, xmltv changes to scrape them.
You seem to have forgotten that there is noone for the listings providers to complain to - they can't complain to the Myth or XMLTV developers (they haven't done anything wrong). Admittedly they could complain to the end users, but that seems unfeasable since the end users aren't republishing the copyrighted data, they're just using it for themselves.
Personally, I would pay for decent quality listings in a sane format if there was the option. The other possibility is to embed banner adverts in the XML - I for one wouldn't complain about a banner advert being displayed on the top of my EPG to help pay for the listings I'm using.
They've already said on the mythtv-users list that they're providing their own listings service for Australia and will be allowing any MythTV users to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
HDTV isn't quite as important in the UK - in the US they are all jumping on the HDTV bandwagon because their NTSC TV system is (frankly) crap. In comparison to NTSC, PAL is already quite high quality.
I'm sorry, but thats a horrible sentence
:)
Probably - English never was my strong point.
Although I don't think the statement "a small amount of energy can accellerate a massive object" was at all wrong - if you apply any energy to an object (whatever the source - moving a gyroscope, hitting it with a metior, firing a thruster, whatever), that energy will be conserved - a light object will accellerate very quickly under the application of that energy, a massive object will accellerate very slowly.
However, if you only need a small accelleration to keep a massive object in a stable orientation then you don't need much energy. (hence you aren't going to need especially heavy or fast gyros).
AFAIK, the only axis a gyro can't be used to control is it's spin axis, so you should only need 2 gyros to control all 3 axis - anyone know why hubble needs 3 to keep it stable?
Remember theres (practically) no friction in space - a small amount of energy can accellerate a massive object (very slowly). I'd guess that the amount of accelleration needed to keep an orbiting body stable is pretty low. Of course if there was a metior strike, etc then it would probably send the station into a spin, but in that case (if there's enough of the station left) you would fire up the thrusters to provide a much bigger accelleration.
Although I'd be quite interested to know how massive the gyros are and how fast they spin. Also, how quickly can they spin up a gyro from stationary - I'd expect they have to do this quite slowly since the torque of spinning up a reasonably massive gyro would have some effect on the spin of the station.
"At this time, the box that holds that particular circuit breaker ... is outside (the station) and that implies we'll have to do an EVA,"
:)
So which monkey put the fuse box on the outside of a space station?
Has anyone tried decoding and encoding the raw 802.11 frames in software and stuffing them into the IP stack? That way you could continue to use the network card while sniffing...
the kernel itself was the biggest patch pile I have ever seen in my entire live
:)
You never looked inside the XFree86 SRPM then?
The same thing applies to software security - how many people would leave their doors and windows open 24/7? Compare to how many people happilly plug their unfirewalled, unpatched windows machines into their DSL...
I've said it before, but IMHO one of the reasons for this is that most modern worms and trojans just don't do a whole lot of damage to the infected machine. If people who left their computers open got their drives trashed and had to buy a new copy of windows (because their supplier didn't bother giving them the installation disks) then they would pay far more attention to security (at least once they've been hit once). As it is, their machine gets infected, the worm uses up a bit of their bandwidth, sends out a load of spam... maybe their ISP blocks their connection until they sort it out, but all in all it's only a minor inconvenience, not a complete disaster.
The financial institutions use credit scoring databases to decide if you get a loan, maybe ISPs should work together to keep a database of your compromises - if you keep getting cracked then they just won't let you have a internet connection (or at least you won't get a proper connection, they could provide a "web only" solution for those people). Yes, there is a cost involved with operating such a system and that would be passed on to all the end users, but who knows - maybe the operating costs of the ISPs will go down to compensate when they end up with less wasted bandwidth.
Pure water is not conductive.
Err.. Why not just use deionised water? It's not electrically conductive...
When I was at university back around 1998/99 the university didn't install any secure services - all users _had_ to use telnet. What made things even worse was that the Solaris network (which you could log in remotely to using your username and password) was on the same unswitched network as the Macs... so you sit in the Mac lab running EtherPeek and watch everyone's usernames and passwords fly past! In the end I got sick of doing insecure logins and I ended up installing sshd in my home directory and running it on an unprivalidged port as my own user.
In most cases, the attacker gets access to a machine by cracking or sniffing passwords. Local user accounts are escalated to root privileges by triggering a variety of local exploits
The machines should of course be patched up to date, but I think the real failing here is the sysadmins not enforcing secure protocols - it doesn't take much to disable the telnet and ftp servers and make people use ssh and scp, etc instead. As soon as users are allowed to send authentication details in the clear instead of encrypting them you open up all the local exploits to network attack, and security holes that can be accessed remotely by arbitrary users are far more of a security risk than holes that are only exploitable by users who have legitimate access to the system.
I wasn't complaining - I just said I'd like to see some power consumption estimates. Most people don't realise that the power consumption of the CPU changes depending on the amount of work it's doing. Most modern operating systems do power saving in their idle loops - when idle the OS tells the CPU to essentially power off for short periods of time, and in the case of many laptop CPUs it can also reduce the clock speed. But even if the OS doesn't do any power saving when it's idle, the CPU will use less power than if a process is hammering the FPU with floating point math (which is what ray tracing and probably the likes of SETI will do).
I'd love to see some estimates on how much more electricity the average workstation uses when having all it's idle CPU time being sucked up by these distributed clients. Yes, distributed computing is a nice idea, but I don't see the benefits for the people actually running the client machines since they're not getting paid for their trouble and it's actually costing them for the juice.
The 14" secondary monitor on my home workstation is now about 12 years old and still functioning (yeah, it's crap, but then it was crap when it was new). When I can get a LCD screen running at a decent resolution at a sensible price then maybe I'll upgrade...
They're also not available in sensible resolutions and sizes at sane prices. I use a 21" CRT in 1600x1200 - until I can afford to buy a flat screen that's the same size and will do the same resolution I won't be upgrading. Also, why the complete lack of high resolution widescreen displays? I don't want to get a screen any taller than my monitor, but extra width would be nice (ATM I have a second 14" monitor on each of my workstations).
If anyone has any bright ideas for what to do with really old crap like 386 and 486 era... I can't even get rid of it on ebay.
I couldn't agree more.
And we all know what end lusers do when their computer complains mightilly don't we? Yes, thats right - they just keep clicking ok until the annoying popup "you're getting infected with a virus" windows disappear :)
Possibly the major problem with current "viruses" is that none of them do any major damage to the infected machine - they just infect other machines, DDoS servers, open up spam relays, etc. None of which affects the infected user - as far as joe average Windoze user is concerned, it's not doing them any harm so they don't care.
If these "viruses" actually did damage to the computers they infect then the average Windoze user might take more notice (at least after the first time all their files had been wiped, replaced by kiddie porn and their computer phoned the cops for them).
While I'm certainly against malicious software (my inbox gets absolutely flooded with these trojans), I think that "virus" writing has really gone down hill in recent years.
.com files to include it's code as they're opened. Compare with current "viruses", which are really no more than trojans. They're several tens of K in size, rely on the user to be stupid and execute it manually and often just add themselves to the list of programs to start on bootup.
In the good old days, viruses were tightly coded programs that often did cool things (undesirable, but still cool, like making all the letters fall off your screen). They would modify existing programs to become carriers - this is the true meaning of a virus, it modifys legitimate code to allow it to propogate.
Remember the Cascade virus, back in 1988? 1701 bytes of code that sits in memory, modifying
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a real virus has been written since the late 1990's. All current "viruses" are either trojans or worms.
Virus - modifies existing programs to include it's own code.
Trojan - executable file that pretends to be something the luser wants but is really malicious.
Worm - self replicating software that uses a network-accessible vulnerability to propogate to other machines on the network (think Code Red, et al)
We'll think of the hardware as being almost free because Bill thinks the software will be that much more expensive? :)
They are working on it: Zap2it Labs.
:(
:-)
:)
Yep, I've seen the discussions about that - doesn't help those of us in the UK though.
I contacted the RadioTimes (where the current UK grabber gets the listings) - they provide a subscription listings-on-your-pda service, but say they are not interested in providing the listings in XML format (I wonder what format the PDA listings come in, although I suspect they're not as detailed). The RadioTimes listings are far from exceptional quality though - lack of descriptions and subtitles on some minor channels and some of the smaller channels have completely the wrong times listed every week.
By the way, for what it's worth, my MythTV 0.14 setup has been the most stable I've ever had.
I'm running a 3-week old CVS version ATM, which has a much better (IMHO) recording scheduler algorithm than 0.14. I need to upgrade it this weekend but generally it's very good.
I'm using a BT878 card on an Athlon XP 1900+ and just have one minor issue - sometimes the colours during recording get shifted slightly towards green. Seems to be related to high CPU load and dropped interrupts, but it's not actually a MythTV problem, it's a problem with the BTTV driver.
If you are squeamish about messing with Linux though, do everyone a favor and stick with your lame TiVo.
I couldn't agree more - when I was originally looking for a PVR I thought about getting Tivo or Sky Plus and didn't because:
- Tivo aren't available as new in the UK anymore
- Sky Plus had some reasonably serious bugs in the recordings sheduler which had been an ongoing problem for years and Sky showed no sign of fixing them.
- If I want a new feature on Myth then I can implement it myself
- If there's a bug in Myth I can fix it myself instead of waiting for someone to spend years doing it
- I got to try it out for free by using one of my existing computers before splashing out on dedicated hardware
And now I'm using it, I realise the project is also developing very rapidly, which is really good, and even more amazing is that 99% of the time the CVS versions are almost as good as the release versions
(I've been using Myth since I read about it on Slashdot last summer, and love it).
One day everyone will be watching TV like this - I never watch live TV anymore, Myth knows what I like and records it automagically. When I want to watch TV I just sit down and choose something to watch from the 120 hours of assorted programs that are sitting on the box at any time without caring when the show was actually scheduled,
Many MythTV users have asked the listings providers to provide a pay service to get the listings in a sensible format instead of site scraping - the listings providers just don't want to know about it.
XMLTV is also a rapidly developing project - as the listings providers change the format of their websites, xmltv changes to scrape them.
You seem to have forgotten that there is noone for the listings providers to complain to - they can't complain to the Myth or XMLTV developers (they haven't done anything wrong). Admittedly they could complain to the end users, but that seems unfeasable since the end users aren't republishing the copyrighted data, they're just using it for themselves.
Personally, I would pay for decent quality listings in a sane format if there was the option. The other possibility is to embed banner adverts in the XML - I for one wouldn't complain about a banner advert being displayed on the top of my EPG to help pay for the listings I'm using.
They've already said on the mythtv-users list that they're providing their own listings service for Australia and will be allowing any MythTV users to use it.