How good is Linux support for any of these chipsets? Are they real RAID?
Linux software-based RAID is going to be the same or better then the proprietary, binary-only, only for certain distros, drivers that come with these "software RAID chipsets".
IIRC, Linux has built-in support for some of the 3Ware RAID cards, which means that you can setup a software RAID on just about any distro. But if you want to use the 3ware official drivers and use the card's BIOS to manage tha array, you're going to be extremely limited in which distros you can use.
(But then, I'm using Gentoo, which lacks binary driver support...)
Poor baby. News flash: I HAVE a commercial class DSL account. I DO pay for it (for my hundred or so personal messages/month). It doesn't work now, sometimes, because OTHER ISPs are blocking INBOUND SMTP connections from "DSL ranges" of various providers.
That's my particular ox. But there's no good reason why users on dynamic accounts should be blocked either, except that it makes life easier for mail admins.
I pay for a business class DSL as well, static IP and everything, and it's 4-6x more expensive then consumer DSL. Most server have that IP address blocked, because they think it's a dynamically assigned IP. So I feel your pain, and it occasionally annoys me. If I was really motivated, I'd go chase down the various block lists and get myself removed. (Instead, I pay a tiny bit of money to a 3rd party mail service, which reduces my work load.)
The simple fact is that not filtering residential customers, who only pay $10-$30 per month for access, will drive an ISP out of business due to increased costs (and a rapidly eroding profit margin). That $20/mo is probably based on a cost model that assumes that less then $0.50/mo will need to be spent on support for that customer. Not to mention increased bandwidth due to worm/spam traffic and the loss of business when the ISP gets dropped from their peering arrangements like a rotten apple.
Residential customers (99.9%) do not know how to secure their machines, and probably half of them don't give a darn until the machine no longer boots even if they do get infected. Worse, $0.50/mo of available support costs by the ISP will never pay for the hours that a tech would need to spend to walk an user through securing or cleaning up their machine.
Think of it another way. Internet access is a service (not a right). Somewhat like taking a flight from point A to point B. People flying in coach class, who paid pennies for a ticket, don't get everything they want. OTOH, the first-class passengers, who paid more, get much better service. Which is why some folks learn to fly themselves, spending the cash and time needed in order to have the freedom to not be treated like cattle.
Blocking ports is a combination of being a good net company and an economic decision so that the support costs don't eat them alive.
Most games assume a 48kbps connection (which is a reasonable expectation for dial-up). Call it 4KB/s or 14MB/hr. If you have 8 people playing for 6 hours a day... that is 672 MB/day.
Newer games support up to 64 players per server, assuming that it's more like 32 players on average and 18 hours per day... the number is 8064 MB/day (over 8GB).
The numbers add up quick when you host multi-user games.
Question: How do you tell whether your machine is zombie spammer? Is running spybot enough?
Answer: If it's a Windows machine, hooked up to the internet, without a hardware firewall between it and the internet, then odds are high that it's a zombie spammer. In short, you shouldn't assume that you're not infected, you should proceed from the assumption that you are already infected.
Seriously, only fools believe that a Windows machine hooked straight to the net without firewall software will not be infected before sundown.
And does anyone run POP any more if IMAP is possible?
I do... tried using IMAP with FuseMail (an e-mail service) and didn't care for it. Thunderbird 0.4 had *horrid* issues with thread sorting when used in conjunction with an IMAP folder. Zero issues if I flipped the account back to POP3.
Then there were the lost messages (was offline, added messages to the folder, when online to sync, poof, gone). My preference (hope/dream) was that I'd be able to work with my mailbox much like the corporate version of MSOutlook works with MSExchange. Being able to work with my corporate e-mail box while off-line was a nice feature, auto-sync back up with the server when I got back in the office, plus webmail access.
Once Thunderbird hits 1.0 release status, I *might* go back and examine IMAP again. But since I use a laptop as my primary machine anyway, web access to my IMAP'd mailbox on the server doesn't do a whole lot for me. (Nice to have, but not a driving need.)
Why don't the "responsible" PC magazines who complain about all these security issues push Firefox? Are they worried about their advertising revenues? Maybe they just don't know any better.
Possibly because Firefox is still a "technology preview"? A.K.A. "use at your own risk".
Oh wait... Internet Explorer seems to also be "use at your own risk".
The real answer probably lies somewhere in:
- unfamiliarity with Firefox
- pressure from advertisers (e.g. Microsoft)
- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt with regards to open-source
- don't know, don't care
All smartass-ness aside though, this is a big problem with PDF's, is that alot of them don't use text inside, but rather scanned images of text. This makes PDF accessibility a huge issue.
And then there are equipment manufacturers who turn on the obfuscation flag in their User Manual PDFs so that you can't copy-n-paste a relevant section out to send to someone. (Sony does this with their AIT tape drive manuals!)
I keep my passwords on my computer, but in an encrypted database. I don't know of any safer way to manage my passwords and user accounts for countless web sites and pieces of software.
Just as easy to keep your account information stored in seperate text files in your home directory, but with the contents encrypted to your public-key. (e.g. using GPG in combination with GPGShell) I create one file for each website, varying the internal layout of the text file (e.g. not always using the word "password").
Text files are easy-peasy to backup, you don't have to worry about someone swiping the contents of your home folder, and it gives you an excuse to use that 8192bit encryption key.
The fact that Windows is everywhere is why it's such a tempting target; a hit rate of 1% on virus infection of Windows PCs is a good number, so it's worth going after. If linux had a good market share, it would be running the spam zombies.
Not really, although that's a contributing factor. (A common counter-argument is that there are very few widespread attacks against Apache compared to IIS, even though Apache is a more popular web server.)
It has more to do with the fact that malware authors are comfortable and familiar with the Windows operating system, as opposed to say the Macintosh O/S. Combined with how easy it is to hack a Windows box and users who have been lulled into a "no administration needed" mindset by Microsoft. If you're setting out to write a program, do you write for a platform that you're personally familar with, or do you write for one that you're unfamiliar with?
The fact that there are lots of malware kits doesn't help matters. The end-result is the same, lots of Windows viruses, but I think what started the problem was attackers going after what they were familiar with.
Is DVD writing still a real-time task? It shouldn't be. You don't worry about a disk drive or a flash drive getting corrupted just because you don't supply data to it as fast as it can write. I thought most CD writers now had "burn proof" and other similar buzzwords for the ability to recover from an underflow, in effect writing at whatever speed the computer can provide the data.
The DVD-writer that I have does have burn-proof, or whatever the marketing term is.
However, anytime that buffer runs dry and the burn-proof kicks in, I've found the disc to become problematic quickly. As in, losing data.
So while, you might technically manage to burn that DVD with running the buffer dry a few times during the session, I wouldn't hold much hope that you'll be able to read data off of that DVD in a few months.
Lessons learned are either that I've had a bit of bad luck, the burn-proof tech in my drive is sub-standard, or that the entire concept of burn-proof is merely a band-aid approach.
The security side is a joke - If you are connecting to work to download that critical report, you're going to be connecting to a VPN, whether it's IPSEC, PPTP, or SSL based. Each one of these is more secure than the WEP or WPA based security that a commercial hotspot will be providing.
You would think that would be obvious. But given the number of complaints from people who are against various anti-spam proposals that would force them to send their corporate/organization e-mail through their organization's mail server, it's quite apparent that a lot of organizations lack such rudimentary services such as VPNs.
After all, if you're going to VPN back to the home office to grab a report off the server, then you can use that same VPN to send your e-mail.
And 200dpi screens are almost "not special" anymore. (I think ViewSonic also carries a high-res LCD.)
The laptop LCD that I'm looking at right now is 124dpi (1400x1050 in 15" diagonal). There are 1600x1200 15" LCDs, which are roughly 145dpi.
Personally, I think 300-400dpi is a good goal as well, possibly with the bonus that you won't be able to notice individual "stuck" pixels. On a 100dpi display, that stuck pixel is going to stand out pretty well. But on a 400dpi display, there are 15 other pixels there to carry the slack.
Second, I agree with you that memory is not as important as some people pay for it, but still, 2-2-2 memory is faster than the standard stuff you get, and does indeed improve performance if the rest of your rig is able to keep up already.
The question is, how much faster is it and how much more expensive.
If we're talking 100% more expensive for only 10% improvement, then for the majority of folks, the cost-benefit balance tips towards "ain't worth it". Of course, how you weight the value of that speed-up is also an extremely personal decision.
As with anything related to computers and price per performance... bleeding edge is expensive and rarely worth it, so long as prices continue to slowly fall every month. Instead of buying the latest-and-greatest, purchase what was at the top of the heap 3-6 months ago. Usually, you'll pay 50% of what the bleeding edge items are selling for, but still get 80-90% of the performance.
That's been pretty much true for 10 years now, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
The second is that this method makes configurationless email impossible. You HAVE to configure your MTA to point at a specific smarthost. You HAVE to change this if you use a different ISP. And if you regularly use more than one ISP, then you have to reconfigure every time you connect.
If you're regularly connecting to different ISPs as often as that then the internet is apparently worth something to you. Which means that you should step up to the plate and either:
1. Use a mail-provider service like FuseMail, which can be accessed from anywhere
2. VPN into your corporate mail server and use that to send your e-mail
Residential internet users don't pay enough per month to pay for the support required to allow them to run widely abused services like SMTP. "Configurationless e-mail" is a smoke-screen.
At least I am glad that I have already decided on an Antec server case which has air filters over the intake fans in the front. If I do find a way to clean off the mobo and other internal electronics, then I might be able to keep dust off of the inside of the case.
Unless those filters on the Antec server are HEPA (???), they're not going to do anything about dust particles. (Those filters are more to keep hair, large dust flakes, small mammals, etc. out of the inside of the machine.) In fact, there are zero filters on the exhaust ports, so anything inside the machine will end up outside if you shake it hard enough.
However, the "Microsoft update" virus crud (harvesting from Usenet) also goes there, and at 144k per "update" it doesn't take long to fill the freebee quota.
Switch to Yahoo! Mail.
Anything in the "Bulk" folder doesn't get counted towards your quota. (Whether you can abuse that to your advantage...)
You could argue that, but seeing as there are decent sysadmins out there (no really) who will have turned this feature off, it's pretty severe.
Early implementations of WEP were buggy, especially when your access point was made by a different vendor then your wireless NIC. Hence, 3 years ago, I was one of those sysadmins who ran a semi-open WAP on my home network. (Instead, I isolated the WAP into the DMZ and required VPN to get into the home network from the laptop.)
2nd and 3rd generations of the chipsets seem to be much better, less prone to trouble, so WEP has now been turned back on and the access point locked back down. Ideally, I'd still like to get back to where the WAP is on it's own LAN segment, with no way to get out except via VPN'ing.
There's just one problem: how do you know that the code that has been subject to public scrutiny is also the code running on the voting machines themselves?
Well, that's why you need to have a paper-ballot printed out, that is human-verifiable at the time of casting the vote, and re-countable at a later date. Sure, stick a bar-code on there to make re-counting quick, but still print human-readable text in case there is suspicion about the contents of the bar-code.
Other then physically securing the machines after auditing them by a 3rd party (much like securing the old mechanical voting booths). There's not much that can be done on the end-user side to verify the voting software in the unit is legit. Anything that the system displays can be hacked to display something else. So while you may trust the voting system to record the proper votes, there should be a means to verify those votes.
So T-Bird makes the conservative decision not to mark the e-mail as spam.
T-Bird makes the mistake of making spam/ham a binary decision. I really wish it would work more like SpamBayes which has a trinary system (spam / unsure / ham). That works well because the stuff it tags as spam is almost always spam, and the false positives usually end up in the unsure pile. The "unsure" pile is also usually 1/10th the size of the "spam" pile, so it takes a lot less time to verify before tagging all of the "unsure" as spam.
T-Bird has a ways to go before their system is as easy to use as SpamBayes for MSOutlook is. (e.g. moving messages back to the original folder if they were mis-tagged and then un-flagged by the user)
Next: "how conceal your Porsche as a Hyundai Pony" and "make your Rolex look like a Timex Indiglo".
Guess you haven't seen the car commercial on NBC the past few months where the guy has a car-cover that makes his parked car look like an old rusted Chevy Citation?
i think i read that ordinary bomb-crew robots carry either a gun or a water-gun to induce explosion in potential bombs.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the goal of the gun/water-gun is to demolish the workings of the bomb (e.g. the timer/transmitter/etc) so that the bomb doesn't explode.
Re:swap sucks with 2k & xp - disable it if pos
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
23 minutes to deallocate less than a gig of ram seems like you've got more serious problems than overly-aggressive swap behavior.
Definitely agree with that assessment. NBPro might be a pig, but the parent poster's machine needs some serious work if de-allocating memory takes 20+ minutes. While I've seen it happen, it's only when you exceed the amount of physical memory in the machine by a goodish amount.
The parent poster should've used 1 spindle for O/S and applications. With the 2nd spindle dedicated to swap, temp and data files.
Windows viruses exist because Microsoft decided long ago that they were going to co-mingle EXECUTABLE CODE with DATA!
Windows users have been trained for years to double click on DATA to launch the EXECUTABLE application which reads the DATA.
In a sane world, a user would have been taught to launch the APPLICATION first, and, afterword, used that APPLICATION to open a DATA file.
The problem is not with the double-clicking to open up documents (which is a reasonable action, much like the Mac, and makes the system easier to use for novices).
The problems are:
1) Microsoft chose to hide file extensions from the user, which makes it difficult for the user to tell what is a document and what is an executable file. Prior to Win95, users were fairly easily trainable to not run.COM/.EXE/.BAT files.
2) Documents that contain executable code. While not a sin in and of itself, these scraps of script were given complete and unfettered access to the box (rather then running in a limited sandbox). Which is actually the fault of the application, and not the operating system. (Except that Microsoft is responsible for both, since most problems are with VBA macros in MSWord or MSExcel.)
3) Lack of an execute flag on files that has to be manually set (this isn't perfect protection either as anything the user can do by hand, can be automated).
4) Poor security model where the user has to pretty much run as Administrator. Which is a leftover from the Win9x days when there was no such thing as file system security. (And rather then break compatibility with old programs... we have the mess that we have now.)
The last time I was in the US, I went to see a movie. They had 5 Credit/Debit card kiosks and 3 cashiers available for customer use. There were about 100 people in line for the cashiers and less the 5 in line for kiosks. What makes anyone thing people will actually use the this technology?
Go to Penn Station in NYC sometime and check out the huge lines for the ticket windows at Amtrak or the LIRR. Actually, Amtrak/LIRR would probably even have statistics available regarding how many tickets were sold at the window vs the kiosk. Same phenomena.
The first few times I travelled via Amtrak, I used the ticket window at the local station. Mostly because I was unfamiliar with travelling by train and I wanted to ask questions of the cashier.
Now that I'm more familiar with the process, I can hit the kiosk and be down the stairs to the platform in about 2-3 minutes. (I also now know that it's possible to pay for the ticket on the train if I'm running late, except you pay a surcharge.)
People are used to dealing with humans when purchasing tickets. And a lot of folks have high distrust of kiosks (sorta like how long it took for ATMs to catch on?).
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How good is Linux support for any of these chipsets? Are they real RAID?
Linux software-based RAID is going to be the same or better then the proprietary, binary-only, only for certain distros, drivers that come with these "software RAID chipsets".
IIRC, Linux has built-in support for some of the 3Ware RAID cards, which means that you can setup a software RAID on just about any distro. But if you want to use the 3ware official drivers and use the card's BIOS to manage tha array, you're going to be extremely limited in which distros you can use.
(But then, I'm using Gentoo, which lacks binary driver support...)
Poor baby. News flash: I HAVE a commercial class DSL account. I DO pay for it (for my hundred or so personal messages/month). It doesn't work now, sometimes, because OTHER ISPs are blocking INBOUND SMTP connections from "DSL ranges" of various providers.
That's my particular ox. But there's no good reason why users on dynamic accounts should be blocked either, except that it makes life easier for mail admins.
I pay for a business class DSL as well, static IP and everything, and it's 4-6x more expensive then consumer DSL. Most server have that IP address blocked, because they think it's a dynamically assigned IP. So I feel your pain, and it occasionally annoys me. If I was really motivated, I'd go chase down the various block lists and get myself removed. (Instead, I pay a tiny bit of money to a 3rd party mail service, which reduces my work load.)
The simple fact is that not filtering residential customers, who only pay $10-$30 per month for access, will drive an ISP out of business due to increased costs (and a rapidly eroding profit margin). That $20/mo is probably based on a cost model that assumes that less then $0.50/mo will need to be spent on support for that customer. Not to mention increased bandwidth due to worm/spam traffic and the loss of business when the ISP gets dropped from their peering arrangements like a rotten apple.
Residential customers (99.9%) do not know how to secure their machines, and probably half of them don't give a darn until the machine no longer boots even if they do get infected. Worse, $0.50/mo of available support costs by the ISP will never pay for the hours that a tech would need to spend to walk an user through securing or cleaning up their machine.
Think of it another way. Internet access is a service (not a right). Somewhat like taking a flight from point A to point B. People flying in coach class, who paid pennies for a ticket, don't get everything they want. OTOH, the first-class passengers, who paid more, get much better service. Which is why some folks learn to fly themselves, spending the cash and time needed in order to have the freedom to not be treated like cattle.
Blocking ports is a combination of being a good net company and an economic decision so that the support costs don't eat them alive.
Being a game server for your friends.
Most games assume a 48kbps connection (which is a reasonable expectation for dial-up). Call it 4KB/s or 14MB/hr. If you have 8 people playing for 6 hours a day... that is 672 MB/day.
Newer games support up to 64 players per server, assuming that it's more like 32 players on average and 18 hours per day... the number is 8064 MB/day (over 8GB).
The numbers add up quick when you host multi-user games.
Question: How do you tell whether your machine is zombie spammer? Is running spybot enough?
Answer: If it's a Windows machine, hooked up to the internet, without a hardware firewall between it and the internet, then odds are high that it's a zombie spammer. In short, you shouldn't assume that you're not infected, you should proceed from the assumption that you are already infected.
Seriously, only fools believe that a Windows machine hooked straight to the net without firewall software will not be infected before sundown.
And does anyone run POP any more if IMAP is possible?
I do... tried using IMAP with FuseMail (an e-mail service) and didn't care for it. Thunderbird 0.4 had *horrid* issues with thread sorting when used in conjunction with an IMAP folder. Zero issues if I flipped the account back to POP3.
Then there were the lost messages (was offline, added messages to the folder, when online to sync, poof, gone). My preference (hope/dream) was that I'd be able to work with my mailbox much like the corporate version of MSOutlook works with MSExchange. Being able to work with my corporate e-mail box while off-line was a nice feature, auto-sync back up with the server when I got back in the office, plus webmail access.
Once Thunderbird hits 1.0 release status, I *might* go back and examine IMAP again. But since I use a laptop as my primary machine anyway, web access to my IMAP'd mailbox on the server doesn't do a whole lot for me. (Nice to have, but not a driving need.)
NAV Corporate 7.x (and probably 8.x) eats Mozilla inboxes. Very annoying.
Yes it does, if you have it set to scan ALL files, or if you fail to exclude the Mozilla inbox.
That's actually been a long-running problem since the Netscape 4.x days. It also affects MS Outlook Express users.
Here's the Symantec tech bulletin about NAV and Mozilla/Netscape mail.
Why don't the "responsible" PC magazines who complain about all these security issues push Firefox? Are they worried about their advertising revenues? Maybe they just don't know any better.
Possibly because Firefox is still a "technology preview"? A.K.A. "use at your own risk".
Oh wait... Internet Explorer seems to also be "use at your own risk".
The real answer probably lies somewhere in:
- unfamiliarity with Firefox
- pressure from advertisers (e.g. Microsoft)
- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt with regards to open-source
- don't know, don't care
All smartass-ness aside though, this is a big problem with PDF's, is that alot of them don't use text inside, but rather scanned images of text. This makes PDF accessibility a huge issue.
And then there are equipment manufacturers who turn on the obfuscation flag in their User Manual PDFs so that you can't copy-n-paste a relevant section out to send to someone. (Sony does this with their AIT tape drive manuals!)
I keep my passwords on my computer, but in an encrypted database. I don't know of any safer way to manage my passwords and user accounts for countless web sites and pieces of software.
Just as easy to keep your account information stored in seperate text files in your home directory, but with the contents encrypted to your public-key. (e.g. using GPG in combination with GPGShell) I create one file for each website, varying the internal layout of the text file (e.g. not always using the word "password").
Text files are easy-peasy to backup, you don't have to worry about someone swiping the contents of your home folder, and it gives you an excuse to use that 8192bit encryption key.
The fact that Windows is everywhere is why it's such a tempting target; a hit rate of 1% on virus infection of Windows PCs is a good number, so it's worth going after. If linux had a good market share, it would be running the spam zombies.
Not really, although that's a contributing factor. (A common counter-argument is that there are very few widespread attacks against Apache compared to IIS, even though Apache is a more popular web server.)
It has more to do with the fact that malware authors are comfortable and familiar with the Windows operating system, as opposed to say the Macintosh O/S. Combined with how easy it is to hack a Windows box and users who have been lulled into a "no administration needed" mindset by Microsoft. If you're setting out to write a program, do you write for a platform that you're personally familar with, or do you write for one that you're unfamiliar with?
The fact that there are lots of malware kits doesn't help matters. The end-result is the same, lots of Windows viruses, but I think what started the problem was attackers going after what they were familiar with.
Is DVD writing still a real-time task? It shouldn't be. You don't worry about a disk drive or a flash drive getting corrupted just because you don't supply data to it as fast as it can write. I thought most CD writers now had "burn proof" and other similar buzzwords for the ability to recover from an underflow, in effect writing at whatever speed the computer can provide the data.
The DVD-writer that I have does have burn-proof, or whatever the marketing term is.
However, anytime that buffer runs dry and the burn-proof kicks in, I've found the disc to become problematic quickly. As in, losing data.
So while, you might technically manage to burn that DVD with running the buffer dry a few times during the session, I wouldn't hold much hope that you'll be able to read data off of that DVD in a few months.
Lessons learned are either that I've had a bit of bad luck, the burn-proof tech in my drive is sub-standard, or that the entire concept of burn-proof is merely a band-aid approach.
The security side is a joke - If you are connecting to work to download that critical report, you're going to be connecting to a VPN, whether it's IPSEC, PPTP, or SSL based. Each one of these is more secure than the WEP or WPA based security that a commercial hotspot will be providing.
You would think that would be obvious. But given the number of complaints from people who are against various anti-spam proposals that would force them to send their corporate/organization e-mail through their organization's mail server, it's quite apparent that a lot of organizations lack such rudimentary services such as VPNs.
After all, if you're going to VPN back to the home office to grab a report off the server, then you can use that same VPN to send your e-mail.
And 200dpi screens are almost "not special" anymore. (I think ViewSonic also carries a high-res LCD.)
The laptop LCD that I'm looking at right now is 124dpi (1400x1050 in 15" diagonal). There are 1600x1200 15" LCDs, which are roughly 145dpi.
Personally, I think 300-400dpi is a good goal as well, possibly with the bonus that you won't be able to notice individual "stuck" pixels. On a 100dpi display, that stuck pixel is going to stand out pretty well. But on a 400dpi display, there are 15 other pixels there to carry the slack.
Second, I agree with you that memory is not as important as some people pay for it, but still, 2-2-2 memory is faster than the standard stuff you get, and does indeed improve performance if the rest of your rig is able to keep up already.
The question is, how much faster is it and how much more expensive.
If we're talking 100% more expensive for only 10% improvement, then for the majority of folks, the cost-benefit balance tips towards "ain't worth it". Of course, how you weight the value of that speed-up is also an extremely personal decision.
As with anything related to computers and price per performance... bleeding edge is expensive and rarely worth it, so long as prices continue to slowly fall every month. Instead of buying the latest-and-greatest, purchase what was at the top of the heap 3-6 months ago. Usually, you'll pay 50% of what the bleeding edge items are selling for, but still get 80-90% of the performance.
That's been pretty much true for 10 years now, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
The second is that this method makes configurationless email impossible. You HAVE to configure your MTA to point at a specific smarthost. You HAVE to change this if you use a different ISP. And if you regularly use more than one ISP, then you have to reconfigure every time you connect.
If you're regularly connecting to different ISPs as often as that then the internet is apparently worth something to you. Which means that you should step up to the plate and either:
1. Use a mail-provider service like FuseMail, which can be accessed from anywhere
2. VPN into your corporate mail server and use that to send your e-mail
Residential internet users don't pay enough per month to pay for the support required to allow them to run widely abused services like SMTP. "Configurationless e-mail" is a smoke-screen.
At least I am glad that I have already decided on an Antec server case which has air filters over the intake fans in the front. If I do find a way to clean off the mobo and other internal electronics, then I might be able to keep dust off of the inside of the case.
Unless those filters on the Antec server are HEPA (???), they're not going to do anything about dust particles. (Those filters are more to keep hair, large dust flakes, small mammals, etc. out of the inside of the machine.) In fact, there are zero filters on the exhaust ports, so anything inside the machine will end up outside if you shake it hard enough.
However, the "Microsoft update" virus crud (harvesting from Usenet) also goes there, and at 144k per "update" it doesn't take long to fill the freebee quota.
Switch to Yahoo! Mail.
Anything in the "Bulk" folder doesn't get counted towards your quota. (Whether you can abuse that to your advantage...)
You could argue that, but seeing as there are decent sysadmins out there (no really) who will have turned this feature off, it's pretty severe.
Early implementations of WEP were buggy, especially when your access point was made by a different vendor then your wireless NIC. Hence, 3 years ago, I was one of those sysadmins who ran a semi-open WAP on my home network. (Instead, I isolated the WAP into the DMZ and required VPN to get into the home network from the laptop.)
2nd and 3rd generations of the chipsets seem to be much better, less prone to trouble, so WEP has now been turned back on and the access point locked back down. Ideally, I'd still like to get back to where the WAP is on it's own LAN segment, with no way to get out except via VPN'ing.
There's just one problem: how do you know that the code that has been subject to public scrutiny is also the code running on the voting machines themselves?
Well, that's why you need to have a paper-ballot printed out, that is human-verifiable at the time of casting the vote, and re-countable at a later date. Sure, stick a bar-code on there to make re-counting quick, but still print human-readable text in case there is suspicion about the contents of the bar-code.
Other then physically securing the machines after auditing them by a 3rd party (much like securing the old mechanical voting booths). There's not much that can be done on the end-user side to verify the voting software in the unit is legit. Anything that the system displays can be hacked to display something else. So while you may trust the voting system to record the proper votes, there should be a means to verify those votes.
Gee, kinda like the "Trust, but Verify" thingy.
So T-Bird makes the conservative decision not to mark the e-mail as spam.
T-Bird makes the mistake of making spam/ham a binary decision. I really wish it would work more like SpamBayes which has a trinary system (spam / unsure / ham). That works well because the stuff it tags as spam is almost always spam, and the false positives usually end up in the unsure pile. The "unsure" pile is also usually 1/10th the size of the "spam" pile, so it takes a lot less time to verify before tagging all of the "unsure" as spam.
T-Bird has a ways to go before their system is as easy to use as SpamBayes for MSOutlook is. (e.g. moving messages back to the original folder if they were mis-tagged and then un-flagged by the user)
Next: "how conceal your Porsche as a Hyundai Pony" and "make your Rolex look like a Timex Indiglo".
Guess you haven't seen the car commercial on NBC the past few months where the guy has a car-cover that makes his parked car look like an old rusted Chevy Citation?
i think i read that ordinary bomb-crew robots carry either a gun or a water-gun to induce explosion in potential bombs.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the goal of the gun/water-gun is to demolish the workings of the bomb (e.g. the timer/transmitter/etc) so that the bomb doesn't explode.
Using Bomb Disrupters in Demining Operations
Robots Make Bomb Disposal Safer
23 minutes to deallocate less than a gig of ram seems like you've got more serious problems than overly-aggressive swap behavior.
Definitely agree with that assessment. NBPro might be a pig, but the parent poster's machine needs some serious work if de-allocating memory takes 20+ minutes. While I've seen it happen, it's only when you exceed the amount of physical memory in the machine by a goodish amount.
The parent poster should've used 1 spindle for O/S and applications. With the 2nd spindle dedicated to swap, temp and data files.
Windows viruses exist because Microsoft decided long ago that they were going to co-mingle EXECUTABLE CODE with DATA!
.COM/.EXE/.BAT files.
Windows users have been trained for years to double click on DATA to launch the EXECUTABLE application which reads the DATA.
In a sane world, a user would have been taught to launch the APPLICATION first, and, afterword, used that APPLICATION to open a DATA file.
The problem is not with the double-clicking to open up documents (which is a reasonable action, much like the Mac, and makes the system easier to use for novices).
The problems are:
1) Microsoft chose to hide file extensions from the user, which makes it difficult for the user to tell what is a document and what is an executable file. Prior to Win95, users were fairly easily trainable to not run
2) Documents that contain executable code. While not a sin in and of itself, these scraps of script were given complete and unfettered access to the box (rather then running in a limited sandbox). Which is actually the fault of the application, and not the operating system. (Except that Microsoft is responsible for both, since most problems are with VBA macros in MSWord or MSExcel.)
3) Lack of an execute flag on files that has to be manually set (this isn't perfect protection either as anything the user can do by hand, can be automated).
4) Poor security model where the user has to pretty much run as Administrator. Which is a leftover from the Win9x days when there was no such thing as file system security. (And rather then break compatibility with old programs... we have the mess that we have now.)
The last time I was in the US, I went to see a movie. They had 5 Credit/Debit card kiosks and 3 cashiers available for customer use. There were about 100 people in line for the cashiers and less the 5 in line for kiosks. What makes anyone thing people will actually use the this technology?
Go to Penn Station in NYC sometime and check out the huge lines for the ticket windows at Amtrak or the LIRR. Actually, Amtrak/LIRR would probably even have statistics available regarding how many tickets were sold at the window vs the kiosk. Same phenomena.
The first few times I travelled via Amtrak, I used the ticket window at the local station. Mostly because I was unfamiliar with travelling by train and I wanted to ask questions of the cashier.
Now that I'm more familiar with the process, I can hit the kiosk and be down the stairs to the platform in about 2-3 minutes. (I also now know that it's possible to pay for the ticket on the train if I'm running late, except you pay a surcharge.)
People are used to dealing with humans when purchasing tickets. And a lot of folks have high distrust of kiosks (sorta like how long it took for ATMs to catch on?).