They become attractive once you see the difference they make in a desktop PC. I bought my first SSD around 6 months ago, now I swear by them. If you're a heavy multitasker, a fast SSD can make a huge difference by eliminating seek times. I'm actually tempted to replace my boss' boot drive with an SSD, just to see if he notices - and by "notice" I mean "stop bitching about his gaming-grade PC being slow".
I need prices to drop another 2x to 3x before I'll use it on a desktop PC.
But yes, it makes a huge difference. I run a 10k RPM SATA on my home machine and it's been well worth it. It makes the other PCs feel sluggish. I'll definitely be upgrading to a SSD next year if the prices can drop enough.
We've also put a 128GB SSD ($350) into one of our user's laptops and the responsiveness of the laptop has gone up tremendously. Even for someone who isn't a real big multitasker, it makes boot-up much faster which matters for a laptop user. As our other users complain about their laptops, we'll probably install a few more SSDs.
When that worked, that would've reduced the potential culprits to the memory, CPU, and then lastly the mainboard. Memtest would've found no memory issue (which would also indicate that the mainboard is also less likely a problem), so that's when the CPU switch should've happened...
Maybe, maybe not. Memtest has never been good at finding timing issues or partially good memory.
In the case of flaky hardware, your best bet is a stress/torture test of the hardware. Moving lots and lots of data around between the RAM/CPU and checking to see that it doesn't get corrupted along the way. One good tool is Prime95 in torture test mode for 24-48 hours. It'll run your memory/CPU into the ground and expose timing issues, poor cooling, or calculation errors due to the immense amount of work that it forces the CPU/RAM to perform.
One of the lab computers and the lab instruments need to be on a 192.168.1.x/24 subnet because the lab instrument software is programmed terribly.
One of the joys of being on the 172.x.x.x network scheme internally is finding devices like that. Everyone knows about 192.168.x.y and 10.x.y.z, but the 172 range tends to be overlooked.
You think you're being funny, but in the past month or two, the corn-syrup folks have already started running commercials that claim their product is just as good as regular old sugar when used in processed foods.
For our work, 120GB is about the minimum size for laptops. 40-60GB would be way too small for our tastes.
Personally, I need an affordable 500GB SSD before I can switch off of rotational media. Although I might try it when the 250GB SSDs finally drop below $300.
Well, to be fair, some of the Dune prequels were decent (the 3 "house" books). The other 3 were more of "here's a lot of storyline, not well tied together or with any sense of climax".
But then, the 2nd and 3rd Dune books weren't all that great either.
At 103000 attempts per seconds, that's... 421 years oh.
Still within the realm of cracking, especially if those passwords guard a few million dollars of assets. 421 years sounds like a lot until you add things like:
- Crossfire or SLI where you have multiple boards installed
- Setup half a dozen machines to work on the problem
- Apply a botnet to the problem
- Future improvements in technology
- Apply some heuristics to the guessing process
All of which can easily shave off at least 2 orders of magnitude and possibly 3 orders of magnitude. Which reduces that 421 years down to a few months (or worse).
8 character passwords are pretty much dead in the water now. Or at least they need to be phased out within the next few years. Or protected by rate-limiters which control how fast passwords can be tried. (Personally, I always assume that the attacker has the stored hash and can apply parallelism to the attack. Which means that rate limiters should not be relied on to prevent cracks.)
1st: Move SSH out of port 22. That'll filter out 75% of all attempts.
Closer to 99%+ in my experience (possibly even 99.9%).
And eliminating all of that noise from the logs allows you to see more serious attackers who were previously getting lost in the noise / clutter.
However, I no longer believe that things like fail2ban / denyhosts work well. Many modern attackers use botnets that slowly pick at your firewall from hundreds of different IPs at a very slow rate. Unless you have a very aggressive ban setting (where you block for a few days), you're unlikely to effectively block these attackers. And you're much more likely to lock yourself out by accident.
Move the port, switch to pub-key authentication, limit who can login via SSH, turn off the ability to login to root via SSH. Then focus on the other weaknesses in the server.
Additionally, an evenly-slightly determined hacker can still find where your sshd process is listening on by running a basic nmap scan.
A determined hacker is a whole different ball of wax. If someone is specifically targeting you, then different rules apply.
Moving the port is a good first step (hell, put it on 443 or 8080). That alone will eliminate 99.9% of the attackers who are too lazy / busy to port scan the box. And it does wonders in cleaning up the log files because you'll no longer have thousands of attempts per day. That makes it easier to see more serious attackers without them being lost in the noise.
- move the port
- only allow key-based authentication
- disable root login via SSH
If you absolutely positively have to have SSH running on port 22, create a 2nd daemon and restrict it to a limited set of users.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like prices will go down much until Q4 when Intel get their next generation flash chips going.
Price per gigabyte has been stuck in neutral for the past year. If you look at price per gigabyte for the consumer-grade MLC SSDs, we're in the same general price point as Jan 2009.
So, is it a temporary bump on the race to smaller/cheaper? Or are we starting to hit production limits / issues with the current MLC technology? Or are the generations taking longer to deliver?
Unlike mechanical drives which have a very clear sweet spot the SSD prices scale almost linearly with size.
That's because the mechanical parts have a fixed base price. You can't get the rare earth magnets and tiny spinning parts below a certain cost (due to materials and tolerances). Plus there's the shipping/handling costs which are pretty much a fixed value. Which is why in the 3.5" market, very few drives are less then about $50 and the sweet spot is in the $100-$150 range.
SSD probably also has a sweet spot, but because they're still so expensive we haven't seen it yet. My bet is that you won't ever see SSDs much below $30/unit because they're not worth stocking/shipping below that cost.
(You can already see that when you go looking for SSD cards, or USB flash drives. Nobody makes/sells the smaller units anymore. Even though there are systems out there which can't read from USB drives larger then 2GB. The cheapest cards seem to be around the $7 mark at places like NewEgg. The only way to get them cheaper per unit is if they are bundled into packs of 3 or 5 units.)
I think we're pretty close to that point already. SSDs (MLC variants) are real close to the $2/GB mark now, which is real close to prime-time. A consumer-grade 128GB SSD can be had for about $350 now, and works well in laptops and desktops.
Now, $350 is still on the expensive side for most people. But I remember spending $300 on a single hard drive within the past decade. So it's not unheard of.
I think the magic number is going to be $1/GB. At which point things get very interesting and 10k SATA consumer-grade drives are going to be in trouble. (A 10k SATA Raptor or Velociraptor is in that price band.) At $1/GB (maybe within 2 years?), they're cheap enough to be suitable for the high-end use where you want something fast but of a decent capacity (256-512GB).
Sounds like normal market PvP in EVE Online. (There's always people attempting to corner the market in a particular good - once the margins get too high, competitors come out of the woodwork.)
Exactly this. Nothing else is rational at this point in time. Letting random sites run code on your machine *will* get you infected at some point.
(Personally I use both NoScript and FlashBlock for Firefox. With a very selective whitelist. Which pretty much prevents all attacks, unless they infect one of the few dozen sites that I have whitelisted.)
The problem with EvE is that you're looking at months of real life time to fly a ship that's halfway fun.
Bullshit. You're doing it wrong. Stop getting caught up in the myth that "more expensive ships are more fun".
Get a pack of friends in Rifters and assorted other T1 frigates and go roaming in lo-sec / null-sec. Sure, you'll probably get spanked at some point, but in the meantime you've raised hell and caused havoc without spending a lot of ISK.
I'll feed the troll. I can tell right off the bat that you've never used one for more then a few hours. And that you have no idea what the market for book readers is like.
The joy of a dedicated eReader (like the Sony PRS-505) is that it does that one thing well. Multi-tasking is not always a plus. The current crop of e-ink based devices are excellent for leisure or other cover-to-cover reading where the refresh time of the screen really doesn't matter. That's it, that's all they're supposed to do. And frankly, they do it quite smashingly.
Cost is an issue still, but there are now devices available for under $200 (my price point was under $300, which is why I picked up the PRS-505 two years ago). The price of books... is stupidity on the part of the publishers. But there are hundreds of good books from Project Gutenberg, or the inexpensive and no-DRM books over at Baen. If you don't like the costs, then you're not the target demographic.
The portability of the current readers is just fine, about equivalent to a large format paperback, with the bonus that I can carry a few dozen books in about 1/3 the space and weight of a single large format paperback.
Battery life is a non-issue. The Sony's only require charging every few weeks, even for a voracious reader. Which means that on any given night, when I pickup my reader to do a spot of reading, the device is always ready. And when I finish for the night, if it's finally (after 2-3 weeks) dropped below 25% battery, I'll toss it on the charger overnight.
Clarity of the display of e-ink devices is excellent. Unless you're trying to read by candlelight, in which case most mass-market paperbacks are going to be equally difficult to read. More DPI would always be nice, but it's already up around 175dpi.
As for book storage - I have (5) 2 meter tall, ~1 meter wide book bookshelves filled with dead-tree books. It's a pain to deal with that quantity of paper if you move more then once a century. With the electronic versions, I can backup my entire library on a few CDs/DVDs. Which means I could toss a copy in the bank, at a friend's house, or email myself a copy at different webmail accounts. Which goes back to the portability argument.
In short, eReaders do an excellent job of their assigned task. Which is to present text on the screen and let me get into the book.
I don't know why Sony gets such a bad rap. I think it's because they're not advertising it well. They also tried to out-do Amazon with their Sony Store for the past 2 years before finally jumping on the ePub wagon. On the upside, they have come out with new versions - which was looking iffy 2 years ago when I bought the PRS-505.
I really like my 2 year old Sony PRS-505. Excellent product that does exactly what it's supposed to do (at least for leisure reading). I take it pretty much everywhere if I think I'll have some downtime to read.
I find it very surprising that the most open eReader on the market today is the Sony. I always though that was one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse. They must be catching on to what consumers actually want.... I hope Apple is paying attention.
Yeah, I was rather wary about buying my PRS-505 two years ago, but went ahead and took the plunge when they got below $300. I'm extremely happy with it as it does exactly what I want for leisure, cover-to-cover reading. Open formats, a no-DRM source of books (Gutenberg and Baen's Webscription), and the fact that it stays the hell out of my way when I want to read. Takes a few weeks for the battery to wear down and I keep 200-300 books on it.
I've averaged 1 book every week or two for the past 2 years on it.
Very much a no-muss no-fuss e-reader. Which is a key selling point.
Eh, the problem with AAA and AA batteries is the form factor. Round is not a good shape for a compact product like a cell phone, mp3 player or camera where smaller, slimmer and sleeker is often a key virtue.
I finally gave up looking for MP3 players that run on AAA or AA batteries. I can get something with better battery life that is 1/2 the thickness of the thinnest of AAA-powered MP3 players if I go with a built-in flat battery. The same thing goes for the digital camera that I have, which uses a 3/16" thick square battery pack (that can be swapped). As a result, the camera is a hella lot thinner and lighter then if it used AA batteries.
Now, for a notebook/laptop, the AA battery size is not a big issue, except for all the space lost due to the roundness of the package. Basically, we need a set of standard, squared off batteries. But the modern markets are so disjointed that it's unlikely to happen.
The problem with Broken Steel raising the level cap to 30 was that it basically trivialized the portion of the game with regards to "it's better to be a specialist then a generalist" aspect. With 10 more levels, it was pretty easy to get to 90+ in all skills.
MZ was basically a big piggy-bank in the sky, completely out of place in the FO3 universe. The only interesting portion of it was the audio recordings of the captives. Definitely the least favorite of the expansions, even if some of the puzzles / events were interesting. Such as the infinitely spawning shooting gallery or being rushed by reinforcements while you cause an alien craft to bang into powered poles.
Right now, no country is seriously planning to do anything genuinely new with manned spaceflight for the next couple of decades. There's no motivation for a president budget a lot of money to try to beat anybody.
China's a sure bet, and India won't be far behind.
Why? Because manned spaceflight technology dovetails nicely with the development of medium-range missiles and ICBMs.
Go with a microATX motherboard (preferably one that only uses heat pipes and no moving fans, like the Asus boards). Use one of the 45W TDP AMD chips - which are dead easy to cool, even in confined spaces and the stock fan runs pretty much silently.
As for the case... I don't have a suggestion for that at the moment.
(Best place to pickup the AMD CPU & MB is over at MWave since they'll bundle it, assemble the CPU and RAM onto the MB, and test it for you. So you're never left holding a bag full of incompatible parts.)
I don' tthink that's where it will fail -- yes, some will get through in that windows before the system learns the new template, but it could drastically reduce the problem for a short time.
We already see that issue with our SpamAsassin setup and the DNSBLs that are used to score. Spam coming in from new spam zombies that have not been identified can often sail right through because those IPs are not yet in the block lists.
(I'm strongly considering implementing a greylisting setup - which would give the blocklists an extra few minutes to list the new zombies.)
What would happen, if something like this goes live, is that spam authors will change their botnets so that all messages are delivered within the first 5 minutes of the run. A few thousand or hundreds of thousands of zombies can push out a large volume of mail within 5 minutes. They'll try to get 80% of their spam run delivered before the filters can react.
(That's not to say that the new template filters are a bad idea - I'm just presenting a way that the botnets will attempt to get past it.)
Slashdot Mirror
They become attractive once you see the difference they make in a desktop PC. I bought my first SSD around 6 months ago, now I swear by them. If you're a heavy multitasker, a fast SSD can make a huge difference by eliminating seek times. I'm actually tempted to replace my boss' boot drive with an SSD, just to see if he notices - and by "notice" I mean "stop bitching about his gaming-grade PC being slow".
I need prices to drop another 2x to 3x before I'll use it on a desktop PC.
But yes, it makes a huge difference. I run a 10k RPM SATA on my home machine and it's been well worth it. It makes the other PCs feel sluggish. I'll definitely be upgrading to a SSD next year if the prices can drop enough.
We've also put a 128GB SSD ($350) into one of our user's laptops and the responsiveness of the laptop has gone up tremendously. Even for someone who isn't a real big multitasker, it makes boot-up much faster which matters for a laptop user. As our other users complain about their laptops, we'll probably install a few more SSDs.
When that worked, that would've reduced the potential culprits to the memory, CPU, and then lastly the mainboard. Memtest would've found no memory issue (which would also indicate that the mainboard is also less likely a problem), so that's when the CPU switch should've happened...
Maybe, maybe not. Memtest has never been good at finding timing issues or partially good memory.
In the case of flaky hardware, your best bet is a stress/torture test of the hardware. Moving lots and lots of data around between the RAM/CPU and checking to see that it doesn't get corrupted along the way. One good tool is Prime95 in torture test mode for 24-48 hours. It'll run your memory/CPU into the ground and expose timing issues, poor cooling, or calculation errors due to the immense amount of work that it forces the CPU/RAM to perform.
One of the lab computers and the lab instruments need to be on a 192.168.1.x/24 subnet because the lab instrument software is programmed terribly.
One of the joys of being on the 172.x.x.x network scheme internally is finding devices like that. Everyone knows about 192.168.x.y and 10.x.y.z, but the 172 range tends to be overlooked.
I'm still using my GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card as well.
Still, I'd like to find something for under $300 that runs a lot faster without being a space-heater.
Queue[sic] Corn Lobby response in 3 . . . 2. . . . 1 . . . .
You think you're being funny, but in the past month or two, the corn-syrup folks have already started running commercials that claim their product is just as good as regular old sugar when used in processed foods.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ad 1
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ad 2
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ad 3
For our work, 120GB is about the minimum size for laptops. 40-60GB would be way too small for our tastes.
Personally, I need an affordable 500GB SSD before I can switch off of rotational media. Although I might try it when the 250GB SSDs finally drop below $300.
Well, to be fair, some of the Dune prequels were decent (the 3 "house" books). The other 3 were more of "here's a lot of storyline, not well tied together or with any sense of climax".
But then, the 2nd and 3rd Dune books weren't all that great either.
At 103000 attempts per seconds, that's... 421 years oh.
Still within the realm of cracking, especially if those passwords guard a few million dollars of assets. 421 years sounds like a lot until you add things like:
- Crossfire or SLI where you have multiple boards installed
- Setup half a dozen machines to work on the problem
- Apply a botnet to the problem
- Future improvements in technology
- Apply some heuristics to the guessing process
All of which can easily shave off at least 2 orders of magnitude and possibly 3 orders of magnitude. Which reduces that 421 years down to a few months (or worse).
8 character passwords are pretty much dead in the water now. Or at least they need to be phased out within the next few years. Or protected by rate-limiters which control how fast passwords can be tried. (Personally, I always assume that the attacker has the stored hash and can apply parallelism to the attack. Which means that rate limiters should not be relied on to prevent cracks.)
1st: Move SSH out of port 22. That'll filter out 75% of all attempts.
Closer to 99%+ in my experience (possibly even 99.9%).
And eliminating all of that noise from the logs allows you to see more serious attackers who were previously getting lost in the noise / clutter.
However, I no longer believe that things like fail2ban / denyhosts work well. Many modern attackers use botnets that slowly pick at your firewall from hundreds of different IPs at a very slow rate. Unless you have a very aggressive ban setting (where you block for a few days), you're unlikely to effectively block these attackers. And you're much more likely to lock yourself out by accident.
Move the port, switch to pub-key authentication, limit who can login via SSH, turn off the ability to login to root via SSH. Then focus on the other weaknesses in the server.
Additionally, an evenly-slightly determined hacker can still find where your sshd process is listening on by running a basic nmap scan.
A determined hacker is a whole different ball of wax. If someone is specifically targeting you, then different rules apply.
Moving the port is a good first step (hell, put it on 443 or 8080). That alone will eliminate 99.9% of the attackers who are too lazy / busy to port scan the box. And it does wonders in cleaning up the log files because you'll no longer have thousands of attempts per day. That makes it easier to see more serious attackers without them being lost in the noise.
- move the port
- only allow key-based authentication
- disable root login via SSH
If you absolutely positively have to have SSH running on port 22, create a 2nd daemon and restrict it to a limited set of users.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like prices will go down much until Q4 when Intel get their next generation flash chips going.
Price per gigabyte has been stuck in neutral for the past year. If you look at price per gigabyte for the consumer-grade MLC SSDs, we're in the same general price point as Jan 2009.
So, is it a temporary bump on the race to smaller/cheaper? Or are we starting to hit production limits / issues with the current MLC technology? Or are the generations taking longer to deliver?
Unlike mechanical drives which have a very clear sweet spot the SSD prices scale almost linearly with size.
That's because the mechanical parts have a fixed base price. You can't get the rare earth magnets and tiny spinning parts below a certain cost (due to materials and tolerances). Plus there's the shipping/handling costs which are pretty much a fixed value. Which is why in the 3.5" market, very few drives are less then about $50 and the sweet spot is in the $100-$150 range.
SSD probably also has a sweet spot, but because they're still so expensive we haven't seen it yet. My bet is that you won't ever see SSDs much below $30/unit because they're not worth stocking/shipping below that cost.
(You can already see that when you go looking for SSD cards, or USB flash drives. Nobody makes/sells the smaller units anymore. Even though there are systems out there which can't read from USB drives larger then 2GB. The cheapest cards seem to be around the $7 mark at places like NewEgg. The only way to get them cheaper per unit is if they are bundled into packs of 3 or 5 units.)
I think we're pretty close to that point already. SSDs (MLC variants) are real close to the $2/GB mark now, which is real close to prime-time. A consumer-grade 128GB SSD can be had for about $350 now, and works well in laptops and desktops.
Now, $350 is still on the expensive side for most people. But I remember spending $300 on a single hard drive within the past decade. So it's not unheard of.
I think the magic number is going to be $1/GB. At which point things get very interesting and 10k SATA consumer-grade drives are going to be in trouble. (A 10k SATA Raptor or Velociraptor is in that price band.) At $1/GB (maybe within 2 years?), they're cheap enough to be suitable for the high-end use where you want something fast but of a decent capacity (256-512GB).
Sounds like normal market PvP in EVE Online. (There's always people attempting to corner the market in a particular good - once the margins get too high, competitors come out of the woodwork.)
Allow javascript -only- on a whitelist basis.
Exactly this. Nothing else is rational at this point in time. Letting random sites run code on your machine *will* get you infected at some point.
(Personally I use both NoScript and FlashBlock for Firefox. With a very selective whitelist. Which pretty much prevents all attacks, unless they infect one of the few dozen sites that I have whitelisted.)
The problem with EvE is that you're looking at months of real life time to fly a ship that's halfway fun.
Bullshit. You're doing it wrong. Stop getting caught up in the myth that "more expensive ships are more fun".
Get a pack of friends in Rifters and assorted other T1 frigates and go roaming in lo-sec / null-sec. Sure, you'll probably get spanked at some point, but in the meantime you've raised hell and caused havoc without spending a lot of ISK.
I'll feed the troll. I can tell right off the bat that you've never used one for more then a few hours. And that you have no idea what the market for book readers is like.
The joy of a dedicated eReader (like the Sony PRS-505) is that it does that one thing well. Multi-tasking is not always a plus. The current crop of e-ink based devices are excellent for leisure or other cover-to-cover reading where the refresh time of the screen really doesn't matter. That's it, that's all they're supposed to do. And frankly, they do it quite smashingly.
Cost is an issue still, but there are now devices available for under $200 (my price point was under $300, which is why I picked up the PRS-505 two years ago). The price of books... is stupidity on the part of the publishers. But there are hundreds of good books from Project Gutenberg, or the inexpensive and no-DRM books over at Baen. If you don't like the costs, then you're not the target demographic.
The portability of the current readers is just fine, about equivalent to a large format paperback, with the bonus that I can carry a few dozen books in about 1/3 the space and weight of a single large format paperback.
Battery life is a non-issue. The Sony's only require charging every few weeks, even for a voracious reader. Which means that on any given night, when I pickup my reader to do a spot of reading, the device is always ready. And when I finish for the night, if it's finally (after 2-3 weeks) dropped below 25% battery, I'll toss it on the charger overnight.
Clarity of the display of e-ink devices is excellent. Unless you're trying to read by candlelight, in which case most mass-market paperbacks are going to be equally difficult to read. More DPI would always be nice, but it's already up around 175dpi.
As for book storage - I have (5) 2 meter tall, ~1 meter wide book bookshelves filled with dead-tree books. It's a pain to deal with that quantity of paper if you move more then once a century. With the electronic versions, I can backup my entire library on a few CDs/DVDs. Which means I could toss a copy in the bank, at a friend's house, or email myself a copy at different webmail accounts. Which goes back to the portability argument.
In short, eReaders do an excellent job of their assigned task. Which is to present text on the screen and let me get into the book.
I don't know why Sony gets such a bad rap. I think it's because they're not advertising it well. They also tried to out-do Amazon with their Sony Store for the past 2 years before finally jumping on the ePub wagon. On the upside, they have come out with new versions - which was looking iffy 2 years ago when I bought the PRS-505.
I really like my 2 year old Sony PRS-505. Excellent product that does exactly what it's supposed to do (at least for leisure reading). I take it pretty much everywhere if I think I'll have some downtime to read.
I find it very surprising that the most open eReader on the market today is the Sony. I always though that was one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse. They must be catching on to what consumers actually want. ... I hope Apple is paying attention.
Yeah, I was rather wary about buying my PRS-505 two years ago, but went ahead and took the plunge when they got below $300. I'm extremely happy with it as it does exactly what I want for leisure, cover-to-cover reading. Open formats, a no-DRM source of books (Gutenberg and Baen's Webscription), and the fact that it stays the hell out of my way when I want to read. Takes a few weeks for the battery to wear down and I keep 200-300 books on it.
I've averaged 1 book every week or two for the past 2 years on it.
Very much a no-muss no-fuss e-reader. Which is a key selling point.
Eh, the problem with AAA and AA batteries is the form factor. Round is not a good shape for a compact product like a cell phone, mp3 player or camera where smaller, slimmer and sleeker is often a key virtue.
I finally gave up looking for MP3 players that run on AAA or AA batteries. I can get something with better battery life that is 1/2 the thickness of the thinnest of AAA-powered MP3 players if I go with a built-in flat battery. The same thing goes for the digital camera that I have, which uses a 3/16" thick square battery pack (that can be swapped). As a result, the camera is a hella lot thinner and lighter then if it used AA batteries.
Now, for a notebook/laptop, the AA battery size is not a big issue, except for all the space lost due to the roundness of the package. Basically, we need a set of standard, squared off batteries. But the modern markets are so disjointed that it's unlikely to happen.
The problem with Broken Steel raising the level cap to 30 was that it basically trivialized the portion of the game with regards to "it's better to be a specialist then a generalist" aspect. With 10 more levels, it was pretty easy to get to 90+ in all skills.
MZ was basically a big piggy-bank in the sky, completely out of place in the FO3 universe. The only interesting portion of it was the audio recordings of the captives. Definitely the least favorite of the expansions, even if some of the puzzles / events were interesting. Such as the infinitely spawning shooting gallery or being rushed by reinforcements while you cause an alien craft to bang into powered poles.
What possessed him to go off arguing grades with the teacher without looking at the paper itself, I don't know.
It was probably the easiest way (at the time) to get his kid to shut up about the "unfair" grade that the "mean" teacher had given him.
(Look for the lazy reason first in examples of human stupidity... or one of the other 7 deadly sins.)
Right now, no country is seriously planning to do anything genuinely new with manned spaceflight for the next couple of decades. There's no motivation for a president budget a lot of money to try to beat anybody.
China's a sure bet, and India won't be far behind.
Why? Because manned spaceflight technology dovetails nicely with the development of medium-range missiles and ICBMs.
Go with a microATX motherboard (preferably one that only uses heat pipes and no moving fans, like the Asus boards). Use one of the 45W TDP AMD chips - which are dead easy to cool, even in confined spaces and the stock fan runs pretty much silently.
As for the case... I don't have a suggestion for that at the moment.
(Best place to pickup the AMD CPU & MB is over at MWave since they'll bundle it, assemble the CPU and RAM onto the MB, and test it for you. So you're never left holding a bag full of incompatible parts.)
I don' tthink that's where it will fail -- yes, some will get through in that windows before the system learns the new template, but it could drastically reduce the problem for a short time.
We already see that issue with our SpamAsassin setup and the DNSBLs that are used to score. Spam coming in from new spam zombies that have not been identified can often sail right through because those IPs are not yet in the block lists.
(I'm strongly considering implementing a greylisting setup - which would give the blocklists an extra few minutes to list the new zombies.)
What would happen, if something like this goes live, is that spam authors will change their botnets so that all messages are delivered within the first 5 minutes of the run. A few thousand or hundreds of thousands of zombies can push out a large volume of mail within 5 minutes. They'll try to get 80% of their spam run delivered before the filters can react.
(That's not to say that the new template filters are a bad idea - I'm just presenting a way that the botnets will attempt to get past it.)