Actually, this was tried before (I forget where) and it made no difference at all. The device was attached to the ignition system of repeat offenders. It's not the habitual idiots that are the brunt of the problem -- it's easy enough to revoke their priv. to live.
Your idea will be just as (in)effective as governors on busses and golf carts.
Nah, everything is still in there but it's been badly fragmented. The human brain is an amazing creation -- quite capable of self-repairing.
It took awhile for my grandfather to recover from having a softball sized tumor removed from his head. (If he hadn't been 90 at the time he probablly would have fully recovered and lived for many more years.) It took a fair amount of therapy to get everything straightened out; it would take him a little longer than usual to remember things -- he'd know the red, round thing on the table was an apple, but he couldn't recall the word "apple" (it was explained as problem with the communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.)
I, for example, took a hefty thwack as a kid (about 20 years ago now) when I fell out of a tree swing. As I'm told, I was never unconscious for more than a few minutes. However, I had no sense of balance for a few days. (Scared the shit out of the family doctor:-)) The fall didn't mess up any memories, but it did mess up part of the visual cortex -- that's why I wear glasses; my eyes don't normally focus correctly unless I put some effort into it (read: give myself one hell of a headache) (that really pisses off my eye doc as it generally doesn't matter which lens he puts in front of me.)
People modify cable boxes, so the "surrounded by steel" method wouldn't stop it either. (Every cable box I've ever seen had been filled with tar to prevent modification.)
While they certainly cannot stop people from tinkering, they can make it damned difficult. Say they removed the IDE interface -- be that the connector, the wiring for the connector, or the interface chipset itself -- then it's gonna a lot harder to shoe-spoon linux or netbsd in there.
I don't think it's so much the problem of the direct deposit technology as it is the monkey actually doing the depositing. A friend of mine told me about his employer (they use ADP?) depositing people's pay more often than they were supposed to and in one case getting everyone's bank accounts switched around. My former employer (also using ADP) screwed up the payroll for the entire company for months -- of course, that was 110% the fault of the absolute [censored] idiots in HR.
Given the nature of human processing, I wouldn't trust services like this to take out my trash, much less fail to pay car payment on time. For the most part, most institutions handle fund transfers -- phone companies, power companies, credit cards, etc. The only thing I cannot pay electronically is property taxes and my rent.
You can do this already. Think about it for a few minutes and it should come to you... The TiVo has RCA video and audio inputs. Most radio receivers have RCA in/out and a "monitor" feature for you to pass the audio through an equalizer...
If you cannot figure it out, I'll have to draw you a picture.
... plugin to automatically filter commercials out...
This already exists -- and it's patented as I recall. Several VCRs on the market have "commercial advance" logic in there. It will mark the beginning and end of commercials after a TV show is recorded.
I have an RCA VCR that does this. Over the past three years, it's only been wrong a half dozen times -- and it's recording fuzzy crap out of the atmosphere -- and NO, it is not looking for VBI control signals (even if they were there it wouldn't be able to see them clearly in all the fuzz -- the CC information is garbled already.) It will automotically skip the commercials on playback (even "blue screen" them if you want so you don't even see them in fast forward!) and I've not heard of anyone suing RCA over this.
Personally, I leave both options off... sometimes I want to see the commercials. I'm sure no one ever thought I'd want to use commercial advance in the inverse -- all I wanted to see was the commercials duing the superbowl (it's nice to see they managed to play some football in between all the commercials:-))
Most missiles (obviously unmanned) can be partially remote controlled. One could change the target or just tell it to blow up at will. Detonating an ICBM a few seconds after firing would be rather messy.
Well, unfortunately, we aren't talking about a plot of land; we're talking about a domain name (every @%#$%@#$ who calls it a "web address" should be summarily executed.)
A plot of land is a tangible asset. It has an intrensic, calculable, monetary value. The governing rules have centuries of legal refinement.
A domain name is a virtual construct: a word, a name, a phrase, some junk that means something to someone... It has no value to speak of. And it's relative value to native spanish speakers will be different to that of native arabic speakers (for example.)
Attempting to apply the rules for tangible assets to intangible assets is proving to be a serious mess. (trademark litigation, patent disputes, insane copyright rules...) It's difficult to define what's mine and what's yours when you litterally have nothing to stand on; you cannot put in a box and lock it up, nor can you surround it with razor wire and post armed guards.
I'm glad the "old west" mentality no longer exists (well, in civilized society anyway) -- when someone steals one of your cows, you don't pull your gun and fill him full of holes.
Might I suggest Matrox? They used to have the fastest 2D X engine around. Granted, they aren't the most talkative people on the planet, but they have published the register level specs to all of their chips -- even the one's they sell anymore.
Yes, Matrox chips do tend to be on the "suck" end of the 3D spectrum -- 30fps is more than enough to see what you're fragin', tho':-)
At power down, the drive "strobes" the head stepper (almost all drives use a "voice coil" instead of an actual stepper motor these days) which pushes the head assembly into it's parking position. This can be powered via a capacitor or via "free energy" from the inductive feedback from de-energizing the voice coil. The assembly is locked into the parked position by a selonoid spring latch (or in the case of some shitty Quantum drives, by a plastic arm that "floats" over the surface of the platters.)
The force necessary to move the voice coil head assembly is much more than your laptop case (or you for that matter) could withstand. (something like >150G shock, but I don't remember where I read that.)
This is not damaging per se. However, you can cause a head slap if you do it just right:-) Laptop drives are designed to take this form of use.
Laptop drives have done this for a long time just to protect the heads from damage -- screw the parking area of the platter.
However, with the ever dropping power usage of components, removing the heads from the platters at shutdown is becoming a requirement. 90% of the "stiction" problems with modern drives are simply that the drive cannot provide enough power to the spindle stepper motor to start the drive spinning. Adding bearing wear with the heads clamped over the platter, and you have a drive that won't spin up -- you can hear it trying.
I have a Quantum drive that works perfectly once it's spinning; I have to gently "help" it at power up by "shaking" the drive. (The heads are mounted to the case. If you spin the case quickly from side to side, the platter's interia will keep it relatively stationary while the heads move over the surface. That's usually enough to get the drive spinning.)
Note 1: this drive despite the antishock stuff uses a glass plate so dragging it around is very unwise. Then you would be very surprised to find out most laptop drives have glass platers. They are much stronger than their aluminium cousins at the microscopic sizes of laptop drives. Plus, head slaps (the ferrite R/W head touching the surface of the platter) are far less damaging to a glass platter -- it might knock the oxide off the platter but it won't pit (the head is too soft.)
Actually, there is a bug in the Sparc PROMs prior to v3 that limits the boot loader to the first 1G of the drive. But yes, PC BIOSes are very severly limiting.
Answer: That depends on who has more experience. The one who has actually done a break job ranks alot higher than the one with a framed Ford certificate on the wall. BOTH are just as capable of making mistakes.
There's something to be said for training, but there's much more value in experience.
I, for example, taught myself to program C. Yes, I took programming courses, but I was mostly just setting there waiting for the instructor to get on with it. (I also took BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, and C++ courses from high school onwards.) Having taught FORTRAN labs I can say without any doubt, certification ("book learning" or "in theory") is no substitute for actual experience ("in practice").
In fact, most of what I know I learned on my own. I would expect this to be true of many slashdoters. (I could quote 7th grade SAT scores, but I won't. [Part of the Duke UniversityTalent Identification Program back in 1985, I took the SAT for the first time in the 7th grade. TIP still exists; my nephew is now part of the program:-)]
The cost of the OS is not important in the business world. In fact, the opposite is true -- companies have been known to shy away from perfectly good products simply because they were "too cheep" as if the price tag is in direct coorelation to the quality of the software.
I would be more inclined to question the value of the certification. It's just another piece of paper. We make millions of pieces of paper every day. So what makes a Redhat Linux Certification any more or less valuable than a UPS waybill or say a stock certificate? (This can be said of _any_ certification.)
As for on-site training, certainly Microsoft has a broader base from which to work. They've been at this for alot longer than Redhat. Give Redhat some time to clear away the dust and put all their ducks, err penguins, in a row.
How many space probes have we lost to asteroids? Probes: none, but we have had several satelites damaged by micro-meteoroids (read: space trash.) And, in fact, one tiny spec of trash when 3/4 the way through a shuttle window! It was at that point, NASA began funding projects for tracking all the trash in orbit with us. What are the odds of a space craft being hit by a meteor? Better than that of a 1976 Buick -- I've seen old pictures of a Buick that had its rear bumper removed by a meteoroid. (The Earth is hit by stuff _alot_. Most of it burns up in the atmosphere.)
Now, back to the movie... The part of the ship that was so elaborately hit, was also the part designed for landing? Hello, nobody's stupid enough to try reentry (even to mars) in a cardboard box. I'm not suggesting borg amourment, but something a little stronger that the zinc used in the average 10$ PC case would be advisable.
My bigest problem was the whole you-have-to-run-your-thrusters-or-you-don't-move inertial physics model. And what was that blue shit? (Penzoil rocket fuel?)
They don't call it "explosive decompression" for nothing.
I've never seen any actual scientific research on the effects of vacuum exposure or rapid decompression. HOWEVER, Hollywood had presented many "possibilities"... and yes, in one Outer Limits, a kid survived going inside an air lock and being decompressed to outer space. (Maybe he had read HHGTTG?)
"authenticity of the spacecraft"? How many NASA devices have a Penzoil racing logos on them? To my recollection, not one molecule of a Penzoil product has ever be fired into space.
I'll give them the "product shot"... I was laughing at most of them... the Sony logo on the LCD monitors, the Dr Pepper and Sunkist cans in the play house, the Penzoil logo on the mars station, (hah) a Dr Pepper squeze-tube! [uncarbonated DrP?, eww.]
Actually, it was explained (breifly and rather lame)... they were pulled off course by the gravity of a comet. The opening sequence of the movie shows them flying into it's tail -- that's where the rocks come flying through the ship.
You'd have to admit, they are some _really_ damned unlucky people to -- in the vastness of space -- pass close enough to a comet to be pulled off course... One would assume 1) the ship has a navigation computer and 2) the hull is made of something a little stronger than tin foil.
Well, if it wasn't on the day of the happens-once-every-22-years eclipse, then there wouldn't really be a movie now would there?
PS: Eclipses (at least on earth) occur in minutes, not seconds like Pitch Black.
PPS: Isn't it odd to think that such creatures would have evolved thusly on such a planet???
Without access to NSI's whois archive (to see the records for the original registration), I don't know when openssh.org was originally registered. HOWEVER, the existing records show creation of OPENSSH2-DOM on Nov 4, 1999. Openssh.com was created on Oct 25, 1999. So, who got where when?
As was stated on openssh.org's page, he offered to give them the domain -- he didn't say if that meant a domain transfer or just giving openbsd access to the records (I'll assume a transfer.) This then comes down to, "here, you can have this domain name." "No thanks, we don't trust you." "Fine, I'll keep my domain."
I will submit, 'OpenSSH' isn't really "open" if it's only for OpenBSD... maybe 'ssh.OpenBSD.org' is a better idea.
[It will never cease to amaze me how people can find the most worthless things to bitch about.]
I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.
What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.
Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this was tried before (I forget where) and it made no difference at all. The device was attached to the ignition system of repeat offenders. It's not the habitual idiots that are the brunt of the problem -- it's easy enough to revoke their priv. to live.
Your idea will be just as (in)effective as governors on busses and golf carts.
Nah, everything is still in there but it's been badly fragmented. The human brain is an amazing creation -- quite capable of self-repairing.
:-)) The fall didn't mess up any memories, but it did mess up part of the visual cortex -- that's why I wear glasses; my eyes don't normally focus correctly unless I put some effort into it (read: give myself one hell of a headache) (that really pisses off my eye doc as it generally doesn't matter which lens he puts in front of me.)
It took awhile for my grandfather to recover from having a softball sized tumor removed from his head. (If he hadn't been 90 at the time he probablly would have fully recovered and lived for many more years.) It took a fair amount of therapy to get everything straightened out; it would take him a little longer than usual to remember things -- he'd know the red, round thing on the table was an apple, but he couldn't recall the word "apple" (it was explained as problem with the communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.)
I, for example, took a hefty thwack as a kid (about 20 years ago now) when I fell out of a tree swing. As I'm told, I was never unconscious for more than a few minutes. However, I had no sense of balance for a few days. (Scared the shit out of the family doctor
People modify cable boxes, so the "surrounded by steel" method wouldn't stop it either. (Every cable box I've ever seen had been filled with tar to prevent modification.)
While they certainly cannot stop people from tinkering, they can make it damned difficult. Say they removed the IDE interface -- be that the connector, the wiring for the connector, or the interface chipset itself -- then it's gonna a lot harder to shoe-spoon linux or netbsd in there.
I don't think it's so much the problem of the direct deposit technology as it is the monkey actually doing the depositing. A friend of mine told me about his employer (they use ADP?) depositing people's pay more often than they were supposed to and in one case getting everyone's bank accounts switched around. My former employer (also using ADP) screwed up the payroll for the entire company for months -- of course, that was 110% the fault of the absolute [censored] idiots in HR.
Given the nature of human processing, I wouldn't trust services like this to take out my trash, much less fail to pay car payment on time. For the most part, most institutions handle fund transfers -- phone companies, power companies, credit cards, etc. The only thing I cannot pay electronically is property taxes and my rent.
You can do this already. Think about it for a few minutes and it should come to you... The TiVo has RCA video and audio inputs. Most radio receivers have RCA in/out and a "monitor" feature for you to pass the audio through an equalizer...
If you cannot figure it out, I'll have to draw you a picture.
... plugin to automatically filter commercials out ...
:-))
This already exists -- and it's patented as I recall. Several VCRs on the market have "commercial advance" logic in there. It will mark the beginning and end of commercials after a TV show is recorded.
I have an RCA VCR that does this. Over the past three years, it's only been wrong a half dozen times -- and it's recording fuzzy crap out of the atmosphere -- and NO, it is not looking for VBI control signals (even if they were there it wouldn't be able to see them clearly in all the fuzz -- the CC information is garbled already.) It will automotically skip the commercials on playback (even "blue screen" them if you want so you don't even see them in fast forward!) and I've not heard of anyone suing RCA over this.
Personally, I leave both options off... sometimes I want to see the commercials. I'm sure no one ever thought I'd want to use commercial advance in the inverse -- all I wanted to see was the commercials duing the superbowl (it's nice to see they managed to play some football in between all the commercials
Most missiles (obviously unmanned) can be partially remote controlled. One could change the target or just tell it to blow up at will. Detonating an ICBM a few seconds after firing would be rather messy.
Nope. The only ones I saw in their "list" was for com, net, and org domains. As if those are the only three TLDs with any standing disputes?
"hackers" don't drink Coke... far too little caffine! We all drink The Dew (or for the serious, Jolt and/or Bawls.)
Well, unfortunately, we aren't talking about a plot of land; we're talking about a domain name (every @%#$%@#$ who calls it a "web address" should be summarily executed.)
A plot of land is a tangible asset. It has an intrensic, calculable, monetary value. The governing rules have centuries of legal refinement.
A domain name is a virtual construct: a word, a name, a phrase, some junk that means something to someone... It has no value to speak of. And it's relative value to native spanish speakers will be different to that of native arabic speakers (for example.)
Attempting to apply the rules for tangible assets to intangible assets is proving to be a serious mess. (trademark litigation, patent disputes, insane copyright rules...) It's difficult to define what's mine and what's yours when you litterally have nothing to stand on; you cannot put in a box and lock it up, nor can you surround it with razor wire and post armed guards.
I'm glad the "old west" mentality no longer exists (well, in civilized society anyway) -- when someone steals one of your cows, you don't pull your gun and fill him full of holes.
What arbitration logs? I wasn't aware of ICANN handling domain disputes in Switzerland.
Might I suggest Matrox? They used to have the fastest 2D X engine around. Granted, they aren't the most talkative people on the planet, but they have published the register level specs to all of their chips -- even the one's they sell anymore.
:-)
Yes, Matrox chips do tend to be on the "suck" end of the 3D spectrum -- 30fps is more than enough to see what you're fragin', tho'
Maybe, but they aren't distributing their database. At most, they have described a schema.
At power down, the drive "strobes" the head stepper (almost all drives use a "voice coil" instead of an actual stepper motor these days) which pushes the head assembly into it's parking position. This can be powered via a capacitor or via "free energy" from the inductive feedback from de-energizing the voice coil. The assembly is locked into the parked position by a selonoid spring latch (or in the case of some shitty Quantum drives, by a plastic arm that "floats" over the surface of the platters.)
:-) Laptop drives are designed to take this form of use.
The force necessary to move the voice coil head assembly is much more than your laptop case (or you for that matter) could withstand. (something like >150G shock, but I don't remember where I read that.)
This is not damaging per se. However, you can cause a head slap if you do it just right
Laptop drives have done this for a long time just to protect the heads from damage -- screw the parking area of the platter.
However, with the ever dropping power usage of components, removing the heads from the platters at shutdown is becoming a requirement. 90% of the "stiction" problems with modern drives are simply that the drive cannot provide enough power to the spindle stepper motor to start the drive spinning. Adding bearing wear with the heads clamped over the platter, and you have a drive that won't spin up -- you can hear it trying.
I have a Quantum drive that works perfectly once it's spinning; I have to gently "help" it at power up by "shaking" the drive. (The heads are mounted to the case. If you spin the case quickly from side to side, the platter's interia will keep it relatively stationary while the heads move over the surface. That's usually enough to get the drive spinning.)
Note 1: this drive despite the antishock stuff uses a glass plate so dragging it around is very unwise.
Then you would be very surprised to find out most laptop drives have glass platers. They are much stronger than their aluminium cousins at the microscopic sizes of laptop drives. Plus, head slaps (the ferrite R/W head touching the surface of the platter) are far less damaging to a glass platter -- it might knock the oxide off the platter but it won't pit (the head is too soft.)
Actually, there is a bug in the Sparc PROMs prior to v3 that limits the boot loader to the first 1G of the drive. But yes, PC BIOSes are very severly limiting.
Answer: That depends on who has more experience. The one who has actually done a break job ranks alot higher than the one with a framed Ford certificate on the wall. BOTH are just as capable of making mistakes.
:-)]
There's something to be said for training, but there's much more value in experience.
I, for example, taught myself to program C. Yes, I took programming courses, but I was mostly just setting there waiting for the instructor to get on with it. (I also took BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, and C++ courses from high school onwards.) Having taught FORTRAN labs I can say without any doubt, certification ("book learning" or "in theory") is no substitute for actual experience ("in practice").
In fact, most of what I know I learned on my own. I would expect this to be true of many slashdoters. (I could quote 7th grade SAT scores, but I won't. [Part of the Duke University Talent Identification Program back in 1985, I took the SAT for the first time in the 7th grade. TIP still exists; my nephew is now part of the program
The cost of the OS is not important in the business world. In fact, the opposite is true -- companies have been known to shy away from perfectly good products simply because they were "too cheep" as if the price tag is in direct coorelation to the quality of the software.
I would be more inclined to question the value of the certification. It's just another piece of paper. We make millions of pieces of paper every day. So what makes a Redhat Linux Certification any more or less valuable than a UPS waybill or say a stock certificate? (This can be said of _any_ certification.)
As for on-site training, certainly Microsoft has a broader base from which to work. They've been at this for alot longer than Redhat. Give Redhat some time to clear away the dust and put all their ducks, err penguins, in a row.
How many space probes have we lost to asteroids? Probes: none, but we have had several satelites damaged by micro-meteoroids (read: space trash.) And, in fact, one tiny spec of trash when 3/4 the way through a shuttle window! It was at that point, NASA began funding projects for tracking all the trash in orbit with us. What are the odds of a space craft being hit by a meteor? Better than that of a 1976 Buick -- I've seen old pictures of a Buick that had its rear bumper removed by a meteoroid. (The Earth is hit by stuff _alot_. Most of it burns up in the atmosphere.)
Now, back to the movie... The part of the ship that was so elaborately hit, was also the part designed for landing? Hello, nobody's stupid enough to try reentry (even to mars) in a cardboard box. I'm not suggesting borg amourment, but something a little stronger that the zinc used in the average 10$ PC case would be advisable.
My bigest problem was the whole you-have-to-run-your-thrusters-or-you-don't-move inertial physics model. And what was that blue shit? (Penzoil rocket fuel?)
They don't call it "explosive decompression" for nothing.
I've never seen any actual scientific research on the effects of vacuum exposure or rapid decompression. HOWEVER, Hollywood had presented many "possibilities"... and yes, in one Outer Limits, a kid survived going inside an air lock and being decompressed to outer space. (Maybe he had read HHGTTG?)
"authenticity of the spacecraft"? How many NASA devices have a Penzoil racing logos on them? To my recollection, not one molecule of a Penzoil product has ever be fired into space.
I'll give them the "product shot"... I was laughing at most of them... the Sony logo on the LCD monitors, the Dr Pepper and Sunkist cans in the play house, the Penzoil logo on the mars station, (hah) a Dr Pepper squeze-tube! [uncarbonated DrP?, eww.]
Dr. Pepper on the Shuttle... where do I sign up!
Actually, it was explained (breifly and rather lame)... they were pulled off course by the gravity of a comet. The opening sequence of the movie shows them flying into it's tail -- that's where the rocks come flying through the ship.
You'd have to admit, they are some _really_ damned unlucky people to -- in the vastness of space -- pass close enough to a comet to be pulled off course... One would assume 1) the ship has a navigation computer and 2) the hull is made of something a little stronger than tin foil.
Well, if it wasn't on the day of the happens-once-every-22-years eclipse, then there wouldn't really be a movie now would there?
PS: Eclipses (at least on earth) occur in minutes, not seconds like Pitch Black.
PPS: Isn't it odd to think that such creatures would have evolved thusly on such a planet???
Without access to NSI's whois archive (to see the records for the original registration), I don't know when openssh.org was originally registered. HOWEVER, the existing records show creation of OPENSSH2-DOM on Nov 4, 1999. Openssh.com was created on Oct 25, 1999. So, who got where when?
As was stated on openssh.org's page, he offered to give them the domain -- he didn't say if that meant a domain transfer or just giving openbsd access to the records (I'll assume a transfer.) This then comes down to, "here, you can have this domain name." "No thanks, we don't trust you." "Fine, I'll keep my domain."
I will submit, 'OpenSSH' isn't really "open" if it's only for OpenBSD... maybe 'ssh.OpenBSD.org' is a better idea.
[It will never cease to amaze me how people can find the most worthless things to bitch about.]
I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.
What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.
Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.