This is Slashdot. You should expect that 95% of the users will not even bother following the link to your whitepaper, especially after you hint that your server may not handle the slashdot effect very well. Some of us just get tired of clicking on interesting links and waiting half an hour for the page to load. Try to anticipate what the major objections and questions of the average Slashdot user will be and include some answers in the slashdot article itself.
We have a "Social Security Number" here in the states, and despite the fact that when Social Security was instituted it was specifically prohibited that this number be used for identification purposes aside from collecting social security benefits, it has nonetheless become the de facto standard for numeric identification in the US.
Why not just combine the domain registration and certificate authority tasks? The registrar can issue an intermediate CA certificate which expires along with the domain to the registrant with authority for the domain. The registrant can then sign as many certificates as he likes for subdomains. If the domain is transfered away from the registrar or to a different registrant, the registrar simply revokes the old intermediate certificate. The registrar, with minimal work, could even provide a multi-platform GUI tool based on the OpenSSL source to allow the registrants to easily generate certificates. Without requiring any large amount of identity verification, this will allow the client to verify that the communication is arriving unaltered, directly from the owner of the domain, which is really all we want to know in the first place, isn't it? (I know Verisign is already both a registrar and CA, but they don't combine the services, and they charge far too much for each. Maybe a smaller registrar like GANDI (http://gandi.net))
I had some bad experiences recently with UPS while building a computer from ordered parts for a friend. Some of the merchants I had purchased from shipped FedEx, and some shipped UPS. I happened to be at working during the day some of the boxes were scheduled to arrive, but my former roommate was visiting and watching TV at my apartment. FedEx came by and dropped off a package, which he signed for, but the UPS guy didn't even bother knocking, just slapped a note on the door and left. This annoyed me a bit, but I figured, what the heck. I called UPS and told them to hold the box at the local distribution center so I could come pick it up. Well, I went there after work, gave them my tracking number, and showed them the note. (I was expecting 3 boxes - 2 from one merchant and 1 from another) After about an hour of waiting (along with about 4 other people) they finally found the smallest box of mine (which had been somewhat crushed) and the lady explained to me that they had no idea where the other two were, and suggested I call the office where the truck was parked (next door). So I went home, called the truck place, and they told me the UPS distribution center had it (in fact, the person I spoke with recalled the name of the person who had taken my packages - the same lady at the distribution center who had told me that they were lost), and gave me a number. I called that number, and they (the same ones at the distribution center that I had seen 10 minutes before) assured me that they didn't have my packages. They told me to call the truck place. I told them the truck place told me to call them... After much commotion on their end, they finally declared that they had found my packages after all, and that I could come back to get them. I came back, and they had my packages (neither of which was in any way small, and both of which had large labels slapped on the side with my name and the tracking numbers on them) Needless to say, once I finished the computer, I shipped it to my friend FedEx. I paid for 2day-Saturday delivery, and the package arrived in 1 day on Friday. (Ontario, California to Bend, Oregon)
lol. You can get an old Panasonic or Epson dot-matrix for fairly cheap. (might even be able to find an IBM!) It's the ribbons and paper that will kill your budget. (although not as much as laser toner, drums, and quartz lamps.)
You also have to watch out for the weirdos who actually manage to get root on your box and then take it upon themselves to edit your logs.:-p It might be a good idea to report alerts to an external machine so that the record itself can't be compromised.
Suggestions:
syslog to remote logserver that has no open ports except syslog.
tail -f your logfile to a line printer with plenty of bannerfold paper. Lets see a hacker try to erase that log! (just make sure you don't leave the carrage on the same line as the entry about my intrusion or I may just run several hundred "X"s over the top of it before issuing an LF)
send email to an external email account when an incident is detected.
(I have phun with my friends' machines in the name of security. Can you tell?)
Even the clean netstat binary will not work on a Linux machine that has been compromised with adore. Adore is a kernel module that blocks netstat (and others) at the kernel level from seeing the compromised ports, as well as making certain parts of the filesystem (such as those holding the backdoor software) invisible to userspace. Really an amazing little hack.
The only real way to bypass it is from outside the compromised kernel, which means either a clean boot off of a boot CD or such (which would be pointless for netstat monitoring because the system should be clean at that point anyway) or a view of the net traffic from an external clean machine.
I would recommend the external sniffer method. I would use ethereal and/or tcpdump on a clean machine to monitor traffic to the suspected compromised machine, and filter out "normal" traffic. (of course this will not detect a backdoor that is piggybacked ontop of another valid protocol such as HTTP if you are filtering out "normal" traffic, but you gotta start somewhere...)
Of course, if the hacker were really slick, he might even flash some malicious code into the BIOS so it could survive reboots and even reinstalls, but in reality, how many really good hackers are out there? (Just kidding, but not about the BIOS idea!) Of the rootkits I've seen so far, adore is one of the best.
Several years ago (maybe as far back as the early 90's?) Popular Mechanics ran a cover story on a solar-powered self-controlled mower-robot. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly which issue, and my own collection of PM doesn't go back that far.
I completely agree that real-mode should not be attempted in a protected-mode OS. My point was that the idea of implementing a standard API in the hardware BIOS was a good idea. Also, unless I am mistaken, a few video BIOSes (I think in the VBE 2.0 era) actually supported native VBE calls in protected mode. Unfortunately the industry does not see a need anymore for a standardized API since compatibility is handled in the OS layer now. -Aaron
There is an open standard. It is called VESA-VBE. During the wild days of post-VGA graphics cards, there were many manufacturers and no standard. At that time, VESA VBE was born and most hardware manufacturers tried to comply with it. Applications finally had a common interface to video hardware, and the future looked bright. Then came Windows 95, with its DirectX, and most graphically-intensive programs moved to this hot new "standard". (why is beyond me...) VESA VLB 2.0 arrived at about the same time, but fizzled and died because nobody cared anymore. Just make whatever hardware you want, and write a VXD for it, and it will work under Windows. So now the only "standards" we have are on an application level, not a hardware level. (OpenGL, DirectX, XFree86...) -CyberVenom
Actually, I thought the animations from SOF were pretty realistic. You get to watch as the soldiers writhe in pain from a severed limb, or as they clutch intestines spewing from a hole in their gut, or as they choke to death on their own blood after being shot in the neck. Of course, when (inevitably) the celebrity-media unit is near a soldier who dies a gruesome death, you get replay clips with national news anchors condemning you for allowing such horrible things to happen in "your" war...
Oh, and while we're at it, lets make it an RTSS like Savage (http://s2games.com/savage). Let real humans control those soldiers, and let the commander get frustrated when they completely ignore his orders...
Does this mean that the NSA "Red Team" will go on to compete in the Defcon Root-Fu competition this year? Will we end up with virtual reporters on the Alexis Park cable talking about "Red Team" getting beat by "Team Green (0x00FF00)" and "WMD"? (that I would love to see!) Come to Defcon XII and find out!
I don't really see why not: most of the team members will probably be in attendance already, and according to some of the earlier posts, they are not allowed to use any classified tricks anyway.
I liked Tribes 2. One of the nice things was that the game browser was good at filtering mods, so unlike some other games, you could find exactly what you were looking for. Personally, I played vanilla for a while, but soon became a fan of the shifter mod. (more vehicles, more weapon modes, more classes, and not usually too unbalanced) It was almost like getting a whole new game without having to buy anything. Mods can be fun, but maybe what the online community needs is something more like the UT voting systems where the server can be tailored to the tastes of the users who are currently playing, not always the tastes of the one admin who is only online for an hour every few days. I agree that those admins who really want their own setup can pay for and run their own server, but why waste resources? I see lots of game servers online that are empty and unplayed simply because they are not running what the players currently online feel like playing. Of course if the server admin comes online and his server is running a mod he hates, he can simply override it and play his version, but that's no reason he needs to keep his server running that version when he is gone and it would go unused anyway.
The only way you will ever get more energy out of a system than you put in is if there is a pre-existing source of energy in the system that someone else stored there. E.g. I flip the switch on a flashlight, and more energy comes out as light than I put into flipping the switch, but that energy is being removed from the batteries (a pre-existing component in the system), where it was stored by someone else. In the case of a magnetic motor, energy may be drawn from several sources: electrical input to electromagnets, existing momentum of the rotating shaft (flywheel), or most improbably it might come from the "energy in the permanent magnets". Most of the perpetual motion claims I have seen focus on this "permanent magnet" energy. Unfortunately, if an easy way were found to liberate this stored energy, it would have the side effect of demagnetizing the permanent magnet itself, essentially making the "p-m generator" nothing more than a battery harnessing the stored potential energy in the magnet... And before someone claims that permanent magnets hold an infinite amount of energy that could be thus released, remember that the exact amount of potential energy stored in a permanent magnet could be calculated by measuring the energy required to magnetize it, and this quantity is definitely finite.
The only thing that violates the Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy, is the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, which simply states that mass and energy are the same thing, so even in fusion, you still do not have a perpetual energy source.
In that case, you could accomplish the same thing with a single ICMP packet that has in its payload a port number to open, followed by a hash built from the port number, current epoch time (as synchronized from the USNO clock), the password and the destination IP (to prevent the same packet from being replayed within 1 second against another server that has the same password). Viola! You now have a time-dependant, unilateral unlock mechanism piggybacked on an existing, allowed protocol, whose reply packets can easily be dropped in every case but a successful auth, making the server invisible to ping sweeps. The time sync window can be as small as a few seconds if both machines synchronize their clocks from the USNO. Obviously once a particular hash is used, the server should reject any further uses of that hash within 1 second to avoid instant replay attacks. A similar procedure could also be used to dynamically route ports (sort of like portmap) through a NAT firewall to specific hosts on the inside, thus moving the software requirement off of the server itself and onto the firewall. The client side can be just a small userland app to unlock the port, then the normal program can initiate the port connection (ssh, eMule, kMail, or whatever)
I hope Doom 3 will be able to stand out on its own, even without the support of its line of predecessors, but even if it turns out to be "just another sequel" as far as plot and gameplay, lets not forget its merit as a techdemo. Many of the games on the market today are based on id's engines, and even if Doom 3 itself is not the great game we are hoping for, the technology behind it will undoubtedly power at least a few great games to come. Aside from that point though, I would have to agree: the game market is becoming saturated with copycat and sequel titles. What the game market needs is not more games, but more focus on creating innovative new gameplay. Case in point: I still waste a few hours every few months playing the original Pitfall just for the fun of it. Now who can say that for most of these modern FPS, RTS, or MMORPG formula games?
As I read it, basically, the air is ionized by electrodes, and the ionized air is then pulled across the heat sink via electric charge. This happens to be the same concept as used in the "Ion Air Purifiers" that are advertised on TV. This is supposedly more efficient because the airflow is induced along the surface of the heatsink directly instead of the brute-force method of a fan where the air is thrown at the heatsink en masse and it is hoped that it diplaces the hot air already there. Kinda makes me wonder how this would work in a real-world environment... small particles like dust, pollen, and smoke are attracted to the ionized surfaces (this is how the air purifiers work), so in a place like Southern California, I would imagine that the dust buildup on the heatsink would be much worse with this method than a fan... And dust buildup on a heatsink is not only an insulator, but in the case of the ionized airflow heatsink, it may actually render the ionization process useless, and the air will cease to flow, creating not only an insulated heatsink, but dead air over it.
It is amazing that someone actually bothered to type this... But then again, considering the bland topic at hand, I suppose maybe the poster was simply trying to present a topic of discussion more suited to a front-page slashdot article?
Hey, give it a few years and maybe all the baby bells will merge back into Ma Bell, and all of the old school phreakers will once again be presented with a standardized interface to reverse engineer. >;-} Maybe they will even absorb AOL/Time/Warner... Hmmm. So Bell will own the wiring, but they can't (God, I hope not!) own the air! Wireless will be the last-mile technology of the future anyway after the real engineers make it [more] secure and usable instead of simple being the novelty item it is today. (ok, I admit, I run an open network with one computer where I could more easily have used a CAT5 cable, but it is cool to play with and it works well when freinds visit. I watch the network carefully anyway for excessive leeching... I don't mind if people borrow a little bandwidth, as long as it doesn't get in my way.)
Do any of you remember the old (and surprisingly realistic compared to newer crap) hacker movie "Sneakers"? When they are trying to break into the office to steal the chip, Redford comes to a door with an electronic lock. After getting an earful of explanation (which we don't hear) from his partner back in the van about how the military deals with that kind of lock, he agrees to try a new lockpicking method. He kicks the door, and the bolt pops out of the doorjam...
I actually own one of those.;-) It is a complete pentium-class computer in a 2x3x3/4 package. It uses an AMD Elan processor, and IBM Microdrive, and a few other components (memory chips, cmos battery, etc.)
I bought it a few years ago from Tiqit Computers (a company founded by some people from Stanford). It was their now discontinued Matchbox PC model. I believe Slashdot had an article about some guys at Stanford using one as a webserver back then.
A friend of mine actually installed Windows 98 on it... (It came with RedHat, but he wanted to impress people, and who is impressed by Linux running on small systems anymore?)
Three monitors... I remember the good old days when I had Doom running on three monitors. To get that set up you needed to use 3 machines on the same IPX network, one for the center monitor and the controls, and the other two set up as observer nodes attached to the left and right side of the player entity. You would use command line options to specify this. It was pretty cool! To get Q3 to do the same, you may need to run something similar with each monitor handled by a different process, but because Q3 runs under windows, you may be able to run all 3 processes on the same machine, unlinke the DOS days of Doom. Or maybe you can edit some configs to just do an extra-wide FOV and use the windows spanning features to streach it across all 3 monitors. -CyberVenom
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot. You should expect that 95% of the users will not even bother following the link to your whitepaper, especially after you hint that your server may not handle the slashdot effect very well. Some of us just get tired of clicking on interesting links and waiting half an hour for the page to load. Try to anticipate what the major objections and questions of the average Slashdot user will be and include some answers in the slashdot article itself.
We have a "Social Security Number" here in the states, and despite the fact that when Social Security was instituted it was specifically prohibited that this number be used for identification purposes aside from collecting social security benefits, it has nonetheless become the de facto standard for numeric identification in the US.
Why not just combine the domain registration and certificate authority tasks? The registrar can issue an intermediate CA certificate which expires along with the domain to the registrant with authority for the domain. The registrant can then sign as many certificates as he likes for subdomains. If the domain is transfered away from the registrar or to a different registrant, the registrar simply revokes the old intermediate certificate.
The registrar, with minimal work, could even provide a multi-platform GUI tool based on the OpenSSL source to allow the registrants to easily generate certificates.
Without requiring any large amount of identity verification, this will allow the client to verify that the communication is arriving unaltered, directly from the owner of the domain, which is really all we want to know in the first place, isn't it? (I know Verisign is already both a registrar and CA, but they don't combine the services, and they charge far too much for each. Maybe a smaller registrar like GANDI (http://gandi.net))
I had some bad experiences recently with UPS while building a computer from ordered parts for a friend. Some of the merchants I had purchased from shipped FedEx, and some shipped UPS. I happened to be at working during the day some of the boxes were scheduled to arrive, but my former roommate was visiting and watching TV at my apartment.
FedEx came by and dropped off a package, which he signed for, but the UPS guy didn't even bother knocking, just slapped a note on the door and left.
This annoyed me a bit, but I figured, what the heck. I called UPS and told them to hold the box at the local distribution center so I could come pick it up. Well, I went there after work, gave them my tracking number, and showed them the note. (I was expecting 3 boxes - 2 from one merchant and 1 from another) After about an hour of waiting (along with about 4 other people) they finally found the smallest box of mine (which had been somewhat crushed) and the lady explained to me that they had no idea where the other two were, and suggested I call the office where the truck was parked (next door).
So I went home, called the truck place, and they told me the UPS distribution center had it (in fact, the person I spoke with recalled the name of the person who had taken my packages - the same lady at the distribution center who had told me that they were lost), and gave me a number. I called that number, and they (the same ones at the distribution center that I had seen 10 minutes before) assured me that they didn't have my packages. They told me to call the truck place. I told them the truck place told me to call them...
After much commotion on their end, they finally declared that they had found my packages after all, and that I could come back to get them.
I came back, and they had my packages (neither of which was in any way small, and both of which had large labels slapped on the side with my name and the tracking numbers on them)
Needless to say, once I finished the computer, I shipped it to my friend FedEx.
I paid for 2day-Saturday delivery, and the package arrived in 1 day on Friday. (Ontario, California to Bend, Oregon)
Just my 4-cents.
lol.
You can get an old Panasonic or Epson dot-matrix for fairly cheap. (might even be able to find an IBM!) It's the ribbons and paper that will kill your budget. (although not as much as laser toner, drums, and quartz lamps.)
You also have to watch out for the weirdos who actually manage to get root on your box and then take it upon themselves to edit your logs. :-p It might be a good idea to report alerts to an external machine so that the record itself can't be compromised.
Suggestions:
syslog to remote logserver that has no open ports except syslog.
tail -f your logfile to a line printer with plenty of bannerfold paper. Lets see a hacker try to erase that log! (just make sure you don't leave the carrage on the same line as the entry about my intrusion or I may just run several hundred "X"s over the top of it before issuing an LF)
send email to an external email account when an incident is detected.
(I have phun with my friends' machines in the name of security. Can you tell?)
Even the clean netstat binary will not work on a Linux machine that has been compromised with adore. Adore is a kernel module that blocks netstat (and others) at the kernel level from seeing the compromised ports, as well as making certain parts of the filesystem (such as those holding the backdoor software) invisible to userspace. Really an amazing little hack.
The only real way to bypass it is from outside the compromised kernel, which means either a clean boot off of a boot CD or such (which would be pointless for netstat monitoring because the system should be clean at that point anyway) or a view of the net traffic from an external clean machine.
I would recommend the external sniffer method. I would use ethereal and/or tcpdump on a clean machine to monitor traffic to the suspected compromised machine, and filter out "normal" traffic. (of course this will not detect a backdoor that is piggybacked ontop of another valid protocol such as HTTP if you are filtering out "normal" traffic, but you gotta start somewhere...)
Of course, if the hacker were really slick, he might even flash some malicious code into the BIOS so it could survive reboots and even reinstalls, but in reality, how many really good hackers are out there? (Just kidding, but not about the BIOS idea!) Of the rootkits I've seen so far, adore is one of the best.
Then we nuke them, of course!
Haven't you learned anything about Earthman politics in the last century?
Several years ago (maybe as far back as the early 90's?) Popular Mechanics ran a cover story on a solar-powered self-controlled mower-robot. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly which issue, and my own collection of PM doesn't go back that far.
An 80% chance of living 5 years? Isn't that the same as L.A.? Between the freeways, the gangs, and the smog, it sounds about right to me...
I completely agree that real-mode should not be attempted in a protected-mode OS. My point was that the idea of implementing a standard API in the hardware BIOS was a good idea. Also, unless I am mistaken, a few video BIOSes (I think in the VBE 2.0 era) actually supported native VBE calls in protected mode.
Unfortunately the industry does not see a need anymore for a standardized API since compatibility is handled in the OS layer now.
-Aaron
There is an open standard. It is called VESA-VBE.
During the wild days of post-VGA graphics cards, there were many manufacturers and no standard. At that time, VESA VBE was born and most hardware manufacturers tried to comply with it. Applications finally had a common interface to video hardware, and the future looked bright.
Then came Windows 95, with its DirectX, and most graphically-intensive programs moved to this hot new "standard". (why is beyond me...) VESA VLB 2.0 arrived at about the same time, but fizzled and died because nobody cared anymore. Just make whatever hardware you want, and write a VXD for it, and it will work under Windows. So now the only "standards" we have are on an application level, not a hardware level. (OpenGL, DirectX, XFree86...)
-CyberVenom
20. I want better death animations.
Actually, I thought the animations from SOF were pretty realistic. You get to watch as the soldiers writhe in pain from a severed limb, or as they clutch intestines spewing from a hole in their gut, or as they choke to death on their own blood after being shot in the neck.
Of course, when (inevitably) the celebrity-media unit is near a soldier who dies a gruesome death, you get replay clips with national news anchors condemning you for allowing such horrible things to happen in "your" war...
Oh, and while we're at it, lets make it an RTSS like Savage (http://s2games.com/savage). Let real humans control those soldiers, and let the commander get frustrated when they completely ignore his orders...
Does this mean that the NSA "Red Team" will go on to compete in the Defcon Root-Fu competition this year?
Will we end up with virtual reporters on the Alexis Park cable talking about "Red Team" getting beat by "Team Green (0x00FF00)" and "WMD"? (that I would love to see!)
Come to Defcon XII and find out!
I don't really see why not: most of the team members will probably be in attendance already, and according to some of the earlier posts, they are not allowed to use any classified tricks anyway.
I liked Tribes 2. One of the nice things was that the game browser was good at filtering mods, so unlike some other games, you could find exactly what you were looking for. Personally, I played vanilla for a while, but soon became a fan of the shifter mod. (more vehicles, more weapon modes, more classes, and not usually too unbalanced) It was almost like getting a whole new game without having to buy anything. Mods can be fun, but maybe what the online community needs is something more like the UT voting systems where the server can be tailored to the tastes of the users who are currently playing, not always the tastes of the one admin who is only online for an hour every few days. I agree that those admins who really want their own setup can pay for and run their own server, but why waste resources? I see lots of game servers online that are empty and unplayed simply because they are not running what the players currently online feel like playing. Of course if the server admin comes online and his server is running a mod he hates, he can simply override it and play his version, but that's no reason he needs to keep his server running that version when he is gone and it would go unused anyway.
The only way you will ever get more energy out of a system than you put in is if there is a pre-existing source of energy in the system that someone else stored there. E.g. I flip the switch on a flashlight, and more energy comes out as light than I put into flipping the switch, but that energy is being removed from the batteries (a pre-existing component in the system), where it was stored by someone else. In the case of a magnetic motor, energy may be drawn from several sources: electrical input to electromagnets, existing momentum of the rotating shaft (flywheel), or most improbably it might come from the "energy in the permanent magnets". Most of the perpetual motion claims I have seen focus on this "permanent magnet" energy. Unfortunately, if an easy way were found to liberate this stored energy, it would have the side effect of demagnetizing the permanent magnet itself, essentially making the "p-m generator" nothing more than a battery harnessing the stored potential energy in the magnet... And before someone claims that permanent magnets hold an infinite amount of energy that could be thus released, remember that the exact amount of potential energy stored in a permanent magnet could be calculated by measuring the energy required to magnetize it, and this quantity is definitely finite. The only thing that violates the Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy, is the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, which simply states that mass and energy are the same thing, so even in fusion, you still do not have a perpetual energy source.
not UDP, ICMP.
In that case, you could accomplish the same thing with a single ICMP packet that has in its payload a port number to open, followed by a hash built from the port number, current epoch time (as synchronized from the USNO clock), the password and the destination IP (to prevent the same packet from being replayed within 1 second against another server that has the same password). Viola! You now have a time-dependant, unilateral unlock mechanism piggybacked on an existing, allowed protocol, whose reply packets can easily be dropped in every case but a successful auth, making the server invisible to ping sweeps. The time sync window can be as small as a few seconds if both machines synchronize their clocks from the USNO. Obviously once a particular hash is used, the server should reject any further uses of that hash within 1 second to avoid instant replay attacks.
A similar procedure could also be used to dynamically route ports (sort of like portmap) through a NAT firewall to specific hosts on the inside, thus moving the software requirement off of the server itself and onto the firewall. The client side can be just a small userland app to unlock the port, then the normal program can initiate the port connection (ssh, eMule, kMail, or whatever)
I hope Doom 3 will be able to stand out on its own, even without the support of its line of predecessors, but even if it turns out to be "just another sequel" as far as plot and gameplay, lets not forget its merit as a techdemo. Many of the games on the market today are based on id's engines, and even if Doom 3 itself is not the great game we are hoping for, the technology behind it will undoubtedly power at least a few great games to come. Aside from that point though, I would have to agree: the game market is becoming saturated with copycat and sequel titles. What the game market needs is not more games, but more focus on creating innovative new gameplay. Case in point: I still waste a few hours every few months playing the original Pitfall just for the fun of it. Now who can say that for most of these modern FPS, RTS, or MMORPG formula games?
As I read it, basically, the air is ionized by electrodes, and the ionized air is then pulled across the heat sink via electric charge. This happens to be the same concept as used in the "Ion Air Purifiers" that are advertised on TV. This is supposedly more efficient because the airflow is induced along the surface of the heatsink directly instead of the brute-force method of a fan where the air is thrown at the heatsink en masse and it is hoped that it diplaces the hot air already there. Kinda makes me wonder how this would work in a real-world environment... small particles like dust, pollen, and smoke are attracted to the ionized surfaces (this is how the air purifiers work), so in a place like Southern California, I would imagine that the dust buildup on the heatsink would be much worse with this method than a fan... And dust buildup on a heatsink is not only an insulator, but in the case of the ionized airflow heatsink, it may actually render the ionization process useless, and the air will cease to flow, creating not only an insulated heatsink, but dead air over it.
It is amazing that someone actually bothered to type this... But then again, considering the bland topic at hand, I suppose maybe the poster was simply trying to present a topic of discussion more suited to a front-page slashdot article?
Hey, give it a few years and maybe all the baby bells will merge back into Ma Bell, and all of the old school phreakers will once again be presented with a standardized interface to reverse engineer. >;-}
Maybe they will even absorb AOL/Time/Warner...
Hmmm. So Bell will own the wiring, but they can't (God, I hope not!) own the air! Wireless will be the last-mile technology of the future anyway after the real engineers make it [more] secure and usable instead of simple being the novelty item it is today. (ok, I admit, I run an open network with one computer where I could more easily have used a CAT5 cable, but it is cool to play with and it works well when freinds visit. I watch the network carefully anyway for excessive leeching... I don't mind if people borrow a little bandwidth, as long as it doesn't get in my way.)
Do any of you remember the old (and surprisingly realistic compared to newer crap) hacker movie "Sneakers"? When they are trying to break into the office to steal the chip, Redford comes to a door with an electronic lock. After getting an earful of explanation (which we don't hear) from his partner back in the van about how the military deals with that kind of lock, he agrees to try a new lockpicking method. He kicks the door, and the bolt pops out of the doorjam...
I actually own one of those. ;-) It is a complete pentium-class computer in a 2x3x3/4 package. It uses an AMD Elan processor, and IBM Microdrive, and a few other components (memory chips, cmos battery, etc.)
I bought it a few years ago from Tiqit Computers (a company founded by some people from Stanford). It was their now discontinued Matchbox PC model. I believe Slashdot had an article about some guys at Stanford using one as a webserver back then.
A friend of mine actually installed Windows 98 on it... (It came with RedHat, but he wanted to impress people, and who is impressed by Linux running on small systems anymore?)
Three monitors...
I remember the good old days when I had Doom running on three monitors. To get that set up you needed to use 3 machines on the same IPX network, one for the center monitor and the controls, and the other two set up as observer nodes attached to the left and right side of the player entity. You would use command line options to specify this. It was pretty cool!
To get Q3 to do the same, you may need to run something similar with each monitor handled by a different process, but because Q3 runs under windows, you may be able to run all 3 processes on the same machine, unlinke the DOS days of Doom. Or maybe you can edit some configs to just do an extra-wide FOV and use the windows spanning features to streach it across all 3 monitors.
-CyberVenom