It only gets difficult to secure stuff once things get large enough that you can't keep track of what is going in or out. Need a port open for this person X, for that for person Y, for someone else with antivirus that phones home via the port only the mail server has legit business using, then all kinds of shit tunnelling trough port 80 - that's when things get out of control and people end up hosting spambots on their networks and only find out when they get blacklisted. Cut things into segments small enough that you don't lose track of what's going on and you can secure that chunk, then the next, then the one after. The smaller the target the easier to stop someone hitting it.
You've been tricked by revisionism - after it was pointed out just a few years ago how little radioactivity bananas actually have a new and far more correct "banana dose" value ended up in places like wikipedia. Look for it in print, or something that quotes the print, and you'll see, but you don't have to - just think about my next point.
How do those "setting off alarms" comments make any sense when a banana emits far less radiation from potassium than a single human being (as pointed out by another poster)? It only makes sense in the context of a vastly inflated figure.
In the case of my workplace we've got some obscure embedded hardware for digital sampling of analog signals that needed some drivers that hadn't been written yet, so a couple of guys spent a few months on and off writing a little bit of the kernel. That is one of the reasons why a company would want to contribute. It's not as if we are in the business of selling the hardware or software so it's no skin off our nose to give a tiny bit back after being given a lot.
Microsoft has previously been forced to release source code when GPL code was found in one of it's products.
I remember an MS developers disk with gcc on it, and the GPL in a text file. I don't see why that's a big deal because they used to have the Berkley copyright text in their hosts file as well.
With respect, I suggest you attempt to learn something about the topic before lecturing those of us who have worked in laboratories with such materials. I would not make up something about Ruby and assert it as a "fact" in some ego building effort to lecture others and suggest you do the same in areas outside of your awareness, knowlege and experience.
Yes my point is the infamous banana dose with the false assumption is inflated by about four significant digits based on that 0.0117%. A pretty huge "mistake" for the sake of PR a few decades back. The final sentence sounds incredibly unlikely. Add up those numbers you've got and compare them to a granite countertop or a bucket of beach sand - then consider the wisdom of setting sensors to go off at that level. Surely if it's "capable" then some bananas must have set off a detector at least once, which surely would have been documented somewhere and even got some press because it so weird - yet somehow we've never heard about it. Funny about that isn't it?
Housing is famously overinflated in comparison to just about everything else. There's a diminishing supply of places just where people want them compared with the number of people wanting them while other things are not so limited by location.
People did drink metallic mercury for medical purposes (Syphillus) and one of the side effects was necrosis of the bowel if some of it get trapped somewhere. It did kill people faster than it's slow poison effect in the same way two little magnets trapped in the bowel can. There's been a Materials Safety Data Sheet for mercury on the internet for longer than the web has existed (I remember fetching it with Gopher), so even a coder has no excuse for some "pure mercury isn't a problem" misinformation. It's not instant death but it's not the sort of thing you want to inhale or ingest either. I've worked with it in a well ventilated area, so I'm not frightened of it, but I'm not going to push some bullshit line about it not being a poison either.
The famous "banana dose" relies on the false assumption that all Potassium in a banana is Potassium-40. It was a tool of a public relations campaign about the safety of nuclear waste and is almost certain to be a deliberate mistake in order to skew any comparisons and make things look as if they are far less radioactive than they are.
In metalworking we all made knives or "ninja stars" instead of this little things used for cardboard boxes. The teachers were normally very sharp-eyed but made an effort to avoid noticing - I think they were happy that students were applying their skills. Somehow they managed to always catch kids attempting to smuggle out tools but never found one of those knives even when they were almost in plain sight.
My father was the teacher that had to get rid of the Sodium in a school in 1976, of which quite a lot had built up in the lab supplies for some reason. He crumbled it up and tipped it on a large ants nest, then a few hours later got all the students to watch from one floor up in a nearby building when he turned on the sprinklers. A bit of a slow start - then a crater. At university some potassium poured down a sink produced some interesting results with jets of flame coming from multiple plug holes in a lab sinks - the lab manager who did that should have known better but there was no fire despite some plastic pipes and drain grilles - it burns "cold" but there's still a fire risk. Nearly scared the crap out of me because I didn't know he was doing it. Liquid nitrogen was also used to "sweep the floor" on Friday afternoons because it wouldn't last till Monday.
The previous generation had even better toys. My uncle got to play with cordite and picric acid from the dump at the back of the WWII army camp. Somehow he kept all his fingers. BTW, what's with the black swan sig? As an someone that believes subject matter experts in climate science know more about the topic than economists just starting out should I get offended? Everyone leading their field in science graduated before the term was even coined FFS let alone shoehorning a financial term into a different niche - so what has "the black swan" got to do with the scientific process at all?
You do not appear to understand that the "banana dose" assumes that all potassium in a banana is a rare radioactive isotope instead of what is actually found in quantity in bananas. The "banana dose" was a bit of misdirection to assist public relations and was never intended to be taken seriously. I'm pretty sure that even wikipedia corrects the deliberate myth of the "banana dose".
I remember now (with the help of google) - Wayne Gilbert. He was very big on "quality" in words but not in action. We had many hours of meetings (lectures really) throughout the entire org where someone would stand up the front and say little more than "quality is good" - meanwhile he sacked a lot of preventative maintanance people etc. I only met him once, when he may have been very poorly briefed instead of stupid (didn't seem to know where he was when he visited the scientific service section and had a few foot in mouth moments) and shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but he made a mess of NSW and QLD electricity distributors and generators (I was in QLD) before he did his even more spectacular magic in NZ.
On February 20, 1998 the chief executive of Mercury Energy is on his way to a celebration honoring his accomplishments. Having quadrupled the profits of his company in four years and halved the staff in the same period, he has achieved a lot. But on that day the last of the four underground cables supplying power to Auckland's Business District fails, leaving Central Business District in the dark. Electric Light & Power magazine, November 1998
I'm probably a bit too cynical, bitter and twisted on the topic as a reaction to such contact.
Yes but what about that cheap and nasty Acer or similar shit brand which is already pushing the limits of it's cooling instead of having a safety factor in the design. BBQ! What about the people living where water outside is not in a solid state at the moment. BBQ!
Good post. I'm tempted to quote it to libertarians as an example of why their small government/I've got mine bullshit is insane, but that would end up sending loonies in your direction.
I can see why they are removing the overclock feature on graphics hardware in very tight spaces with little in the way of cooling options so I really don't understand why this is a story.
Where do you believe emergency generators would/should come from to deploy in every town/area after such a blizzard event?
Another area where they don't need them at the moment - just like the firefighting gear. I get your point that FEMA or whatever does not have their shit together like the fire fighters who even share their stuff between countries in the off season.
It was all pre-slashdot apart from external contracting, in fact one of the truly odd things was we had only a single computer with unblocked web access in the entire scientific services section as late as 1996 - so a restrictive government owned utility full of knee-jerk reactions. We used ftpmail a lot to read stuff on the net tunnelled via email. Other people have a lot more interesting stuff than I could provide from before I moved to plant inspection, academia, coal and oil, then the small end of cluster computing. It's an interesting industry with a very mobile workforce so among others I got to work with a Russian with nuclear experience. There's a lot of idiots that industry and a shift to "crisis maintanance" where things are only fixed after they catastrophically go wrong. You may have heard of my former boss that later went on to black out Auckland for something like a month, I can't recall his name at this point.
Maybe taking advantage of the shutdown to do a bit of inspection and maintainance turned up something that took a while to fix. I'm sure a few people on this site have experience of a server that had been on for over a year with no problems but would not power back on after a full shutdown and cold start. Mechanical systems can act that way as well, especially if there is a bit of heat involved and the size difference between parts when cold or in operation is significant. I've seen a wide variety of broken components in even well run thermal power plants (I've never worked with nukes but anything after the water is heated is pretty similar). I've seen even more on the way to breaking and getting cut out before they can fail. So to sum up I don't think there's much to take away from a single outage - if all you've got is outage times you'd have to get statistical with more info before a sensible judgement.
I went through the ice storm of 98 - a month with no power. 25 people died of hypothermia.
A month and a serious death toll, that does indeed suck. I'd wonder why they didn't truck in a pile of the container sized generators or a similar disaster plan as done by utilities after hurricanes.
No. What is the first thing that will happen when an uninformed person reads this story?
They will take it on face value, most likely that it's both a good idea and standard operating procedure, unless of course they have an agenda to push.
Slashdot Mirror
It only gets difficult to secure stuff once things get large enough that you can't keep track of what is going in or out. Need a port open for this person X, for that for person Y, for someone else with antivirus that phones home via the port only the mail server has legit business using, then all kinds of shit tunnelling trough port 80 - that's when things get out of control and people end up hosting spambots on their networks and only find out when they get blacklisted.
Cut things into segments small enough that you don't lose track of what's going on and you can secure that chunk, then the next, then the one after.
The smaller the target the easier to stop someone hitting it.
You've been tricked by revisionism - after it was pointed out just a few years ago how little radioactivity bananas actually have a new and far more correct "banana dose" value ended up in places like wikipedia. Look for it in print, or something that quotes the print, and you'll see, but you don't have to - just think about my next point.
How do those "setting off alarms" comments make any sense when a banana emits far less radiation from potassium than a single human being (as pointed out by another poster)? It only makes sense in the context of a vastly inflated figure.
In the case of my workplace we've got some obscure embedded hardware for digital sampling of analog signals that needed some drivers that hadn't been written yet, so a couple of guys spent a few months on and off writing a little bit of the kernel. That is one of the reasons why a company would want to contribute. It's not as if we are in the business of selling the hardware or software so it's no skin off our nose to give a tiny bit back after being given a lot.
I remember an MS developers disk with gcc on it, and the GPL in a text file. I don't see why that's a big deal because they used to have the Berkley copyright text in their hosts file as well.
That seems like a perfectly sensible step on their way to world domination.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
I should have pointed out the obvious - vapor at room temperature and body temperature. How did you miss that?
With respect, I suggest you attempt to learn something about the topic before lecturing those of us who have worked in laboratories with such materials. I would not make up something about Ruby and assert it as a "fact" in some ego building effort to lecture others and suggest you do the same in areas outside of your awareness, knowlege and experience.
Yes my point is the infamous banana dose with the false assumption is inflated by about four significant digits based on that 0.0117%. A pretty huge "mistake" for the sake of PR a few decades back.
The final sentence sounds incredibly unlikely. Add up those numbers you've got and compare them to a granite countertop or a bucket of beach sand - then consider the wisdom of setting sensors to go off at that level. Surely if it's "capable" then some bananas must have set off a detector at least once, which surely would have been documented somewhere and even got some press because it so weird - yet somehow we've never heard about it. Funny about that isn't it?
Housing is famously overinflated in comparison to just about everything else. There's a diminishing supply of places just where people want them compared with the number of people wanting them while other things are not so limited by location.
People did drink metallic mercury for medical purposes (Syphillus) and one of the side effects was necrosis of the bowel if some of it get trapped somewhere. It did kill people faster than it's slow poison effect in the same way two little magnets trapped in the bowel can.
There's been a Materials Safety Data Sheet for mercury on the internet for longer than the web has existed (I remember fetching it with Gopher), so even a coder has no excuse for some "pure mercury isn't a problem" misinformation. It's not instant death but it's not the sort of thing you want to inhale or ingest either. I've worked with it in a well ventilated area, so I'm not frightened of it, but I'm not going to push some bullshit line about it not being a poison either.
The famous "banana dose" relies on the false assumption that all Potassium in a banana is Potassium-40.
It was a tool of a public relations campaign about the safety of nuclear waste and is almost certain to be a deliberate mistake in order to skew any comparisons and make things look as if they are far less radioactive than they are.
In metalworking we all made knives or "ninja stars" instead of this little things used for cardboard boxes. The teachers were normally very sharp-eyed but made an effort to avoid noticing - I think they were happy that students were applying their skills. Somehow they managed to always catch kids attempting to smuggle out tools but never found one of those knives even when they were almost in plain sight.
My father was the teacher that had to get rid of the Sodium in a school in 1976, of which quite a lot had built up in the lab supplies for some reason. He crumbled it up and tipped it on a large ants nest, then a few hours later got all the students to watch from one floor up in a nearby building when he turned on the sprinklers. A bit of a slow start - then a crater.
At university some potassium poured down a sink produced some interesting results with jets of flame coming from multiple plug holes in a lab sinks - the lab manager who did that should have known better but there was no fire despite some plastic pipes and drain grilles - it burns "cold" but there's still a fire risk. Nearly scared the crap out of me because I didn't know he was doing it. Liquid nitrogen was also used to "sweep the floor" on Friday afternoons because it wouldn't last till Monday.
The previous generation had even better toys. My uncle got to play with cordite and picric acid from the dump at the back of the WWII army camp. Somehow he kept all his fingers.
BTW, what's with the black swan sig? As an someone that believes subject matter experts in climate science know more about the topic than economists just starting out should I get offended? Everyone leading their field in science graduated before the term was even coined FFS let alone shoehorning a financial term into a different niche - so what has "the black swan" got to do with the scientific process at all?
You do not appear to understand that the "banana dose" assumes that all potassium in a banana is a rare radioactive isotope instead of what is actually found in quantity in bananas.
The "banana dose" was a bit of misdirection to assist public relations and was never intended to be taken seriously. I'm pretty sure that even wikipedia corrects the deliberate myth of the "banana dose".
Just be like me and don't keep your flash player or browser up to date - thus avoiding both "beta" and videos like that.
I'm probably a bit too cynical, bitter and twisted on the topic as a reaction to such contact.
Where did I suggest that. Oh that's right, I didn't!
I instead suggested that she attacked democracy and capitalism with little understanding of either.
Yes but what about that cheap and nasty Acer or similar shit brand which is already pushing the limits of it's cooling instead of having a safety factor in the design. BBQ!
What about the people living where water outside is not in a solid state at the moment. BBQ!
Good post. I'm tempted to quote it to libertarians as an example of why their small government/I've got mine bullshit is insane, but that would end up sending loonies in your direction.
I can see why they are removing the overclock feature on graphics hardware in very tight spaces with little in the way of cooling options so I really don't understand why this is a story.
Another area where they don't need them at the moment - just like the firefighting gear. I get your point that FEMA or whatever does not have their shit together like the fire fighters who even share their stuff between countries in the off season.
It was all pre-slashdot apart from external contracting, in fact one of the truly odd things was we had only a single computer with unblocked web access in the entire scientific services section as late as 1996 - so a restrictive government owned utility full of knee-jerk reactions. We used ftpmail a lot to read stuff on the net tunnelled via email.
Other people have a lot more interesting stuff than I could provide from before I moved to plant inspection, academia, coal and oil, then the small end of cluster computing.
It's an interesting industry with a very mobile workforce so among others I got to work with a Russian with nuclear experience.
There's a lot of idiots that industry and a shift to "crisis maintanance" where things are only fixed after they catastrophically go wrong. You may have heard of my former boss that later went on to black out Auckland for something like a month, I can't recall his name at this point.
I've seen a wide variety of broken components in even well run thermal power plants (I've never worked with nukes but anything after the water is heated is pretty similar). I've seen even more on the way to breaking and getting cut out before they can fail.
So to sum up I don't think there's much to take away from a single outage - if all you've got is outage times you'd have to get statistical with more info before a sensible judgement.
A month and a serious death toll, that does indeed suck. I'd wonder why they didn't truck in a pile of the container sized generators or a similar disaster plan as done by utilities after hurricanes.
They will take it on face value, most likely that it's both a good idea and standard operating procedure, unless of course they have an agenda to push.