There's quite a few solar powered cars out there (enough that they get together and have races once in a while anyways.) This one may be unique, but on some level, so is my 99 Taurus Station Wagon.
This accident will hurt the family of the guy killed, and his friends, and will hurt the idea of solar powered cars in general, but the loss of the car itself is no big deal. The damage to life and the `idea' of solar powered cars is much much worse.
I've had problems with this a lot myself. Not intrusion attempts, but DDoS attacks. Apparantly people want my nickname on IRC, and think that hitting me with a DDoS attack until I drop off is an acceptable way of freeing it up for their own use. It's not so bad when they just go after my cable modem, but they've also gone after the place that I work at, even when I'm not IRCing from there at the time, and that's much much worse. Also, they often don't attack for the needed ten minutes -- I've had attacks going on for 15 hours, and perhaps even longer but at that point I had the ISP filter out the traffic for me.
So, being a good guy, I never respond in kind (I could, but 1) it's wrong, 2) it affects more than just the target and 3) I don't feel like going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison), I just log every single packet I can, and when the attack is over find the worst offenders (typically the packets are not spoofed) and use Spamcop and whois to find the responsible parties for each one, and send them all an email.
Many (most?) emails elicit an automatic response.
Perhaps 10% get a personalized response, but usually this response says that I should contact the ISP of the offender (when in fact that's exactly what I'm doing.) Perhaps half of the responses I do get say they'll do something about it, which is good -- usually these are compromised drone/zombie machines, and need cleaning anyways.
Quite often, the attacker is stupid enough to ping my machine from his home machine (so he can see how it's going), not thinking I'll notice that. When this happens, I can also email his home ISP, the people who really know who he is, and the people who can really hit him where it hurts. Except that they ignore my email too, and if they do email me back, they just tell me that the attack did not come from their ISP so they can't do anything, or there's no proof that the pinging is related to the attack.
Phone calls are much more effective than emails, but you really need to make them during the attack for them to take them seriously. And often the attacks happen outside of business hours, so there's nobody to call. And they're very time consuming.
Though I did succeed in nailing at least one guy. He was in Romania, and he messaged me a few weeks after the attack basically pleading with me that it wasn't him, but his brother using his computer. Apparantly the police (in Romania) were questioning him, and one of the things they showed him was my email. The police had never contacted me -- I'm guessing that my email was just one of many pieces of evidence they had against the guy. I felt a bit bad for him, but not that bad. Not that I had any control over what was happening to him at that point -- it was out of my hands the moment I sent my email.
So, if it happens again, I'll do the same thing. I know it's not likely that anything substantial will come from my emails, but there's still a chance. Every time it happens, I know I nail at least some of his compromised machines, and have a chance at getting him. I'll win eventually -- either that, or he'll hit puberty, in which case we both win.
Speaking of CSFB, Linus made million off the VA Linux IPO.
Lots of people made lots of money in the various IPOs during the dot-com boom. It wasn't really a matter of doing the right thing, or getting ahead through hard work, but instead just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
Tradionally, it's been investment bankers and favored clients that made the most money in IPOs, but the dot-com boom allowed the average Joe to get in on it in many cases. Many made a few million, lots made several hundred thousands. Now, those people who really made oodles of money were still the CEOs and bankers, but lots of the working guys did do ok too.
Note that Linus is not the `average Joe' in this case. He definately became one of the favored clients, and unlike most of them, he truly deserved it.
After all, even Bill Gates has a budget when he buys a new computer. It's just bigger than mine probably is.
When I want a new computer, I see what Fry's has. They usually have a decent Athlon cpu + cheap MB for $80-$100 at any given time. Lately it's been Athlon XP 2700 or 2800's -- which are really quite fast. The MB is cheap, but I've had generally good results with them.
You could get a system that will play Doom reasonably well for something like $400. If you have $1000 to spend, sure, you can get something that's a bit better, but not that much better.
Really, the ideal interface for a device like this is for it to appear like a hard drive to the computer. So when you plug it in, either USB or Firewire, the computer sees a hard drive (and doesn't need any special drivers.) I believe the iPod did this, though they were hardly first (many cameras work this way.) This is what other companies should emulate.
If they want to ship a pretty GUI on top of that, fine, but don't force us to use it.
Oh, and support the entire USB protocol if you do USB, not just the part that Windows needs. I'm tired of USB devices that won't work under Linux:)
Of course, if your device doesn't do mp3 (which is like shooting yourself in the foot,) then copying files to it won't help much.
Of course, having it work like a hard drive makes copy protection difficult. Consider that a bonus:)
This whole `second full moon in a month' thing is just stupid. Looks like there's already some interesting comments here about the original source of this idea.
Fortunately, there is a chance of a real blue moon if you live near Anchorage, Alaska. Actually, it's not really a fortunate thing, because if this volcano does erupt and spew ash everywhere, it's a big mess. It mucks up your car, you don't want to breath it, it's almost caused airplanes to crash, etc. But it does have the possibility of causing the moon to appear truely blue.
His imediate reaction was that pulsitile flow probably slows the build up of plaques in the arteries, and that people without a pulse would, IHNSHO (in his not so humble opinion), be more likely to experience blockages.
Perhaps, though people should remeber that these artificial hearts are meant for people in extremely dire straights. Their life expectancy, even with the artificial heart, probably isn't long enough to allow the build up of plaques.
I noticed that the pump still has external wires for power. I thought it was generally believed that this was a bad idea, because the holes in the skin where the wires come out is a prime place for infections and such. I thought the `state of the art' was to have rechargable batteries inside, and charge them via an electromaget placed outside (basically it's a transformer.)
So, HTTP (and HTML, though the two really have nothing to do with each other, beyond the fact that HTTP is the primary way of delivering HTML) can't do everything. We know this. We have always known this, for as long as we've had HTTP.
Has something changed that I'm not aware of here?
HTTP may be the most popular protocol out there, but it's hardly the only one. SMTP is really popular, FTP, NNTP, IRC, whatever all the IM systems use, UDP protocols used by games, DNS... many of these may be showing their age, but they're not showing any signs of going away any time soon.
I know of these guys who launched their computer into space, had it crash on a planet, and found that it didn't quite work right. And yet they were ultimately able to fix it -- remotely.
Launching into space, then crashing on Mars with just some air bags for cushions. THAT IS ABUSE! And yet they made it work!
SCSI interfaces on IDE drives? That's like taking a K6-2 and putting an adapter for a socket 953 (Athlon 64 FX-53, the 64 bit processor, 2.4 GHz, very fast heh.)
SCSI and IDE drives generally aren't any different except for the interface. You may be able to find SCSI drives with faster rotational speeds, and some believe that the SCSI drives are just built better, but the differences are small.
But the interface makes a huge difference. A system that pounds on the disk will perform much better with SCSI drives than IDE drives, even if the drives themselves are identical otherwise.
IDE drives can handle raw throughputs very similar to that of SCSI drives, but while the drive is being hammered like this, the SCSI system will be able to do other things much better than the IDE system.
What he suggests is possible. And a well hidden bug could easily escape detection by Linus and anybody else who goes over each new patch looking for stuff like this.
And it doesn't have to be in the Linux kernel. The classic example (at least 10 years old) is to hack up gcc so that it examines the code it's compiling, and if it decides that it's compiling/bin/login to do things a little differently, inserting a back door where there was none before.
However, while he does have a point, it's a very myopic point. Closed source software has exactly the same vulnerabilities, except for one critical difference -- only people within the company in question have a chance of detecting the problem -- the end user will never get to see the source and see if it's compromised. Granted, most open source users do not review all the source code that they use, but at least the option is there, and for the people where security is absolutely essential (like the NSA) they almost certainly use it.
Also, for a closed source company, the problem is even worse. The backdoor (or whatever) could be introduced when the code is finally compiled for distribution, and never get checked into whatever source control system they use. So the binaries get shipped out, but NOBODY has reviewed the source code in question (except our cracker friend) and once the bug does come to light (if it ever does) the company will look at the source code and scratch it's head -- it won't even have the source code in question to look at.
Well, the warranty on the SCSI drives would go up to five years as well.
I've not noticed IDE drives to be that much less reliable than SCSI drives lately -- I've had both fail on me in pretty large numbers. In fact, I'd say I've had more SCSI drives fail than IDE drives lately.
I just wish they'd put SCSI interfaces on IDE drives and sell them at IDE prices -- even if the quality is a little lower.
I believe that AM requires about six times the power as SSB to make a transmission that is of equal readability (sorry, I'm not sure what the proper terms would be.) So why did you choose AM? -- seems to me that SSB would have been a lot easier, either letting you lose a lot less power, or giving you more `effective' power to get through with?
Two passengers, a mechanic and 10 bank employees are killed in Chicago when a Goodyear blimp, the Winged Foot Express, catches fire and crashes through the roof of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank.
They're bigger and more dangerous than you may think, though the `Winged Foot Express' was probably full of hydrogen rather than helium (as modern blimps are -- not quite as bouyant, but much safer.)
Threat to shoot him is illegal under the patriot act.
Making threats of violence has been illegal for a lot longer than the Patriot Act has been around. The legal term (or at least one of them) is `assault'.
However, merely saying that you'll shoot somebody is not illegal in all cases. For example, if you show up at my house and kick down the door, or break in, etc. -- I would probably shoot you if I felt I or my family was in danger. And it's not illegal to say so. Context is important.
My first instinct was to check the calender... nope, not April 1st...
Which department is this from? The jumping-the-gun dept... no clues there that this is a joke.
Then I looked at my keyboard. The 9 key is right above the 6 key. One could easily mean to type IPv6 and accidently type IPv9. Could that explain it? Of course, that wouldn't explain why somebody would say this is is compatible with both IPv4 and IPv6...
I can't read the article itself, since it seems to have fallen under the/. effect. So I guess I just won't know if 1) this is a joke, 2) a typo, or 3) China doing something different from the rest of the world just because they can. It's usually #3, so that's my guess.
Hard drives do not `skip'. So there's no need for a skip buffer.
However, it's possible that a jolt or something could stop the hard drive from delivering data for a second or two -- in that case, a few seconds of buffer space would be a good thing. (However, any jolt that's this strong risks damaging the hard drive itself, stopping it from delivering data forever.) But 25 minutes would be silly -- one minute would be far more than enough.
The reason that you'd want 25 minutes of buffering would be power conservation. 25 minutes of 128 kB mp3s is only about 25 MB, so it's not that much memory. What happens is your hard drive spins up, the player buffers the next 25 MB of music to play into RAM, and then the hard drive spins down, and stays spun down until 20 or so minutes elapse, or until you manually pick a song that's not in it's buffer already. When either one happens, it spins up, fills it's buffer again, and goes back to sleep.
An added bonus of this is that a hard drive that is not spinning is much less likely to be damaged by a shock than one that is spinning.
62 calls at once is due to the fact that there is only so much space in the radio spectrum.
Of course, but a very large chunk of this spectrum is allocated to cell phone usage now. A SSB signal takes about 3 khz but the quality isn't really that great. A FM signal about 20 khz with good quality. Double the FM signal bandwidth (for full duplex )and you get 40 khz, allowing you to stuff 25 calls in a single mhz of bandwidth (and it wouldn't surprise me if the digital phones used lossy compression to stuff more into less space.)
If the 62 call limit was really due to the limited spectrum, then that would mean that no more than 62 people could talk from a given location at once, no matter what. Obviously the limit is a good deal higher -- the local mall certainly has more than 62 cell phone users at once.
It's more likely that the limits are mostly due to not being able to stuff enough equipment and antennas into the van. Things like duplexers are big and heavy!
That's why we have the FCC.;)
You've grossly oversimplified things. Even if the spectrum was unlimited, there would still be a need for the FCC, as certain bands are more desireable than others. For example, there's a massive amount of unused spectrum over 300 gHz -- but these frequencies are so high that they don't really go through walls or anything else. So they don't get used much.
Changing your MAC address on specific cards is strongly cautioned as it weakens the standard
Yes, you're not encouraged to do it, but there are reasons to do so -- mostly related to copy protection schemes, it seems. But nobody really cares -- if you accidently get two machines with the same MAC address on your network, it only affects you, not the whole world.
(MAC address are supposed to be unique and all).
Yes in theory, but in practice they're not. Some manufacturers do seem to ship devices with the same MAC addresses quite often. It's ok as long as they don't go to the same place, but every once in a while they appear on the same network and hilarity ensues.
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This accident will hurt the family of the guy killed, and his friends, and will hurt the idea of solar powered cars in general, but the loss of the car itself is no big deal. The damage to life and the `idea' of solar powered cars is much much worse.
So, being a good guy, I never respond in kind (I could, but 1) it's wrong, 2) it affects more than just the target and 3) I don't feel like going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison), I just log every single packet I can, and when the attack is over find the worst offenders (typically the packets are not spoofed) and use Spamcop and whois to find the responsible parties for each one, and send them all an email.
Many (most?) emails elicit an automatic response.
Perhaps 10% get a personalized response, but usually this response says that I should contact the ISP of the offender (when in fact that's exactly what I'm doing.) Perhaps half of the responses I do get say they'll do something about it, which is good -- usually these are compromised drone/zombie machines, and need cleaning anyways.
Quite often, the attacker is stupid enough to ping my machine from his home machine (so he can see how it's going), not thinking I'll notice that. When this happens, I can also email his home ISP, the people who really know who he is, and the people who can really hit him where it hurts. Except that they ignore my email too, and if they do email me back, they just tell me that the attack did not come from their ISP so they can't do anything, or there's no proof that the pinging is related to the attack.
Phone calls are much more effective than emails, but you really need to make them during the attack for them to take them seriously. And often the attacks happen outside of business hours, so there's nobody to call. And they're very time consuming.
Though I did succeed in nailing at least one guy. He was in Romania, and he messaged me a few weeks after the attack basically pleading with me that it wasn't him, but his brother using his computer. Apparantly the police (in Romania) were questioning him, and one of the things they showed him was my email. The police had never contacted me -- I'm guessing that my email was just one of many pieces of evidence they had against the guy. I felt a bit bad for him, but not that bad. Not that I had any control over what was happening to him at that point -- it was out of my hands the moment I sent my email.
So, if it happens again, I'll do the same thing. I know it's not likely that anything substantial will come from my emails, but there's still a chance. Every time it happens, I know I nail at least some of his compromised machines, and have a chance at getting him. I'll win eventually -- either that, or he'll hit puberty, in which case we both win.
Tradionally, it's been investment bankers and favored clients that made the most money in IPOs, but the dot-com boom allowed the average Joe to get in on it in many cases. Many made a few million, lots made several hundred thousands. Now, those people who really made oodles of money were still the CEOs and bankers, but lots of the working guys did do ok too.
Note that Linus is not the `average Joe' in this case. He definately became one of the favored clients, and unlike most of them, he truly deserved it.
When I want a new computer, I see what Fry's has. They usually have a decent Athlon cpu + cheap MB for $80-$100 at any given time. Lately it's been Athlon XP 2700 or 2800's -- which are really quite fast. The MB is cheap, but I've had generally good results with them.
You could get a system that will play Doom reasonably well for something like $400. If you have $1000 to spend, sure, you can get something that's a bit better, but not that much better.
If they want to ship a pretty GUI on top of that, fine, but don't force us to use it.
Oh, and support the entire USB protocol if you do USB, not just the part that Windows needs. I'm tired of USB devices that won't work under Linux :)
Of course, if your device doesn't do mp3 (which is like shooting yourself in the foot,) then copying files to it won't help much.
Of course, having it work like a hard drive makes copy protection difficult. Consider that a bonus :)
Fortunately, there is a chance of a real blue moon if you live near Anchorage, Alaska. Actually, it's not really a fortunate thing, because if this volcano does erupt and spew ash everywhere, it's a big mess. It mucks up your car, you don't want to breath it, it's almost caused airplanes to crash, etc. But it does have the possibility of causing the moon to appear truely blue.
I noticed that the pump still has external wires for power. I thought it was generally believed that this was a bad idea, because the holes in the skin where the wires come out is a prime place for infections and such. I thought the `state of the art' was to have rechargable batteries inside, and charge them via an electromaget placed outside (basically it's a transformer.)
I was not criticizing the article (or question) author for saying http/html. I was asking why he felt they needed to go away at all.
Has something changed that I'm not aware of here?
HTTP may be the most popular protocol out there, but it's hardly the only one. SMTP is really popular, FTP, NNTP, IRC, whatever all the IM systems use, UDP protocols used by games, DNS ... many of these may be showing their age, but they're not showing any signs of going away any time soon.
Launching into space, then crashing on Mars with just some air bags for cushions. THAT IS ABUSE! And yet they made it work!
But the interface makes a huge difference. A system that pounds on the disk will perform much better with SCSI drives than IDE drives, even if the drives themselves are identical otherwise.
IDE drives can handle raw throughputs very similar to that of SCSI drives, but while the drive is being hammered like this, the SCSI system will be able to do other things much better than the IDE system.
And it doesn't have to be in the Linux kernel. The classic example (at least 10 years old) is to hack up gcc so that it examines the code it's compiling, and if it decides that it's compiling /bin/login to do things a little differently, inserting a back door where there was none before.
However, while he does have a point, it's a very myopic point. Closed source software has exactly the same vulnerabilities, except for one critical difference -- only people within the company in question have a chance of detecting the problem -- the end user will never get to see the source and see if it's compromised. Granted, most open source users do not review all the source code that they use, but at least the option is there, and for the people where security is absolutely essential (like the NSA) they almost certainly use it.
Also, for a closed source company, the problem is even worse. The backdoor (or whatever) could be introduced when the code is finally compiled for distribution, and never get checked into whatever source control system they use. So the binaries get shipped out, but NOBODY has reviewed the source code in question (except our cracker friend) and once the bug does come to light (if it ever does) the company will look at the source code and scratch it's head -- it won't even have the source code in question to look at.
I've not noticed IDE drives to be that much less reliable than SCSI drives lately -- I've had both fail on me in pretty large numbers. In fact, I'd say I've had more SCSI drives fail than IDE drives lately.
I just wish they'd put SCSI interfaces on IDE drives and sell them at IDE prices -- even if the quality is a little lower.
I believe that AM requires about six times the power as SSB to make a transmission that is of equal readability (sorry, I'm not sure what the proper terms would be.) So why did you choose AM? -- seems to me that SSB would have been a lot easier, either letting you lose a lot less power, or giving you more `effective' power to get through with?
However, merely saying that you'll shoot somebody is not illegal in all cases. For example, if you show up at my house and kick down the door, or break in, etc. -- I would probably shoot you if I felt I or my family was in danger. And it's not illegal to say so. Context is important.
Which department is this from? The jumping-the-gun dept ... no clues there that this is a joke.
Then I looked at my keyboard. The 9 key is right above the 6 key. One could easily mean to type IPv6 and accidently type IPv9. Could that explain it? Of course, that wouldn't explain why somebody would say this is is compatible with both IPv4 and IPv6 ...
I can't read the article itself, since it seems to have fallen under the /. effect. So I guess I just won't know if 1) this is a joke, 2) a typo, or 3) China doing something different from the rest of the world just because they can. It's usually #3, so that's my guess.
However, it's possible that a jolt or something could stop the hard drive from delivering data for a second or two -- in that case, a few seconds of buffer space would be a good thing. (However, any jolt that's this strong risks damaging the hard drive itself, stopping it from delivering data forever.) But 25 minutes would be silly -- one minute would be far more than enough.
The reason that you'd want 25 minutes of buffering would be power conservation. 25 minutes of 128 kB mp3s is only about 25 MB, so it's not that much memory. What happens is your hard drive spins up, the player buffers the next 25 MB of music to play into RAM, and then the hard drive spins down, and stays spun down until 20 or so minutes elapse, or until you manually pick a song that's not in it's buffer already. When either one happens, it spins up, fills it's buffer again, and goes back to sleep.
An added bonus of this is that a hard drive that is not spinning is much less likely to be damaged by a shock than one that is spinning.
If the 62 call limit was really due to the limited spectrum, then that would mean that no more than 62 people could talk from a given location at once, no matter what. Obviously the limit is a good deal higher -- the local mall certainly has more than 62 cell phone users at once.
It's more likely that the limits are mostly due to not being able to stuff enough equipment and antennas into the van. Things like duplexers are big and heavy!
You've grossly oversimplified things. Even if the spectrum was unlimited, there would still be a need for the FCC, as certain bands are more desireable than others. For example, there's a massive amount of unused spectrum over 300 gHz -- but these frequencies are so high that they don't really go through walls or anything else. So they don't get used much.Counter-counterpoint: You miss DIVISION BY ZERO ERROR}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} NO CARRIER
Still, 127.0.0.1 is a great warez/porn/mp3 site. Too bad I've already got everything it does -- I get great transfer rates to it!