Cuts out more than just noisy PCs: also airco, neighbours, and fire sirens.
You must have some magical noise-reduction headphones. The ones I have, from the low tech (plugs of foam you stick in your ear) to high tech (working like the system described in the article) do definately drop the volume of the noise around you, but neither makes it so you can't have a conversation with somebody, and certainly neither drowns out the fire alarm. (Those things are INCREDIBLY loud.)
Don't worry -- they won't be silent. Only quieter.
And besides, as others have suggested, there are better ways to monitor fans. And if you have several computers in your office and just one of the fans fails, how likely is it that you'll be able to hear the difference anyways? Especially if you're not listening for it?
How would I go about booting from a ramdisk?
This would make the 'powerwitch' kernel mod not so important since there is no worry of corrupting the file system.
Actually, booting off a ramdisk would have the same worries of corrupting the filesystem as booting off a hard disk. Well, I guess it depends on what kind of ram disk you're referring too -- flash ram would have the same problem, but a ram disk that's loaded from boot media at bootup would not.
What you probably want to do is just never open the disk for read/write access -- make it read only. Then you can turn it off at will with no problems, because the disk is never written to.
The ROKSO list says otherwise. Stop 10 top spammers, and the spam will likely decrease by over 90%.
Ok, fine. Suppose you're the #1 spammer in the world (responsible for 20% of the world-wide spam sent), and you suddenly grow a conscience, and decide to reduce your spam volume by 80%. Big whoop -- instead of getting 1500 spams/day, I now get 1260 spams/day. And as you mentioned, the other spammers will soon pick up the slack.
Spammers are indeed ruining email -- I know lots of people who no longer check their email at all -- but they're not going to stop until they're forced to.
One would think that even spammers would realize that if things go too far, businesses might not carry emails at all anymore.
Yes, but suppose you're a spammer. A big-time spammer, but still just a single person. You're worried about killing the goose that lays the golden egg, so you cut the spam that you emit by 90%. Your income drops by 90%, but the total spam sent world wide drops by, oh, 0.5%?
Even if the spammers band together and make a big organziation to self organize and police, spammers by almost by definition dishonest (no honor among theives!), and as soon as one realizes that he can make more money by ignoring the organzation (i.e. almost immediately), he will.
The parent post may be redundant (as it's already been suggested), but it's not a troll. It's a reasonable solution to this problem.
This is going to be a job that uses lots of time, but may not require much training to perform. Perfect for outsourcing, be it to the secretary, Kinkos or India.
Give your professors a copy of Open Office and have them redo the work in a format that can be read, indexed, searched and distributed.
While I do agree that this would be ideal in an ideal world, I know that we do not live in an ideal world. If you are requiring that the professors rewrite their notes on a computer so that they can be indexed and searched and such before they're put online, you're pretty
much guaranteeing that most of them never get put online.
Images of handwritten pages (be it pdf, png, tif, jpeg, whatever) may suck, but they're better than nothing, and they're the best you're likely to get without dedicating many many man hours towards rewriting them in a better format.
Xerox bundles OCR as a software add-on. It works well when you get it all set up at your company. By the time you get back to your desk, the document is open and ready to be OCR'd with a drag and drop.
The original question said that the notes were handwritten. Has anybody had any sort of success whatsoever in reading handwriting with OCR? (Not that I'm aware of.)
I don't recommend OpenBSD for a Unix beginner, unless you're building a firewall.
A unix beginner really shouldn't be building a firewall, at least not a production one. Use something else that somebody else set up instead. Firewalls can be tricky to get right.
And OpenBSD is possibly the least user friendly *nix distribution out there, and it lacks much of the hardware support that FreeBSD and especially Linux has. I don't suggest it for a beginner.
Basically, I'd stay away from any distro that calls itself "GNU/Linux"
It's better than lignux:) (if you remember that.)
Actually, I'm surprised that RMS hasn't decided to call FreeBSD GNU/FreeBSD. After all, several important parts of the base install come straight from the GNU project. Ditto for OpenBSD...
Calling the credit-card companies will be a fool's errand; there are tons of them and you have no clue how many of these numbers are Visa, how many are Mastercard, how many are Discover/Novus, etc.
Actually, you can tell from the number itself which type of card it is. Visa cards start with a 4, Mastercard starts with 5, and I don't know about the rest, but I'm sure somebody else does.
I'm now getting 940 KB/s (kilobytes/s, that's not a typo) down and 870 KB/s up. It should be done in 20 minutes. You'll really have to forgive me if I don't agree that BitTorrent blows goats.
Granted, I have more bandwidth available to me than you do (work doesn't do much on the weekend, so I've got the full big pipe to myself) but it seems to be doing awfully well.
You may want to cap BitTorrent's upstream bandwidth to 75% of your upstream bandwidth. For example, if your upstream bandwidth is 128 kilobits/s, cap BT's uploads at 96 Kb/s. The caps put on cable modems are very unfriendly when you actually hit them -- by hitting your upstream bandwidth, you'll typically slow down your downloads to a similar rate. So rather than uploading 128 Kb/s and downloading 768 Kb/s, you'll get 128 Kb/s in both directions. But if you slow your uploads to 96 Kb/s, your downloads can get the full speed of 768 Kb/s. It's kind of wierd, but it's the way the caps work.
I don't have any experience with DSL -- but it wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way.
3 Kibs down, 27 kibs up on a 768k downstream. BitTorrent blows goats.
Then turn it off and wait for the ftp site.
Of course, I'll have it today, thanks to the goat blowing effectiveness of bittorrent. It's already 6% done. Not too bad for something that won't even be available via ftp for days.
no mean to rant, but the pdf is too long, i can't be bothered to read it all, someone want to summarize it please?:)
Sure!
It all started with a ebay auction when the seller got a email from a dude who wanted to scam him. It was a normal setup and it went horribly wrong... for the scammer. This has turned from a awful plight for a ebay user to a wonderful prank on the scammer. Throw in some crazy brits with digicams and you have the making of a great story.
The other thing to understand is IT'S SLOW AS SHIT.
Hardly. I regularly get 200 KB/s+ (bytes, not bits) downloads from bittorrent downloads. Right now, I'm getting 55 KB/s for FC2 -- not that fast, but then again I just started it up. I fully expect it to pass the 200 KB/s mark before it's done.
Were it not for bittorrent, I'd be getting 0 B/s -- because it wouldn't be available at all until they loaded up all the mirrors. And once they did, I'd get about 20 B/s, as they'd all be massively overloaded for a week.
Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time.
Perhaps, but it's an awesome way to distribute them when six gazillion people want something large the moment it comes out. FC2 definately falls into this category right now.
And even once the initial flood of demand has been satisfied, it scales at least as well as downloading via a web or ftp site -- and much better if two or more people are downloading. FC is popular enough that it will probably have at least two people downloading (probably many more) it at any given time until FC3 comes out.
And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.
You're wrong. People DO leave their BT clients open longer than needed to download the file. Some people do have extra bandwidth to spare, and some will leave it open just because they saw it was going to take 4 hours to download, so they went to bed and didn't come back for 10 hours.
And even if they don't, it still works, because they were uploading while they were downloading.
Bush: "Why is everyone pointing to the air?"
As millions of people try to call the police about a mistereous RC plane but can't becouse of the cell phone jamming.
At the same time an RC plane packed with explosives is gliding in on target.
An R/C plane would make an extremely ineffective flying bomb. At most, with a huge plane, you could only hold a few pounds of explosives. The only way it would be dangerous to the president would be if it could be aimed right at him, which would require very good piloting (and somebody would need to see it -- the whole `flying it via a camera' thing doesn't work well) and a lot of luck.
And besides, when the president is nearby, the FAA prohibits just about all flying, including R/C flying. It affects law abiding citizens far more than terrorists, but it does help protect against this extremely unlikely and ineffective attack scenario.
Carbon fiber is indeed really really strong, but it's a serious bitch to repair. A shell that hit the ship would make a nice big hole (carbon fiber is pretty brittle -- I wonder if they've got a kevlar shell outside of it, or would that mess with the radar signature?) of splintery mess.
I guess rather than welding it they'd be using epoxy to repair? At least that's what we do with R/C planes that use carbon fiber (well, usually you replace the carbon fiber completely when it breaks -- not an option for a ship made of it.)
This technology could let Comcast's techs lock down any access point who's not running WEP
More accurately, it would probably mandate WEP at initial configuration -- Comcast would set it up themselves (probably not even letting the customer have access at all) and instead give the customer a card with their WEP key and instructions on how to set all their wireless devices to use it.
I certainly won't be using any of these boxes, but I can see where this would be a very good thing for the non-technical user. Unless you're one of those people who likes to borrow their neighbor's wireless network...
Of course, it also would mean that Comcast has a database with everybody's WEP key in it somewhere -- which Comcast or the FBI/NSA/KGB/BSA/KFC/etc could use to sniff all your traffic, even that which doesn't go over the network (of course, Comcast could do that at the WAP itself, without even requring physical proximity.) And if somebody hacked into that database, it would give them a huge number of WAPs (and their addresses) that you could use with impunity -- and the encryption would even make them *seem* secure. (If a user suddenly starts spewing spam, and their WAP uses WEP, people are going to be less likely to believe that his WAP was abused.)
I was thinking `if you're worried about carpal tunnel syndrome, just do the exact opposite of whatever emacs does.'. The alt-meta-cokebottle stuff is very hard on my left pinky:)
When someone makes a web browser that has an emacs interface, I will use it.
I do believe that emacs does have a web browser mode.
I wasn't sure at the time, but after asking I learned that GF1 means `GeForce 1', the original GeForce card. None of those specifications are particularly hairy (by today's standards.) Or did things just change that much between last July and now?
... probably. It almost didn't survive Diablo 2, which should have been renamed `carpal tunnel syndrome in a box', but it did, because I just stopped playing -- it was just too hard on my mouse pointing finger. Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click Click...
The current dcc protocol isn't *that* bad -- it's very similar to ftp's protocol. It's biggest problem is that it can't work in both directions (send and receive) through a NAT or a firewall that won't let you open a listening port and have somebody else connect to it. So if you're behind a NAT, you can receive a file but can't send one.
How dcc works: if you're sending a file, you open a listening port, then send your IP and port to the remote host via a CTCP message. The remote host connects to that IP and port, and accepts the file.
To fix the send/receive via a NAT problem, one could merely make an extension (or just a seperate sending command) where the sending machine requests that the receiving client open a host and port and then the sender connects to it. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement, but it might require that a ctcp message be sent back from the receving client. We've been talking about this for over a decade. The hardest part would be to talk the other client authors to implemenet it.
One other, less commnon problem -- that IP that is sent comes from your hostname in many cases, so on a multi-homed box it's often wrong.
Here is a pseudo-fix that's just under 10 years old for ircII.
File name and size information never needs to pass over IRC", the website of the DCC2 protocol reads. Some networks have taken action against channels where music files are being shared over DCC.
But make no mistake here -- the *only* reason one would need to avoid sending file name and size information over irc would be to avoid censorship or logging done by the irc servers. It's just metadata, and a few bytes of it -- the servers can handle it without any problems.
In fact, it would be nice if the new dcc protocol (if it's ever completed and widely implemented, which I doubt, based on my experience with how irc stuff is done) could support sending small files directly through the servers with no additional TCP connections. It would be *very* slow (thanks to flood control -- perhaps 100 bytes/second tops) and would put a larger load on the servers, but it would allow two clients behind two different NATs to send files to each other when nothing else would. Wouldn't be practical for.mp3 files, but it would for.ircrc files. Of course, the server admins would hate the mere idea, and if people used it a lot they'd add code to the servers to find and block it, K-line the users, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
And besides, as others have suggested, there are better ways to monitor fans. And if you have several computers in your office and just one of the fans fails, how likely is it that you'll be able to hear the difference anyways? Especially if you're not listening for it?
What you probably want to do is just never open the disk for read/write access -- make it read only. Then you can turn it off at will with no problems, because the disk is never written to.
Spammers are indeed ruining email -- I know lots of people who no longer check their email at all -- but they're not going to stop until they're forced to.
Even if the spammers band together and make a big organziation to self organize and police, spammers by almost by definition dishonest (no honor among theives!), and as soon as one realizes that he can make more money by ignoring the organzation (i.e. almost immediately), he will.
This is going to be a job that uses lots of time, but may not require much training to perform. Perfect for outsourcing, be it to the secretary, Kinkos or India.
Images of handwritten pages (be it pdf, png, tif, jpeg, whatever) may suck, but they're better than nothing, and they're the best you're likely to get without dedicating many many man hours towards rewriting them in a better format.
And OpenBSD is possibly the least user friendly *nix distribution out there, and it lacks much of the hardware support that FreeBSD and especially Linux has. I don't suggest it for a beginner.
It's better than lignuxActually, I'm surprised that RMS hasn't decided to call FreeBSD GNU/FreeBSD. After all, several important parts of the base install come straight from the GNU project. Ditto for OpenBSD ...
Most BitTorrent clients now have an option to limit the upload bandwidth used. Even in XP :)
Use it.
Granted, I have more bandwidth available to me than you do (work doesn't do much on the weekend, so I've got the full big pipe to myself) but it seems to be doing awfully well.
You may want to cap BitTorrent's upstream bandwidth to 75% of your upstream bandwidth. For example, if your upstream bandwidth is 128 kilobits/s, cap BT's uploads at 96 Kb/s. The caps put on cable modems are very unfriendly when you actually hit them -- by hitting your upstream bandwidth, you'll typically slow down your downloads to a similar rate. So rather than uploading 128 Kb/s and downloading 768 Kb/s, you'll get 128 Kb/s in both directions. But if you slow your uploads to 96 Kb/s, your downloads can get the full speed of 768 Kb/s. It's kind of wierd, but it's the way the caps work.
I don't have any experience with DSL -- but it wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way.
Of course, I'll have it today, thanks to the goat blowing effectiveness of bittorrent. It's already 6% done. Not too bad for something that won't even be available via ftp for days.
It all started with a ebay auction when the seller got a email from a dude who wanted to scam him. It was a normal setup and it went horribly wrong... for the scammer. This has turned from a awful plight for a ebay user to a wonderful prank on the scammer. Throw in some crazy brits with digicams and you have the making of a great story.
Or were you looking for a *longer* summary?
Were it not for bittorrent, I'd be getting 0 B/s -- because it wouldn't be available at all until they loaded up all the mirrors. And once they did, I'd get about 20 B/s, as they'd all be massively overloaded for a week.
And even once the initial flood of demand has been satisfied, it scales at least as well as downloading via a web or ftp site -- and much better if two or more people are downloading. FC is popular enough that it will probably have at least two people downloading (probably many more) it at any given time until FC3 comes out.
You're wrong. People DO leave their BT clients open longer than needed to download the file. Some people do have extra bandwidth to spare, and some will leave it open just because they saw it was going to take 4 hours to download, so they went to bed and didn't come back for 10 hours.And even if they don't, it still works, because they were uploading while they were downloading.
Gigli may have been bad, but wouldn't blowing up a movie theater be overkill?
And besides, when the president is nearby, the FAA prohibits just about all flying, including R/C flying. It affects law abiding citizens far more than terrorists, but it does help protect against this extremely unlikely and ineffective attack scenario.
I guess rather than welding it they'd be using epoxy to repair? At least that's what we do with R/C planes that use carbon fiber (well, usually you replace the carbon fiber completely when it breaks -- not an option for a ship made of it.)
I certainly won't be using any of these boxes, but I can see where this would be a very good thing for the non-technical user. Unless you're one of those people who likes to borrow their neighbor's wireless network ...
Of course, it also would mean that Comcast has a database with everybody's WEP key in it somewhere -- which Comcast or the FBI/NSA/KGB/BSA/KFC/etc could use to sniff all your traffic, even that which doesn't go over the network (of course, Comcast could do that at the WAP itself, without even requring physical proximity.) And if somebody hacked into that database, it would give them a huge number of WAPs (and their addresses) that you could use with impunity -- and the encryption would even make them *seem* secure. (If a user suddenly starts spewing spam, and their WAP uses WEP, people are going to be less likely to believe that his WAP was abused.)
I wasn't sure at the time, but after asking I learned that GF1 means `GeForce 1', the original GeForce card. None of those specifications are particularly hairy (by today's standards.) Or did things just change that much between last July and now?
Now I'm just more careful about what I play :)
How dcc works: if you're sending a file, you open a listening port, then send your IP and port to the remote host via a CTCP message. The remote host connects to that IP and port, and accepts the file.
To fix the send/receive via a NAT problem, one could merely make an extension (or just a seperate sending command) where the sending machine requests that the receiving client open a host and port and then the sender connects to it. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement, but it might require that a ctcp message be sent back from the receving client. We've been talking about this for over a decade. The hardest part would be to talk the other client authors to implemenet it.
One other, less commnon problem -- that IP that is sent comes from your hostname in many cases, so on a multi-homed box it's often wrong. Here is a pseudo-fix that's just under 10 years old for ircII.
But make no mistake here -- the *only* reason one would need to avoid sending file name and size information over irc would be to avoid censorship or logging done by the irc servers. It's just metadata, and a few bytes of it -- the servers can handle it without any problems.In fact, it would be nice if the new dcc protocol (if it's ever completed and widely implemented, which I doubt, based on my experience with how irc stuff is done) could support sending small files directly through the servers with no additional TCP connections. It would be *very* slow (thanks to flood control -- perhaps 100 bytes/second tops) and would put a larger load on the servers, but it would allow two clients behind two different NATs to send files to each other when nothing else would. Wouldn't be practical for .mp3 files, but it would for .ircrc files. Of course, the server admins would hate the mere idea, and if people used it a lot they'd add code to the servers to find and block it, K-line the users, etc.