It seems to me that a clever outlook worm, i.e. one that attached itself to valid outgoing attachments, could infect a large number of machines and simply begin making valid http requests to a few servers could be sufficient.. Enough machines requesting enough data will drop any connection to it's knees..
There are a number of apps that have been dong this for a long time.. Stuff-it Deluxe for example would check the local Appletalk network for multiple copies of the app during the install..
Uh, Cringely, wouldn't creating the thing and then using it as the subject of an article for the company that employs you count as a commercial purpose?
You don't really expect QNX to bitch about a little free advertising do you?..
nor are there substitues for the iApps (simple, but still extremely funcitonal consumer-level apps)
Have you taken a look at the Applescript functionality of the iApps? I'd be surprised if there was much that you could do with any of the Linux or Windows apps that you couldn't do with the iApps and Applesscript..
What is the problem with a script accessing the address book?
Before flaming me, think about what you're asking.. The address book for Eudora (for example) is a text file! I can write an applescript that accesses the information in the test file without ever talking to Eudora. What will disabling address book support do besides removing a feature that might be very useful (for example, a script that filters your incoming mail according to your address book)..
You don't need to reflect 100% of the energy! You only need to relect enough energy that destroying your missile requires more energy than your opponent has the ability to deliver..
The laser will be illuminating a fairly small area on the missile casing. The big problems are: Will burning a hole in the side to the missile destroy it? and if so, where does that hole have to be located?
Take the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.. The booster rocket was pushing hot gas through a hole in the side of the casing, and even after the booster rocket was jetisoned from the external fuel tank it continued to fly relatively straight for miles before being destroyed by mission control. Read that again.. The booster casing which was under phenomenal internal and compressive loads did not explode or really even change course with a hole in the side of its structure.. So what makes us think that burning holes in missiles will destroy them?
From what I've read the idea of the Air Force's Airborne Laser program was to hit missiles as they were launching and the cases were still under a compressive load.. In this scenerio, weakening the structure MAY result in a buckling of the case in a manner similar to applying a small dent to a soda can under compression..
Yep.. You're missing density variations and laser induced heating of the local atmosphere. Both of which will degrade the power of your beam, and complicate aiming the device. The Air Forces Airborne laser program attempted to solve these using a pair of low power lasers to sample the atmosphere and track the object. Given the information from the low power lasers, the optics for the primary laser could be corrected to hit the target. I'm not sure they ever got the system to work, but I seem to recall the power of the beam to be roughly equivilent to 30 ocyacetylin (sp?) torches focused on a single point.. There was a lot of speculation in the articles I read, suggesting that the laser power would be attenuated by some staggering amount by the atmosphere, and the chances for success were considered minimal by some of the scientists working on the project..
If the interface on the client is so horrible, find an undergraduate CS major taking a software design class and having him help you build your own!!! Quicktime is a programming API... The client is just an app that passes calls the API.. Have you ever used a Mac? If you have one available, or can find one to sit down in front of for a few minutes, pop open something like SimpleText and open a movie.. SimpleText will call the Quicktime API and have it play the movie within the SimpleText window.. Then pop open iCab.. iCab is happy as a clam letting Quicktime render images and movies..
The point is, that there's no reason a simple, bare-bones, client couldn't be written that supports playlists, and windows 3.0 type dialog boxes..
As for the 99% cpu at double size option; all I can say is Wow!.. I just popped open one of large pixar trailers on my B&W G3 450 with 64MB RAM and at double size it used about 10% of the cpu at 12.25 fps, and at some size (non-integer scaling) greater than 200% it only used less than 15% of the cycles.. Huh..
Now, for all the naysayers and trolls out there who can't see how this could possibly work I want you to stop and think for a second!!.. You're not going to glue these things onto the outside of your stock exhaust system. You're going to design a new exhaust system that incorporates this technology AND hopefully optimizes the waste heat recovery without increasing the accoustic and chemical emmissions or reducing performance. How would that be done?
Well you want to begin by increasing the surface roughness on the inside of the exhaust piping to increase the surface area and thin the boundary layer which will increase the convective heat transfer coefficient. Okay, so now we have a heat exchanger that should remove heat from the exhaust stream at a greater rate than previously, however, the penalty for this is an increased pressure drop and a non-optimal inlet temperature for the catalytic converter. So, you reduce the length of the piping prior to the catalytic converter and possible increase the diameter of the piping.. Better yet, because the typical catalytic converter sold by Corning produces a huge pressure drop, why not design a nice smooth diffuser with some internal fins that trades the separation induced pressure drop developed within Corning's catalytic converter for one that results in improved heat recovery.. The point to all this is that there are a lot of design changes that will probably need to be made, but there's no reason why recoverying waste heat to improve efficiency should be considered impossible or even difficult.. Given a particular TEG, the design optimization problem is something a senior mechanical engineering student should be able to sort out in a week or two..
Who needs another power sucking electronic gadget, when you can pick up a fat burning mechanical work of art?
I finally cracked the mountain bike frame I brazed together 6 years ago.. So, while I work up the next one, I decided to pick up one of these little numbers... It's not steel, and it's a bit heavier than ride I'm used to, but what the heck, right? The addition of rear suspension will be nice with the ground beginning to freeze..
The FBI doesn't need to send anything to their servers! In fact it'd be really silly to do so.. They can simply mail the log file to gotchauterroristpunk@[your ISP] and then simply let their carnivore boxes search for keywords or phrases.. This would minimize the opportunity for DOS problems and get around some of the firewalls also..
It seems to me that the best way to distribute something like this would be to integrate it into Windows XP.. Just let Microsoft ship it with every new copy sold.. Then let XP distribute it to other, possibly older, machines on its local area network..
"an interactive projection system designed to enrich the experience of going to bed,..."
Now maybe I'm just old fashion, but the way I see it, we already have something that enriches the experience of going to bed. They're called girls! Going to bed is much nicer when you've got a soft skinned hard body to curl up next to..
Think about cpu's made of cheap gold rather than aluminum, or copper. If the cost of gold is reduced making it possible to improve the energy efficiency of certain devices, then we need to measure it's value in terms of the cost of the energy saved rather than the cost of the raw material..
Uhm.. Not all tunnels are loud. I imagine this tunnel is only running at 10-20mph.. At those speeds the aeroaccoustic noise should be very minimal (Noise is proportional to Velocity^4).. Assuming the motor is sized correctly, well balanced, and turning an aerodynamically clean fan, the noise levels should be very small in the test section..
I'm actually surprised they decided to use a closed loop facility for a study like this. The cost of a closed loop facility is roughly 2.5 times the cost of an open loop facility (all those turning vanes should be airfoils) and there are air exchange issues to deal with..
don't see these things taking off for most uses because the PCI bus is limited to a measly 133 MB/S. Even newer 64 bit PCI slots found in some servers have insignifigant bandwidth to keep the data flowing fast enough to make full use of these things.
You've heard of Beowolf clusters, right?
Let's imagine I'm running some large routine to model some physical phenomena.. Depending on the problem, it is often possible to split the computational domain into small chunks and then pass only the elements along the interfaces between nodes.. So, how does that impact this discussion? Well, let's assume I can break up an NxM grid onto four subdomains. The communication from each node will consist of N+M elements (not NxM).. Now, let's take a look at our options. I can either purchase 4 machines with gigabit (~1000Mb/s) ethernet, Myranet (~200Mb/s) cards, or maybe I can use ip-over-firewire (~400Mb/s) to communicate between machines.. Gigabit ethernet has some latency problems that are answered by Myranet, but if we just look at the bandwidth issue, then ~1000Mb/s is roughly 125MB/s. That's slower than the 133MB/s you quoted above for a 32bit, 33MHz PCI bus.. Of course there are motherboards out there that support 64bit, 66MHz PCI cards (such as these from TotalImpact)..
You're right that the PCI bus is not as fast as the data io approaches use by IBM, Sun, SGI, etc to feed their processors. BUT, if I'm deciding between one machine sitting in the corner crunching numbers, or 4 machines sitting in the corner talking slowly to each other through an expensive gigabit ethernet switch, guess which system I'm going to look at?
Re:Doesn't seems like a bad deal after all
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 2
For the last time, the client (without any editing features) is free! If you want to CREATE or EDIT any movies (for example assemble a collection of images into a sorensen 3 encoded movie) then you need to pay $30.. I imagine that's probably because the encoding portion of many codec are liscensed for a fee, while the decoding portion is generally liscensed for free. So, in summary, Apple is charging for the editting features to cover the costs that they incur in liscensing fees..
Let me guess. You're sitting in front of a Linux box and have never used quicktime.. Right?
The Quicktime Player you download from Apple contains ALL the codecs they support (even the exotic ones like Sorensen 3).. if you have a Windows or Mac around download a copy of Quicktime 5, click the later button (you haven't registered anything), and try to take a look at any of the movie trailers on Apple's page. If you can watch them you're using the decoding portion of the Sorensen CODEC..
These chemistry movies are encoded using the Sorensen Codec, which it unfortunately not supported by the free quicktime versions.
WRONG!!
The Quicktime API allows for the decoding of all formats supported regardless of whether you're using the free client or the registered Pro version. The restrictions that Apple places on their software falls into the authoring catagory. You can watch anything, but until you register, you can not encode your DV stream, or mpeg clip as a Sorensen movie.
Very interesting, yes, but it reminds me a lot of the meetings with my CEO that start with the words "I've had a really exciting new idea, and your guys are all going to be really excited about it..."
*grin*... I completely understand the time and research problems involved in doing this right. I'm not suggesting that a voice2text utility would be as easy to construct.. I'm merely tossing this idea out there for the/. readers to ponder..
Slashdot Mirror
Why do the DDoS attacks need to be spoofed?
It seems to me that a clever outlook worm, i.e. one that attached itself to valid outgoing attachments, could infect a large number of machines and simply begin making valid http requests to a few servers could be sufficient.. Enough machines requesting enough data will drop any connection to it's knees..
There are a number of apps that have been dong this for a long time.. Stuff-it Deluxe for example would check the local Appletalk network for multiple copies of the app during the install..
Uh, Cringely, wouldn't creating the thing and then using it as the subject of an article for the company that employs you count as a commercial purpose?
You don't really expect QNX to bitch about a little free advertising do you?..
Just a quick comment:
nor are there substitues for the iApps (simple, but still extremely funcitonal consumer-level apps)
Have you taken a look at the Applescript functionality of the iApps? I'd be surprised if there was much that you could do with any of the Linux or Windows apps that you couldn't do with the iApps and Applesscript..
What is the problem with a script accessing the address book?
Before flaming me, think about what you're asking.. The address book for Eudora (for example) is a text file! I can write an applescript that accesses the information in the test file without ever talking to Eudora. What will disabling address book support do besides removing a feature that might be very useful (for example, a script that filters your incoming mail according to your address book)..
You don't need to reflect 100% of the energy! You only need to relect enough energy that destroying your missile requires more energy than your opponent has the ability to deliver..
The laser will be illuminating a fairly small area on the missile casing. The big problems are: Will burning a hole in the side to the missile destroy it? and if so, where does that hole have to be located?
Take the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.. The booster rocket was pushing hot gas through a hole in the side of the casing, and even after the booster rocket was jetisoned from the external fuel tank it continued to fly relatively straight for miles before being destroyed by mission control. Read that again.. The booster casing which was under phenomenal internal and compressive loads did not explode or really even change course with a hole in the side of its structure.. So what makes us think that burning holes in missiles will destroy them?
From what I've read the idea of the Air Force's Airborne Laser program was to hit missiles as they were launching and the cases were still under a compressive load.. In this scenerio, weakening the structure MAY result in a buckling of the case in a manner similar to applying a small dent to a soda can under compression..
Am i forgetting something here?
Yep.. You're missing density variations and laser induced heating of the local atmosphere. Both of which will degrade the power of your beam, and complicate aiming the device. The Air Forces Airborne laser program attempted to solve these using a pair of low power lasers to sample the atmosphere and track the object. Given the information from the low power lasers, the optics for the primary laser could be corrected to hit the target. I'm not sure they ever got the system to work, but I seem to recall the power of the beam to be roughly equivilent to 30 ocyacetylin (sp?) torches focused on a single point.. There was a lot of speculation in the articles I read, suggesting that the laser power would be attenuated by some staggering amount by the atmosphere, and the chances for success were considered minimal by some of the scientists working on the project..
Well, here I go.. Feeding the trolls again..
If the interface on the client is so horrible, find an undergraduate CS major taking a software design class and having him help you build your own!!! Quicktime is a programming API... The client is just an app that passes calls the API.. Have you ever used a Mac? If you have one available, or can find one to sit down in front of for a few minutes, pop open something like SimpleText and open a movie.. SimpleText will call the Quicktime API and have it play the movie within the SimpleText window.. Then pop open iCab.. iCab is happy as a clam letting Quicktime render images and movies..
The point is, that there's no reason a simple, bare-bones, client couldn't be written that supports playlists, and windows 3.0 type dialog boxes..
As for the 99% cpu at double size option; all I can say is Wow!.. I just popped open one of large pixar trailers on my B&W G3 450 with 64MB RAM and at double size it used about 10% of the cpu at 12.25 fps, and at some size (non-integer scaling) greater than 200% it only used less than 15% of the cycles.. Huh..
Agreed!
Now, for all the naysayers and trolls out there who can't see how this could possibly work I want you to stop and think for a second!!.. You're not going to glue these things onto the outside of your stock exhaust system. You're going to design a new exhaust system that incorporates this technology AND hopefully optimizes the waste heat recovery without increasing the accoustic and chemical emmissions or reducing performance. How would that be done?
Well you want to begin by increasing the surface roughness on the inside of the exhaust piping to increase the surface area and thin the boundary layer which will increase the convective heat transfer coefficient. Okay, so now we have a heat exchanger that should remove heat from the exhaust stream at a greater rate than previously, however, the penalty for this is an increased pressure drop and a non-optimal inlet temperature for the catalytic converter. So, you reduce the length of the piping prior to the catalytic converter and possible increase the diameter of the piping.. Better yet, because the typical catalytic converter sold by Corning produces a huge pressure drop, why not design a nice smooth diffuser with some internal fins that trades the separation induced pressure drop developed within Corning's catalytic converter for one that results in improved heat recovery.. The point to all this is that there are a lot of design changes that will probably need to be made, but there's no reason why recoverying waste heat to improve efficiency should be considered impossible or even difficult.. Given a particular TEG, the design optimization problem is something a senior mechanical engineering student should be able to sort out in a week or two..
Who needs another power sucking electronic gadget, when you can pick up a fat burning mechanical work of art?
I finally cracked the mountain bike frame I brazed together 6 years ago.. So, while I work up the next one, I decided to pick up one of these little numbers... It's not steel, and it's a bit heavier than ride I'm used to, but what the heck, right? The addition of rear suspension will be nice with the ground beginning to freeze..
The FBI doesn't need to send anything to their servers! In fact it'd be really silly to do so.. They can simply mail the log file to gotchauterroristpunk@[your ISP] and then simply let their carnivore boxes search for keywords or phrases.. This would minimize the opportunity for DOS problems and get around some of the firewalls also..
It seems to me that the best way to distribute something like this would be to integrate it into Windows XP.. Just let Microsoft ship it with every new copy sold.. Then let XP distribute it to other, possibly older, machines on its local area network..
"an interactive projection system designed to enrich the experience of going to bed,..."
Now maybe I'm just old fashion, but the way I see it, we already have something that enriches the experience of going to bed. They're called girls! Going to bed is much nicer when you've got a soft skinned hard body to curl up next to..
Think about cpu's made of cheap gold rather than aluminum, or copper. If the cost of gold is reduced making it possible to improve the energy efficiency of certain devices, then we need to measure it's value in terms of the cost of the energy saved rather than the cost of the raw material..
Possibly.. But the Wisconsin cheese lobbyists will never stand for it...
Uhm.. Not all tunnels are loud. I imagine this tunnel is only running at 10-20mph.. At those speeds the aeroaccoustic noise should be very minimal (Noise is proportional to Velocity^4).. Assuming the motor is sized correctly, well balanced, and turning an aerodynamically clean fan, the noise levels should be very small in the test section..
I'm actually surprised they decided to use a closed loop facility for a study like this. The cost of a closed loop facility is roughly 2.5 times the cost of an open loop facility (all those turning vanes should be airfoils) and there are air exchange issues to deal with..
interesting project though.
Only LONELY geeks program in Hex or assembly!
Real Men code in C++, Java, Fortran, or Objective C, get the necessary job done, then go home to f*ck the prom queen!
Here's a link to OmniWeb
on Mac OS X checking the speeling of a post as it's typed.
How about we paint the external fuel tank to look a big trojan condom? .. Or atleast a couple cans of coke..
don't see these things taking off for most uses because the PCI bus is limited to a measly 133 MB/S. Even newer 64 bit PCI slots found in some servers have insignifigant bandwidth to keep the data flowing fast enough to make full use of these things.
You've heard of Beowolf clusters, right?
Let's imagine I'm running some large routine to model some physical phenomena.. Depending on the problem, it is often possible to split the computational domain into small chunks and then pass only the elements along the interfaces between nodes.. So, how does that impact this discussion? Well, let's assume I can break up an NxM grid onto four subdomains. The communication from each node will consist of N+M elements (not NxM).. Now, let's take a look at our options. I can either purchase 4 machines with gigabit (~1000Mb/s) ethernet, Myranet (~200Mb/s) cards, or maybe I can use ip-over-firewire (~400Mb/s) to communicate between machines.. Gigabit ethernet has some latency problems that are answered by Myranet, but if we just look at the bandwidth issue, then ~1000Mb/s is roughly 125MB/s. That's slower than the 133MB/s you quoted above for a 32bit, 33MHz PCI bus.. Of course there are motherboards out there that support 64bit, 66MHz PCI cards (such as these from TotalImpact)..
You're right that the PCI bus is not as fast as the data io approaches use by IBM, Sun, SGI, etc to feed their processors. BUT, if I'm deciding between one machine sitting in the corner crunching numbers, or 4 machines sitting in the corner talking slowly to each other through an expensive gigabit ethernet switch, guess which system I'm going to look at?
For the last time, the client (without any editing features) is free! If you want to CREATE or EDIT any movies (for example assemble a collection of images into a sorensen 3 encoded movie) then you need to pay $30.. I imagine that's probably because the encoding portion of many codec are liscensed for a fee, while the decoding portion is generally liscensed for free. So, in summary, Apple is charging for the editting features to cover the costs that they incur in liscensing fees..
Let me guess. You're sitting in front of a Linux box and have never used quicktime.. Right?
The Quicktime Player you download from Apple contains ALL the codecs they support (even the exotic ones like Sorensen 3).. if you have a Windows or Mac around download a copy of Quicktime 5, click the later button (you haven't registered anything), and try to take a look at any of the movie trailers on Apple's page. If you can watch them you're using the decoding portion of the Sorensen CODEC..
These chemistry movies are encoded using the Sorensen Codec, which it unfortunately not supported by the free quicktime versions.
WRONG!!
The Quicktime API allows for the decoding of all formats supported regardless of whether you're using the free client or the registered Pro version. The restrictions that Apple places on their software falls into the authoring catagory. You can watch anything, but until you register, you can not encode your DV stream, or mpeg clip as a Sorensen movie.
You're right. The audio track is encoded using the QDesign Music 2 codec
Very interesting, yes, but it reminds me a lot of the meetings with my CEO that start with the words "I've had a really exciting new idea, and your guys are all going to be really excited about it..."
*grin* ... I completely understand the time and research problems involved in doing this right. I'm not suggesting that a voice2text utility would be as easy to construct.. I'm merely tossing this idea out there for the /. readers to ponder..