It seems you could save even more heat by underclocking a fair bit, then undervolt it a bit.
I haven't actually tried it, and I'm sure some joker who doesn't know what he is talking about will chime in here and pose as an engeneer and say it can't be done, but I really thing this will work.
You won't be able to lower the voltage much, because you'll need to meet a certain minimal signal level. OTOH, less clock means less noise, and every little bit helps.
Also consider using a notebook HDD. Quieter and cooler.
Two glaring omissions reveal your political bias. What about Somalia and Bosnia?
Oh, those, while more recent and larger in scale than most of the actions you listed, were brought to us by the Beloved Clinton.
Please see http://www.cato.org/dailys/8-11-97.html but to summarize he said that we would be out of Bosnia in one year on Nov 27, 1995. I spent Christmas of '96 there. I undersand that one year was an estimate, but there was no end in sight at that time. The kindest interpretation I can come up with is gross incompetence. An out-and-out line seems more likely. AFAIK he never fully withdrew troops. (See http://www.cnn.com/US/9511/bosnia_speech/speech.ht ml for the full transcript.)
If you are actually trying to achieve any credibility don't act as such a blatant partisan.
If I run a webbrowser as root on a Unix system, there's nothing preventing it from overwriting anything, including my bootsector. Are you saying that Unix is defective?
No the admin who does that is.
Bitching that Windows doesn't have a "sandbox" system is kind of silly because no commonly available OS has this feature. (and no, FBSD Jail doesn't cut it). Included in that is every complaint that Administrative users should be prevented from running the VBS equiv of rm -rf.
Moving to a capabilities sandbox system is a huge deal, will break tons of programs. However Microsoft is going in that direction with.NET, and they'll probably get there before Unix does.
1. I didn't say sandbox. The original example was about priveleged serviced that drop privs being able to take them back. So for instance, if you are running an anon ftp server on NT and on Linux, and they both bind the port then drop the root/admin privleges, and they both have a hole that allows a remote user to execute arbitrary commands as the ftp server the NT box is "rooted" and the Linux box is not. This has nothing to do with a "sandbox."
2. A lot of what you are talking about is available on *NIX today via ACLs. So it would seem that Windows is already beaten.
I suppose if you interpret "OS" as "kernel" you're right, but that isn't very sensible.
Windows (beyond DOS or the NT kernel) is crippled by "legacy support." Recall that the typical install of NT 4 used FAT as the filesystem. A filesystem with NO NOTION OF FILE OWNERSHIP. This IMO is an OS issue. Another example is that, as I understand it, services that drop privileges can just take those privilages back. This turns a potential DOS into a "Administrator" exploit.
MS puts just as much effort into ease of use for developers as they do for end users. Easy and secure tend to be in conflict.
Bottom line is that software has bugs, and applications can't be trusted. What the OS can control is localizing the damage. IMO the UNIX model does a far better job of this than NT/Win2k.
Another example that is from the Win9x world, but perfectly illustrates what I am saying is that there was an exploit for IE that cause the browser to overwrite the boot sector with the browsers "Favorites." It is completely the OSes fault that it gives a web browser write access to the boot sector.
Well, are they already armed. They wouldn't be doing very well as robbers otherwise.
On the other hand, I think that your general idea has merit. I am generally against entitlement programs, but I would be for spending tax dollars to arm decent people living in neighborhoods with crime problems.
Of course, I wouldn't vote for a Green just because that was on his agenda. I am, after all, not a Communist.
As a final note for anyone other than "Ralph", let me say that I disapprove of his language, use of bold, and his general trollness. I normally wouldn't have replied to this sort of thing, but, as I said, his general idea has merit.
Yes, they have the right to offer their product any why they want. But that doesn't make screwing your BEST customers (the ones that run out and by the DVD when it comes out) a good idea.
As for rent-rip-burn, "IP" is largely a steaming pile. But that aside, if the game is "Let's see how many times we can get Peter to pay to watch this movie." then I feel justified in playing "Let's see how many times I can watch this movie on one payment." That is to say, I feel like I'm being treated as a wallet, not a customer, and that they made it adversarial. That's they way they made it, I'm just playing along.
They are ignoring "free market law" and paying the penalty.
Could you point out where I said I wanted to take anything away from them? That I want to be in charge of their release process?
I'm not saying it should be illegal, I am saying that it is not a good way to relate to your customer. They are businesses, I am a customer. Their actions piss me off. That's bad business.
Now, I am making a leap trying to guess their motives from their actions, but I suspect that they do this because they know some people will buy the SAME DAMN MOVIE twice. I payed full price for the DVD, why shouldn't I get the fancy-schmancy version made from a newly restored digital master? 'Cause I fucked up and bought the DVD in the first place.
This is clearly different than wanting to use someones bathroom. I BOUGHT THE FUCKING DVD.
At some level I feel like when I buy a DVD of a movie that is >10 years old it is/should be the difinative version. The studios clearly disagree. Fine, we're back to rent-rip-burn because I, as a customer, don't feel I'm getting value when I open my wallet to the SOBs.
So, your point that it is my choice, is well taken, but was never in question.
I'm I the only one who finds the practice of releasing a "vanilla" DVD, then releasing a "extra groovy" DVD six months or a year later totally annoying?
One more reason to rent-rip-burn. Bastards.
-Peter
Re:Pretty crazy stuff
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, the primary reason would be the lack of any viruses to scan for.
It is only "crazy" to not scan for viruses from the mindset that viruses are out there. It isn't crazy to take a road trip in a car that doesn't have a spare innertube if the car uses tubeless tires.
It is also important to note that this article is not about a virus. It is about a trojan. There isn't really any way to do an automated check for unknown trojans on any platform, since the scanner can't know what the program is supposed to do in to first place to figure out if it is doing something else as well.
The question with Linux binaries is are they what they claim to be. That question is generally answered with an MD5 sum from a trusted source. This renders the case of unknown trojans moot.
Well, I'm not scientist, but I think that it is possible.
Clearly it wouldn't be practical with a chemical type (lead-acid or whatever) battery. Just off of the top of my head, what if you use the energy to heat multi-ton blocks of iron to several hundred degrees? You could boil water to drive a steam generator for days between "charges".
-Peter
Re:Why bother?
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Does it not seem better to build solar arrays in the deserts near the equator (max sunlight) and have the energy transported through a smaller distance than from the moon?
Of course we have a little thing in the way called an atmosphere.
And why is this news for nerds?
Uh, lasers, space, science (sci-fi-like at that). I'm not sure what could be nerdier.
I think that it will be much too late to complain when they "ONLY do WMA" (I presume you also mean WMV).
The complaint isn't about players supporting additional formats, or about them "suck"ing because they support WMA. It is that this smacks of another attempt by MS to take over a new chunk of the market of digital stuff. Maybe they are just trying to "participate" in it, but it is naive to think that they are going to suddenly behave differently in this market than they have in others.
This is something like the other file formats (.doc,.ppt, etc) situation. In a way it is worse, because MS has a good chance of blocking compatible systems by legal action with the audio and video formats.
To answer your question directly, I care.
Oh, and VCD is an MP* format. (In exactly the same way that DVD is an MP* format. Namely, there is a separate standard for how the files are managed, but the data files are MPEG.)
A "normal" CFS would be transparent to rsync, no problem there.
The problem is that if the system can read it how can you stop root from reading it? Clearly you can't.
It could, I suppose, be "write only" in theory (i.e. use public key encryption and give your friends server only your public key.) but you wouldn't be able to "update" it, only add too it. IOW, rsync needs read-write, write only will break it.
So, I'm pretty confident that you either have to trust your friend (don't get me wrong, this is a totally viable option), or scp entire encrypted dumps. (scp just to protect your password in this case)
Oh, I just thought of a bigger problem. Even if you do get some perfect filesystem that can't be read by root you still won't have a secure system. Think about this:
scp->friend's server->CFS
oops! It is encrypted in transit to your friend's server, and on the disk, but there is a middle step that could be hijacked. There are plenty of validation schemes to defend against this, but I think they are all worthless against root on the correct destination server.
you may be able to figure out a way to encrypt the volume if you don't trust your friends.
I rarely use the word impossible, but I think this is. He, presumably, is root. The system has to write to the disk . . . I don't see how to overcome this.
OTOH, you could encrypt the files prior to transmission. This creates the new problems that 1. the efficiency of rsync is lost unless you do some kind of "chunky" encryption and 2. there is no obvious way to do this.
I guess you could use dump to do a full backup periodically, then encrypt and upload that, then do incremental dumps nightly and encrypt and upload that. Not pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems you could save even more heat by underclocking a fair bit, then undervolt it a bit.
I haven't actually tried it, and I'm sure some joker who doesn't know what he is talking about will chime in here and pose as an engeneer and say it can't be done, but I really thing this will work.
You won't be able to lower the voltage much, because you'll need to meet a certain minimal signal level. OTOH, less clock means less noise, and every little bit helps.
Also consider using a notebook HDD. Quieter and cooler.
Good luck!
-Peter
Beware the Barricade! It can ONLY be configured with MSIE!
:-(
:-(
I have tried Konq, Mozilla, Links and Lynx.
Lynx is able to do about 20% of the config stuff. The rest, none.
Thankfully my current roomate has a windows box. Don't know what I'm going to do when I move
And yes, I am on the latest firmware.
Apparently the serial port can be used for out-of-band management, but this is no help since it is my WAN side. No broadband where I live
Otherwise, it is a kick-ass piece of hardware.
-Peter
Well, you'll be pleased to know that I was modded up twice and down twice, and lost a point of karma in the process, due to the cap.
:-P
Hope this helps you sleep tonight.
-Peter
PS: This is off-topic, so I deserve to burn three more points on this post.
-P
don't most P2P systems use . . . HTTP as a transport?
-Peter
I think that:
#chgrp fine-honeys
#chmod 770 *
would be better.
-Peter
Two glaring omissions reveal your political bias. What about Somalia and Bosnia?
t ml for the full transcript.)
Oh, those, while more recent and larger in scale than most of the actions you listed, were brought to us by the Beloved Clinton.
Please see http://www.cato.org/dailys/8-11-97.html but to summarize he said that we would be out of Bosnia in one year on Nov 27, 1995. I spent Christmas of '96 there. I undersand that one year was an estimate, but there was no end in sight at that time. The kindest interpretation I can come up with is gross incompetence. An out-and-out line seems more likely. AFAIK he never fully withdrew troops. (See http://www.cnn.com/US/9511/bosnia_speech/speech.h
If you are actually trying to achieve any credibility don't act as such a blatant partisan.
-Peter
It would be nice if there was a Cringely slashbox so the editors wouldn't feel compelled to post a front page story almost every week.
I guess Sundays are slow anyway. *shrug*
-Peter
Odd that you can't spell "Excel" . . .
Anyway, I read what you have said as "They walked into vendor lock-in with both eyes open."
What is your point?
-Peter
If I run a webbrowser as root on a Unix system, there's nothing preventing it from overwriting anything, including my bootsector. Are you saying that Unix is defective?
.NET, and they'll probably get there before Unix does.
No the admin who does that is.
Bitching that Windows doesn't have a "sandbox" system is kind of silly because no commonly available OS has this feature. (and no, FBSD Jail doesn't cut it). Included in that is every complaint that Administrative users should be prevented from running the VBS equiv of rm -rf.
Moving to a capabilities sandbox system is a huge deal, will break tons of programs. However Microsoft is going in that direction with
1. I didn't say sandbox. The original example was about priveleged serviced that drop privs being able to take them back. So for instance, if you are running an anon ftp server on NT and on Linux, and they both bind the port then drop the root/admin privleges, and they both have a hole that allows a remote user to execute arbitrary commands as the ftp server the NT box is "rooted" and the Linux box is not. This has nothing to do with a "sandbox."
2. A lot of what you are talking about is available on *NIX today via ACLs. So it would seem that Windows is already beaten.
-Peter
You are dead wrong.
I suppose if you interpret "OS" as "kernel" you're right, but that isn't very sensible.
Windows (beyond DOS or the NT kernel) is crippled by "legacy support." Recall that the typical install of NT 4 used FAT as the filesystem. A filesystem with NO NOTION OF FILE OWNERSHIP. This IMO is an OS issue. Another example is that, as I understand it, services that drop privileges can just take those privilages back. This turns a potential DOS into a "Administrator" exploit.
MS puts just as much effort into ease of use for developers as they do for end users. Easy and secure tend to be in conflict.
Bottom line is that software has bugs, and applications can't be trusted. What the OS can control is localizing the damage. IMO the UNIX model does a far better job of this than NT/Win2k.
Another example that is from the Win9x world, but perfectly illustrates what I am saying is that there was an exploit for IE that cause the browser to overwrite the boot sector with the browsers "Favorites." It is completely the OSes fault that it gives a web browser write access to the boot sector.
-Peter
Eventually, he would need only one key.
Would it be labeled "Any"?
Anyway, I hope you are trying to be funny, because I can't think of a less efficient way to type than having the keys move around on you.
-Peter
Well, are they already armed. They wouldn't be doing very well as robbers otherwise.
On the other hand, I think that your general idea has merit. I am generally against entitlement programs, but I would be for spending tax dollars to arm decent people living in neighborhoods with crime problems.
Of course, I wouldn't vote for a Green just because that was on his agenda. I am, after all, not a Communist.
As a final note for anyone other than "Ralph", let me say that I disapprove of his language, use of bold, and his general trollness. I normally wouldn't have replied to this sort of thing, but, as I said, his general idea has merit.
-Peter
No, that's what the GNU Free Documentation License is for.
That's why they use the words software and program in the GPL
You're still missing the point.
Yes, they have the right to offer their product any why they want. But that doesn't make screwing your BEST customers (the ones that run out and by the DVD when it comes out) a good idea.
As for rent-rip-burn, "IP" is largely a steaming pile. But that aside, if the game is "Let's see how many times we can get Peter to pay to watch this movie." then I feel justified in playing "Let's see how many times I can watch this movie on one payment." That is to say, I feel like I'm being treated as a wallet, not a customer, and that they made it adversarial. That's they way they made it, I'm just playing along.
They are ignoring "free market law" and paying the penalty.
-Peter
Could you point out where I said I wanted to take anything away from them? That I want to be in charge of their release process?
I'm not saying it should be illegal, I am saying that it is not a good way to relate to your customer. They are businesses, I am a customer. Their actions piss me off. That's bad business.
Now, I am making a leap trying to guess their motives from their actions, but I suspect that they do this because they know some people will buy the SAME DAMN MOVIE twice. I payed full price for the DVD, why shouldn't I get the fancy-schmancy version made from a newly restored digital master? 'Cause I fucked up and bought the DVD in the first place.
This is clearly different than wanting to use someones bathroom. I BOUGHT THE FUCKING DVD.
At some level I feel like when I buy a DVD of a movie that is >10 years old it is/should be the difinative version. The studios clearly disagree. Fine, we're back to rent-rip-burn because I, as a customer, don't feel I'm getting value when I open my wallet to the SOBs.
So, your point that it is my choice, is well taken, but was never in question.
-Peter
I'm I the only one who finds the practice of releasing a "vanilla" DVD, then releasing a "extra groovy" DVD six months or a year later totally annoying?
One more reason to rent-rip-burn. Bastards.
-Peter
Well, the primary reason would be the lack of any viruses to scan for.
It is only "crazy" to not scan for viruses from the mindset that viruses are out there. It isn't crazy to take a road trip in a car that doesn't have a spare innertube if the car uses tubeless tires.
It is also important to note that this article is not about a virus. It is about a trojan. There isn't really any way to do an automated check for unknown trojans on any platform, since the scanner can't know what the program is supposed to do in to first place to figure out if it is doing something else as well.
The question with Linux binaries is are they what they claim to be. That question is generally answered with an MD5 sum from a trusted source. This renders the case of unknown trojans moot.
-Peter
Some (most?) sunlight makes it through. A much lower percentage of solar radiation (less than half?) makes it through.
So, would you rather have twenty percent of a little or a lot?
-Peter
Well, I'm not scientist, but I think that it is possible.
Clearly it wouldn't be practical with a chemical type (lead-acid or whatever) battery. Just off of the top of my head, what if you use the energy to heat multi-ton blocks of iron to several hundred degrees? You could boil water to drive a steam generator for days between "charges".
-Peter
Does it not seem better to build solar arrays in the deserts near the equator (max sunlight) and have the energy transported through a smaller distance than from the moon?
Of course we have a little thing in the way called an atmosphere.
And why is this news for nerds?
Uh, lasers, space, science (sci-fi-like at that). I'm not sure what could be nerdier.
-Peter
Hmm, the first BOFH immediately follows the first AOL post.
.".
Coincidence? You decide.
-Peter
PS: Please feel free to not post "BOFH is about an operator, and since you obviously don't even know what a real computer was in those days . .
-P
I think that it will be much too late to complain when they "ONLY do WMA" (I presume you also mean WMV).
.ppt, etc) situation. In a way it is worse, because MS has a good chance of blocking compatible systems by legal action with the audio and video formats.
The complaint isn't about players supporting additional formats, or about them "suck"ing because they support WMA. It is that this smacks of another attempt by MS to take over a new chunk of the market of digital stuff. Maybe they are just trying to "participate" in it, but it is naive to think that they are going to suddenly behave differently in this market than they have in others.
This is something like the other file formats (.doc,
To answer your question directly, I care.
Oh, and VCD is an MP* format. (In exactly the same way that DVD is an MP* format. Namely, there is a separate standard for how the files are managed, but the data files are MPEG.)
-Peter
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but . . .
A "normal" CFS would be transparent to rsync, no problem there.
The problem is that if the system can read it how can you stop root from reading it? Clearly you can't.
It could, I suppose, be "write only" in theory (i.e. use public key encryption and give your friends server only your public key.) but you wouldn't be able to "update" it, only add too it. IOW, rsync needs read-write, write only will break it.
So, I'm pretty confident that you either have to trust your friend (don't get me wrong, this is a totally viable option), or scp entire encrypted dumps. (scp just to protect your password in this case)
Oh, I just thought of a bigger problem. Even if you do get some perfect filesystem that can't be read by root you still won't have a secure system. Think about this:
scp->friend's server->CFS
oops! It is encrypted in transit to your friend's server, and on the disk, but there is a middle step that could be hijacked. There are plenty of validation schemes to defend against this, but I think they are all worthless against root on the correct destination server.
-Peter
you may be able to figure out a way to encrypt the volume if you don't trust your friends.
I rarely use the word impossible, but I think this is. He, presumably, is root. The system has to write to the disk . . . I don't see how to overcome this.
OTOH, you could encrypt the files prior to transmission. This creates the new problems that 1. the efficiency of rsync is lost unless you do some kind of "chunky" encryption and 2. there is no obvious way to do this.
I guess you could use dump to do a full backup periodically, then encrypt and upload that, then do incremental dumps nightly and encrypt and upload that. Not pretty.
-Peter
RAID (even RAID1) is not backup, it is fault-tolerance.
The difference becomes clear when you say ">" when you mean ">>"!
-Peter