Are you sure it's really syncing? How often? (I'm sitting here with my laptop and cell phone disagreeing on time by more than a minute, which is annoying because the laptop is supposed to be syncing time to something accurate...)
"Fetching the time via the web" is using NTP or SNTP to get time from better clocks. The article says that NTP is at best getting you millisecond accuracy, and claims RADclock can get to microsecond level.
It's annoying that manufacturers are gratuitously incompatible with each other. It's really convenient to have one power brick at work and one at home, so I only need to drag one along if I'm traveling somewhere, and there's no reason it needs to be a $90 fancy proprietary brick as opposed to a $10 generic brick.
I'm sure there's some technical reason that laptop makers keep increasing the voltages they use rather than increasing the available current at the old voltage - my current Dell wants 19. 5v, and my previous IBM wanted 20. But it really would be nice to have 12 volts again, so I could power the laptop from my car, or my portable car jump-starter battery, or from those 12-volt solar panels, as opposed to my current combination of 12Vdc-to-120Vac inverter and laptop power cord. You might want a surge protector in line, to avoid problems when you're starting you car, but you shouldn't need more than that.
(Insert some lame joke about how YOU can have POWER over Ethernets, bwahaha, or about how in Soviet Russia, Ethernets power You.....)
PoE only provides 15.4 watts - it's not enough. And you end up needing a bunch of power equipment back in the switching room anyway, which you're buying at Cisco prices instead of No-Name-Netbook mfr prices, and if you've got PoE on your desk, it's because they've talked your boss into buying an IP Phone, which already wants that power.
My work laptops for the last N years were Toshibas and IBMs, and both used a cheap 2-prong cord to feed the power brick. You could buy them for $2 or so at Fry's as "Panasonic boom-box power cords", and it meant that I could leave them permanently plugged in under my desks at work and home, carry a couple of spares in my car and briefcase, occasionally forget one at a hotel or customer site and not care, etc. And most of the bricks that didn't sue that cord have used the (US) standard NEMA cords that all other computer equipment uses. (Now I've got a Dell at work, which uses a three-prong cord, and I haven't found a cheap source yet, but between enlightened equipment policies and incompetent repair people, I've got a couple of extra power bricks, so I don't need to carry them around very often.)
But no, a standardized power supply would only be expensive if it's using some specialized Intellectual Property, i.e. if they pay Apple enough to use the cool magnetic coupler. Otherwise there's no reason they won't be sold for $5 by no-name Chinese companies, and if they're more expensive because they're oversized, they'll still only be $10.
Back in the early 90s, a friend of mine used to keep his computers in the kitchen pantry, next to the stove, and run long cables into the living room for the monitors and keyboards. It let him keep things quieter, back when PCs were loud and some Sun machines were very loud, and he didn't bake very often anyway...
Definitely you can do that - the problem you run into is the tradeoff between block size and storage efficiency, because you lose space at the end of a block of data. And you care about it more on small expensive disks than on big cheap ones. Some file systems deal with this by having two different block sizes, the smaller one used for frags, but even so, the bigger the big block size, the more you lose. However, I'd expect Apple to do a better job of tuning their file systems to the media type than Windows does.
Techshop is a shared-equipment workspace in Menlo Park CA, with a few other branches (they're opening in San Francisco this summer.) I was there welding a couple of weeks ago, and ran into a friend of mine who was doing a project in the laser cutter room, and the people working on the other laser cutter were Knuth and his wife. (I refrained from walking over and saying "Hi, I'm Joe Fanboi, I used your books 30 years ago!".) Techshop has laser cutters, embroidering machines, 3D printers, and plasma cutters, and here's Knuth's latest project supporting them. I wonder if he's got any plans for controlling CNC milling machines and routers?
I'd say the "identifying where a bottle of water is from" part may have some scientific validity. Assuming that the isotope ratios in the oxygen molecules in your blood match the water you're drinking is more dubious - you're also breathing air, which may have different ratios, plus your body would also be exchanging liquids between cells and bloodstream, so there's a long slow storage period. How that relates by the time the stuff gets out to your hair is even more speculative. The real question is how much was speculation by the scientists, and how much by the reporter.
But yeah, terrorists are going to start drinking bottled water, and the real trick is that you'll be able to identify terrorists by all the water bottles in the trash. Or, wait, was that terrorists or tourists? Hard to tell the difference sometimes...
It won't cause significant interference if nobody's on it very often, or if you live somewhere that the airwaves aren't overcrowded. Either run it unencrypted, or use encryption but set the SSID to "Password = guest" and be nice to the people who can't just log in to "linksys" any more.
Literature searching can be really hard, because algorithms don't necessarily fit well into Google queries, even if you do have an online system that has the relevant kinds of papers in it. It's tough enough if you've got a problem you're trying to solve, but tougher if you're trying to demonstrate non-existence of a specific solution.
1) File for a patent 2) Get the idea stolen by $LARGE_CORP 3) $LARGE_CORP files for a patent 4) $LARGE_CORP sues you for infringement 5) Kick their ass in court 6) Profit!
Worked well for a friend of mine. I may have some details wrong, and I'm not sure the dates that the patents got approved, and it may have been that he wrote a paper first, got it stolen, then filed, or something. Anyway, he invented something, they did something similar and sued, he had the prior art, then he had a nice house. Not bad for a grad student.
It's not just the jack they don't want to use, it's the UART and the bits of Southbridge that support all of that stuff. Easier for them just to stick it all on USB.
Yes, that was a typo, thanks. Still haven't seen one in the stores that could do that with AGP, but maybe nobody had that geforce version around (and if they did, it was probably more expensive than a motherboard.)
I suppose there probably are SATA optical drives, and it might make more sense to buy one of them rather than using one of the several IDE ones I've got lying around.
I'm thinking specifically of Spamhaus's SBL/ROKSO stuff, which is identifying actual spammers from spammy behaviour, which they documented well enough for lawsuits they might have wanted to defend (as opposed to this one where they screwed up their jurisdictional argument.) If somebody was on their RBL, they belonged there, and I'd trust their list enough to not bother accepting SMTP sessions from anybody on it.
The original MAPS RBL was a bit heavy-handed at times, but got people's attention and generally got problems fixed. SORBS may have changed by now, but at least for quite a while it was a cannon where a sledgehammer would have done, and it was pretty much guaranteed to produce false positives, because it blasted any ISP that ever got caught with a spammer, and sometimes collateral damage around them too, so legitimate users who made a poor choice of ISP could get flagged; that's fine for triggering a greylist or adding some weight to SpamAssassin, or especially for fancier mail-handling complexes to use to direct traffic to a mostly-spam-handling mail server that gets overloaded at times, as opposed to the mostly-whitelist-handling mail server that doesn't.
I'm not sure which of the chain of things going wrong this morning was caused by the upgrade dying in the middle (:-), but at least one of the problems was that the proxy setting got set to something that didn't match my network at work (which normally does transparent proxying, so I don't tell FF to use a proxy server, and it was trying to load one automagically or something.)
I had to reinstall it to get it to work. (Didn't help that the reinstalled version had an incorrect proxy setting on it, so it wasn't loading anything from the net until I found that:-)
I decided to open the week's worth of FARK stories into Chrome today rather than Firefox, that was a couple hundred tabs. The great thing about running on a dual-core machine is that if Firefox gets hosed, it can only burn up one of the CPUs with runaway Javascripts, and the rest of the machine keeps working fine, and I was hoping Chrome would be better behaved. Well, Chrome got hosed and started burning 50% of my CPU capacity with runaway Javascripts or something, and was unhappy when my wireless connection died underneath of it, and more unhappy when I took the machine in to work and plugged it in there behind a firewall. It doesn't help that I don't have Chrome configured with all the Ad-Block, No-Script, and Ghostery that's protecting my Firefox from overbloated websites, but it still shouldn't have done that.
It's getting really annoying - I'd like to get an LCD monitor as an upgrade for my old CRT - but my current motherboard graphics can only drive 1280x1024, which is lame, so I'll need a graphics card. And almost all of the AGP graphics cards are lame too - they won't do 1920x1280, though some might do 1680x1050, so basically I'd need to upgrade the motherboard to do PCI-express. And while there are 500MB PATA disk drives, nobody's really selling them any more, just SATA, so I'd need to either get a PCI-to-SATA card or upgrade the motherboard.
And most of the new motherboards than have PCI-e and SATA only have enough PATA ports to drive a CD/DVD player, not to put one or especially two 500 MB disks on it, so I'll have to put those in a USB shoebox.
It's tempting to ignore the whole process and just get one of those little ATOM processor desktops, but most of them seem to have really lousy choices of graphics support, e.g. 1366x10xx graphics, and don't have enough RAM to run VMware; probably the next generation will have faster ATOM and more RAM.
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Too cheap an apartment :-) The kitchen closet was the closest one, and I don't think they had one in the living room.
No, the Taliban wouldn't use a "monkey army", because that's something the infidel religion to the south would have done.
And that army of invisible bloodsucking ghosts is a myth too - it doesn't exist. At all.
Are you sure it's really syncing? How often? (I'm sitting here with my laptop and cell phone disagreeing on time by more than a minute, which is annoying because the laptop is supposed to be syncing time to something accurate...)
"Fetching the time via the web" is using NTP or SNTP to get time from better clocks. The article says that NTP is at best getting you millisecond accuracy, and claims RADclock can get to microsecond level.
It's annoying that manufacturers are gratuitously incompatible with each other. It's really convenient to have one power brick at work and one at home, so I only need to drag one along if I'm traveling somewhere, and there's no reason it needs to be a $90 fancy proprietary brick as opposed to a $10 generic brick.
I'm sure there's some technical reason that laptop makers keep increasing the voltages they use rather than increasing the available current at the old voltage - my current Dell wants 19. 5v, and my previous IBM wanted 20. But it really would be nice to have 12 volts again, so I could power the laptop from my car, or my portable car jump-starter battery, or from those 12-volt solar panels, as opposed to my current combination of 12Vdc-to-120Vac inverter and laptop power cord. You might want a surge protector in line, to avoid problems when you're starting you car, but you shouldn't need more than that.
Anybody know if we can get back to 12 volts?
(Insert some lame joke about how YOU can have POWER over Ethernets, bwahaha, or about how in Soviet Russia, Ethernets power You.....)
PoE only provides 15.4 watts - it's not enough. And you end up needing a bunch of power equipment back in the switching room anyway, which you're buying at Cisco prices instead of No-Name-Netbook mfr prices, and if you've got PoE on your desk, it's because they've talked your boss into buying an IP Phone, which already wants that power.
My work laptops for the last N years were Toshibas and IBMs, and both used a cheap 2-prong cord to feed the power brick. You could buy them for $2 or so at Fry's as "Panasonic boom-box power cords", and it meant that I could leave them permanently plugged in under my desks at work and home, carry a couple of spares in my car and briefcase, occasionally forget one at a hotel or customer site and not care, etc. And most of the bricks that didn't sue that cord have used the (US) standard NEMA cords that all other computer equipment uses. (Now I've got a Dell at work, which uses a three-prong cord, and I haven't found a cheap source yet, but between enlightened equipment policies and incompetent repair people, I've got a couple of extra power bricks, so I don't need to carry them around very often.)
But no, a standardized power supply would only be expensive if it's using some specialized Intellectual Property, i.e. if they pay Apple enough to use the cool magnetic coupler. Otherwise there's no reason they won't be sold for $5 by no-name Chinese companies, and if they're more expensive because they're oversized, they'll still only be $10.
Back in the early 90s, a friend of mine used to keep his computers in the kitchen pantry, next to the stove, and run long cables into the living room for the monitors and keyboards. It let him keep things quieter, back when PCs were loud and some Sun machines were very loud, and he didn't bake very often anyway...
Definitely you can do that - the problem you run into is the tradeoff between block size and storage efficiency, because you lose space at the end of a block of data. And you care about it more on small expensive disks than on big cheap ones. Some file systems deal with this by having two different block sizes, the smaller one used for frags, but even so, the bigger the big block size, the more you lose.
However, I'd expect Apple to do a better job of tuning their file systems to the media type than Windows does.
Techshop is a shared-equipment workspace in Menlo Park CA, with a few other branches (they're opening in San Francisco this summer.) I was there welding a couple of weeks ago, and ran into a friend of mine who was doing a project in the laser cutter room, and the people working on the other laser cutter were Knuth and his wife. (I refrained from walking over and saying "Hi, I'm Joe Fanboi, I used your books 30 years ago!".) Techshop has laser cutters, embroidering machines, 3D printers, and plasma cutters, and here's Knuth's latest project supporting them. I wonder if he's got any plans for controlling CNC milling machines and routers?
I'd say the "identifying where a bottle of water is from" part may have some scientific validity. Assuming that the isotope ratios in the oxygen molecules in your blood match the water you're drinking is more dubious - you're also breathing air, which may have different ratios, plus your body would also be exchanging liquids between cells and bloodstream, so there's a long slow storage period. How that relates by the time the stuff gets out to your hair is even more speculative. The real question is how much was speculation by the scientists, and how much by the reporter.
But yeah, terrorists are going to start drinking bottled water, and the real trick is that you'll be able to identify terrorists by all the water bottles in the trash. Or, wait, was that terrorists or tourists? Hard to tell the difference sometimes...
Imported, domestic, bottled somewhere across the continent, Rocky Mountain Spring Water, whatever.
It won't cause significant interference if nobody's on it very often, or if you live somewhere that the airwaves aren't overcrowded.
Either run it unencrypted, or use encryption but set the SSID to "Password = guest" and be nice to the people who can't just log in to "linksys" any more.
We don't use an explicitly-set-in-the-browser proxy either, which was one reason that whatever proxy setting didn't work.
Literature searching can be really hard, because algorithms don't necessarily fit well into Google queries, even if you do have an online system that has the relevant kinds of papers in it. It's tough enough if you've got a problem you're trying to solve, but tougher if you're trying to demonstrate non-existence of a specific solution.
Steam! Steam, I tell you!
And I'd have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling grad students!
Worked well for a friend of mine. I may have some details wrong, and I'm not sure the dates that the patents got approved, and it may have been that he wrote a paper first, got it stolen, then filed, or something. Anyway, he invented something, they did something similar and sued, he had the prior art, then he had a nice house. Not bad for a grad student.
It's not just the jack they don't want to use, it's the UART and the bits of Southbridge that support all of that stuff. Easier for them just to stick it all on USB.
Yes, that was a typo, thanks. Still haven't seen one in the stores that could do that with AGP, but maybe nobody had that geforce version around (and if they did, it was probably more expensive than a motherboard.)
I suppose there probably are SATA optical drives, and it might make more sense to buy one of them rather than using one of the several IDE ones I've got lying around.
I'm thinking specifically of Spamhaus's SBL/ROKSO stuff, which is identifying actual spammers from spammy behaviour, which they documented well enough for lawsuits they might have wanted to defend (as opposed to this one where they screwed up their jurisdictional argument.) If somebody was on their RBL, they belonged there, and I'd trust their list enough to not bother accepting SMTP sessions from anybody on it.
The original MAPS RBL was a bit heavy-handed at times, but got people's attention and generally got problems fixed. SORBS may have changed by now, but at least for quite a while it was a cannon where a sledgehammer would have done, and it was pretty much guaranteed to produce false positives, because it blasted any ISP that ever got caught with a spammer, and sometimes collateral damage around them too, so legitimate users who made a poor choice of ISP could get flagged; that's fine for triggering a greylist or adding some weight to SpamAssassin, or especially for fancier mail-handling complexes to use to direct traffic to a mostly-spam-handling mail server that gets overloaded at times, as opposed to the mostly-whitelist-handling mail server that doesn't.
I'm not sure which of the chain of things going wrong this morning was caused by the upgrade dying in the middle (:-), but at least one of the problems was that the proxy setting got set to something that didn't match my network at work (which normally does transparent proxying, so I don't tell FF to use a proxy server, and it was trying to load one automagically or something.)
I had to reinstall it to get it to work. (Didn't help that the reinstalled version had an incorrect proxy setting on it, so it wasn't loading anything from the net until I found that :-)
I decided to open the week's worth of FARK stories into Chrome today rather than Firefox, that was a couple hundred tabs. The great thing about running on a dual-core machine is that if Firefox gets hosed, it can only burn up one of the CPUs with runaway Javascripts, and the rest of the machine keeps working fine, and I was hoping Chrome would be better behaved. Well, Chrome got hosed and started burning 50% of my CPU capacity with runaway Javascripts or something, and was unhappy when my wireless connection died underneath of it, and more unhappy when I took the machine in to work and plugged it in there behind a firewall. It doesn't help that I don't have Chrome configured with all the Ad-Block, No-Script, and Ghostery that's protecting my Firefox from overbloated websites, but it still shouldn't have done that.
It's getting really annoying - I'd like to get an LCD monitor as an upgrade for my old CRT - but my current motherboard graphics can only drive 1280x1024, which is lame, so I'll need a graphics card. And almost all of the AGP graphics cards are lame too - they won't do 1920x1280, though some might do 1680x1050, so basically I'd need to upgrade the motherboard to do PCI-express. And while there are 500MB PATA disk drives, nobody's really selling them any more, just SATA, so I'd need to either get a PCI-to-SATA card or upgrade the motherboard.
And most of the new motherboards than have PCI-e and SATA only have enough PATA ports to drive a CD/DVD player, not to put one or especially two 500 MB disks on it, so I'll have to put those in a USB shoebox.
It's tempting to ignore the whole process and just get one of those little ATOM processor desktops, but most of them seem to have really lousy choices of graphics support, e.g. 1366x10xx graphics, and don't have enough RAM to run VMware; probably the next generation will have faster ATOM and more RAM.