Why does the new site try to load trac_session cookies repeatedly ? Is it necessary to store data on my computer in order to run a web site advertising an open-source program ?
These types of tests have been used ever since professional management was invented as a skill separate from actually being able to do anything economically useful.
I suggest that anyone who has to work in an organization that uses these types of tests read "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte. Some key chapters are online here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html However, what is not online is the Appendix, titled "How To Cheat on Personality Tests". The book was published in 1956.
Whyte doesn't suggest that you cheat on personality tests just because you are greedy, or because corporations are evil and you have to survive, or anything radical like that. It is clear from the book that Whyte is the kind of guy who presumes that most people are well-intentioned, that managers probably want to hire the best, and they need these scores to cover their ass, so people should give the correct answers on tests so managers can then pick the good guys and promote them.
Meyer-Briggs and Minnesota Multi-Phasic whatchamacallits have never been shown to be of any practical use, and their pointlessness has been known for decades.
"The Organization Man" is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but I think it is only funny if you have been exposed to Organization Men enough to recogize the traits he points out, and it is a kind of dry, no-punch line humour that I associate with old men who are constantly laughing at you inside. For the enjoyment of Slashdot I will reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from the "How to Cheat on Personality Tests" chapter:
"The important thing to realize is that you don't win a good score: you avoid a bad one. (...) Sometimes it is perfectly all right for you to score in the 80th or 90th percentile; if you are being tested, for example, to see if you would make a good chemist, a score indicating that you are likely to be more reflective than ninety out of a hundred adults might not harm you and might even do you some good."
"By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world, give the most convential, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself:
a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more b) I like things pretty well the way they are c) I never worry much about anything d) I don't care for books or music much e) I love my wife and children f) I don't let them get in the way of company work"
You know what is the saddest about these personality tests ? This guide to cheating on them was written just a few years after the basic ones became popular (they were developed in the 20's and 30's, came into use and were standardized (and also statistically tested and proven worthless) in the bureaucracy of WWII, and The Organization Man was published in '56), but the cheat guide works perfectly well even for tests developed long after the cheat guide was written.
You can take a computer administered test developed in the last few years by the best minds in modern management theory, and cheat it with a guide written over 50 years ago.
Don't spend money until you figure out that you can't achieve your goals without spending. You don't give many details about what sort of environment or development you want to do, but but as long as you can get the OS installed, it is probably good enough for home development.
However, don't leave those PCs on all the time. It will kick your electric bill up . . . unless you heat your house with electricity, then it will make no difference in the winter but hurt you twice as bad in the summer. Set up your little server closet or whatever on backups or power strips that allow you to kill the whole collection when you aren't using it.
That's right. Spamassasin will not lower the bandwidth directly, unless maybe people are displaying html spam messages that fetch more images, but most html mail and most spam doesn't work that way, the images are inlined in the message.
Also, spamassasin is not really set up to work on the stream of data passing through the interfaces, so you could not use it unmodified on a router connecting to smtp and pop mail. You would have to make some type of snort like setup. Snort is a huge resource hog, and hard to set up -- it probably is too much to do on cast-off machines to give to people as routers.
However, as much as possible along those lines ought to be done. Checking and blocking outgoing spam to save the rest of us is also key.
Right now, most people use the internet like a Television -- it shoves a lot of crap at them, over which they excercise little control. Just look at the yahoo homepage. If bandwidth caps are going to be enforced, the ordinary non-computer savy public is going to have to take back some of that control.
In addition, as a happy side product, removing a lot of the commercial content from the user's experience will generally be a good thing. If this evolves to the point that there is a cheap low-level broadband that you can get for nearly free, and if you want to actually see all the ads and download movies you have to pay more, is that a bad thing ? I say that not as some kind of hippy anti-capitalism person. The device I propose would ban google adwords, and I have an adwords account and buy that advertising. However, I believe most internet marketing is a waste -- it is a waste of the person's time who has to look at it, and a waste of the advertiser's money. We should chop out the vast majority of all that crap and reserve the bandwidth for useful things, including useful commercial activity. However internet advertising as a whole does not bring the advertisers enough to pay off their ad spending, and is thus a net drag on the economy, not just the internet.
We should make a shorewall type floppy or CD based distribution, that blocks all ads from web pages, and strips out spam as well. Perhaps a similar setup can be made with the Linksys WRT54G or similar devices. We should go to all the places where broadband caps are being experimented with, and promote them to users as protection from those caps, via door to door if nothing else.
I suspect that these large ISPs would reconsider bandwidth caps if caps implied an advertising-free internet.
An appliance type setup that used ClamAV, spamassassin, or similar software to block botnets and spam would have a healthy effect on the internet as a whole. However those types of programs usually consumer lots of CPU resources, and may not be appropriate for all hardware.
They could require that any device with more than X grams of certain heavy metals, have a "refund" label so you could return the device for some cash payment, say $10 or so. That would keep the batteries mostly out of the ground water, and Apple could decide if they wanted a separate battery with the refund on it, or if the refund should apply to the whole device. There are a variety of ways to administer such programs, the company can be trusted to run it themselves or the company can be forced to pay the refund into a government administered program when the device is sold.
They could apply an excise tax to all the batteries, and use the revenue to clean up the effects. (Those kind of earmarked revenue programs, such as the fuel tax highway funds in the US, tend to be targets for legislative grabs, so that might not be as good as the first option.)
I like the idea of forcing the sellers to offer to buy back any dangerous chemicals they sell, for an indefinite period. For small companies that go out of business or change business regularly, or don't want to track that potential liability forever, a government corporation or a private corporation could provide that service for them -- the small company would pay Specialized Recycling Inc. $8 per device, and be allowed to slap a sticker that says "return to Specialized for $10 reward" on all the products. ( $8 is less than $10, because not all would be redeemed, and there would be competition in this area keeping the prices down. ) The redemption fee would be high enough to incentivize people to not throw them away if possible, and it would also encourage manufacturers to find ways to make their devices use less power, to use capacitors instead of batteries, or seek other technical solutions.
A simple ban on integrated batteries seems like it is not likely to keep the batteries out of the landfill. If anything, there are probably fewer batteries from iPhones in landfills precisely because of this anti-customer policy that you have to send them in to Apple to get them swapped (unless Apple is tossing the old ones).
The hypothesis on the origin of HIV that best fits all the facts we have, is outlined in a book titled "The River" by Edward Hooper. This new evidence, including the new tissue sample (not the oldest found) and the analysis of genetic divergence, is consistent with that theory.
It is disappointing that a forum such as slashdot can discuss this new announcement and no one mentions "The River" at all. A number of well thought out posts in here show reasonable familarity with the subject of HIV and biology in general, complete with links to sources, and that those people do not make any reference to the Edward Hooper / Tom Curtis hypothesis about Hilary Koprowski's testing of an oral polio vaccine on human subjects is kind of scary. Posts about HIV being a plot to kill blacks and gays get more credibility.
The hypothesis is that SIV or another HIV ancestor was collected from chimpanzee liver cells in the mid-1950s, and a live but weakened polio vaccine was grown on cultures of those cells in an attempt to make a polio vaccine. The process would involve repeatedly re-infecting a fresh culture of the cells growing on the glass of a bottle containing nutriants, and then the fluid would be filtered for anything as big as a bacteria or cell but viruses would pass through, and then the process would be repeated. This would compress many generations of genetic selection into a short time frame, and any viruses already present in the chimpanzee, could pass through the process with the modified polio virus and make it into the vaccine. The a "seed" of the live vaccine polio was then sent to Africa, where it was grown into a larger volume on more chimpanzee liver cultures, possibly locally collected. Then, in an attempt to compete with the other polio vaccines by making a safety-theater production, about 3 million Congolese were administered the vaccine with the help of the Belgian colonial government. I call it safety-theater because they (Hillary Koprowski and the people pushing his vaccine) apparently wanted to quote the 3 million figure to sell their product, but they didn't go back and check to see if any of those 3 million got sick or even if those people did or did not get polio.
Details of all this are hard to ferret out, given that the people involved are either dead or have dim memories due to the passage of time.
There is other circumstantial evidence. The polio vaccine in question was tested in other places, such as homes for retarded children and "wayward girls" (unmarried teenage mothers). Some of those people died with strange AIDS like symptoms. No early sample of HIV doesn't come from a place where the polio vaccine was tested. Early samples of HIV show the most genetic variation in the geographic area exposed to that polio vaccine.
There is circumstantial evidence against competeing theories: the theory that it crossed over in the 1930s or before, and took a while to spread, the theory that it crosses over on a regular basis throughout human-chimp history but only in modern times was the behaviour of humans such that it would spread in our population, etc. For details read the book.
There will probably never be positive proof, we can only note that over time this theory is not disproven, and look at the balance of circumstantial evidence.
This new study is consistent with the polio vaccine origin theory. A sample of HIV from before the polio vaccine tests, which would conclusively disprove the polio vaccine origin, is not produced. The new sample that is produced shows a "genetic distance" from the supposed original sample that is consistent with a number of related chimpanzee viruses being in the liver cells, and with the compressed selection process that produces an attenuated (weakened) vaccine virus strain from the live dangerous polio virus strain -- both factors are also consistent with the other AIDS-like cases in polio test subjects and the variation in early HIV samples from Africa.
I guess some people in the medical industry didn't like this
And keep in mind that if ASUS had been shipping Linux, this mistake would still be possible, if they were setting up their machines using a "kickstart" USB flash disk.
I had forgotten that it was a windows restore CD, I was thinking in terms of a driver CD or something.
However, there exist tools that are designed to do exactly that sort of thing. I run something that checksums every file on a server and compares it to a known good value, as part of an intrusion detection system. If I were shipping a windows computer otu of manufacturing, I would take file lists from as-shipped as well as after restoration, and I would compair them against other windows installations, and make sure I knew a reason why every single different file was different.
It's not that hard. Once you write a script to go through and get the file list out of all the.cab files, and subtract that from what's on the disk, what's left is not that much. Just the pre-installed cruftware and whatnot . . . maybe they had so much of that, these files got lost in the noise.
So, what had to happen was this:
1) Employee got the "official vista install" USB fob, probably used it, and then he or someone else used it as a hand file transfer mechanism, adding more files to it
2) This non-pristine USB fob was used again to install the "master" harddrive that would be used to make recovery DVDs shipped with the product
3) No one carefully checked the files on that recovery, OR the USB fob infection had also gotten to the vista's that he compaired against
Still seems sloppy to me. If you know you are going to be dealing with a behemoth like Vista, one of the things you do is write scripts or develope tools to deal with it.
One thought I had, is that this would be a way to make a virus replicate. What if instead of random crap, it put some kernel driver in windows that checked to see if you were writing an "unattend.xml" file and dumped itself on that drive if so ? Some minimal attempts at hiding might take you a long way, given that there appears to be little quality control. How to get it into the OEM so it will be re-distributed ? Oh, just add it to a cracked copy of WinRAR and post it on a warez site, that apparently works.
I can how an internal ASUS USB flash disk with an unattend.xml file on it, might get used to move documents around, and then also get used to install windows.
That might explain how certain documents got put on a lot of harddrives inside ASUS.
It doesn't explain how that directly ended up being part of what they made an ISO out of, and how no one apparently did quality control and checked every single file on a CD before it was replicated and sent out to the world.
I've written a lot of Asterisk AGI stuff, in the.conf files, in perl and php AGI. I have several years experience. But I am not getting offers of $100 / hr . . . hook me up.
I have been involved with cooling some small business "server closets" and have some observations and thoughts:
1) Is 86 degrees F out of bounds ? Are you having regular hardware failure now, that you think will be fixed by running cooler ? I know of various little closets around Austin in various small businesses that are packed with 4 to 8 servers (desktops running linux) that probably sit at over 90 or even 100 a lot of the time. I try to put the servers near the floor and disperse them as much as possible to avoid hot spots. Most of the failures I deal with I attribute to crappy hardware, and they happen on the desktops sitting in people's air conditioned offices just as often as they happen on the cast-off desktops sitting in the baking hot closet.
2) Those standalone AC units that have a water pan and exhaust the hot air through a dryer hose are crap from an efficiency point of view. Even if the hot air is exhausted out of the building instead of just loading the central AC, outside air will then be pulled into the building. Also, the water (as in most central AC units) is thrown out. These should be regarded as emergency use only, hot spots are really better taken care of my moving servers or even a wal-mart box fan blowing on them.
3) I believe (I plan to do actually tests with a kill-a-watt meter and thermometer) that the cheap, small window or wall unti airconditioners cool the most per watt. This is because there is no air exchange to the outside, and the condensate is allowed to run outside and then spattered over the condenser coil and re-evaporated. Even central AC units usually don't do that because the inside and outside coils are too far apart.
4) If you are marginally too hot -- which sounds like your situation -- you can probably best get what you need by cutting power consumption. Focus on the oldest servers first, and see if there are any disk servers that no longer used, backup servers that can be turned only when backups are happening, old hardware that has services that can moved to existing machines or virtualized onto existing machines, etc. There are some very low power boards out there now, that are probably faster than your oldest hardware. Look up that under-voltaged K8 writeup on Tom's hardware. You may find you have a bigger budget if you are speeding up the servers as well as lowering the temperature.
Also, I have chopped power consumption in some places by using laptops with a broken screen as a "server" for light tasks, such as a little used web site or a CVS server. Remember to keep on top of your backup situation when using possibly flaky hardware like that. Good luck.
I don't have one. However, at the linux users group I attend ( http://ale.freeshell.org/ ), a group of people who got them via one of the group purchase agreements came to last night's meeting. I was pretty impressed.
It does cost $300 or $400 depending on what model you get, and then you have to get one of the cellular services that works on a sim chip thing.
At least one of the guys at the linux meeting was using it as his daily phone. However he also said he was putting up with various quirks and working around them, that "normal people" might not be able to deal with. One person showed me the phone running X with xfce, but the others were using a qt interface that didn't use X, if I understood them correctly.
But, if you are a developer and having problems with the openness of your phones, this is the way to go. Even the hardware and plastic designs are open source.
Look, the pointy haired boss doesn't really want or expect a numerical metric of organization. Immagine asking him if he has a function in Word that will tell him how organized an outline or document is. He doesn't, and if he never needed it for Word, he doesn't need it for a webpage.
Possibility 1: he wants to kill the project, and came up with this as a way to find an excuse. The best response to this is to get your resume out there on monster right now, and walk into his office tomorrow morning and say "do you want to kill the wiki, and is this metric a way to get an excuse ?" . Let that conversation go where it will.
Possibility 2: he read in USA Today that anyone can add stuff to wiki's and they are chaotic, so he's worried. He's never actually looked at any wiki including this one in his life. This is the most likely possibility. If you still have a job after asking the question in Possibility 2, go for this, or maybe start with this.
Here, you want to talk to him for about 5 minutes using the following words as much as possible, without actually lying: "review", "control", "process" and "catagorize". If you want to can reveiw everything he has ever said and come up with your own set of buzzwords, based on the words he himself likes to use, but these will do. Then you say things like "We have a PROCESS to CONTROL the QUALITY of employee submissions. I occasionally REVIEW the most visited pages in the wiki, and make sure they are ACCURATE and properly CATAGORIZED. I also REVIEW the least visited pages, and if they are not visited because they are improperly CATAGORIZED and linked, I fix that." Actually talk like that, and kind of shout the buzzwords at him. He's either stupid enough that he needs it, or smart enough to figure out what's going on and move on to something important.
All the geeks in this discussion who started actually talking about measuring connectedness of graphs and crap are totally off in the weeds.
Well, maybe the Seattle Goodwill needs to catch up with Austin Goodwill. The Austin Goodwill Computer store is a great resource. I do try not to dump non-working stuff there, because it probably doesn't make them money recycling that. I shop there a lot, and the prices vary from great deals (usually when they don't recognize something for what it is) to slightly above brand new for some items. Mainly, they are good for stuff no longer sold new, that you can examine before buying and not have to wait for shipping, unlike ebay.
For example, they regularly have the linux-running versions of the WRT54G for $25.
I am not sure of the business situation of Austin Goodwill, but the place may be partially subsidized by Dell Computers to handle some of their recycling obligations.
However, let's presume that the original poster doesn't have that option. Here's what I would do: pot on some local forums, and find several local people in a similar situation, and have a "computer garage sale" at someone's house on a Saturday. If there is no Goodwill Computers type place in your market, it is possible that this could become regular and grow and have to move to a parking lot somewhere and become a swap meet.
But the article implies that one by product of his process is fertilizer. It emphasizes the cleaniness and clarity of the fuel. I think what the article is trying to imply, although it and the company's web site are extremely non-technical and informationless, is that the carbon is extracted from the feedstock to make fuel, and the "contaminants" of phosphorous, nitrogen, and minerals, are pulled out and labeled "fertilizer". Because of emissions issues it is unlikely that a fuel with nitrogen and phosphorous compounds in it could be widely used.
Although there is no technical information in the article, the picture shows merely agricultural feed hoppers and a table of buckets and pans. No picture of a vessel that could cook waste at around 500 psi and 500 degrees F is shown, and that is roughly the temperatures and pressures needed for those kinds of reactions. I'd be more interested in seeing that apparatus. You can look at the wikipediate articles on Thermal Polymerization and the Fischer-Tropsch process to confirm this.
I collected some notes on various books and articles I read, because I was thinking of attempting some small scale way of powering an internal combustion engine:
Haven't you ever seen one of those gray garbage can sized transformers on a pole explode ? I used to live in a neighborhood that was right across the tracks from some sort of electrical switching station or something, they had rows of those things in a lot covered with white gravel. Explosions that were violent enough to feel like a granade going off a hundred yards away were not uncommon. I think most of them were simply the arcing of high voltage vaporizing everything and producing a shock wave, but sometimes the can-type transformers that are filled with cooling oil exploded and the burning oil sprayed everywhere.
At one place I worked, every lightening storm my boss would rush to move his shitty old truck to underneath the can on the power pole, hoping the thing would blow and burn it so he could get insurance to replace it.
Ethanol cuts your miles per gallon by 30% or more. I don't see that in your calculation. Or the extra trip to go to the store to haul back 475 pounds of sugar to the house.
If I owned a restaurant or bar I would make the wait staff pour all the alcoholic remants in a big barrel and run it through this thing. It is has a distillation-only mode.
I tried to do this (using a Nikon Coolpix 4500 and gphoto). One thing I noticed is that there would be a long pause, and occasionally "usb bus resetting" messages, before the camera took a picture. This pause can be longer that 30 seconds and made it useless in my opinion, given how I wanted to trigger it.
However, I noticed that the same camera would also pause as long as 10 seconds when triggered manually from the button. I will have to go through the menus and see if there is something I can do to fix that.
Specifically, for USB controlled consumer type cameras, is there one that works well and reliably from gphoto ?
I have set up these cameras with zoneminder. It worked. My opinion of the cameras is that they aren't really of sufficient resolution. It might be ok for indoor use, where the lighting would be more constant and the camera would be much closer to the target, for example a server room.
If you look in the file usualy attached to any GPL'd code, for example/usr/src/linux/COPYING on many linux distributions, you will see that part of the file is the actual GNU Public License and part is an explanation and philosophy and so on. If you want to open source your work, I'd hope you would have read that file at some point . . . but in any case, here is the relevant portion:
"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program
`Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.
<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice"
I like that copyright disclaimer because it is short and simple. No doubt someone suffering from the brain damage of a legal education could provide you with a longer one.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the new site try to load trac_session cookies repeatedly ? Is it necessary to store data on my computer in order to run a web site advertising an open-source program ?
These types of tests have been used ever since professional management was invented as a skill separate from actually being able to do anything economically useful.
I suggest that anyone who has to work in an organization that uses these types of tests read "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte. Some key chapters are online here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html However, what is not online is the Appendix, titled "How To Cheat on Personality Tests". The book was published in 1956.
Whyte doesn't suggest that you cheat on personality tests just because you are greedy, or because corporations are evil and you have to survive, or anything radical like that. It is clear from the book that Whyte is the kind of guy who presumes that most people are well-intentioned, that managers probably want to hire the best, and they need these scores to cover their ass, so people should give the correct answers on tests so managers can then pick the good guys and promote them.
Meyer-Briggs and Minnesota Multi-Phasic whatchamacallits have never been shown to be of any practical use, and their pointlessness has been known for decades.
"The Organization Man" is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but I think it is only funny if you have been exposed to Organization Men enough to recogize the traits he points out, and it is a kind of dry, no-punch line humour that I associate with old men who are constantly laughing at you inside. For the enjoyment of Slashdot I will reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from the "How to Cheat on Personality Tests" chapter:
"The important thing to realize is that you don't win a good score: you avoid a bad one. (...) Sometimes it is perfectly all right for you to score in the 80th or 90th percentile; if you are being tested, for example, to see if you would make a good chemist, a score indicating that you are likely to be more reflective than ninety out of a hundred adults might not harm you and might even do you some good."
"By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world, give the most convential, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself:
a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more
b) I like things pretty well the way they are
c) I never worry much about anything
d) I don't care for books or music much
e) I love my wife and children
f) I don't let them get in the way of company work"
You know what is the saddest about these personality tests ? This guide to cheating on them was written just a few years after the basic ones became popular (they were developed in the 20's and 30's, came into use and were standardized (and also statistically tested and proven worthless) in the bureaucracy of WWII, and The Organization Man was published in '56), but the cheat guide works perfectly well even for tests developed long after the cheat guide was written.
You can take a computer administered test developed in the last few years by the best minds in modern management theory, and cheat it with a guide written over 50 years ago.
Don't spend money until you figure out that you can't achieve your goals without spending. You don't give many details about what sort of environment or development you want to do, but but as long as you can get the OS installed, it is probably good enough for home development.
However, don't leave those PCs on all the time. It will kick your electric bill up . . . unless you heat your house with electricity, then it will make no difference in the winter but hurt you twice as bad in the summer. Set up your little server closet or whatever on backups or power strips that allow you to kill the whole collection when you aren't using it.
That's right. Spamassasin will not lower the bandwidth directly, unless maybe people are displaying html spam messages that fetch more images, but most html mail and most spam doesn't work that way, the images are inlined in the message.
Also, spamassasin is not really set up to work on the stream of data passing through the interfaces, so you could not use it unmodified on a router connecting to smtp and pop mail. You would have to make some type of snort like setup. Snort is a huge resource hog, and hard to set up -- it probably is too much to do on cast-off machines to give to people as routers.
However, as much as possible along those lines ought to be done. Checking and blocking outgoing spam to save the rest of us is also key.
Right now, most people use the internet like a Television -- it shoves a lot of crap at them, over which they excercise little control. Just look at the yahoo homepage. If bandwidth caps are going to be enforced, the ordinary non-computer savy public is going to have to take back some of that control.
In addition, as a happy side product, removing a lot of the commercial content from the user's experience will generally be a good thing. If this evolves to the point that there is a cheap low-level broadband that you can get for nearly free, and if you want to actually see all the ads and download movies you have to pay more, is that a bad thing ? I say that not as some kind of hippy anti-capitalism person. The device I propose would ban google adwords, and I have an adwords account and buy that advertising. However, I believe most internet marketing is a waste -- it is a waste of the person's time who has to look at it, and a waste of the advertiser's money. We should chop out the vast majority of all that crap and reserve the bandwidth for useful things, including useful commercial activity. However internet advertising as a whole does not bring the advertisers enough to pay off their ad spending, and is thus a net drag on the economy, not just the internet.
We should make a shorewall type floppy or CD based distribution, that blocks all ads from web pages, and strips out spam as well. Perhaps a similar setup can be made with the Linksys WRT54G or similar devices. We should go to all the places where broadband caps are being experimented with, and promote them to users as protection from those caps, via door to door if nothing else.
I suspect that these large ISPs would reconsider bandwidth caps if caps implied an advertising-free internet.
An appliance type setup that used ClamAV, spamassassin, or similar software to block botnets and spam would have a healthy effect on the internet as a whole. However those types of programs usually consumer lots of CPU resources, and may not be appropriate for all hardware.
They could require that any device with more than X grams of certain heavy metals, have a "refund" label so you could return the device for some cash payment, say $10 or so. That would keep the batteries mostly out of the ground water, and Apple could decide if they wanted a separate battery with the refund on it, or if the refund should apply to the whole device. There are a variety of ways to administer such programs, the company can be trusted to run it themselves or the company can be forced to pay the refund into a government administered program when the device is sold.
They could apply an excise tax to all the batteries, and use the revenue to clean up the effects. (Those kind of earmarked revenue programs, such as the fuel tax highway funds in the US, tend to be targets for legislative grabs, so that might not be as good as the first option.)
I like the idea of forcing the sellers to offer to buy back any dangerous chemicals they sell, for an indefinite period. For small companies that go out of business or change business regularly, or don't want to track that potential liability forever, a government corporation or a private corporation could provide that service for them -- the small company would pay Specialized Recycling Inc. $8 per device, and be allowed to slap a sticker that says "return to Specialized for $10 reward" on all the products. ( $8 is less than $10, because not all would be redeemed, and there would be competition in this area keeping the prices down. ) The redemption fee would be high enough to incentivize people to not throw them away if possible, and it would also encourage manufacturers to find ways to make their devices use less power, to use capacitors instead of batteries, or seek other technical solutions.
A simple ban on integrated batteries seems like it is not likely to keep the batteries out of the landfill. If anything, there are probably fewer batteries from iPhones in landfills precisely because of this anti-customer policy that you have to send them in to Apple to get them swapped (unless Apple is tossing the old ones).
Watches have much smaller batteries, and even the cheapest $4 walmart watch lasts longer than a cellphone, so you throw away fewer watches.
The hypothesis on the origin of HIV that best fits all the facts we have, is outlined in a book titled "The River" by Edward Hooper. This new evidence, including the new tissue sample (not the oldest found) and the analysis of genetic divergence, is consistent with that theory.
It is disappointing that a forum such as slashdot can discuss this new announcement and no one mentions "The River" at all. A number of well thought out posts in here show reasonable familarity with the subject of HIV and biology in general, complete with links to sources, and that those people do not make any reference to the Edward Hooper / Tom Curtis hypothesis about Hilary Koprowski's testing of an oral polio vaccine on human subjects is kind of scary. Posts about HIV being a plot to kill blacks and gays get more credibility.
The hypothesis is that SIV or another HIV ancestor was collected from chimpanzee liver cells in the mid-1950s, and a live but weakened polio vaccine was grown on cultures of those cells in an attempt to make a polio vaccine. The process would involve repeatedly re-infecting a fresh culture of the cells growing on the glass of a bottle containing nutriants, and then the fluid would be filtered for anything as big as a bacteria or cell but viruses would pass through, and then the process would be repeated. This would compress many generations of genetic selection into a short time frame, and any viruses already present in the chimpanzee, could pass through the process with the modified polio virus and make it into the vaccine. The a "seed" of the live vaccine polio was then sent to Africa, where it was grown into a larger volume on more chimpanzee liver cultures, possibly locally collected. Then, in an attempt to compete with the other polio vaccines by making a safety-theater production, about 3 million Congolese were administered the vaccine with the help of the Belgian colonial government. I call it safety-theater because they (Hillary Koprowski and the people pushing his vaccine) apparently wanted to quote the 3 million figure to sell their product, but they didn't go back and check to see if any of those 3 million got sick or even if those people did or did not get polio.
Details of all this are hard to ferret out, given that the people involved are either dead or have dim memories due to the passage of time.
There is other circumstantial evidence. The polio vaccine in question was tested in other places, such as homes for retarded children and "wayward girls" (unmarried teenage mothers). Some of those people died with strange AIDS like symptoms. No early sample of HIV doesn't come from a place where the polio vaccine was tested. Early samples of HIV show the most genetic variation in the geographic area exposed to that polio vaccine.
There is circumstantial evidence against competeing theories: the theory that it crossed over in the 1930s or before, and took a while to spread, the theory that it crosses over on a regular basis throughout human-chimp history but only in modern times was the behaviour of humans such that it would spread in our population, etc. For details read the book.
There will probably never be positive proof, we can only note that over time this theory is not disproven, and look at the balance of circumstantial evidence.
This new study is consistent with the polio vaccine origin theory. A sample of HIV from before the polio vaccine tests, which would conclusively disprove the polio vaccine origin, is not produced. The new sample that is produced shows a "genetic distance" from the supposed original sample that is consistent with a number of related chimpanzee viruses being in the liver cells, and with the compressed selection process that produces an attenuated (weakened) vaccine virus strain from the live dangerous polio virus strain -- both factors are also consistent with the other AIDS-like cases in polio test subjects and the variation in early HIV samples from Africa.
I guess some people in the medical industry didn't like this
And keep in mind that if ASUS had been shipping Linux, this mistake would still be possible, if they were setting up their machines using a "kickstart" USB flash disk.
I had forgotten that it was a windows restore CD, I was thinking in terms of a driver CD or something.
However, there exist tools that are designed to do exactly that sort of thing. I run something that checksums every file on a server and compares it to a known good value, as part of an intrusion detection system. If I were shipping a windows computer otu of manufacturing, I would take file lists from as-shipped as well as after restoration, and I would compair them against other windows installations, and make sure I knew a reason why every single different file was different.
It's not that hard. Once you write a script to go through and get the file list out of all the .cab files, and subtract that from what's on the disk, what's left is not that much. Just the pre-installed cruftware and whatnot . . . maybe they had so much of that, these files got lost in the noise.
So, what had to happen was this:
1) Employee got the "official vista install" USB fob, probably used it, and then he or someone else used it as a hand file transfer mechanism, adding more files to it
2) This non-pristine USB fob was used again to install the "master" harddrive that would be used to make recovery DVDs shipped with the product
3) No one carefully checked the files on that recovery, OR the USB fob infection had also gotten to the vista's that he compaired against
Still seems sloppy to me. If you know you are going to be dealing with a behemoth like Vista, one of the things you do is write scripts or develope tools to deal with it.
One thought I had, is that this would be a way to make a virus replicate. What if instead of random crap, it put some kernel driver in windows that checked to see if you were writing an "unattend.xml" file and dumped itself on that drive if so ? Some minimal attempts at hiding might take you a long way, given that there appears to be little quality control. How to get it into the OEM so it will be re-distributed ? Oh, just add it to a cracked copy of WinRAR and post it on a warez site, that apparently works.
I can how an internal ASUS USB flash disk with an unattend.xml file on it, might get used to move documents around, and then also get used to install windows.
That might explain how certain documents got put on a lot of harddrives inside ASUS.
It doesn't explain how that directly ended up being part of what they made an ISO out of, and how no one apparently did quality control and checked every single file on a CD before it was replicated and sent out to the world.
I've written a lot of Asterisk AGI stuff, in the .conf files, in perl and php AGI. I have several years experience. But I am not getting offers of $100 / hr . . . hook me up.
I have been involved with cooling some small business "server closets" and have some observations and thoughts:
1) Is 86 degrees F out of bounds ? Are you having regular hardware failure now, that you think will be fixed by running cooler ? I know of various little closets around Austin in various small businesses that are packed with 4 to 8 servers (desktops running linux) that probably sit at over 90 or even 100 a lot of the time. I try to put the servers near the floor and disperse them as much as possible to avoid hot spots. Most of the failures I deal with I attribute to crappy hardware, and they happen on the desktops sitting in people's air conditioned offices just as often as they happen on the cast-off desktops sitting in the baking hot closet.
2) Those standalone AC units that have a water pan and exhaust the hot air through a dryer hose are crap from an efficiency point of view. Even if the hot air is exhausted out of the building instead of just loading the central AC, outside air will then be pulled into the building. Also, the water (as in most central AC units) is thrown out. These should be regarded as emergency use only, hot spots are really better taken care of my moving servers or even a wal-mart box fan blowing on them.
3) I believe (I plan to do actually tests with a kill-a-watt meter and thermometer) that the cheap, small window or wall unti airconditioners cool the most per watt. This is because there is no air exchange to the outside, and the condensate is allowed to run outside and then spattered over the condenser coil and re-evaporated. Even central AC units usually don't do that because the inside and outside coils are too far apart.
4) If you are marginally too hot -- which sounds like your situation -- you can probably best get what you need by cutting power consumption. Focus on the oldest servers first, and see if there are any disk servers that no longer used, backup servers that can be turned only when backups are happening, old hardware that has services that can moved to existing machines or virtualized onto existing machines, etc. There are some very low power boards out there now, that are probably faster than your oldest hardware. Look up that under-voltaged K8 writeup on Tom's hardware. You may find you have a bigger budget if you are speeding up the servers as well as lowering the temperature.
Also, I have chopped power consumption in some places by using laptops with a broken screen as a "server" for light tasks, such as a little used web site or a CVS server. Remember to keep on top of your backup situation when using possibly flaky hardware like that.
Good luck.
You should check out the OpenMoko: http://openmoko.com/
I don't have one. However, at the linux users group I attend ( http://ale.freeshell.org/ ), a group of people who got them via one of the group purchase agreements came to last night's meeting. I was pretty impressed.
It does cost $300 or $400 depending on what model you get, and then you have to get one of the cellular services that works on a sim chip thing.
At least one of the guys at the linux meeting was using it as his daily phone. However he also said he was putting up with various quirks and working around them, that "normal people" might not be able to deal with. One person showed me the phone running X with xfce, but the others were using a qt interface that didn't use X, if I understood them correctly.
But, if you are a developer and having problems with the openness of your phones, this is the way to go. Even the hardware and plastic designs are open source.
Look, the pointy haired boss doesn't really want or expect a numerical metric of organization. Immagine asking him if he has a function in Word that will tell him how organized an outline or document is. He doesn't, and if he never needed it for Word, he doesn't need it for a webpage.
Possibility 1: he wants to kill the project, and came up with this as a way to find an excuse. The best response to this is to get your resume out there on monster right now, and walk into his office tomorrow morning and say "do you want to kill the wiki, and is this metric a way to get an excuse ?" . Let that conversation go where it will.
Possibility 2: he read in USA Today that anyone can add stuff to wiki's and they are chaotic, so he's worried. He's never actually looked at any wiki including this one in his life. This is the most likely possibility. If you still have a job after asking the question in Possibility 2, go for this, or maybe start with this.
Here, you want to talk to him for about 5 minutes using the following words as much as possible, without actually lying: "review", "control", "process" and "catagorize". If you want to can reveiw everything he has ever said and come up with your own set of buzzwords, based on the words he himself likes to use, but these will do. Then you say things like "We have a PROCESS to CONTROL the QUALITY of employee submissions. I occasionally REVIEW the most visited pages in the wiki, and make sure they are ACCURATE and properly CATAGORIZED. I also REVIEW the least visited pages, and if they are not visited because they are improperly CATAGORIZED and linked, I fix that." Actually talk like that, and kind of shout the buzzwords at him. He's either stupid enough that he needs it, or smart enough to figure out what's going on and move on to something important.
All the geeks in this discussion who started actually talking about measuring connectedness of graphs and crap are totally off in the weeds.
Well, maybe the Seattle Goodwill needs to catch up with Austin Goodwill. The Austin Goodwill Computer store is a great resource. I do try not to dump non-working stuff there, because it probably doesn't make them money recycling that. I shop there a lot, and the prices vary from great deals (usually when they don't recognize something for what it is) to slightly above brand new for some items. Mainly, they are good for stuff no longer sold new, that you can examine before buying and not have to wait for shipping, unlike ebay.
For example, they regularly have the linux-running versions of the WRT54G for $25.
I am not sure of the business situation of Austin Goodwill, but the place may be partially subsidized by Dell Computers to handle some of their recycling obligations.
However, let's presume that the original poster doesn't have that option. Here's what I would do: pot on some local forums, and find several local people in a similar situation, and have a "computer garage sale" at someone's house on a Saturday. If there is no Goodwill Computers type place in your market, it is possible that this could become regular and grow and have to move to a parking lot somewhere and become a swap meet.
When I have to do this, I use TraqMonkey -- http://www.traqmonkey.com/
It sends the message I leave to their email as an attachment
For some people, that gets the message to them faster; also, TraqMonkey has transcription available, so they can just read the text.
But I think the most common use for TraqMonkey is delivering reminders to yourself.
But the article implies that one by product of his process is fertilizer. It emphasizes the cleaniness and clarity of the fuel. I think what the article is trying to imply, although it and the company's web site are extremely non-technical and informationless, is that the carbon is extracted from the feedstock to make fuel, and the "contaminants" of phosphorous, nitrogen, and minerals, are pulled out and labeled "fertilizer". Because of emissions issues it is unlikely that a fuel with nitrogen and phosphorous compounds in it could be widely used.
Although there is no technical information in the article, the picture shows merely agricultural feed hoppers and a table of buckets and pans. No picture of a vessel that could cook waste at around 500 psi and 500 degrees F is shown, and that is roughly the temperatures and pressures needed for those kinds of reactions. I'd be more interested in seeing that apparatus. You can look at the wikipediate articles on Thermal Polymerization and the Fischer-Tropsch process to confirm this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch
I collected some notes on various books and articles I read, because I was thinking of attempting some small scale way of powering an internal combustion engine:
http://rgr.freeshell.org/woodgas/
Haven't you ever seen one of those gray garbage can sized transformers on a pole explode ? I used to live in a neighborhood that was right across the tracks from some sort of electrical switching station or something, they had rows of those things in a lot covered with white gravel. Explosions that were violent enough to feel like a granade going off a hundred yards away were not uncommon. I think most of them were simply the arcing of high voltage vaporizing everything and producing a shock wave, but sometimes the can-type transformers that are filled with cooling oil exploded and the burning oil sprayed everywhere.
At one place I worked, every lightening storm my boss would rush to move his shitty old truck to underneath the can on the power pole, hoping the thing would blow and burn it so he could get insurance to replace it.
A stationary, installed UPS would never use lithium batteries. Unless weight is a factor, they do not compete with lead-acid batteries.
Ethanol cuts your miles per gallon by 30% or more. I don't see that in your calculation. Or the extra trip to go to the store to haul back 475 pounds of sugar to the house.
If I owned a restaurant or bar I would make the wait staff pour all the alcoholic remants in a big barrel and run it through this thing. It is has a distillation-only mode.
I tried to do this (using a Nikon Coolpix 4500 and gphoto). One thing I noticed is that there would be a long pause, and occasionally "usb bus resetting" messages, before the camera took a picture. This pause can be longer that 30 seconds and made it useless in my opinion, given how I wanted to trigger it.
However, I noticed that the same camera would also pause as long as 10 seconds when triggered manually from the button. I will have to go through the menus and see if there is something I can do to fix that.
Specifically, for USB controlled consumer type cameras, is there one that works well and reliably from gphoto ?
I have set up these cameras with zoneminder. It worked. My opinion of the cameras is that they aren't really of sufficient resolution. It might be ok for indoor use, where the lighting would be more constant and the camera would be much closer to the target, for example a server room.
If you look in the file usualy attached to any GPL'd code, for example /usr/src/linux/COPYING on many linux distributions, you will see that part of the file is the actual GNU Public License and part is an explanation and philosophy and so on. If you want to open source your work, I'd hope you would have read that file at some point . . . but in any case, here is the relevant portion:
"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if
necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program
`Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.
<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice"
I like that copyright disclaimer because it is short and simple. No doubt someone suffering from the brain damage of a legal education could provide you with a longer one.
The flip-up protective cover is officially known as a molly guard.