My home machines is a SMP 2xCeleron 400 w/256mb ram.
It frightens me that you would call a system with a cpu 3x the speed of mine 'not that great'. More RAM might make a difference but just how many numbers should you need to crunch to compose an email?
I started a C/S course in 1994, and likewise dutifully purchased all my texts. I stalled a bit the next year but bought most of them again. Finally it dawned on me that I was getting nothing out of them, wasn't using them, and could have purchased them half price from the "i'm only at uni because that's what I thought I was supposed to do after school" dropouts. (OT flamebait - how can Universities claim they need more places when (in my experience) 80% of first year enrollments eventually drop out, and should never have gone to uni in the first place!!!)
There was at least one case of a web site which would respond to code red (or was it nimda?) probes by connecting to the infected pc and install the relevent patches on it then reboot it.
There may have been a disclaimer on the web site that said 'to automatically clean your server, connect to this URL' (which was, by an amazing coincidence, the same URL the worm was using to attack vulnerable computers).
People rubbish windows update, but i think it's the perfect solution to the problem. It will either: a) install all the latest updates or b) kill your computer
both outcomes result in a more secure server/workstation.:)
(to be fair, i've never had a computer that broke as a result of windowsupdate, although i've heard stories of people who have).
Why don't i ever have any moderation points when a posting like this comes up!!!
This is exactly the point that nearly everyone misses. No company would spend a billion dollars researching an idea if they had no way of protecting that idea until they had had time to recoup their research money (and make some profit from it). It just wouldn't happen. The patent system allows this research to be worthwhile in the eyes of shareholders.
The patent system needs to be policed better, but without it private sector development would pretty much stop. I've previously come to the same conclusion as you, demand some sort of proof of expenditure in developing the idea before granding a patent. It would at least filter out some of the 'had an idea in the shower' patents, and free up resources to take a better look at the rest.
Would that make it go faster, or at least reach the theoritical limit faster? You have a rail to the left and a rail to the right of your projectile, now add a rail above and a rail below, on a separate power supply isolated from the first. Add more rails and power supplies.
I couldn't glean from the article exactly what packet would cause the failure. The ACL that was given as a workaround permitted typical protocols (eg tcp, udp, icmp, etc) and blocked the rest. Presumably somewhere in 'the rest' lies the exploit but it's a big space to search.
I'll badmouth Telstra at any opportunity I get where there is some basis for it, so I guess in the interest of karma I should speak up here:)
I've received approximately 5 items of spam in the 13 months i've had my Bigpond dialup account for. Compared to the amount of real email I get, this number is insignificant to at least 3 decimal places.
If you were to ask why i'm on dialup and not broadband, _then_ you'd hear some badmouthing of telstra:)
The whole idea of a patent is to protect a person/company who has poured time and money into researching an idea. With a patent, they can make sure they can recoup their expenses and that nobody will rip off the fruits of their efforts without paying some contribution.
If you were on the board of a large company, would you vote to spend a bazillion dollars on research when you knew full well that once the research was complete, anyone could rip off the outcome and profit from it?
If patents didn't exist, research in the private sector would pretty much stop. Your grandpa's friend shouldn't have been granted a patent for simply having an idea, a patent should be granted for recouping the time and money spent on researching and developing an idea. If it turns out he did spend time and/or money on it, then he did work for his money afterall.
oh yeah, another change i'd suggest is that a patent should only be transferable to a party who is willing to develop the idea. If they buy it and sit on it or just litigate anyone else who uses it then it should become public property after a short time (say, 5 years, much shorter if they are litigating but not developing). (i know, probably a little bit too idealistic:)
a thought just occured to me. Say there was a vulnerability in tcpdump (which there was). Say you could exploit this vulnerability remotely (which apparantly you could, but I might be thinking of something else). Say you wanted to trick a whole load of people into running tcpdump... one way would be to generate a whole load of strange packets and then announce on a public forum that people could use tcpdump to look at these strange packets...:)
... just today i spent 90 minutes on the phone to various reps trying to find out what type of line splitting (pair gain) technology I was on and exactly how it was preventing me from getting DSL and ISDN, so that I could write a letter to someone who might be able to do something about it. The were all very friendly but mostly unhelpful.
The best answer I could get was that I should lodge an official application for ADSL, and that when a line tech phoned back to tell me I couldn't get it, that I should ask him/her.
What if you only came into existance 5 seconds ago, and all the memories you think of as the past have only been implanted... how would you know?
I'll fill you all in, I created the universe you are presently perceiving to gauge a beings reaction to discovering that they may be living in a non-existant universe. It was created about 5 seconds before you started reading this article. Memories of things like the matrix, the 13th floor, and the book 'a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair' were all implanted to to give your mind some background. (If you've never heard or one or more of those stories, then they don't really exist, they are only mentioned here to give the illusion that there is more in the world than you have experienced).
I created it because I was going to post this article (eg the parent article) to Slashdot (the one in the real universe) and just wanted to make sure that posting it wasn't going to begin a breakdown in society. eg if people think they don't really exist, why would they go to work tomorrow.
I'll turn you all off in a few minutes once i've collected the information i need. hope there are no hard feelings.:)
I was studying Neural Networks at about the same time I was interested in this sort of stuff. At the time I thought that a fuel injection controller could be a fun experiment to implement as a neural network.
It has a bunch of inputs, and a bunch of outputs, and a hazy sort of relationship between them all. You could give it a basic training by the maths (eg so it wouldn't melt the engine the first time it tried to run), and then stick it in and let it learn on the fly. Training could be biased towards economy or power. Economy would be interesting as peek economy might be a little too far on the lean side...
The big advantage though would be that you could shove in a few other inputs and see what happens, eg humidity, number of people on board, phase of the moon, whatever. It would work it out itself. Yearly re-training could also allow to to make adjustments for wear and tear.
Training could be done on an external device (eg laptop) as it's fairly cpu intesive, but the actual runtime calculations are relatively cheap.
That was quite a few years ago though and i haven't touched neural networks since...
hmmm... "sensible (paranoid)" wouldn't have illustrated what i meant in the way i meant it. The idea was that i was typing paranoid, and then changed my mind (hence the ^H's (backspaces)) and typed something else, but it took my fancy to let the rest of the world know what i was going to type in the first place.
I think the misconfigured backspace pre-dates 'leet speek' just a little doesn't it?
Anyway, the ps was only 'cos i'm feeling my age (28) and just wanted to make sure i wasn't out of touch too much. I was chatting to someone at a lan recently and mentioned I had written a Commodore 64 emulator once upon a time (it even ran in a text console:). He looked at me blankly and inquired what a Commodore 64 was and why would i want to emulate it. I would have sworn he was only a few years younger than me:(
... allows an admin to release patches to users when they have tested them. SUS retrieves patches from Microsoft. An Admin approves them. Client PC's (with an appropriate Group Policy) retrieve and install approved updates from the SUS server. Easy.
If you're paranoid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsensible, wait a week or more to give the rest of the world time to find bugs, test the patch thoroughly in a test environment, and of course ask yourself if you actually need it.
ps. how many of todays slashdot readers know what ^H means?
I've never done most of those things, and certainly don't do any of the others on purpose. In fact i'm not sure how anyone could not wear a seatbelt in this day and age. I feel so naked without one!!!
Maybe it 'cos i'm from Australia, but what's a rolling stop? is that where you don't quite stop at a stop sign???
I pay car insurance so that if i hit a kangaroo, (or one hits me!!! if you know of a larger more stupid animal i'd like to hear it), I won't have to pay all the repair costs. I pay insurance so that if a kid runs out in front of me and I swerve and hit something, I don't have to pay all the repair costs. I pay insurance so that if through my own carelessness I have an accident, I don't have to pay all the repair costs.
I also pay insurance so that the insurance company can cover someone else if the above unfortunate events happen to them. I don't pay insurance so someone else can drive like a maniac. If a black box can separate them from me, I'll be much happier.
I'm from Australia btw, we make a contribution to personal insurance (eg if someone is injured) with vehicle registration. Third party property insurance and Comprehensive insurance isn't compulsory. I could just choose not to have it if I thought that was a good idea (which I don't!!!)
Peeling back the irony, I agree with what you said. Healthcare and Education are the one area where I think the state/government should provide full cover to all, the premiums should just take the form of taxes. You can't choose if you get cancer (apart from the obvious smoking and other blatant risks). You don't necessarily have complete control over your employment status. I'm more than happy to pay extra tax to help out if you or anyone else were struck down with cancer, or if you found yourself out of employment. You can't control that.
You do, however, have complete control over what you do when you get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. You choose to drive dangerously - you should pay the price, not me. Driving is a privilege, not a right.
I have a problem with what YOU are saying. If YOU are costing the insurance system more due to increased claims, then i want YOU to pay. I don't drive like a fsckwit, I shouldn't have to subsidise the insurance premiums of those who do. If the insurance company wants to install a box in my car to prove I drive in a safe and reasonable manner then I have no problem with that..
Why shouldn't insurance companies charge higher premiums to those who consistantly drive in a less than safe manner? Why shouldn't YOU pay for what YOU use?
Just like when isp's implement volume limiting, and suddenly people have to pay for what they use. The people who make a noise about it are the people who are using well above what they are really paying for anyway. It's the casual users who are subsidising them, which isn't really fair in any sense of the word.
Labelling me a sheep for not thinking and acting in a way that is going to keep me paying for part of YOUR insurance premium sound pretty bogus to me.
(YOU = the collection of people who drive in a dangerous manner, not necessarily the author of the parent comment)
Slashdot Mirror
My home machines is a SMP 2xCeleron 400 w/256mb ram.
It frightens me that you would call a system with a cpu 3x the speed of mine 'not that great'. More RAM might make a difference but just how many numbers should you need to crunch to compose an email?
... if you are going to post an article about cool machines like this, please find some pics for us to drool over!!!
I started a C/S course in 1994, and likewise dutifully purchased all my texts. I stalled a bit the next year but bought most of them again. Finally it dawned on me that I was getting nothing out of them, wasn't using them, and could have purchased them half price from the "i'm only at uni because that's what I thought I was supposed to do after school" dropouts. (OT flamebait - how can Universities claim they need more places when (in my experience) 80% of first year enrollments eventually drop out, and should never have gone to uni in the first place!!!)
... if he got caught/found out, then he probably is just naive. Any who knew what they were doing wouldn't get caught.
The hornets have been stirred!!!
There was at least one case of a web site which would respond to code red (or was it nimda?) probes by connecting to the infected pc and install the relevent patches on it then reboot it.
There may have been a disclaimer on the web site that said 'to automatically clean your server, connect to this URL' (which was, by an amazing coincidence, the same URL the worm was using to attack vulnerable computers).
People rubbish windows update, but i think it's the perfect solution to the problem. It will either:
:)
a) install all the latest updates
or
b) kill your computer
both outcomes result in a more secure server/workstation.
(to be fair, i've never had a computer that broke as a result of windowsupdate, although i've heard stories of people who have).
well. that's what i thought it said when i first read it.
... will really help you pleasure the ladies. :)
Why don't i ever have any moderation points when a posting like this comes up!!!
This is exactly the point that nearly everyone misses. No company would spend a billion dollars researching an idea if they had no way of protecting that idea until they had had time to recoup their research money (and make some profit from it). It just wouldn't happen. The patent system allows this research to be worthwhile in the eyes of shareholders.
The patent system needs to be policed better, but without it private sector development would pretty much stop. I've previously come to the same conclusion as you, demand some sort of proof of expenditure in developing the idea before granding a patent. It would at least filter out some of the 'had an idea in the shower' patents, and free up resources to take a better look at the rest.
Would that make it go faster, or at least reach the theoritical limit faster? You have a rail to the left and a rail to the right of your projectile, now add a rail above and a rail below, on a separate power supply isolated from the first. Add more rails and power supplies.
Can anyone comment on if this would work or not?
I couldn't glean from the article exactly what packet would cause the failure. The ACL that was given as a workaround permitted typical protocols (eg tcp, udp, icmp, etc) and blocked the rest. Presumably somewhere in 'the rest' lies the exploit but it's a big space to search.
I'll badmouth Telstra at any opportunity I get where there is some basis for it, so I guess in the interest of karma I should speak up here :)
:)
I've received approximately 5 items of spam in the 13 months i've had my Bigpond dialup account for. Compared to the amount of real email I get, this number is insignificant to at least 3 decimal places.
If you were to ask why i'm on dialup and not broadband, _then_ you'd hear some badmouthing of telstra
The whole idea of a patent is to protect a person/company who has poured time and money into researching an idea. With a patent, they can make sure they can recoup their expenses and that nobody will rip off the fruits of their efforts without paying some contribution.
:)
If you were on the board of a large company, would you vote to spend a bazillion dollars on research when you knew full well that once the research was complete, anyone could rip off the outcome and profit from it?
If patents didn't exist, research in the private sector would pretty much stop. Your grandpa's friend shouldn't have been granted a patent for simply having an idea, a patent should be granted for recouping the time and money spent on researching and developing an idea. If it turns out he did spend time and/or money on it, then he did work for his money afterall.
oh yeah, another change i'd suggest is that a patent should only be transferable to a party who is willing to develop the idea. If they buy it and sit on it or just litigate anyone else who uses it then it should become public property after a short time (say, 5 years, much shorter if they are litigating but not developing). (i know, probably a little bit too idealistic
imho.
a thought just occured to me. Say there was a vulnerability in tcpdump (which there was). Say you could exploit this vulnerability remotely (which apparantly you could, but I might be thinking of something else). Say you wanted to trick a whole load of people into running tcpdump... one way would be to generate a whole load of strange packets and then announce on a public forum that people could use tcpdump to look at these strange packets... :)
what is this "speak" of which you type?
... just today i spent 90 minutes on the phone to various reps trying to find out what type of line splitting (pair gain) technology I was on and exactly how it was preventing me from getting DSL and ISDN, so that I could write a letter to someone who might be able to do something about it. The were all very friendly but mostly unhelpful.
The best answer I could get was that I should lodge an official application for ADSL, and that when a line tech phoned back to tell me I couldn't get it, that I should ask him/her.
What if you only came into existance 5 seconds ago, and all the memories you think of as the past have only been implanted... how would you know?
:)
I'll fill you all in, I created the universe you are presently perceiving to gauge a beings reaction to discovering that they may be living in a non-existant universe. It was created about 5 seconds before you started reading this article. Memories of things like the matrix, the 13th floor, and the book 'a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair' were all implanted to to give your mind some background. (If you've never heard or one or more of those stories, then they don't really exist, they are only mentioned here to give the illusion that there is more in the world than you have experienced).
I created it because I was going to post this article (eg the parent article) to Slashdot (the one in the real universe) and just wanted to make sure that posting it wasn't going to begin a breakdown in society. eg if people think they don't really exist, why would they go to work tomorrow.
I'll turn you all off in a few minutes once i've collected the information i need. hope there are no hard feelings.
I was studying Neural Networks at about the same time I was interested in this sort of stuff. At the time I thought that a fuel injection controller could be a fun experiment to implement as a neural network.
It has a bunch of inputs, and a bunch of outputs, and a hazy sort of relationship between them all. You could give it a basic training by the maths (eg so it wouldn't melt the engine the first time it tried to run), and then stick it in and let it learn on the fly. Training could be biased towards economy or power. Economy would be interesting as peek economy might be a little too far on the lean side...
The big advantage though would be that you could shove in a few other inputs and see what happens, eg humidity, number of people on board, phase of the moon, whatever. It would work it out itself. Yearly re-training could also allow to to make adjustments for wear and tear.
Training could be done on an external device (eg laptop) as it's fairly cpu intesive, but the actual runtime calculations are relatively cheap.
That was quite a few years ago though and i haven't touched neural networks since...
hmmm... "sensible (paranoid)" wouldn't have illustrated what i meant in the way i meant it. The idea was that i was typing paranoid, and then changed my mind (hence the ^H's (backspaces)) and typed something else, but it took my fancy to let the rest of the world know what i was going to type in the first place.
:). He looked at me blankly and inquired what a Commodore 64 was and why would i want to emulate it. I would have sworn he was only a few years younger than me :(
I think the misconfigured backspace pre-dates 'leet speek' just a little doesn't it?
Anyway, the ps was only 'cos i'm feeling my age (28) and just wanted to make sure i wasn't out of touch too much. I was chatting to someone at a lan recently and mentioned I had written a Commodore 64 emulator once upon a time (it even ran in a text console
... allows an admin to release patches to users when they have tested them. SUS retrieves patches from Microsoft. An Admin approves them. Client PC's (with an appropriate Group Policy) retrieve and install approved updates from the SUS server. Easy.
If you're paranoid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsensible, wait a week or more to give the rest of the world time to find bugs, test the patch thoroughly in a test environment, and of course ask yourself if you actually need it.
ps. how many of todays slashdot readers know what ^H means?
I've never done most of those things, and certainly don't do any of the others on purpose. In fact i'm not sure how anyone could not wear a seatbelt in this day and age. I feel so naked without one!!!
Maybe it 'cos i'm from Australia, but what's a rolling stop? is that where you don't quite stop at a stop sign???
I pay car insurance so that if i hit a kangaroo, (or one hits me!!! if you know of a larger more stupid animal i'd like to hear it), I won't have to pay all the repair costs. I pay insurance so that if a kid runs out in front of me and I swerve and hit something, I don't have to pay all the repair costs. I pay insurance so that if through my own carelessness I have an accident, I don't have to pay all the repair costs.
I also pay insurance so that the insurance company can cover someone else if the above unfortunate events happen to them. I don't pay insurance so someone else can drive like a maniac. If a black box can separate them from me, I'll be much happier.
I'm from Australia btw, we make a contribution to personal insurance (eg if someone is injured) with vehicle registration. Third party property insurance and Comprehensive insurance isn't compulsory. I could just choose not to have it if I thought that was a good idea (which I don't!!!)
Car Insurance != Medical Insurance
Peeling back the irony, I agree with what you said. Healthcare and Education are the one area where I think the state/government should provide full cover to all, the premiums should just take the form of taxes. You can't choose if you get cancer (apart from the obvious smoking and other blatant risks). You don't necessarily have complete control over your employment status. I'm more than happy to pay extra tax to help out if you or anyone else were struck down with cancer, or if you found yourself out of employment. You can't control that.
You do, however, have complete control over what you do when you get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. You choose to drive dangerously - you should pay the price, not me. Driving is a privilege, not a right.
Don't compare apples with oranges please.
I have a problem with what YOU are saying. If YOU are costing the insurance system more due to increased claims, then i want YOU to pay. I don't drive like a fsckwit, I shouldn't have to subsidise the insurance premiums of those who do. If the insurance company wants to install a box in my car to prove I drive in a safe and reasonable manner then I have no problem with that..
Why shouldn't insurance companies charge higher premiums to those who consistantly drive in a less than safe manner? Why shouldn't YOU pay for what YOU use?
Just like when isp's implement volume limiting, and suddenly people have to pay for what they use. The people who make a noise about it are the people who are using well above what they are really paying for anyway. It's the casual users who are subsidising them, which isn't really fair in any sense of the word.
Labelling me a sheep for not thinking and acting in a way that is going to keep me paying for part of YOUR insurance premium sound pretty bogus to me.
(YOU = the collection of people who drive in a dangerous manner, not necessarily the author of the parent comment)
did that. i think i said that the linux server is first, middle, and last in the mx list.