That is more likely to have been a 5160. The 5150 did not come with a harddisk. It was usually seen with two floppies, but it even had a cassette recorder interface. The memory often was only 32 or 64K. The 5160 (IBM PC XT) followed shortly after the 5150 and had a whopping 10MB Harddisk, 8 instead of 5 slots, no cassette interface, and some more memory by default.
Somewhere in 1983 (maybe early 84) we got one of those in the office, fully populated with memory (640K) and running XENIX. It was used as a low-end platform for our Unix-based application that usually ran on larger systems like the NCR TOWER or a PC-like box from Fortune Systems.
Indeed, they were reliable. I think that is one of the major contributions of IBM into the Microcomputer world. Until then, there were systems from names like Commodore, Radio Shack and Apple that really were hobby systems and had lots of glitches. IBM introduced a sturdy system (although expensive) that you could put in a workshop or professional office without worrying about it breaking down all the time, or looking like a toy.
Surely, ABC, CBS, and NBC must have copies of this event. What about the reporters who covered the event? Certainly, Walter Cronkite must have a copy of the event that night. I mean, he WAS their.
You should have read the article first (this time or the previous time it came on/.)
Sure the TV stations have a copy. But it is a bad-quality copy because it is a camera shot of a monitor that showed the original downlink signal. What they are looking for is a tape that recorded the original downlink (not in broadcast TV format), to then convert that to digital TV using TODAY's tech, not the put-camera-in-front-of-monitor tech of 1969.
At home I block everything in Korean character set. Without that I receive 10 messages per day in a totally unreadable language, and when I follow the links they seem to point to loans and mortgages at Korean banks. (in their usual awful color schemes that in our region are only appreciated by young schoolgirls)
I consider them completely clueless. Any Korean should understand that their language is understood only by Koreans, and that it is a complete waste of time to send their spam all over the world. Apparently the dumbheads think they can get their message through by repeating it often enough.
We already use greylisting. It does some good work, but spammers are starting to deal with it. I have observed some spam being re-tried using the same sender address. It might be coincidence because they might use a limited set of sender addresses, and randomly re-use an address that is already on the greylist. There is also the spam (especially the 419 stuff) that is sent via regular mailservers using free mail accounts like Yahoo, Hotmail and a load of similar services. Those are not blocked by greylisting.
In my experience, 90% of the trojan-relayed spam can be blocked at the SMTP level because of the lousy implementation of the SMTP protocol in the software they use. But, like greylisting, you have to verify that inside the SMTP server.
There are also spammers that use sender addresses that can be caught using a simple regular expression, because they apparently just cut a part of an alphabetically sorted list of mail addresses and they all fall within a very small range. Of course it helps when you normally don't receive mail from addresses in that range (which is usually in.com)
Well, I maybe should have noted that it actually is helpful that it works this way, because the "english language blocker" blocks very much more spam messages than that it causes false positives.
The spammers will have to move on to i18n, to get their message through.
At work our spamassassin bayes filter has heavily trained on English text always being spam. This is because English is not our local language, so almost no business communication is in English and most of the spam is. This indeed sometimes causes false positives when English language mail has other spam-like properties as well, and the added 3.5 points from the Bayes filter pushes it above the limit.
This again shows that you should not use solely a Bayes filter as spam blocker.
I have bought several relatively high-end systems over time, and I don't care about spending the money. But even then, there is little justification for going the last few percent.
Look at tables of prices of processors or harddisks vs capacity. The price per unit of performance of capacity is increasing dramatically at the high end. As new options become available (faster processors, larger disks) the prices of what once was the fastest or largest relatively drop most.
So, when you really want 3.2 instead of 3.0 GHz, or 500 instead of 400 GB, go ahead. But you are burning your money.
On the other hand, for the money you spend today on a top of the line computer, you can buy an average computer today, and another one in 2-3 years that outperforms today's top of the line computer (and is average at that time). So, over the entire 5 year period you have spent equal (or less) money, and you end up with two systems.
There is only one reason for not doing this: saving the environment. Otherwise, spending on top of the line computers is always a bad investment.
On the other side of the street here, they get fiber to the home for 50 euro per month (= like 60 USD). This includes 10 Mbps up/down Internet access, telephony, and a basic cable TV package (about 30 channels). Upgrade to 100 Mbps Internet is also available.
You mean you need 32 bits to have long filenames? Will we hear the same bullsh*t when moving to 64 bits?
Anyway, the CD command always had very dumb parameter conventions. Maybe they have now fixed that. For example: - you can type the pathname after CD without space, like CD\Windows - it accepts pathnames with spaces without quoting them, like CD \Program Files\Internet Explorer
Users switching from commandline-Windows to a Linux commandline interpreter often do not understand why they should type cd/etc and not cd/etc or cd\etc But other commands in the Windows CLI do not offer this freedom. I think it was a big mistake.
This is very true. I have a successful spamfilter deployed at work. It uses SpamAssassin for the backend filtering, but that part has to do very little. The bulk of the rejecting is done in the dedicated SMTP engine that receives the mail. There is a lot of information to be deduced from the SMTP transaction itself, which is normally not used by spamfilters. Close adherence to RFC standards is something that most SMTP servers have achieved quite well, and the tools the spammers use are very bad at it. I know several "bugs" in those spamtools that make them easy to identify and make it simple to discard spam without even receiving the body.
But unfortunately, when widely releasing such a filter the spammers would of course fix the bugs, and the effectiviness of the filter would be gone.
Reading over this, probably USB2 or Firewire is a better solution. For you, and also for me. Single drive enclosures are as low as $20 and you can connect them to a hub. Support is in all interesting operating systems.
Another solution is "Sata port expanders" which connect cabinets with several Sata drives to a single Sata port on a controller. However, Linux support for this technology is limited.
The difference is that with a paper voting system there are a lot of participants. For election fraud you need very many persons to know and participate. With electronic systems, it is possible to modify something in the sofware with only very few people knowing and participating, and still have influence on the end result.
It is of course much easier to have 3-10 persons work with you, than 10.000
I do not need hot-swap capability. When I want to add or replace a drive I can just powerdown the unit. However, all solutions I have looked at (the Coraid included) have this useless (for me) feature.
Currently I am looking at a 3E high 19" cabinet I have, to construct some disk mounting hardware (horizontal rails across top and bottom) and put a small board (ITX) in it. The thing can then run as a (Linux) server and export the disks as SMB or NFS instead of AoE, so they are directly accessible to my satellite receiver/recorder (Dreambox) as well. When going AoE I would have to do NFS->AoE in my normal PC.
I want the whole thing as low-power as it can be. So, lowpower board, stopping the disks when not in use, automatic fan control. Ideally, when everything is idle it should consume 15-25W. I don't intend to use RAID because with the usual RAID schemes you always have to have all disks running. Separate volumes and some manual copying of important files to different places should do, in this case.
It may be cool, but it is WAY too expensive. 4000 dollars for a 15-disk box without disks, come on!
I am looking for an affordable storage box for my home network, but for this kind of money I expect SMB/NFS functionality, not a dumb ATA interface over ethernet.
When you design a page that works OK in Firefox/Opera/Konqueror/Safari etc etc and then insert the MSIE CSS hacks via "[if lt IE 7]" conditional comments, you would expect the site to work OK in MSIE 7. However, it does not work out that way. Apparently Microsoft still have some way to go to become standards compliant. Try my employer's website http://www.uw.nl/ in some different browsers (including MSIE 7) and you'll see the differences (in the CSS-based menu system).
That is all true, but was it anywhere claimed otherwise?
The article talked about midrange routers. Any modern PC can do what a 2xxx or 3xxx cisco can do. I don't know anything about 7xxx so I cannot make that claim.
Also note that in many environments routers are used between LAN and quite slow WAN links, in the megabit speed range. No challenge for a PC. For fast (1G) traffic, switches are used.
In the past, in this country anyone could have any license plate made. You just went to some workshop, told them what plate you wanted, and it was made. Of course, criminals sometimes made plates of other similar cars, put them on their car and avoid identification (at least on quick checks).
Step in the typical shortsighted politician/civial officer. A new system was devised, where license plates could only be issued in a very controlled way. Lots of documents to be shown, complicated procedures when plates are damaged or lost, stamp duty to be paid, sequence numbers on second-issue plates, etc.
And of course, all for nothing and all only to the dismay of the citizen. Criminals, instead of having plates made, now just steal them from parked cars. Ordinary citizens are the victim of a marked increase in plate theft. They have to go through the difficult procedure and pay the duties, while for the criminal the costs have actually gone down because they now just steal the plates instead of having them made. And those plates are so flimsy that they can impossibly be firmly attached to the vehicle.
A couple of years ago, my car was stolen. In this country we have a database in which the status of every car is listed, including if it is insured (which is mandatory). At the time I reported the car stolen, the police sent an update to this system marking it as "missing", which is also sent to the insurer which marks it as "not insured" (because it was not in the posession of the policy holder). Shortly afterward, it was recovered. So I insured it again and this was reported. Somehow these two reports crossed, and my car remained in "not insured" status. I consider this a bug in the system, those events should at least have caused an alert somewhere.
You would think I would receive a letter about having an uninsured car, but no. About a year later, I suddenly found my car towed away. I had to go to some remote area where those cars are kept, only to find it already closed for the weekend. After the weekend I went there could not recover it "because I had no proof it was insured". A policy and payment proof was not enough. Fortunately I got the insurance company to send a fax and I got my car returned. I had to pay for the tow-away and storage. Several months later, I got a large fine "because of having a car that is not insured", and I had to defend myself again and send proof again that the car was in fact insured.
So what you can see here: there was one bit wrong in some stupid database, and it got me in a lot of trouble. I have no possibility to monitor that bit as a citizen, and my obligation only is to have my car insured, not to have that bit set to the correct status. Yet the police fully base all their actions on this database bit, and impose fines and tow away cars only because the database says they are not insured. Reasonable behaviour like doublechecking such information has made place for blindly trusting the computer. And the citizen has no way of getting his rights in such cases, certainly not immediately.
Events like this make me lose my belief in such systems. Next time I drive to work I may be put behind bars for driving without license, because someone has put wrong information about that in some other database. Automated scanning only makes such mishaps more likely.
"It's worrying to see so many pump-and-dump emails - often with embedded graphics included - being spammed out to the general public," added Cluley. "The people that act upon these emails aren't skilled investors, and don't realise that purchasing the shares is likely to reap no reward, benefiting only the spammers, while creating a financial rollercoaster for the organisation in question."
Why is this worrying, in the sense that it needs to be mentioned explictly? Most of the general public is not medically educated either, yet we have received spam about all sorts of pills for a long time. And many do not know what 419 is, yet lots of those mails are sent as spam. Lots of the spam I receive is in far-east languages which most western citizens are not skilled to read.
SPAM in itself is worrying, but there is nothing especially worrying about pump-and-dump.
Back in '92 when I started to use Linux, the locally available Linux distribution simply did a "cpio" of a set of floppies (or a CD if you had one) to the harddisk.
This of course had disadvantages, but it was simple to get running. The nice user-friendly installation programs and dividing into packages came later.
Slashdot Mirror
That is more likely to have been a 5160. The 5150 did not come with a harddisk. It was usually seen with two floppies, but it even had a cassette recorder interface.
The memory often was only 32 or 64K.
The 5160 (IBM PC XT) followed shortly after the 5150 and had a whopping 10MB Harddisk, 8 instead of 5 slots, no cassette interface, and some more memory by default.
Somewhere in 1983 (maybe early 84) we got one of those in the office, fully populated with memory (640K) and running XENIX.
It was used as a low-end platform for our Unix-based application that usually ran on larger systems like the NCR TOWER or a PC-like box from Fortune Systems.
Indeed, they were reliable. I think that is one of the major contributions of IBM into the Microcomputer world. Until then, there were systems from names like Commodore, Radio Shack and Apple that really were hobby systems and had lots of glitches. IBM introduced a sturdy system (although expensive) that you could put in a workshop or professional office without worrying about it breaking down all the time, or looking like a toy.
Unfortunately they rub in the prejudice that Koreans are dumb.
Just like Nigerian efforts on the Internet rub in that Nigerians are crooks.
The Nigerians don't seem to care. The Koreans may have something more to lose. So it would be good if something was done about this.
Surely, ABC, CBS, and NBC must have copies of this event. What about the reporters who covered the event? Certainly, Walter Cronkite must have a copy of the event that night. I mean, he WAS their.
/.)
You should have read the article first (this time or the previous time it came on
Sure the TV stations have a copy. But it is a bad-quality copy because it is a camera shot of a monitor that showed the original downlink signal.
What they are looking for is a tape that recorded the original downlink (not in broadcast TV format), to then convert that to digital TV using TODAY's tech, not the put-camera-in-front-of-monitor tech of 1969.
At home I block everything in Korean character set.
Without that I receive 10 messages per day in a totally unreadable language, and when I follow the links they seem to point to loans and mortgages at Korean banks.
(in their usual awful color schemes that in our region are only appreciated by young schoolgirls)
I consider them completely clueless. Any Korean should understand that their language is understood only by Koreans, and that it is a complete waste of time to send their spam all over the world. Apparently the dumbheads think they can get their message through by repeating it often enough.
We already use greylisting. It does some good work, but spammers are starting to deal with it.
.com)
I have observed some spam being re-tried using the same sender address. It might be coincidence because they might use a limited set of sender addresses, and randomly re-use an address that is already on the greylist.
There is also the spam (especially the 419 stuff) that is sent via regular mailservers using free mail accounts like Yahoo, Hotmail and a load of similar services.
Those are not blocked by greylisting.
In my experience, 90% of the trojan-relayed spam can be blocked at the SMTP level because of the lousy implementation of the SMTP protocol in the software they use.
But, like greylisting, you have to verify that inside the SMTP server.
There are also spammers that use sender addresses that can be caught using a simple regular expression, because they apparently just cut a part of an alphabetically sorted list of mail addresses and they all fall within a very small range. Of course it helps when you normally don't receive mail from addresses in that range (which is usually in
Well, I maybe should have noted that it actually is helpful that it works this way, because the "english language blocker" blocks very much more spam messages than that it causes false positives.
The spammers will have to move on to i18n, to get their message through.
At work our spamassassin bayes filter has heavily trained on English text always being spam.
This is because English is not our local language, so almost no business communication is in English and most of the spam is.
This indeed sometimes causes false positives when English language mail has other spam-like properties as well, and the added 3.5 points from the Bayes filter pushes it above the limit.
This again shows that you should not use solely a Bayes filter as spam blocker.
I have bought several relatively high-end systems over time, and I don't care about spending the money.
But even then, there is little justification for going the last few percent.
Look at tables of prices of processors or harddisks vs capacity. The price per unit of performance of capacity is increasing dramatically at the high end.
As new options become available (faster processors, larger disks) the prices of what once was the fastest or largest relatively drop most.
So, when you really want 3.2 instead of 3.0 GHz, or 500 instead of 400 GB, go ahead. But you are burning your money.
On the other hand, for the money you spend today on a top of the line computer, you can buy an average computer today, and another one in 2-3 years that outperforms today's top of the line computer (and is average at that time).
So, over the entire 5 year period you have spent equal (or less) money, and you end up with two systems.
There is only one reason for not doing this: saving the environment.
Otherwise, spending on top of the line computers is always a bad investment.
On the other side of the street here, they get fiber to the home for 50 euro per month (= like 60 USD).
This includes 10 Mbps up/down Internet access, telephony, and a basic cable TV package (about 30 channels).
Upgrade to 100 Mbps Internet is also available.
Would you call that reasonable?
You mean you need 32 bits to have long filenames?
/etc and not cd/etc or cd\etc
Will we hear the same bullsh*t when moving to 64 bits?
Anyway, the CD command always had very dumb parameter conventions. Maybe they have now fixed that.
For example:
- you can type the pathname after CD without space, like CD\Windows
- it accepts pathnames with spaces without quoting them, like CD \Program Files\Internet Explorer
Users switching from commandline-Windows to a Linux commandline interpreter often do not understand why they should type cd
But other commands in the Windows CLI do not offer this freedom. I think it was a big mistake.
This is very true.
I have a successful spamfilter deployed at work. It uses SpamAssassin for the backend filtering, but that part has to do very little.
The bulk of the rejecting is done in the dedicated SMTP engine that receives the mail. There is a lot of information to be deduced from the SMTP transaction itself, which is normally not used by spamfilters.
Close adherence to RFC standards is something that most SMTP servers have achieved quite well, and the tools the spammers use are very bad at it.
I know several "bugs" in those spamtools that make them easy to identify and make it simple to discard spam without even receiving the body.
But unfortunately, when widely releasing such a filter the spammers would of course fix the bugs, and the effectiviness of the filter would be gone.
Reading over this, probably USB2 or Firewire is a better solution. For you, and also for me.
Single drive enclosures are as low as $20 and you can connect them to a hub. Support is in all interesting operating systems.
Another solution is "Sata port expanders" which connect cabinets with several Sata drives to a single Sata port on a controller.
However, Linux support for this technology is limited.
The difference is that with a paper voting system there are a lot of participants. For election fraud you need very many persons to know and participate.
With electronic systems, it is possible to modify something in the sofware with only very few people knowing and participating, and still have influence on the end result.
It is of course much easier to have 3-10 persons work with you, than 10.000
I do not need hot-swap capability. When I want to add or replace a drive I can just powerdown the unit.
However, all solutions I have looked at (the Coraid included) have this useless (for me) feature.
Currently I am looking at a 3E high 19" cabinet I have, to construct some disk mounting hardware (horizontal rails across top and bottom) and put a small board (ITX) in it. The thing can then run as a (Linux) server and export the disks as SMB or NFS instead of AoE, so they are directly accessible to my satellite receiver/recorder (Dreambox) as well. When going AoE I would have to do NFS->AoE in my normal PC.
I want the whole thing as low-power as it can be. So, lowpower board, stopping the disks when not in use, automatic fan control. Ideally, when everything is idle it should consume 15-25W.
I don't intend to use RAID because with the usual RAID schemes you always have to have all disks running. Separate volumes and some manual copying of important files to different places should do, in this case.
It may be cool, but it is WAY too expensive. 4000 dollars for a 15-disk box without disks, come on!
I am looking for an affordable storage box for my home network, but for this kind of money I expect SMB/NFS functionality, not a dumb ATA interface over ethernet.
I've been wanting to make my entire Linux system be a subversion repository.
Have a look at FUSE. Maybe it can already do what you want.
When you design a page that works OK in Firefox/Opera/Konqueror/Safari etc etc and then insert the MSIE CSS hacks via "[if lt IE 7]" conditional comments, you would expect the site to work OK in MSIE 7.
However, it does not work out that way. Apparently Microsoft still have some way to go to become standards compliant.
Try my employer's website http://www.uw.nl/ in some different browsers (including MSIE 7) and you'll see the differences (in the CSS-based menu system).
No, that is not true. In the Netherlands it is spelled liter as well. Probably in other countries too.
Usually those are prohibited by trade law.
How many bushels are there in a Volkswagen Beetle anyway? Or in a Library of Congress?
That is all true, but was it anywhere claimed otherwise?
The article talked about midrange routers. Any modern PC can do what a 2xxx or 3xxx cisco can do. I don't know anything about 7xxx so I cannot make that claim.
Also note that in many environments routers are used between LAN and quite slow WAN links, in the megabit speed range. No challenge for a PC.
For fast (1G) traffic, switches are used.
In the past, in this country anyone could have any license plate made. You just went to some workshop, told them what plate you wanted, and it was made.
Of course, criminals sometimes made plates of other similar cars, put them on their car and avoid identification (at least on quick checks).
Step in the typical shortsighted politician/civial officer. A new system was devised, where license plates could only be issued in a very controlled way. Lots of documents to be shown, complicated procedures when plates are damaged or lost, stamp duty to be paid, sequence numbers on second-issue plates, etc.
And of course, all for nothing and all only to the dismay of the citizen. Criminals, instead of having plates made, now just steal them from parked cars. Ordinary citizens are the victim of a marked increase in plate theft. They have to go through the difficult procedure and pay the duties, while for the criminal the costs have actually gone down because they now just steal the plates instead of having them made.
And those plates are so flimsy that they can impossibly be firmly attached to the vehicle.
Unreliable data already is a problem.
A couple of years ago, my car was stolen. In this country we have a database in which the status of every car is listed, including if it is insured (which is mandatory).
At the time I reported the car stolen, the police sent an update to this system marking it as "missing", which is also sent to the insurer which marks it as "not insured" (because it was not in the posession of the policy holder).
Shortly afterward, it was recovered. So I insured it again and this was reported. Somehow these two reports crossed, and my car remained in "not insured" status.
I consider this a bug in the system, those events should at least have caused an alert somewhere.
You would think I would receive a letter about having an uninsured car, but no. About a year later, I suddenly found my car towed away. I had to go to some remote area where those cars are kept, only to find it already closed for the weekend. After the weekend I went there could not recover it "because I had no proof it was insured". A policy and payment proof was not enough. Fortunately I got the insurance company to send a fax and I got my car returned. I had to pay for the tow-away and storage.
Several months later, I got a large fine "because of having a car that is not insured", and I had to defend myself again and send proof again that the car was in fact insured.
So what you can see here: there was one bit wrong in some stupid database, and it got me in a lot of trouble. I have no possibility to monitor that bit as a citizen, and my obligation only is to have my car insured, not to have that bit set to the correct status. Yet the police fully base all their actions on this database bit, and impose fines and tow away cars only because the database says they are not insured. Reasonable behaviour like doublechecking such information has made place for blindly trusting the computer. And the citizen has no way of getting his rights in such cases, certainly not immediately.
Events like this make me lose my belief in such systems. Next time I drive to work I may be put behind bars for driving without license, because someone has put wrong information about that in some other database. Automated scanning only makes such mishaps more likely.
"It's worrying to see so many pump-and-dump emails - often with embedded graphics included - being spammed out to the general public," added Cluley. "The people that act upon these emails aren't skilled investors, and don't realise that purchasing the shares is likely to reap no reward, benefiting only the spammers, while creating a financial rollercoaster for the organisation in question."
Why is this worrying, in the sense that it needs to be mentioned explictly?
Most of the general public is not medically educated either, yet we have received spam about all sorts of pills for a long time.
And many do not know what 419 is, yet lots of those mails are sent as spam.
Lots of the spam I receive is in far-east languages which most western citizens are not skilled to read.
SPAM in itself is worrying, but there is nothing especially worrying about pump-and-dump.
Back in '92 when I started to use Linux, the locally available Linux distribution simply did a "cpio" of a set of floppies (or a CD if you had one) to the harddisk.
This of course had disadvantages, but it was simple to get running. The nice user-friendly installation programs and dividing into packages came later.