I heard (also on NPR) a few weeks ago that most of the pariculate emissions from diesel could be vastly reduced by using low (or zero) sulfur fuel. The EPA would like to have mandated the new fuel by now, but the trucking industry is heavily against it. They're going to mandate it anyway, I think starting in 2007, perhaps rolling from CA eastward.
If I were buying a new car this year, I'd get something like a VW Golf diesel. 48+ MPG, and any old shadetree can work on it. Plus, at least you have a SHOT at a long-term low-maintenance record. It's very unlikely you'll be able to buy a hybrid and drive it 10+ years without major maintenance bills. Assuming you're keeping your cars emissions in check (regular tune-ups), the best thing you can do for the planet is to keep driving the same car. It will cost way more energy to build a new car than what you'll save over just driving the old one. Of course, if you're driving a Hummer or some other idiot box, this isn't true, but you don't give a damn what your impact is anyway.
I can see people who don't want to pay for the connection sniffing someone's traffic, then cloning their MAC address and surfing for free after the guy switches off.
Here's a workout you can take your phone on. www.bike-to-work.com Personally, getting 40 minutes of aerobic exercise before work feels great. Arriving with an endorphine rush helps productivity a lot!
You've never been to Asia, apparently. I've talked to several people who have been there, and they were just amazed. There are stores operating openly in malls there that carry NOTHING but pirated software and music. They say everything's a buck a disc. You want The Matrix DVD? $1. Microsoft Office? $1. A music CD? $1.
I've seen articles where they interviewed shop owners, and they just didn't understand what the problem was. They considered the *DISCS* to be the product, not the content, and said they didn't understand, they bought the discs for x, they sell them for x*2, they're doing nothing wrong, what's the problem?
Another friend said it's about the same in Russia, though less open. For about $15, you can buy a CD pack containing Windows, Office, and a selection of games and stuff. Even when someone has the legitimate software, they sometimes use the "pirate pack" because the pirates take the time to have the properly localized versions of everything already set up. I think the Russians know that what they're doing isn't considered "right" though.
Certainly there are big pirating operations everywhere, but in some countries, pirating is the norm, and nobody thinks twice about it.
So, this is a perfect reason why we need to be able to back up our music CDs, so it's completely legitimate to break music CD copy protection in the name of fair use (making backups).
Just last week, I went to the basement and pulled a whole spindle of old archive CDs to see how the data was holding up. The oldest was written in late 1993, I tested the oldest 10 using Nero CDSpeed's scandisc function. All discs were 100% readable, 6 of 10 with no errors at all, the other 4 with just a few (less than 5) sectors with recoverable read errors (would go unnoticed when just reading the discs).
The label side IS where the data is. The "bottom" side is just a piece of plastic. The reflective layer and all the good stuff is on top. On a factory CD, that's covered with silkscreened ink. If the bottom gets scratched up, you can buff out the scratches with no damage. The "CD/DVD DRx" tool that you can buy in the stores is actually just a ring of fine (like, 2000 grit) wet/dry sandpaper, and the tool sands the scratches out of the bottom of the disc.
I personally put the round labels on the top; it protects the top from scratches. I know, I've heard people saying labels are bad for the discs, but so far I've been doing the label thing for about 5 years, across about 4000 CDs and DVDs, and no problems so far.
I have an 8x burner, but I'm too cheap to buy the media. I can burn at 4x and do firewire video cap (to the same IDE drive the burn's happening from), have SETI running, be browsing under Mozilla web (10+ tabs open) and email, and have Agent downloading and decoding NNTP binaries at the same time, and have a half dozen terminal windows open to various headless boxes, and nothing's suffering. The write buffers are hovering around 97%, no dropped frames on the video, and all my GUI are stable. Win2K, 2.5 GHz Athlon XP.
This is all with totally standard consumer equipment. No SCSI, just a group of Maxtor 160GB drives sitting on a Maxtor/Promise controller in the PCI slot, in an ABit mainboard. Boot/swap drive is plugged into the mainboard.
If you're getting I/O bound on a > 1 GHz machine at 4x write, you may have config problems. Check and make sure your writer is running in UDMA mode, and your drive isn't horribly fragmented.
Also the sysadmins who didn't apply available patches. Shouldn't they bear responsibility as well?
Sure, I know the response of "but MS patches cause problems!" But we know damn well that most failures to patch are NOT due to overly-diligent sysadmins, they're due to UNDER-diligent (AKA *LAZY*) sysadmins.
Any IT department that doesn't have a policy of beginning a review process for patches as soon as they're available, and applying them across the enterprise as soon as possible, should review their policies. Any sysadmin that does not follow the policies should have his/her employment reviewed.
Of course, the problem is that there are so many candidates elected by default in the U.S., it's likely that nobody would ever get elected to some offices, and the number of elections would be horribly expensive.
However, it's a fun game to play to think about whether, should this system come about, whether actually competent people might have to start running for office. We might even have to start drafting people to serve, as in one of Heinlein's speculative libertarian future Americas.
That's a ridiculous statement. The firmware IS the router. Without the firmware, the router is a few of off-the-shelf ethernet chips and a processor. The only difference between many different products is the firmware.
When you buy a router, you're buying the function of routing. That's nearly 100% implemented in the firmware (for consumer-level routers, probably IS 100%). The hardware is just there to support the firmware's function.
I think this system, or one just like it, was on/. a year or two ago. I remember the obligatory messages from people who thought that laser light in the eye automatically meant you'd go blind.
Um, yeah. Any laser powerful enough to modify your cornea, such as the ones used in lasik surgery that is referred to later, would also be powerful enough to ablate off pieces of skin if pointed at bare flesh.
There is a study out there where they took people who had eye cancers and were scheduled to have eyeballs removed soon anyway, and they focussed a common laser pointer at a single spot in the eye for something like 30 minutes straight. No lasting damage.
I don't know about the new green lasers. They look a hell of a lot brighter, but they don't have any more energy than a red laser. The increased visibility is purely due to the human eye's increased sensitivity to green light.
I burn to multiple DVDs, store in multiple locations, and put PAR2 files on each DVD. Typically I'll try to leave about 200MB at the end of a DVD and create a PAR2 set that fills the rest of the drive.
You want to use PAR2, not PAR. With PAR, if the biggest file on the archive is 10M, every file that's at all damaged will require another 10M par file to fix even if it's one wrong byte in a 50 byte file. With PAR2, you only round up to the next block size for each broken bit.
the DeLorean was crappiest design JZD ever put out
I'm glad someone said it. I don't have a lot of specific knowledge on the subject, but I've heard several exotic car enthusiasts say that the DeLorean was perhaps stylish, but it was a piece of junk.
I saw a guy with one in a parking lot once, trying to get his door closed. He'd slam it down, it'd pop right back up again. He was wrestling with a screwdriver in the latch. I talked with him for a few minutes, and he confirmed that yes, the car got him noticed, but it was a pain in the ass to keep going, little bits of it kept breaking all the time.
if you use the net enough to need a second phone line. Once you buy that 2nd line, you're better off with broadband. The cost is the same and it's faster and better (stays up, no redial).
$20/mo (nominal, maybe $15) for decent dial-up, plus $25/mo for the 2nd line (that's the CHEAPEST you can get a line, in MI, including taxes etc). Most places have basic cable broadband for $40 if not less.
Before we got broadband, all 3 machines in our house were sharing a 28.8K modem (too far from the switch for 56K to work). Now THAT is pain. Sometimes 2 or 3 minutes for a web pages with some graphics and no animation to load.
Shit, man, you had a C compiler? I had a copy of the Z80 assembly language reference handbook, a pile of paper, and the built in BASIC that came on the TRS-80. I wrote my assembly for the first year or so by hand assembling, converting to decimal, and typing the code into DATA strings in BASIC, then using a chunk of code that would POKE that into memory and execute it.
I personally liked Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, where they had some smart dust that had been infected with spyware and given to the enemy as a "gift" -the enemy suspected the spyware, but it had been inserted by a guy who lived thousands of years ago, and the systems OS was thousands of layers and patches which nobody had touched in thousands of years, written in languages nobody had used for dozens of generations. So a team of programmers spent something like a dozen years analyzing code to try to figure out if there was indeed spy code in there.
I think we're on the path to this situation now. There are people graduating these days that don't even have a concept of the lowest levels of the systems.
More than that, I'm a heartless idiot, apparently. I guess that explains the degree, nice income on a purely technical job, and the volunteer work and charitable donations I do.
VC7 is head and shoulders above VC6 for standards compliance, including templates. Our company is switching mainly just to get better templates compliance. We do not always upgrade; we skipped VC5, stayed on VC4.2 until VC6. I'm not a compliance expert (I'm more of a perl hack), but the people at the company that are into advanced C++ code like the new compiler very much.
This is because his web server is claiming that the MIME type of the GIF is "text/plain" I bet if it was.gif instead of.GIF it wouldn't to that. But his server should work either way.
You're right, technology should never be brought to war. We should go back to carpet bombing instead of laser guided munitions. We should go back to sending scouts in instead of video cameras, so they can get shot. Hell, let's go back to hand-to-hand bloodbaths.
Wars are going to happen, period. Politicians are just as willing to kill 1000 as 10 to achieve their goals. It's naieve to think that they'll be more likely to go to war because we have a camera in an RC plane.
The most likely result of having spy planes like this would be LESS casualties. Imagine being able to fly a video fly into a building where there's a hostage crisis going on and getting real time video. Imagine flying into a mosque and having video telling you who's in there, where, etc. The place could easily be filled with civilians, and we'd avoid attacking them. Or, it could be filled with armed troups, and we'd have proof to the world that we're justified in attacking.
Almost all war-related technological innovation of the last 50 years has been targeted at reducing civilian casualties, collateral damage, and exposure of our own troops to fire.
Yes, but the free market can't dictate the creation of technological breakthrough any more than a government mandate; they happen when insightful people have been working on a problem for a length of time. Goosing the market a bit in order to gain more time for innovation to occur is not a bad thing if we can afford it. If it turns out we can't make the mandate, then I'm sure the legislation will be relaxed.
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I heard (also on NPR) a few weeks ago that most of the pariculate emissions from diesel could be vastly reduced by using low (or zero) sulfur fuel. The EPA would like to have mandated the new fuel by now, but the trucking industry is heavily against it. They're going to mandate it anyway, I think starting in 2007, perhaps rolling from CA eastward.
If I were buying a new car this year, I'd get something like a VW Golf diesel. 48+ MPG, and any old shadetree can work on it. Plus, at least you have a SHOT at a long-term low-maintenance record. It's very unlikely you'll be able to buy a hybrid and drive it 10+ years without major maintenance bills.
Assuming you're keeping your cars emissions in check (regular tune-ups), the best thing you can do for the planet is to keep driving the same car. It will cost way more energy to build a new car than what you'll save over just driving the old one. Of course, if you're driving a Hummer or some other idiot box, this isn't true, but you don't give a damn what your impact is anyway.
www.bike-to-work.com
I can see people who don't want to pay for the connection sniffing someone's traffic, then cloning their MAC address and surfing for free after the guy switches off.
Here's a workout you can take your phone on.
www.bike-to-work.com
Personally, getting 40 minutes of aerobic exercise before work feels great. Arriving with an endorphine rush helps productivity a lot!
You've never been to Asia, apparently. I've talked to several people who have been there, and they were just amazed. There are stores operating openly in malls there that carry NOTHING but pirated software and music. They say everything's a buck a disc. You want The Matrix DVD? $1. Microsoft Office? $1. A music CD? $1.
I've seen articles where they interviewed shop owners, and they just didn't understand what the problem was. They considered the *DISCS* to be the product, not the content, and said they didn't understand, they bought the discs for x, they sell them for x*2, they're doing nothing wrong, what's the problem?
Another friend said it's about the same in Russia, though less open. For about $15, you can buy a CD pack containing Windows, Office, and a selection of games and stuff. Even when someone has the legitimate software, they sometimes use the "pirate pack" because the pirates take the time to have the properly localized versions of everything already set up. I think the Russians know that what they're doing isn't considered "right" though.
Certainly there are big pirating operations everywhere, but in some countries, pirating is the norm, and nobody thinks twice about it.
So, this is a perfect reason why we need to be able to back up our music CDs, so it's completely legitimate to break music CD copy protection in the name of fair use (making backups).
Just last week, I went to the basement and pulled a whole spindle of old archive CDs to see how the data was holding up. The oldest was written in late 1993, I tested the oldest 10 using Nero CDSpeed's scandisc function. All discs were 100% readable, 6 of 10 with no errors at all, the other 4 with just a few (less than 5) sectors with recoverable read errors (would go unnoticed when just reading the discs).
The label side IS where the data is. The "bottom" side is just a piece of plastic. The reflective layer and all the good stuff is on top. On a factory CD, that's covered with silkscreened ink. If the bottom gets scratched up, you can buff out the scratches with no damage. The "CD/DVD DRx" tool that you can buy in the stores is actually just a ring of fine (like, 2000 grit) wet/dry sandpaper, and the tool sands the scratches out of the bottom of the disc.
I personally put the round labels on the top; it protects the top from scratches. I know, I've heard people saying labels are bad for the discs, but so far I've been doing the label thing for about 5 years, across about 4000 CDs and DVDs, and no problems so far.
I have an 8x burner, but I'm too cheap to buy the media. I can burn at 4x and do firewire video cap (to the same IDE drive the burn's happening from), have SETI running, be browsing under Mozilla web (10+ tabs open) and email, and have Agent downloading and decoding NNTP binaries at the same time, and have a half dozen terminal windows open to various headless boxes, and nothing's suffering. The write buffers are hovering around 97%, no dropped frames on the video, and all my GUI are stable. Win2K, 2.5 GHz Athlon XP.
This is all with totally standard consumer equipment. No SCSI, just a group of Maxtor 160GB drives sitting on a Maxtor/Promise controller in the PCI slot, in an ABit mainboard. Boot/swap drive is plugged into the mainboard.
If you're getting I/O bound on a > 1 GHz machine at 4x write, you may have config problems. Check and make sure your writer is running in UDMA mode, and your drive isn't horribly fragmented.
Also the sysadmins who didn't apply available patches. Shouldn't they bear responsibility as well?
Sure, I know the response of "but MS patches cause problems!" But we know damn well that most failures to patch are NOT due to overly-diligent sysadmins, they're due to UNDER-diligent (AKA *LAZY*) sysadmins.
Any IT department that doesn't have a policy of beginning a review process for patches as soon as they're available, and applying them across the enterprise as soon as possible, should review their policies. Any sysadmin that does not follow the policies should have his/her employment reviewed.
Of course, the problem is that there are so many candidates elected by default in the U.S., it's likely that nobody would ever get elected to some offices, and the number of elections would be horribly expensive.
However, it's a fun game to play to think about whether, should this system come about, whether actually competent people might have to start running for office. We might even have to start drafting people to serve, as in one of Heinlein's speculative libertarian future Americas.
That's a ridiculous statement. The firmware IS the router. Without the firmware, the router is a few of off-the-shelf ethernet chips and a processor. The only difference between many different products is the firmware.
When you buy a router, you're buying the function of routing. That's nearly 100% implemented in the firmware (for consumer-level routers, probably IS 100%). The hardware is just there to support the firmware's function.
I think this system, or one just like it, was on /. a year or two ago. I remember the obligatory messages from people who thought that laser light in the eye automatically meant you'd go blind.
No, # is an octothorpe.
C# - cock-tothorpe.
Um, yeah.
Any laser powerful enough to modify your cornea, such as the ones used in lasik surgery that is referred to later, would also be powerful enough to ablate off pieces of skin if pointed at bare flesh.
There is a study out there where they took people who had eye cancers and were scheduled to have eyeballs removed soon anyway, and they focussed a common laser pointer at a single spot in the eye for something like 30 minutes straight. No lasting damage.
I don't know about the new green lasers. They look a hell of a lot brighter, but they don't have any more energy than a red laser. The increased visibility is purely due to the human eye's increased sensitivity to green light.
I burn to multiple DVDs, store in multiple locations, and put PAR2 files on each DVD. Typically I'll try to leave about 200MB at the end of a DVD and create a PAR2 set that fills the rest of the drive.
You want to use PAR2, not PAR. With PAR, if the biggest file on the archive is 10M, every file that's at all damaged will require another 10M par file to fix even if it's one wrong byte in a 50 byte file. With PAR2, you only round up to the next block size for each broken bit.
the DeLorean was crappiest design JZD ever put out
I'm glad someone said it. I don't have a lot of specific knowledge on the subject, but I've heard several exotic car enthusiasts say that the DeLorean was perhaps stylish, but it was a piece of junk.
I saw a guy with one in a parking lot once, trying to get his door closed. He'd slam it down, it'd pop right back up again. He was wrestling with a screwdriver in the latch. I talked with him for a few minutes, and he confirmed that yes, the car got him noticed, but it was a pain in the ass to keep going, little bits of it kept breaking all the time.
if you use the net enough to need a second phone line. Once you buy that 2nd line, you're better off with broadband. The cost is the same and it's faster and better (stays up, no redial).
$20/mo (nominal, maybe $15) for decent dial-up, plus $25/mo for the 2nd line (that's the CHEAPEST you can get a line, in MI, including taxes etc). Most places have basic cable broadband for $40 if not less.
Before we got broadband, all 3 machines in our house were sharing a 28.8K modem (too far from the switch for 56K to work). Now THAT is pain. Sometimes 2 or 3 minutes for a web pages with some graphics and no animation to load.
Shit, man, you had a C compiler? I had a copy of the Z80 assembly language reference handbook, a pile of paper, and the built in BASIC that came on the TRS-80. I wrote my assembly for the first year or so by hand assembling, converting to decimal, and typing the code into DATA strings in BASIC, then using a chunk of code that would POKE that into memory and execute it.
I personally liked Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, where they had some smart dust that had been infected with spyware and given to the enemy as a "gift" -the enemy suspected the spyware, but it had been inserted by a guy who lived thousands of years ago, and the systems OS was thousands of layers and patches which nobody had touched in thousands of years, written in languages nobody had used for dozens of generations. So a team of programmers spent something like a dozen years analyzing code to try to figure out if there was indeed spy code in there.
I think we're on the path to this situation now. There are people graduating these days that don't even have a concept of the lowest levels of the systems.
More than that, I'm a heartless idiot, apparently. I guess that explains the degree, nice income on a purely technical job, and the volunteer work and charitable donations I do.
VC7 is head and shoulders above VC6 for standards compliance, including templates. Our company is switching mainly just to get better templates compliance. We do not always upgrade; we skipped VC5, stayed on VC4.2 until VC6.
I'm not a compliance expert (I'm more of a perl hack), but the people at the company that are into advanced C++ code like the new compiler very much.
If you are not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.
Actually, I was a conservative at 20, and am now a liberal at 40. What's that make me?
This is because his web server is claiming that the MIME type of the GIF is "text/plain" .gif instead of .GIF it wouldn't to that. But his server should work either way.
I bet if it was
Time to edit httpd.conf
You're right, technology should never be brought to war. We should go back to carpet bombing instead of laser guided munitions. We should go back to sending scouts in instead of video cameras, so they can get shot. Hell, let's go back to hand-to-hand bloodbaths.
Wars are going to happen, period. Politicians are just as willing to kill 1000 as 10 to achieve their goals. It's naieve to think that they'll be more likely to go to war because we have a camera in an RC plane.
The most likely result of having spy planes like this would be LESS casualties. Imagine being able to fly a video fly into a building where there's a hostage crisis going on and getting real time video. Imagine flying into a mosque and having video telling you who's in there, where, etc. The place could easily be filled with civilians, and we'd avoid attacking them. Or, it could be filled with armed troups, and we'd have proof to the world that we're justified in attacking.
Almost all war-related technological innovation of the last 50 years has been targeted at reducing civilian casualties, collateral damage, and exposure of our own troops to fire.
Yes, but the free market can't dictate the creation of technological breakthrough any more than a government mandate; they happen when insightful people have been working on a problem for a length of time. Goosing the market a bit in order to gain more time for innovation to occur is not a bad thing if we can afford it. If it turns out we can't make the mandate, then I'm sure the legislation will be relaxed.