Messages

1

2006 / What does your Mac do when you're away?

« on: November 01, 2006, 12:03:52 AM »

QUOTE(gailwin @ Oct 30 2006, 08:03 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

that may be a lot of bandwidth
and illegal files

i'm using F@H on my Dell Optiplex GX260 with 2.4ghz P4 and 1gb of ram.
i started running it about a week ago
it's done with 2 workunits now and is on its third (7800/20000 so far done on that unit)

      for joining gailwin - the more the merrier!    

[both]

2

2006 / sleeping mac

« on: October 25, 2006, 01:27:29 PM »

QUOTE(Gregg @ Oct 25 2006, 08:29 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah, I think the overwhelming conclusion is that both are better.

I never let my machines sleep - they're either busy continuously (see sig) or turned off entirely.  I have the hard drive set to "never sleep" on all of them.  Since my first original Mac in 1984 I have had only one hard drive fail - one of the Maxtor 40 Gb ones from 2001 that suffered the dreaded "double-beep" failure mode.

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2006 / Internet connection speed Olympics

« on: October 25, 2006, 01:21:28 PM »

QUOTE(kbeartx @ Oct 25 2006, 10:40 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Theoretically, your connection speed would be faster using a wire than wireless.

But not that much faster - and I like the convenience of a wireless connection.  Be sure you have a name for your network and password access, to prevent potential wrongdoers from using your wireless network and ISP for their own nefarious purposes.

QUOTE

Google for speed tests.

I like the speakeasy one because i gives you several mirror sites to choose from.  

Congratulations on the beautiful new Mac!

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2006 / Should I go from Explorer 5.1 to Safari?

« on: October 25, 2006, 01:14:59 PM »

Yes, go with Safari - but don't trash IE.  Keep it in the Applications folder in case you need it to interact with the occasional sites that don't support Safari or Firefox.  I have been on "webinar" and banking sites that only worked with IE.  Visiting those sites under IE was unpleasant, but I endured it because NOT visiting them would have been worse.    

For ordinary browsing, though, Safari is wonderful!  Firefox is a close second.  If you haven't tried "tabbed browsing" yet, you have a real treat in store for you!  

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2006 / What does your Mac do when you're away?

« on: October 23, 2006, 10:18:54 AM »

QUOTE(mastercheif @ Oct 22 2006, 11:40 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My computer is usally seeding and downloading 100+ torrents....

   Wow! That's a lot of bandwidth.  But what about the CPU utilization? The easiest way to check is under Activity Monitor - open the view window and click on the CPU tab, then order the processes by CPU demand.  (Sorry for the beginner-level details if you are a power user; I'm still new here and getting to know people)  I expect that Activity Monitor will show one CPU partially utilized by bittorrent, and the other one nearly idle.

F@H is CPU-intensive, but uses very little bandwidth - just a few Mb every few days for uploading and downloading work units.  That makes it a good fit with bandwidth-intensive activities like running a web server, file-sharing, or internet-mapping projects such as DIMES.

Your 2.13 GHz duallie would be a pretty good folder with the OSX client under Rosetta, a very fast folder with the Windows client under BootCamp or a Linux client under Parallels, and an absolute screamer when the native Intel core is issued.  If you want to give it a try, start here and use the advance options to start folding automatically at boot.

Research AND filesharing -   - now that's getting the most out of a computer!  

6

2006 / What does your Mac do when you're away?

« on: October 22, 2006, 09:23:51 PM »

QUOTE(gailwin @ Oct 22 2006, 11:27 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

is there anything for Mac OS 9?
I could put the classics to work if there is

Sorry, OSX only - the first mac cores were introduced in 2002 when OSX was already released, and the developers never looked back.

Please do sign up your G3's and newer Macs, though - anything running at 350 MHz and faster is still capable of meeting the deadlines.  Did I see a MacBook in your collection? The Intel Macs currently fold under either the OSX folding client in Rosetta or the Windows client in Boot Camp, but a new Intel Mac client currently under development will supersede both of those when it issues.

[exact copy]

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2006 / Net-Related: I hope this is not just sour grapes

« on: October 21, 2006, 10:51:05 PM »

I've done a bit of editing for the wikipedia and while I like it, I've also seen vandalism, editing wars over the tone or partisanship of an article on a controversial subject, and just plain misinformation.  I can see how that would eventually sour one of the founders sufficiently that he would split off and start his own competing encyclopedia.

The advantage of the Citizendium is supposed to be editorial oversight and expert arbitration of vexed questions.  I question where they are going to get the experts for free - but Wikipedia does (even though they are anonymous) so perhaps it's possible.

My main beef with the project is that it's going to start out with an exact copy of the Wikipedia and then allow their copy to evolve in a different direction.  That seems absolutely unfair to me.  OK, the creative commons license makes it legal, but is it right?  

I live in a rather nice house.  But someone else could have a nicer house for only 10% the cost of mine - IF they took my house away and used it as their starting point!

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2006 / What does your Mac do when you're away?

« on: October 21, 2006, 02:26:57 AM »

Kimmer, thanks for checking those energy settings!  It's not unusual that a software upgrade will reset the defaults.

Mrious be,  you're correct that Folding@Home, or any distributed computing project, consumes some electricity that would otherwise not be used. But it's not being wasted - it's contributing toward an important research project.  Conserving energy and other resources is important, not because we need to save energy for its own sake, but because we need to use it for useful, worthwhile purposes.    

I've measured the power draw of my 12" G4 iBook, which pulls about 27 watts when folding a protein; my Core Duo Mini with two proteins folding at once pulls about 37 watts.  They're really energy efficient as computers go.  And they're helping to build the knowledge needed to develop better treatments and preventions for cancer and Alzheimer's. IMHO it's a  good use for that energy.

[Help Cure Cancer]

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2006 / Phishtank website

« on: October 18, 2006, 08:34:24 AM »

QUOTE(jcarter @ Oct 17 2006, 09:05 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

... I clicked upon the link so that I could copy and paste it into Phishtank, it came up with big writing,,,,,"This is a fraud!"
So I guess Bank of America got onto it quickly, and somehow re-directed/intercepted it?
But tomorrow I will bookmark this site and see if I can learn how to decypher them from the headers.

If you use webmail, you can easily see if the site matches the address claimed for it by looking in your browser's status bar (that's the bar at the bottom of the window).  You can display it in Safari by going to the View menu and selecting "Show status bar".  Then when you mouse over the link, its address will show up in the status bar.  Just for instance:  http://www.paypal.com.  You'd think you were going to Paypal, but it takes you to ebay. You can also check it out with the links in my .sig.   The other way to see it without actually going to the site is to use "view source" which will display the html code.  (Works for email too)  It's safer than going to the site, especially if you're on a poorly protected Windows system, because sometimes the phishing site will also try to, er, "donate" a bit of malware to you.  

Be aware that sometimes the (real) site listed in the email is only a redirector or a domain pointed to another domain. Here's an example of pointing: Help Cure Cancer - if you mouse over it you'll see foldforlife.com in the status bar, but clicking on it takes you to teammacosx.com. (Foldforlife was a domain name I bought for the folding project, but never got round to developing... it's totally legit.)  Often a phisher will use a free geocities or yahoo page as a redirector. When they lose the free page, it's no big deal, because their real payoff page somewhere else is untouched.

Concerning the "This is a fraud!" message you saw - that would have been the webhosting company's response to notification of the phishing site.  A responsible host will take down the phishing site, put up a warning and of course cancel the offending user's account.  The host could have found out about it from your note forwarded by BOA, from a direct report to their abuse admin by someone else who saw the phishing mail, or by scanning their clients' webpages for suspicious content.  In any case, hats off to them for a quick and very appropriate response.

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2006 / Phishtank website

« on: October 16, 2006, 10:42:49 PM »

Your folding stats are doing just fine, 37 work units and going strong.  

I can't say I miss getting emails from the Lads (and Lasses) from Lagos. Even if they stopped sending them I woudn't miss them.Still, I'm intrigued by their sob stories - each one more dramatic than the last.  Somewhere over there, in a hot airless server room, the Great Nigerian Screenplay is waiting to be written.

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2006 / Phishtank website

« on: October 16, 2006, 05:08:37 PM »

Hi folks, especially Jim (airbusdriver) who first invited me here back in January.

May I cordially recommend http://www.phishtank.com/  a free community site for reporting, verifying, and tracking phishing email.  Now that phishing attempts have exceeded Nigerian 419 spam as the most common type of fraudulent email, the time is ripe for the 'net community to rise up and fight back.

I've been a volunteer in the spam wars for years, and have always sent phish reports to spoof@ebay.com and spoof@paypal.com - but this is much better, as it collects every kind of phishing scam from 'net users and makes the data openly available via an API and a web interface. That data is used by ISP's to flag phishing emails as malware and by anti-phishing software developers to test and tune their products.

The site info is very well written and friendly (though I can't imagine any site topping this one here for good vibes)