Honest Spam

I just received the most honest spam, subject line “[[utf-8] Phishing] - You’ve received a question about eBay item: @NEW designer DKNY latest watch with diamond spring 08@ (110243158561)“.

Either this spam is filtered and marked as phishing, but still allowed into my inbox, which I don’t understand.

Or the spammers are really using ‘Phishing’ in their subject line… maybe this saves time in finding people to dupe.

Return of the best computer system?

Could it be true that the amiga is going to return? Amiga Inc are selling a PPC based computer, running amigaOS4. The amiga operating system is one of the lightest systems, and is popular for hand held devices. PPC is one of the most effiecient processors due to it’s reduced instruction set and not being based on x86. PPC was doing very nicely for macintosh until they decided to DUMP it.

For a price tag of $500 dollars maybe some people are going to have a play. One natural market may be the fabled ‘thin client’ since there is a good history of building software layers above the amiga operating system for embedded/handheld systems.

Annoucment discussed on technology news site.

Sadly I’m assuming this is all overhyped and I will be left wondering how it got mentioned on the BBC website. Otherwise i’m ready to buy one, I remember my amiga fondly, that’s were I learnt how to use a mouse.

Read the original announcement from amiga.com Amiga Inc will be making two new machines, one consumer entry with price around $500 and another power design with price around $1500.

How-to Install Openoffice2 on Debian Stable

You are running Debian stable, because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That is where backports come in.

This was something that caused me a great amount of trouble in the past, I worked out how to do this and then the backports site changed shortly afterwards. Now it is fairly simple if you can follow the correct instructions.

You have to follow the instructions link on backports, it’s important not to click on the HOWTO link, because this leads to a blank page, you will then wrongly conclude you aren’t going to find any help.

Using backports.org is very simple:

1. Add this line

deb http://www.backports.org/debian sarge-backports main contrib non-free

to your /etc/apt/sources.list.

2. Run apt-get update

3. All backports are deactivated by default. If you want to install something from backports run:

apt-get -t sarge-backports install “package”

This is a lot better than the previous solution which required the use of pinning for each package you wanted to select, this seemed a lot of bother compared to the usual use of dselect. There are instructions on use of pinning on the backports site.

Now that we know how to install a package, the only problem left is to work out the name of the package that provides openoffice2.

I managed to work out this from reading the Contents of the backports repository in my browser. For i386 architecture this can be done by looking inside this file: http://backports.org/debian/dists/sarge-backports/Contents-i386.gz
The other option is to try and guess the name of the package.

I should have been able to guess the package name was openoffice.org-common. Which I installed apt-get -t sarge-backports install openoffice.org-common

Mac Adverts

Charlie Brooker has written a column in the Guardian about the new mac advert. Like the American version, the advert casts actors in the role of mac and PC. He points out that David Mitchell and Robert Webb usually play role neurotic underdog and selfish, self-regarding poseur.

The part that struck me the most about the article was when he was talking about his experience of using the macintosh.

“Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb.

What shocked me about this, is what about the third button?! I’ve started to find this most vital as a quick way of pasting text from application to application.

This was my favourite mac and pc advert:

Neil Stephenson wrote a nice article introducing the ideologies behind PC, Mac and linux, which for some reason he distributes as a zipped file o his website here: In the beginning was the command line.

45 nm transistors

BBC have written about Intel’s production of new microchip technology developed to replace the use of silicon chips - Chips push through nano-barrier. The change in materials also allows the reduction in size from 65 nm to 45 nm, whilst allowing thicker layers of material to be used which will reduce leakage of electrons from the transistors. This is a problem in strained silicon transistors which can only be a few atoms in thickness. These materials aren’t high-k metals as BBC reports, but are gates made from a high-k material and a metal (high-k/metal).

The materials used are high-k materials - where k (kappa) is the dielectric constant,

Material	Dielectric constant source
Air	1 (definition)
Carbon Black	2.5 - 3.0
Cocaine (68° F)	3.1
Copper Oxide	18.1
Formamide (68° F)	84.0
Glass	3.7-10
Hydrogen Cyanide (70° F)	95.4
Iodine (107° F)	118.0
Iodine	11
Iodine (250° F)	118.0
Silicon	11.0 - 12.0
Silicon Dioxide	4.5
Syrup	50-80
Titanium Dioxide	110.00
Titanium Oxide	40-50
Water	4-88

Reduced leakage means more power efficient processors, which also means less heating, which means more transistors per chip, and more computation power. I don’t know if this technology can also be faster but I guess this is why the small size is desirable.

From Intel’s glossary relating to this technology found on Intels pages.

high-k material – A material that can replace silicon dioxide as a gate dielectric. It has
good insulating properties and also creates high capacitance (hence the term “high-k”)
between the gate and the channel. Both of these are desirable properties for high
performance transistors. “k” (actually the Greek letter kappa) is an engineering term for
the ability of a material to hold electric charge. Think of a sponge. It can hold a lot of
water. Wood can hold some but not as much. Glass can’t hold any at all. Similarly, some
materials can store charge better than others, hence have a higher “k” value. Also,
because high-k materials can be thicker than silicon dioxide, while retaining the same
desirable properties, they greatly reduce leakage.
leakage – Current flowing through the gate dielectric. In an ideal situation, the gate
dielectric acts as a perfect insulator. But as it is made ever thinner (in Intel’s 90nm
process, it is a mere 5 atomic layers thick!), current leaks through it. This results in
undesirable results. The transistor doesn’t behave as it should, and it consumes more
power than it should. Think of a leaky faucet that drips water, hence being very wasteful

Intel describe hafnium dioxide (HfO2), zirconium dioxide (ZrO2) and titanium dioxide (TiO2) to be high k materials. All have a dielectric constant or above 3.9, the “k” of silicon dioxide.

Does anyone know what this nano-barrier is that Intel broke as reported by BBC?

Spam

I receive an increasing amount of spam email. Following the advice from computer services I never reply to the SPAM. This makes sense because at-least it stops spammers from launching a denile of service attack on someone by sending out a lot of mails in their name. In the arms war against spammers I use only a filter on my university account. This filters around 95 % of the spam emails I receive, and about 5 % of my real email into a directory. It’s usually possible for me to tell what is spam by the email title so it isn’t a big problem, just annoying.

It won’t be possible to stop the spammers until it becomes more difficult to send someone unsolicited email, or it becomes more expensive. Email tax (will just mean all spam is from large corporates?) or increase the cost of email in another way (increased popularity of encryption).

But one way to decrease the sucess of spammers would surely be for everyone to reply, that way it would surely be harder at least for the Nigerian 419ers? This could be done by a automatic program, they don’t seem to be very good at english so surely they could have a nice converstation with something like Eliza or ALICE.