There isn't as many long distance lines as there are local lines/numbers.... its like a 1000:1 ratio, which basicly means that not everyone can be using long distance or even make local calls at the same time.
A few years ago the local telco offered unlimited long distance here after 6PM, after a few weeks it got to the point where it was impossible to make a phone call. Needless to say, they had to cut the plan off pretty quickly because it was becoming a safey problem, people couldn't call 911.
The local telco has less than 1 millon users connected to its 2.5Gbit SONET network which also carries internet and video conferencing. Assuming that the voice channel is 24k and nothing else is running on the system, the system can carry around 100,000 conversations. So thats around a 10:1 ratio which isn't too bad but you also have video feeds, internet and what not using the same network. Also consider that everytime you pickup the phone the signal has to travel through the network, there are only 3 switching centers(CO) for a network that covers the province(9 hour drive from end to end @ highway speeds).
A normal cafe with free internet terminals may be more sucessful... (Web access only)
Internet should be used to attract customers and you should make your money off coffee and food sales.
Internet is so cheap and the norm these days no one is going to pay to use it.
Also offer free wireless access to attract users with their own laptops.
Another service could be a lan party room which you could charge for...
Or have a room with a few high end machines loaded with the best games which you could charge for...
Offer good background music, a good atmostphere(couches, lots to look at, etc...) and free internet and I'll be there buying coffee... Oh yea and it has to be great coffee...
Its also alot easier to skim over a website and realize its crap than find a book on the shelf, climb the ladder, bring it somewhere to read and then find out it dosn't have any usefull information in it.
I wasted most of my Saterday digging through the univeristy libary only to leave emtpy handed. They had very little upto date information. A what little they had was hard to find... On the 4th floor, west wing, 10th shelf from the floor.... Most of the linux books that were not for beginners were from back in 95. They only had 3 books on wireless networking and all three just skimmed the surface, a basic introduction.
Anyway all that work turned up very little, but in a few min on google I can find usefull info on just about anything that is up to date and accurate(after confirming it with a few other independant websites, which can be done in 1/2 the time it took me to find just one book at the libary, not to mention the time finding the usefull info in the book.
Now there are lots of things you can't find online but you can find in a good libary, history, indeph mathmatics and electronics, things that haven't changed much in the past 10 years or so.
I don't agree with this at all... The robots can hold the streets, cutoff travel, drop supplies(food and water for the locals). Or they can just keep basic laws, search buildings, etc...
The problem they have over in iraq right now is that they still have massive searching todo and the locals keep attacking. Robots are great for searching and are alot tougher than humans, and if they are destroyed its no big deal.
The missions change when you don't have to worry about the soliders lives. You would just tell the robots to advance and capture the city with no shots fired. Robots have no fear, so just keep them comming.
The biggest limiting factors are power and RF bandwidth. You need lots of bandwidth to report back findings and other data. Idealy any robot on the field could be taken over and used as a telerobot to carry out complicated task or identify a prisioner.
Future wars are going to be like iraq, urban conflicts, small uprisings, etc...
Basicly go in, disarm, capture, search and monitor untill a new local goverment is formed.
You don't really have to worry about really good intel, you don't have any of your guys lives on the line and your not going in bombing or shooting up the place, so you don't have to worry about women and children.
Non leathal weapons could be used 99% of the time. Shoot to disarm, not to kill, would work well, if it misses no big deal its just destroyed, the next robot will get him.
Another thing is that an attacking army of robots should be programmed by 20 diffrent isolated groups so that the same bug or securtiy hole will only show up in %5 at one time. Same goes for command and securty codes, no one code should control all the robots no should any one person be in control of more than %5, that way if the enemy or some hackers breaks in they only have 5% of the force and the other 95% can wipe them out.
They still use blackboards? Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
I don't think the fumes from some of the cleaners and markers are much better for you than chauk dust.
Hopefully they will all be replaced by LCD projectors and the instructors will make all the notes aviable on the lan.
I think the main point of the polygraph test isnt to see if your telling the truth but how you handle such a situation.
The author made many mistakes durning the interviews. The main one that comes to mind was getting in the car and answering questions without checking the persons ID and confirming they are from the NSA.
Little things like that are the real test, how careful you will be with secrets, who you trust, how normal do you look and how you react under pressure and stress.
I think the problem their is that you don't have a cdrom drive, it dosn't prove that you need a floppy drive.
Between CDR, wifi, internet and the new cheap usb jump drives I don't see the need to put a floppy drive in a machine any more. Heck I don't even use CD-R that much since I got wifi setup with my laptop.
That said alot of my instructors ask that assignments be passed in on floppies.
Wouldn't it draw less current? Less IR^2 losses and greater heat dissipation(no need for a heat sink, the full chip is one), the speed would be limited more by the time it takes for the signal to travel from one end to the other?
You don't want much more power, not only for security reasons but for frequency reuse!
Keeping the power down lets you use the same frequencys over and over again in the same city. If you went with more power and lower frequencys you would interfear with people accross town using the same frequencys.
You don't need more power to go the distance. For point to point links you can use high gain dish's to go the distance. To cover larger areas you just deploy lots of cheap lower power access points/routers.
Actually I'm running a stripped down winXP on my laptop right now with 128 megs of ram, works great for everything I use it for(web, irc, wordprocessing, pdf, etc...)
I see the tablet PC being the best way to surf the web, read books, etc... but it dosn't replace the laptop or the desktop.
The PDA is just too small for reading books and webpages and the laptop is just too awakward for reading in bed or laying back on the couch. The tablet PC fits right in between.
The problem is the price, a PII-366 would be more than fast enough, thats what my laptop I'm using now has in it, somedays I wish I could flip the screen around and use it as a tablet PC. I would expect to pay around $500 for a tablet PC, not the ungodly $2000 they are selling for now. All it needs is 128 megs of flash, 802.11b and a nice size touch screen. Basicly my laptop minse the drives and keyboard.
Its far from a workstation but as you said its not built for work, its more for reading documents and broswing the web.
The only serious work that they may be suited for is photo editing.
I've never really understood why people kick up such a fuss about unwanted email. Its never really bothered me to have an extra few emails to delete. On that note I've never ever got much spam on any of my email accounts over the years and I never hide my email when posting on forums or anywhere online.
The people who get suckered in to spam are the same people who buy stuff from the shopping channel, made for TV stuff, etc... I guess they have nothing better to spend their money on...
This story just goes to show how stupid the average person is from a tech's standpoint. And thats just it, its all based on point of view.
I think the soulution to the problem would be to have the battery drop out from under the car. Remeber these batteries are goind to be as large as 1000lbs!!
Not so easy to change but if lowered itself below and then you could roll the car ahead onto another is might work. Maybe it could say connected untill it was over the new battery via flexiable cables. So it would have power to move ahead and raise the other battery.
Its not really wider, its just has two diffrent focal points. Down by the cable tv head end there must be 20-30 sitting next to the dumpster.
The real jems are the old 39 inch starchoice dish's. Over 30 dB of gain! which may be illegal but industry canada isn't going to bother you unless your causing problems with someone eles' communtications.
I've been thinking about setting up a relay system here in western newfoundland, moutain top to moutain top to give high speed internet and maybe telephone services to cabin owners.
The main challage is making a 39" dish and solar panels survive 200km/h winds.
It takes alot of energy to seperate Hydrogen from water but the energy dosn't just disapear, its stored as chemical potential energy(I think this is the right term). The process is almost loss less so its a very efficent way to store energy and transport it. Also unlike conventional cells(batteries) hydrogen fuel cells can be "recharged" again and again.
I need two, I some how manage to turn them off in my sleep.
Lately I've been using cron and xmms to start playing mp3's in the morning, its not as annoying as my alarm clock so I don't turn it off and its still loud enough to wake me up.
Same here, ADHD is hard to fight, I keep my laptop game free and internet free while I'm in collage.
I still sneak into a computer lab during lunch to go online but in the evenings I have nothing else todo but study. I still find my self stareing at the walls or playing with bits of wire (I'm an electronics student)
Internet almost cost me my last semester, The computer labs were open in the evenings so I was in here all night reading on slashdot and stuff.
Yea pretty much anything can be hacked. In this case the easyest answer is to haul out their mircocroller board and replace it with your own, running linux ofcouse.
Getting the programming just right so the thing ballanced right might be a little tricky but most of the hard work of collecting the sensors, and building the drive train and power systems are already done.
With 802.11b standard the sky isn't even the limit in range.
Even using low powered off the shelf wireless cards you can go over 70km if you use those cheep/free offset parabolic dish's used for DSS tv.
There are a few problems to overcome. I belive someone said that their is a limit of 48km on most wireless cards because of a timeout in the mac layer. This isn't a problem with some cards because you can change the timeout.
The general rule with 802.11b is if you got a line of sight you got a link.
Is spam really that much of a problem? Having to click off delete on 30 or so emails a day that much trouble?
I think the junk mail I get in my physical mail box more of a problem, that dosn't just jam up a few 100k in my inbox like spam, it fills up the land fills and makes a mess around my apartment.
So maybe its time we restart the postal system from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't as many long distance lines as there are local lines/numbers.... its like a 1000:1 ratio, which basicly means that not everyone can be using long distance or even make local calls at the same time.
A few years ago the local telco offered unlimited long distance here after 6PM, after a few weeks it got to the point where it was impossible to make a phone call. Needless to say, they had to cut the plan off pretty quickly because it was becoming a safey problem, people couldn't call 911.
The local telco has less than 1 millon users connected to its 2.5Gbit SONET network which also carries internet and video conferencing. Assuming that the voice channel is 24k and nothing else is running on the system, the system can carry around 100,000 conversations. So thats around a 10:1 ratio which isn't too bad but you also have video feeds, internet and what not using the same network. Also consider that everytime you pickup the phone the signal has to travel through the network, there are only 3 switching centers(CO) for a network that covers the province(9 hour drive from end to end @ highway speeds).
Just do a simple comparison.
Download a file over a 100mBit or even 1gB and then do the same on the 2.5 gBit link.
Other than that its all numbers and figures about how many users a network using a 2.5gBit backbone can handle...
a cyber cafe isn't really a sound bussiness...
A normal cafe with free internet terminals may be more sucessful... (Web access only)
Internet should be used to attract customers and you should make your money off coffee and food sales.
Internet is so cheap and the norm these days no one is going to pay to use it.
Also offer free wireless access to attract users with their own laptops.
Another service could be a lan party room which you could charge for...
Or have a room with a few high end machines loaded with the best games which you could charge for...
Offer good background music, a good atmostphere(couches, lots to look at, etc...) and free internet and I'll be there buying coffee... Oh yea and it has to be great coffee...
Its also alot easier to skim over a website and realize its crap than find a book on the shelf, climb the ladder, bring it somewhere to read and then find out it dosn't have any usefull information in it.
I wasted most of my Saterday digging through the univeristy libary only to leave emtpy handed. They had very little upto date information. A what little they had was hard to find... On the 4th floor, west wing, 10th shelf from the floor.... Most of the linux books that were not for beginners were from back in 95. They only had 3 books on wireless networking and all three just skimmed the surface, a basic introduction.
Anyway all that work turned up very little, but in a few min on google I can find usefull info on just about anything that is up to date and accurate(after confirming it with a few other independant websites, which can be done in 1/2 the time it took me to find just one book at the libary, not to mention the time finding the usefull info in the book.
Now there are lots of things you can't find online but you can find in a good libary, history, indeph mathmatics and electronics, things that haven't changed much in the past 10 years or so.
I don't agree with this at all... The robots can hold the streets, cutoff travel, drop supplies(food and water for the locals). Or they can just keep basic laws, search buildings, etc...
The problem they have over in iraq right now is that they still have massive searching todo and the locals keep attacking. Robots are great for searching and are alot tougher than humans, and if they are destroyed its no big deal.
The missions change when you don't have to worry about the soliders lives. You would just tell the robots to advance and capture the city with no shots fired. Robots have no fear, so just keep them comming.
The biggest limiting factors are power and RF bandwidth. You need lots of bandwidth to report back findings and other data. Idealy any robot on the field could be taken over and used as a telerobot to carry out complicated task or identify a prisioner.
Future wars are going to be like iraq, urban conflicts, small uprisings, etc...
Basicly go in, disarm, capture, search and monitor untill a new local goverment is formed.
You don't really have to worry about really good intel, you don't have any of your guys lives on the line and your not going in bombing or shooting up the place, so you don't have to worry about women and children.
Non leathal weapons could be used 99% of the time. Shoot to disarm, not to kill, would work well, if it misses no big deal its just destroyed, the next robot will get him.
Another thing is that an attacking army of robots should be programmed by 20 diffrent isolated groups so that the same bug or securtiy hole will only show up in %5 at one time. Same goes for command and securty codes, no one code should control all the robots no should any one person be in control of more than %5, that way if the enemy or some hackers breaks in they only have 5% of the force and the other 95% can wipe them out.
They still use blackboards? Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
I don't think the fumes from some of the cleaners and markers are much better for you than chauk dust.
Hopefully they will all be replaced by LCD projectors and the instructors will make all the notes aviable on the lan.
I think the main point of the polygraph test isnt to see if your telling the truth but how you handle such a situation.
The author made many mistakes durning the interviews. The main one that comes to mind was getting in the car and answering questions without checking the persons ID and confirming they are from the NSA.
Little things like that are the real test, how careful you will be with secrets, who you trust, how normal do you look and how you react under pressure and stress.
I think the problem their is that you don't have a cdrom drive, it dosn't prove that you need a floppy drive.
Between CDR, wifi, internet and the new cheap usb jump drives I don't see the need to put a floppy drive in a machine any more. Heck I don't even use CD-R that much since I got wifi setup with my laptop.
That said alot of my instructors ask that assignments be passed in on floppies.
Wouldn't it draw less current? Less IR^2 losses and greater heat dissipation(no need for a heat sink, the full chip is one), the speed would be limited more by the time it takes for the signal to travel from one end to the other?
You don't want much more power, not only for security reasons but for frequency reuse!
Keeping the power down lets you use the same frequencys over and over again in the same city. If you went with more power and lower frequencys you would interfear with people accross town using the same frequencys.
You don't need more power to go the distance. For point to point links you can use high gain dish's to go the distance. To cover larger areas you just deploy lots of cheap lower power access points/routers.
Actually I'm running a stripped down winXP on my laptop right now with 128 megs of ram, works great for everything I use it for(web, irc, wordprocessing, pdf, etc...)
I see the tablet PC being the best way to surf the web, read books, etc... but it dosn't replace the laptop or the desktop.
The PDA is just too small for reading books and webpages and the laptop is just too awakward for reading in bed or laying back on the couch. The tablet PC fits right in between.
The problem is the price, a PII-366 would be more than fast enough, thats what my laptop I'm using now has in it, somedays I wish I could flip the screen around and use it as a tablet PC. I would expect to pay around $500 for a tablet PC, not the ungodly $2000 they are selling for now. All it needs is 128 megs of flash, 802.11b and a nice size touch screen. Basicly my laptop minse the drives and keyboard.
Its far from a workstation but as you said its not built for work, its more for reading documents and broswing the web.
The only serious work that they may be suited for is photo editing.
I've never really understood why people kick up such a fuss about unwanted email. Its never really bothered me to have an extra few emails to delete. On that note I've never ever got much spam on any of my email accounts over the years and I never hide my email when posting on forums or anywhere online.
The people who get suckered in to spam are the same people who buy stuff from the shopping channel, made for TV stuff, etc... I guess they have nothing better to spend their money on...
This story just goes to show how stupid the average person is from a tech's standpoint. And thats just it, its all based on point of view.
You can get 200mW cards off the shelf aswell!
Check out seattle wireless's website and look at the hardware comparision.
Its not physics that limits the life of breakes and other car parts its the manufactures.
They purposely build cars to fail after 7 years so you will buy a new one!
You could build systems that will last 20 years+, but you only see this kind of stuff on big trucks and pro gear.
I think the soulution to the problem would be to have the battery drop out from under the car. Remeber these batteries are goind to be as large as 1000lbs!!
Not so easy to change but if lowered itself below and then you could roll the car ahead onto another is might work. Maybe it could say connected untill it was over the new battery via flexiable cables. So it would have power to move ahead and raise the other battery.
Its not really wider, its just has two diffrent focal points. Down by the cable tv head end there must be 20-30 sitting next to the dumpster.
The real jems are the old 39 inch starchoice dish's. Over 30 dB of gain! which may be illegal but industry canada isn't going to bother you unless your causing problems with someone eles' communtications.
I've been thinking about setting up a relay system here in western newfoundland, moutain top to moutain top to give high speed internet and maybe telephone services to cabin owners.
The main challage is making a 39" dish and solar panels survive 200km/h winds.
The main problem with using a Low Noise block is finding one for 2.4 GHz. The stock ones are built only to receive at 10Ghz.
The best solution is to put your transceiver right at the focal point with an improved antenna. One of the best feed antennas would be a BiQuad.
Here is a link to using a 2.4GHz BiQuad feed for Primestar dish
It takes alot of energy to seperate Hydrogen from water but the energy dosn't just disapear, its stored as chemical potential energy(I think this is the right term). The process is almost loss less so its a very efficent way to store energy and transport it. Also unlike conventional cells(batteries) hydrogen fuel cells can be "recharged" again and again.
I need two, I some how manage to turn them off in my sleep.
Lately I've been using cron and xmms to start playing mp3's in the morning, its not as annoying as my alarm clock so I don't turn it off and its still loud enough to wake me up.
Same here, ADHD is hard to fight, I keep my laptop game free and internet free while I'm in collage.
I still sneak into a computer lab during lunch to go online but in the evenings I have nothing else todo but study. I still find my self stareing at the walls or playing with bits of wire (I'm an electronics student)
Internet almost cost me my last semester, The computer labs were open in the evenings so I was in here all night reading on slashdot and stuff.
Yea pretty much anything can be hacked. In this case the easyest answer is to haul out their mircocroller board and replace it with your own, running linux ofcouse.
Getting the programming just right so the thing ballanced right might be a little tricky but most of the hard work of collecting the sensors, and building the drive train and power systems are already done.
With 802.11b standard the sky isn't even the limit in range.
Even using low powered off the shelf wireless cards you can go over 70km if you use those cheep/free offset parabolic dish's used for DSS tv.
There are a few problems to overcome. I belive someone said that their is a limit of 48km on most wireless cards because of a timeout in the mac layer. This isn't a problem with some cards because you can change the timeout.
The general rule with 802.11b is if you got a line of sight you got a link.
Is spam really that much of a problem? Having to click off delete on 30 or so emails a day that much trouble?
I think the junk mail I get in my physical mail box more of a problem, that dosn't just jam up a few 100k in my inbox like spam, it fills up the land fills and makes a mess around my apartment.
So maybe its time we restart the postal system from scratch.
Programmer "Glass != full; Glass != empty; return ERROR;"