The $60 is just for an PCMCIA controller that attaches to the ISA bus. You place a (separately purchased) WaveLAN PCMCIA card on there. You can find cheaper PCMCIA controllers that give you two or more slots, for instance the PC-700 (I forget the company name, but just search on buy.com) works great with Linux and a WaveLAN card for $50.
Not to mention the fact that the embedded course is A LOT of fun (at least when my project demos actually work!). This semester the final project may or may not happen, but in previous years it consisted of writing code to record from a QuickCam and microphone in real-time on a small ARM7-based system and playback the video/audio streams later. Not a trivial task.
Right now we're coding up Tron on a terminal to get the basics of concurrency. This is the stuff that I grew up wanting to do when I was a young stupid kid with an IBM PC. The cool thing about this class is if you get really mad at something, there's a physical board that you can kick. Not that I'd ever do that...:)
Yes, either it gets hidden away in storage or it has to go through a process where it's officially labeled trash. In the latter case, it can legally be given away to a more friendly home.
I suppose all of the paperwork is enough of a deterrent to keep it out of the hands of people who might actually use the hardware, though. It would be nice to see some of those old IPC/IPX's or NeXTStations put to good use again, like automating PennDOT's drivers license centers or something silly like that.
I haven't looked at any PCMCIA specs carefully, but the ISA card looks pretty much like a bunch of bus driver chips. There's a weird pair of wide ribbon cables that go to the actual PCMCIA ports. It's like two IDE cables piggie-backed.
There's some actual circuitry in the drive-like thing, but it may just be stuff to control starting and stopping the cards/power support stuff, so it very well could be close to ISA.
I own a WaveLAN Silver and my roommates have a few Bronze Turbos. To let them get on the internet wirelessly, I purchased a cheap PC-700 PCMCIA card reader for my desktop linux box. The reader worked like a charm with the latest PCMCIA package drivers (3.10.something) and the source drivers wvlan_cs2 from ftp.WaveLAN.com. The PCMCIA reader cost $50 from buy.com and something minimal for shipping. So you can get the wavelan card for cheap ($120?) and have a desktop system on the wireless lan for $170 + a little shipping.
The cool thing about this reader is that I can have two PCMCIA slots on the FRONT (it goes in a 3.5 or 5.25" drive bay -- adapter included) of my PC, so I can also read things like digital camera flash cards. This is an ISA card, btw but then again it's only PCMCIA so you can't expect really high bandwidth.
Overall, the installation of the hardware took 15 minutes and configuring/compiling the software/drivers took around 3 hours after poking around to get ad-hoc networking up. After that it's been extremely reliable and very tolarant of me pulling out the card and reinserting it on the fly.
I found this web page really helpful for the configuration: here .
Garbage Pail Kids! Forget the Cabbage Patch kids (or the time my mother dressed my brother and up I as Care Bears). Nowhere do I see the cards that were cooler than Magic cards and had way funnier artwork. Ahh, the days when 45 cents could get you some twisted humor AND a stick of gum!
This is probably just a configuration issue, but with my Lucent WaveLAN Silver, I get variable pings (to hosts one or two router-hops away, on campus) of 10 - 110ms. I happen to have the sleep-on-idle power saving features on, so I'm guessing that the card takes a little nap and that's what causes this. Anyway, it has caused me no grief running Xemacs and and other X apps from my linux box in the dorm.
TCP/IP has been on Unisys mainframes for a while (in addition to the proprietary BNA connections). There's a decent webserver named Atlas for these machines and I'm somewhat surprised that they don't market the machines as ultra-powerful webservers, since they can switch between multiple tasks (e.g. web browser requests) like a breeze.
Aside from the fact that BNA is a pain to interface to a cheap wintel box, TCP/IP makes it much easier to have a terminal emulator running on your windows box.
On a different note, many great GNU programs have been ported to these machines to make porting Java easier. Granted, getting any (what you might think of as normal) C program to run correctly on a Unisys A-series is a challenge. 48-bit words with signed-magnitude representations are entirely unexpected by a normal C programmer. Don't use shifts!
Apparently, the Sperry hardware still does exist. They tried to change to HP at some point, but the HP boxen just couldn't handle it.
This came up in a meeting over the summer after some coworkers had a business trip to Disney World (I worked at Unisys). They don't offer VIP views of the machine room anymore, but I'm sure it's possible to pull some strings down there.:)
Another wow, at least to me, is the orbit period of 3.523 days, 1/100th that of earth! On top of that, it isn't too much more massive than earth (I don't have any numbers with me right now).
I would have thought that something orbiting like that would have a very eccentric orbit, but the eccentricity is ~.001. I'm rather surprised that a gas giant planet can survive as such, so close (0.045AU) to a star that's about as hot and as massive (at least as far as gravity goes) as our sun. Neato.
Does anyone else find this diatribe of multi-syllabic lexical items amusing?
I don't know... attempts to indict CMU with conspiracy theories seem to simply be the expressions of a frustrated student. Take all of these conspiracies with a grain of salt. CMU's administrators really aren't capable of conspiring, anyway.
The big issue here was that many of the shares were protected by passwords, many of them non-trivial. Granted, a large number of machine administrators placed readme.txt files in their shares which either (a) gave away the password or (b) gave a BIG hint as to the password. I found this to be rather upsetting. (I am a CMU student who wasn't disconnected). In many cases, the shares were password-protected, but the machines were still disconnected. It seems as if the mere presence of a share named "music" or "mp3" was enough to set off Computing Services.
I respect Computing Service's position, (particularly with the big hairy 800lb RIAA crawling on their back), but I would have at least expected them to issue warnings to students who were infringing, rather than disconnecting them. If they failed to correct themselves after a warning, CS has every right to disconnect them. Student Senate passed a resolution requiring CS to do so in future "raids".
I don't buy the excuse that "we are paying tuition, therefore we should get X", where X is 100% never-disconnected network access in the dorms. If people don't stay legal, it's only fair to expect to be removed. This type of thing has been done before, mostly for computers generating too much traffic on the residential networks.
At the place I worked at two summers ago, the building did a fairly good job of blocking all FM signals. The solution: with permission, the workers pushed up the ceiling tiles and ran a big spool of antenna wire towards the end of the building. If they wanted better reception, they just wired their radio's antenna to that cable. This was all done with the manager's permission, of course.:)
Alternatively, perhaps those turn-your-whole-electrical-systems-into-an-antenna might help a little bit. Given that your local circuit is probably only a portion of the cubical space, it might or might help much. I think Radio Shack still carries those things.
It seems that manufacturers are willing to increase power consumption. Consider how hot your laptop runs today, versus 5 years ago. Remember those circa-P166 laptops that would almost burn you? Granted, most of that was from the processor and consumers seem to care about the MHz speed of their laptops. Laptop speakers, on the other hand, are pretty lousy all around (with the exception of laptops with sub-woofers).
I would suspect that the inverter that is used to light the florescent backlight (since it is a high-voltage, high-frequency source) could also be used to create the voltages that are needed without additional hardware. The control logic wouldn't be much more than a normal sound card. Of course, having never heard my LCD panel click or create a tone, I don't have any experience with this, but I would suspect that the character of the sound is probably going to be much flatter than a speaker. I read the article as saying that there is a limited number of harmonics that each sized crystal can make, which would require a fairly large range of crystals to get something that doesn't sound like a PC speaker.:)
Seeing that I got a oh-too-short haircut the day before I got new license and I gained a little weight at that time, I look NOTHING like my drivers license photo. Anyway, if a government agency wanted to use that picture to identify me, they would fail miserably.
I must say that I'm a little irked by thought of a national database, seeing that individual states lacked the self-control to keep just their hands on the pictures. If the idea is a database which is somehow publicly accessible (e.g. at a checkout in a store), anyone who masquerades as a company will be eligible to read from the database. Though it doesn't sound as if this version of the database is for public consumption, it is conceivable that rights to portions of the database could be sold to companies such as Image Data. When the motivation becomes an incoming check to public (or private) coffers, over the issue of privacy, I get a little scared.
That's an excellent example. Hennessy & Patterson is an excellent book for Architecture (and it spends a great deal of time discussing benchmarks as well as excellent, clear explainations of Architecture, of course).
For people who are interested in benchmarks, mistakes/ways people fudge numbers and how to measure, analyze and model system performance accurately, another gem to add to your library is: The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain. It even includes a refresher on the stats course that you slept through (although a perfect knowledge of stats is not required to understand and profit from the information in this volume). It will give you an view into real performance analysis, modeling and measurement. Including all of the tricks that everyone seems to call "unfair".
In many cases, they are wrong or unjustified. But it is not a bad idea to use tweaked hardware to perform a benchmark, although publishing the results may be in poor taste. Many times, management makes signficant decisions on what hardware to sell and what changes need to be made to future hardware, based upon these benchmarks. For instance, if a 10-by machine performs more poorly as a 3-by machine because of bad filesystem code (which is not an unreasonable possibility if the operations in the benchmark are IO-bound or depends heavily on IO performance), the management might decide to put pressure on for cleaner fs code. The only time this problem code is isolated and fixed may be during the benchmarks with tweaked code.
ViaVoice is an excellent product (at least under Win32). Sometimes it amazes me as to how it understands what I dictate, of course other times it plainly has no clue. In general it's very good if you have time to go back and correct whatever it has written. It is not suitable as a complete replacement for typing, since it expects you to be dictating in a natural voice (e.g. infrequent stops/pauses between words). Telepathic speech isn't understood clearly by the engine. You would not be able to use this efficiently at a bash prompt or for coding. I suppose if you wanted to write your own grammar (which is possible with Win32 tools right now), you might be able to make a C or a Perl grammar, but moving around the code would be painful. Hopefully ViaVoice will integrate with most applications easily, as it does under Win32. Currently, you can speak to whatever textbox has focus under Win32, and if developers use the free SDK, more functionality (e.g. FONT BOLD ON) could be added to programs. I don't expect wordperfect to support ViaVoice, since they already seem to have a contract with Dragon Systems.
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The $60 is just for an PCMCIA controller that attaches to the ISA bus. You place a (separately purchased) WaveLAN PCMCIA card on there. You can find cheaper PCMCIA controllers that give you two or more slots, for instance the PC-700 (I forget the company name, but just search on buy.com) works great with Linux and a WaveLAN card for $50.
Right now we're coding up Tron on a terminal to get the basics of concurrency. This is the stuff that I grew up wanting to do when I was a young stupid kid with an IBM PC. The cool thing about this class is if you get really mad at something, there's a physical board that you can kick. Not that I'd ever do that... :)
I suppose all of the paperwork is enough of a deterrent to keep it out of the hands of people who might actually use the hardware, though. It would be nice to see some of those old IPC/IPX's or NeXTStations put to good use again, like automating PennDOT's drivers license centers or something silly like that.
There's some actual circuitry in the drive-like thing, but it may just be stuff to control starting and stopping the cards/power support stuff, so it very well could be close to ISA.
The cool thing about this reader is that I can have two PCMCIA slots on the FRONT (it goes in a 3.5 or 5.25" drive bay -- adapter included) of my PC, so I can also read things like digital camera flash cards. This is an ISA card, btw but then again it's only PCMCIA so you can't expect really high bandwidth.
Overall, the installation of the hardware took 15 minutes and configuring/compiling the software/drivers took around 3 hours after poking around to get ad-hoc networking up. After that it's been extremely reliable and very tolarant of me pulling out the card and reinserting it on the fly.
I found this web page really helpful for the configuration: here .
Garbage Pail Kids! Forget the Cabbage Patch kids (or the time my mother dressed my brother and up I as Care Bears). Nowhere do I see the cards that were cooler than Magic cards and had way funnier artwork. Ahh, the days when 45 cents could get you some twisted humor AND a stick of gum!
This is probably just a configuration issue, but with my Lucent WaveLAN Silver, I get variable pings (to hosts one or two router-hops away, on campus) of 10 - 110ms. I happen to have the sleep-on-idle power saving features on, so I'm guessing that the card takes a little nap and that's what causes this. Anyway, it has caused me no grief running Xemacs and and other X apps from my linux box in the dorm.
Aside from the fact that BNA is a pain to interface to a cheap wintel box, TCP/IP makes it much easier to have a terminal emulator running on your windows box.
On a different note, many great GNU programs have been ported to these machines to make porting Java easier. Granted, getting any (what you might think of as normal) C program to run correctly on a Unisys A-series is a challenge. 48-bit words with signed-magnitude representations are entirely unexpected by a normal C programmer. Don't use shifts!
This came up in a meeting over the summer after some coworkers had a business trip to Disney World (I worked at Unisys). They don't offer VIP views of the machine room anymore, but I'm sure it's possible to pull some strings down there. :)
I would have thought that something orbiting like that would have a very eccentric orbit, but the eccentricity is ~.001. I'm rather surprised that a gas giant planet can survive as such, so close (0.045AU) to a star that's about as hot and as massive (at least as far as gravity goes) as our sun. Neato.
I don't know... attempts to indict CMU with conspiracy theories seem to simply be the expressions of a frustrated student. Take all of these conspiracies with a grain of salt. CMU's administrators really aren't capable of conspiring, anyway.
I respect Computing Service's position, (particularly with the big hairy 800lb RIAA crawling on their back), but I would have at least expected them to issue warnings to students who were infringing, rather than disconnecting them. If they failed to correct themselves after a warning, CS has every right to disconnect them. Student Senate passed a resolution requiring CS to do so in future "raids".
I don't buy the excuse that "we are paying tuition, therefore we should get X", where X is 100% never-disconnected network access in the dorms. If people don't stay legal, it's only fair to expect to be removed. This type of thing has been done before, mostly for computers generating too much traffic on the residential networks.
Alternatively, perhaps those turn-your-whole-electrical-systems-into-an-antenna might help a little bit. Given that your local circuit is probably only a portion of the cubical space, it might or might help much. I think Radio Shack still carries those things.
I would suspect that the inverter that is used to light the florescent backlight (since it is a high-voltage, high-frequency source) could also be used to create the voltages that are needed without additional hardware. The control logic wouldn't be much more than a normal sound card. Of course, having never heard my LCD panel click or create a tone, I don't have any experience with this, but I would suspect that the character of the sound is probably going to be much flatter than a speaker. I read the article as saying that there is a limited number of harmonics that each sized crystal can make, which would require a fairly large range of crystals to get something that doesn't sound like a PC speaker. :)
I must say that I'm a little irked by thought of a national database, seeing that individual states lacked the self-control to keep just their hands on the pictures. If the idea is a database which is somehow publicly accessible (e.g. at a checkout in a store), anyone who masquerades as a company will be eligible to read from the database. Though it doesn't sound as if this version of the database is for public consumption, it is conceivable that rights to portions of the database could be sold to companies such as Image Data. When the motivation becomes an incoming check to public (or private) coffers, over the issue of privacy, I get a little scared.
For people who are interested in benchmarks, mistakes/ways people fudge numbers and how to measure, analyze and model system performance accurately, another gem to add to your library is: The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain. It even includes a refresher on the stats course that you slept through (although a perfect knowledge of stats is not required to understand and profit from the information in this volume). It will give you an view into real performance analysis, modeling and measurement. Including all of the tricks that everyone seems to call "unfair".
In many cases, they are wrong or unjustified. But it is not a bad idea to use tweaked hardware to perform a benchmark, although publishing the results may be in poor taste. Many times, management makes signficant decisions on what hardware to sell and what changes need to be made to future hardware, based upon these benchmarks. For instance, if a 10-by machine performs more poorly as a 3-by machine because of bad filesystem code (which is not an unreasonable possibility if the operations in the benchmark are IO-bound or depends heavily on IO performance), the management might decide to put pressure on for cleaner fs code. The only time this problem code is isolated and fixed may be during the benchmarks with tweaked code.
ViaVoice is an excellent product (at least under Win32). Sometimes it amazes me as to how it understands what I dictate, of course other times it plainly has no clue. In general it's very good if you have time to go back and correct whatever it has written. It is not suitable as a complete replacement for typing, since it expects you to be dictating in a natural voice (e.g. infrequent stops/pauses between words). Telepathic speech isn't understood clearly by the engine. You would not be able to use this efficiently at a bash prompt or for coding.
I suppose if you wanted to write your own grammar (which is possible with Win32 tools right now), you might be able to make a C or a Perl grammar, but moving around the code would be painful.
Hopefully ViaVoice will integrate with most applications easily, as it does under Win32. Currently, you can speak to whatever textbox has focus under Win32, and if developers use the free SDK, more functionality (e.g. FONT BOLD ON) could be added to programs.
I don't expect wordperfect to support ViaVoice, since they already seem to have a contract with Dragon Systems.