From what I gather from recent Government History, I guess they simply want to know what kind of excuse they need to start a full-on war.
Once they know what can be used as what, all they need to do is trigger the right event from the right country and they can start an all new war. (After all, it is cyberWARfare, they government has the right to kill people over it).
Maybe a portscan of dod.gov will have the gov't simply ask your ISP for your name and address, for future reference. If they see a valid inciming hack attack (Anything a modern firewall might call hostile), they will -demand- the information from the ISP, so they can storm the location (be it a datacenter or a home) and confiscate any equipment they may want^H^H^H^H^H need.
There have never been laws about these things, because everyone know that investigating a single attack takes a -lot- of time to do the legal way, but having -all- the information available beforehand makes things go a lot quicker.
All they need is a database of all Internet subscribers, and a log of all their IP traffic (HTTP/POP3/SMTP/SIP/SSH/etc). That way they can easily draw a straight line from anyone they don't like to the current Axis of Evil.
I know this sounds very paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Or how about, say, ATC systems? I'm sure it's really easy to spot, at a glance, two planes getting too close for comfort when you're given an 80x25 screen full of numbers, as compared to a graphical representation.
Isn't that what the 'Matrix' view is for?
Only true ATC's can read the pure code. All they see is 747, learjet, Airbus...
That's what you get if a geek has too much money and too little time:
things get silly.
But, to explain my point, I shot a pic of the fans , the back and the front.
The fans in this set-up are simply inaudible.
The (quiet) LaCie's are for live storage (the data / OS), the (loud, power-aware) WD is for timed synchronisation (semi-online backup).
I don't have an XboX360, but I have a lot of temperature-sensitive equipment in a very tight A/V cabinet.
I have managed to keep all this very cool with a pair of Nexus 120mm fans and a generic 6V A/C adapter.
I hung the fans on the shelf above the equipment with a simple 1/2" bend and the rubber mounting, ehm, rubbers.
It also helps if you put something between the devices you stack to increase airflow.
(YOU try stacking something small on top of a classic XboX!)
Amongst other things in that one (cramped) compartment:
Linksys NSLU2 NAS with:
- 320GB USB drive
- 320GB USB drive
Asus WL500gP NAS with:
- 500GB USB drive
- (The other ons is on top of the rack)
Digital TV receiver
Cable modem (not one of those cool Surfboards, but a big, warm one)
XboX (regular, not 360))
Obligatory Pictures (front) (back)
Two of the (LaCie) USB drives are stacked on top of eachother,
but they are both only slightly warm to the touch
Will they fight for humanity's sake -inside the AI they created? (Tron)
Will the phones all over the US spontaneously start ringing? (Lawnmower man)
Will they hide their existence and slowly 'mold' people into avatars of their personal interests? (Neuromancer)
Will they simply disappear into the vast infinity of the net, observing, researching and simply being content with their existence? (Ghost in the Shell)
Having left their corporeal form, will they 'mount' themselves inside a machine and travel the universe? (2001)
I, for one, am interested in what the future has in store for us. Hail our future robotic overlords! (Appleseed/Matrix/BS Galactica/Terminator/AI/I, Robot)
I don't want to seem too atheistic here, but are you sure you need a physical representation of yourself in order to acknowledge your existence? If one is born without sight, feeling or hearing, does that mean that they don't realise they exist?
On the other hand, does that mean that modern construction robots are intelligent? All of them have feedback as to their physical state/shape. Some of them have forms of pressure sensitivity, so they can feel. Some even have cameras, with which they can observer themselves. Does that make them intelligent?
Young children are not exactly what you'd call self-aware. (this is easily observed by the fact that they tend to run into or fall over things,
simply not realizing there's a body attached to their eyes and hands) Do you mean to say they are not intelligent?
Supposing the entire emotional, intellectual and factual content of your brain could be 'saved' as a binary image and run through a software interpreter. Could the result be construed as intelligence?
(Although you could argue that the memories include feedback)
I have to admin I never really studied psychology or AI, but I am seriously intrigued by the likes of Philip K Dick (DADES/Bladerunner) and Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell).
Both of them basically pose the question: What is life? What is intelligence? What is reality?
(and what happens if any of the above are tampered with?)
I personally admire people that actually take those questions, hypothesize and try to answer those questions by scientific method. He might have been seriously insane, but that does not mean he was not intelligent.
Keep in mind, that WOL is not always as compatible as you might think. From my experience, WOL works on about 30% of all workstations. The rest seem to simply ignore incoming requests.
I used to be able to power up my PC at home from a FreeBSD machine at the office, by using a VPN router. Now, I can't even get my workstation (new motherboard/NIC) to start up when it's in the same room, on the same switch. Yes, I have checked the MAC address. Yes, I have enabled WOL in the BIOS. Yes, I have tried it with boot ROM enabled and disabled. Yes, I have enabled WOL in the Windows driver Yes, It is set to 'Magic Packet'
I think the idea has its uses, just not for the consumer market. If you've ever stood behind a bladeserver, you'd know the downright silly amount of heat generated by these machines.
Bladeservers, together with virtualization (which is where the industry is goig right now), have one simple problem: heat. If all cores run at full power for over an hour, things can get very hot in the server room.
One of the things we use these servers for is weather prediction. Every 4 hours, we need about an hour of full processing power.
If you could have the blade operate at 1/4 capacity for most of the time,
whilst you fire up the extra CPUs when you need them,
you save on average power usage, server power usage,
and cooling power.
From what I recall, they use the same mechanism as a laser, only the other way around.
(i.e. - a static sensor and a mirror that moves around, so the sensor can 'look around'.
In initial versions, the mirror would 'follow' the dot, so it becomes dead center.
The actions required provided feedback for the steering mechanism, so the entire missile would 'bend' until the dot was dead center ( (simple method, direct pursuit - more on Wikipedia's Sidewinder Page
Unfortunately, this type of missile has a 10-15% kill ratio. (Though I have to admit those were 'harder targets')
To actually hit a 747, you would need to fire a handful of the rockets, just to make sure you hit a target.
If you want to actually take down a 747, you'd have to fire an entire barrage of them, because it cna survive multiple, ehm, engine failures.
Also an interesting note: The countermeasures mention they mess up the control beam.
This would imply they assume the terrorists use CLOS missiles, which need constant guidance and lots of training. From Wikipedia
"Given these considerations, many experts believe that CLOS missiles are not as ideally suited for terrorist use as are IR missiles, which sometimes are referred to as "fire and forget" missiles"
From the sound of it, this systems protects aircraft from missiles the terrorists will not be using anyway.
Either they use fire-and-forget missiles (SARH, anyone?), or they go all-out and use non-jammable laser-guided SAMs:
Even though laser guided missiles require relatively extensive training and skill to operate, many experts consider these missiles particularly menacing in the hands of terrorists due to the missiles' resistance to most conventional countermeasures in use today
Fooling a sensor of that type depends on how the sensor is sampled.
From what I know, most optical sensors 'freeze-frame' the image so it can be transferred to a buffer, which can be read at a 'normal' speed.
This means, that the entire image is 'sampled' at one point in time, then read in a stream or in blocks.
Then again, if you know you know the sampling frequency, you can 'fool' the sensor into thinking it's seeing something else.
You can either move the 'dot' with each frame, or place multiple dots in different places.
Depending on the software, you could get some spiffy effects (I never heard of a cross-eyed missile, but the original sidewinders got their name from the sensor being slightly off, in relation to the flight path, causing the missile to turn circles around its axis in-flight (hence the name)..
I have very little experience in ECM or ECCM, but I used to like flight sims and I studied Electronic Engineering a while back.
Digital systems are, by definition, predictable, so fooling them depends simply on figuring out how they work.
(That's why so much technical and tactical information is classified).
(You should see the number of troops that keep an on-line diary vua a terminal that can be easily traced to a physical location.)
What if you would make the laser strobe across 8 points at, say, 5 times the rotation speed of the sensor?
According to Nyquist, that should seriously throw off the sensor, no matter where or when it looks;-)
So, if you really want to confuse the missile, you'll either blot random bright spots all over the place or make a trail of bright spots (breadcrumbs), so make the missile thing the plane is heading in another direction.
Still, I don't see how you'll paint a target that is not on the plane, due to the reflective nature of everything around the plane (as in air)
A place could drop flare but, in order to make the missile think the flare is the real thing, the plane needs to break away from the 'sight' of the missile real quick.
So, to REDIRECT the missile, you need to successsfully 'paint over' the official tracking signal, instead of merely disrupting it.
Maybe you can severly overpower the targeting laser, making the missile think the official signal is just noise.
But, in case of bad data, won't an IR missile simply default to 'hitting the really bright spot in its center'?
AFAIK, they had a rudimentary idea of doing that, without being told what to do.
Either way, I don't see this doing much against anything but the simplest of missiles.
Seeing as I don't see boeing's capable breaking and dropping flares, a simple SA-7 should do the trick. These should be available in about any bargain bin in eastern europe.
You will need to hit multiple engines in order for anything to happen to a 747, but that should not be much of a problem.
Authorities will guard all the major airports, but I'm sure there are plenty of smaller airfields where they don't really care about stuff like that.
Don't forget that you may need to get permission from the people living in the valley beyond the dam to build the thing. - I.E. the inhabitants will not be pleased Should the dam break, there is a definite pobbibility of the loss of lives and/or personal property - I.E. your insurance cost goes through the roof When the water rises, a fair number of trees will need to go and the inhabitants will be displaced. - I.E. Greenpeace will not be pleased In most mountainous regions, the problem is not (central) Power Generation, but distributing said power to the next village (and the one beyond that). - I.E. at least 30% of your generated power will be used simply to 'heat the cables (transportation loss)
Personally, I don't mind, because we Dutch can 'buy' Green Power Karma from Scandinavian countries, so we can delay the inevitable until we find a way to get clean, renewable power that everyone agrees on.
In the Netherlands, We have no mountains to speak of, and any river we have is used for transportation (doesn't go well with those damn dams) We have fields of Wind Generators out in the sea, but Greenpeace says they spoil the view and scare the birds. We have several wind generators inside the country, privately owned, but not every farmer can afford one (GP cannot tell people what to stick in their backyard). We have toyed with Sea Wave/Tidal Power, but using it means blocking of sea traffic and it is only useful certain conditions, as to break the Generators. Oh, and is kills the little fishies, so we stopped working on that back in 1990.
There is an equal mountain of arguments against any form of power generation. The only way forward is to keep working them, so they become safer, cleaner and more efficient.
That's nice, but those are plain carboard cards. If you want to use special paper, the price flies up to $150 for a 250-card run minimum. At that price, things get very expensive, very fast.
If I need a batch that big, I will do it on-line, but the person I set up the system for had 6 companies, each with its own business card design. Each of those companies have moved twice in the 3 years I was there. That would have meant 18 runs of for the company cards, not counting the personal cards for management.
$300 gets you a very decent Business Inkjet (which supports optional continuous flow modules). $200 will get you a box of heavy high-class card stock.
That means $500 plus hours for all the cards a manager can dream of. With instant prototyping.
They're custom-design sets of cards made in small runs. 10 pages will make 100 business cards. Also, the printer needs to be set up -just right-
for the card-cutting machine to do its work right.
Also, not many printers will make a decent print on heavy verge (slightly ribbed) cardboard. Laser Printers are, by definition, not a good idea, because of the texture in the paper. The 'lower parts' of the paper don't get heated by the fuser,
which means that half the toner falls off afterwards.
Actually, a lot of modern printers -do- stop printing when the printer decides that the cartridge is out of inkt. It's to protect the quality of the prints, really!)
If you happen to have a printer with a 'tray monitoring tool', it will spout warnings hundreds of pages in advance. This might not seem like much of a problem, but the company the printer resides at prints about 10 pages per week on that printer. (It's used mainly for custom business cards). That means that the printer will start crying months in advance.
The printer (software) already knows this, because it monitors page and ink counters and projects cartridge lifetime, so you know how many to order, in case yhou need to print in bulk.
If people are given a choice between 'Free' Vista and 'Free' XP: - Will they use it to try out an upgrade for free? - Or will they simply use it to get a 'Free' license for Windows XP?
I think they already already got their answer,
and they're not very happy about it.
Numerical street names may make sense in your city, but not this may not always be the case. Not all cities have rectangular blocks of buildings. Worse, Amsterdam (where I live) is mainly circular in nature. There is exactly one set of numbered streets, which are simply named in order of appearance when you travel across the highway around Amsterdam. (S101 - S118, starting at the northwest river Amstel and going up counter-clockwise)
What if there is a fork in the road? Will it become 42.5th street?
But I still bought it (the 2.3GHz version, though).
I know it's not the fastest on the market and I know it has a bad rep,
but I'm an AMD guy and I intend to stick with them as long as I can.
I have a compatible (CrossFire) motherboard and the CPU will cost me about $250. If I want to go to Intel, I would have to spend at least -twice- that much,
just for the MoBo and CPU (Never mind new cooler, etc).
Even if it might freak out under heavy load, It won't be that much of a problem, because it's only a game machine. (I realize that means it will often be under a heavy load, but I can stand to lose the data on there, I have my Ghost Backup) I've had about a half dozen 'freezes' in the past month and I don't think this CPU will make that much of a difference.
Actually, writing linux -for- the 360 is not a problem (its DevStation is a PowerMac). The problem lies in getting your own code to run on the DRM-infested, ehm, machine...
I'll bet you can get a fully-functional port of NetBSD onto any of those chips: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/11/1754253 The problem is getting the correct peripherals Video/Network/Storage interfaces connected to the thing and finding someone that will make it. The XO Laptop has proven that there is a market for low-cost, medium-power rugged laptops.
In the meantime, you'll have to make do with a Psion, a souped-up Palm or some other exotic sub-notebook;-) If you look around, you can find a Sony VIAO PCG-C1VN for around $100:-)
Repost, really sorry, I forgot to check the formatting:-S Could someone please kill the previous post?
I know ARM/PXA/XScale can run some intensive applications (Tomtom is my favorite Killer App) on my PDA. I also have an ARM in my (linux-enabled) router, so I know what it's capable of and some multi-core'ing would be nice (push data with samba and read with UPnP simultaneous). I even have a Gamepark portable console with an ARM9 inside, that can play DivX and DOOM (!) full-screen at 320x200.
On the other hand, my PDA and my router run severely-stripped OS'es (busybox, for example) and the Gamepark can only run one task at a time (reboot, open next game). I never said it was a poor CPU, I just said that most programs on it are built with highly optimized code.
Firefox it an excellent example of something that can be highly multi-threaded (simultaneously retrieve multiple pages/images, run Flash and Java applets, etc. Unfortunately, it is also an absolute pig when it comes to memory consumption (around 500MB, a.t.m.) and some of the Flash applets kick my Core Duo into 75% CPU load (just a single applet).
There is also another problem: those cores need a complex architecture, if you want to stick over 4 cores on a single die. The Quadcore is made of 2 DualCore CPU's that happen to share the same socket, like Pentium2's douls be run in DualCPU, by putting both of them on the same bus and toggling a single CPU bit. This will not scale nicely over 4 cores and will get worse as more cores are stuck on the same bus. AMD took a -very long time- to build a native QuadCore CPU with an efficient crossbar architecture. (I don't know how long it took Sun to design the Niagara CPU). I have one of those wonderful next-gen PowerPC CPU's in my Playstation3, but the programmer's design guidelines tend to scare most programmers. Each sub-cpu is linked to the main CPU, so traffic from one sub-CPU to the next (sending that downloaded image to the Firefox rendering engine is painstakingly slow.
Also, I haven't seen reports of multi-core architectures slowing down individual cores. Because the core is linked to its bus at a (usually) fixed multiplier, slowing down individual cores means managing bus and multiplier speeds for each Core individually, which will make the Interconnection architecture (Crossbar) more complex, and thus slower and more prone to bugs.
Yes, X86 is a dog that should be simply put to sleep. Unfortunately, all other architectures (Itanium, Sun T2) are not built for mainstream use and thus are prohibitively expensive. Transmeta has tried to build/sell a new CPU with a brand-new architecture, which could emulate X86 and 68K, but it failed miserably. (It was even more power-efficient, but it was probably killed stone dead by Intel)
I really hope someone else will build a new Crusoe and, this time, succeed. If they manage to make the interface (mostly) compatible with existing PCIe interfaces,
companies might even start building hardware for it
(otherwise, they would have to re-design their device, investing into something
that is unproven and might not even outlive the design process).
Slashdot Mirror
From what I gather from recent Government History, I guess they simply want to know what kind of excuse they need to start a full-on war.
Once they know what can be used as what, all they need to do is trigger the right event from the right country and they can start an all new war.
(After all, it is cyberWARfare, they government has the right to kill people over it).
Maybe a portscan of dod.gov will have the gov't simply ask your ISP for your name and address, for future reference.
If they see a valid inciming hack attack (Anything a modern firewall might call hostile), they will -demand- the information from the ISP, so they can storm the location (be it a datacenter or a home) and confiscate any equipment they may want^H^H^H^H^H need.
There have never been laws about these things, because everyone know that investigating a single attack takes a -lot- of time to do the legal way, but having -all- the information available beforehand makes things go a lot quicker.
All they need is a database of all Internet subscribers, and a log of all their IP traffic (HTTP/POP3/SMTP/SIP/SSH/etc).
That way they can easily draw a straight line from anyone they don't like to the current Axis of Evil.
I know this sounds very paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Or how about, say, ATC systems? I'm sure it's really easy to spot, at a glance, two planes getting too close for comfort when you're given an 80x25 screen full of numbers, as compared to a graphical representation.
Isn't that what the 'Matrix' view is for?
Only true ATC's can read the pure code.
All they see is 747, learjet, Airbus...
What? :innocent:
That's what you get if a geek has too much money and too little time:
things get silly.
But, to explain my point, I shot a pic of the fans , the back and the front. The fans in this set-up are simply inaudible. The (quiet) LaCie's are for live storage (the data / OS), the (loud, power-aware) WD is for timed synchronisation (semi-online backup).
I don't have an XboX360, but I have a lot of temperature-sensitive equipment in a very tight A/V cabinet.
I have managed to keep all this very cool with a pair of Nexus 120mm fans and a generic 6V A/C adapter.
I hung the fans on the shelf above the equipment with a simple 1/2" bend and the rubber mounting, ehm, rubbers.
It also helps if you put something between the devices you stack to increase airflow.
(YOU try stacking something small on top of a classic XboX!)
Amongst other things in that one (cramped) compartment:
Linksys NSLU2 NAS with:
- 320GB USB drive
- 320GB USB drive
Asus WL500gP NAS with:
- 500GB USB drive
- (The other ons is on top of the rack)
Digital TV receiver
Cable modem (not one of those cool Surfboards, but a big, warm one)
XboX (regular, not 360))
Obligatory Pictures (front) (back)
Two of the (LaCie) USB drives are stacked on top of eachother,
but they are both only slightly warm to the touch
Will they fight for humanity's sake -inside the AI they created?
(Tron)
Will the phones all over the US spontaneously start ringing?
(Lawnmower man)
Will they hide their existence and slowly 'mold' people into avatars of their personal interests?
(Neuromancer)
Will they simply disappear into the vast infinity of the net, observing, researching and simply being content with their existence?
(Ghost in the Shell)
Having left their corporeal form, will they 'mount' themselves inside a machine and travel the universe?
(2001)
I, for one, am interested in what the future has in store for us.
Hail our future robotic overlords!
(Appleseed/Matrix/BS Galactica/Terminator/AI/I, Robot)
Oh, and save me a Cherry 2000
I don't want to seem too atheistic here, but are you sure you need a physical representation of yourself in order to acknowledge your existence?
If one is born without sight, feeling or hearing, does that mean that they don't realise they exist?
On the other hand, does that mean that modern construction robots are intelligent?
All of them have feedback as to their physical state/shape.
Some of them have forms of pressure sensitivity, so they can feel.
Some even have cameras, with which they can observer themselves.
Does that make them intelligent?
Young children are not exactly what you'd call self-aware.
(this is easily observed by the fact that they tend to run into or fall over things,
simply not realizing there's a body attached to their eyes and hands)
Do you mean to say they are not intelligent?
Supposing the entire emotional, intellectual and factual content of your brain could be 'saved' as a binary image and run through a software interpreter.
Could the result be construed as intelligence?
(Although you could argue that the memories include feedback)
I have to admin I never really studied psychology or AI, but I am seriously intrigued by the likes of Philip K Dick (DADES/Bladerunner) and Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell).
Both of them basically pose the question:
What is life?
What is intelligence?
What is reality?
(and what happens if any of the above are tampered with?)
I personally admire people that actually take those questions, hypothesize and try to answer those questions by scientific method.
He might have been seriously insane, but that does not mean he was not intelligent.
Keep in mind, that WOL is not always as compatible as you might think.
From my experience, WOL works on about 30% of all workstations.
The rest seem to simply ignore incoming requests.
I used to be able to power up my PC at home from a FreeBSD machine at the office, by using a VPN router.
Now, I can't even get my workstation (new motherboard/NIC) to start up when it's in the same room, on the same switch.
Yes, I have checked the MAC address.
Yes, I have enabled WOL in the BIOS.
Yes, I have tried it with boot ROM enabled and disabled.
Yes, I have enabled WOL in the Windows driver
Yes, It is set to 'Magic Packet'
No, it will not start up.
I think the idea has its uses, just not for the consumer market.
If you've ever stood behind a bladeserver, you'd know the downright silly amount of heat generated by these machines.
Bladeservers, together with virtualization (which is where the industry is goig right now), have one simple problem: heat.
If all cores run at full power for over an hour, things can get very hot in the server room.
One of the things we use these servers for is weather prediction.
Every 4 hours, we need about an hour of full processing power.
If you could have the blade operate at 1/4 capacity for most of the time,
whilst you fire up the extra CPUs when you need them,
you save on average power usage, server power usage,
and cooling power.
Do you, by change, mean Bloc Tronic?
Unfortunately, not many people remember it
God, I feel old, now...
(i.e. - a static sensor and a mirror that moves around, so the sensor can 'look around'.
In initial versions, the mirror would 'follow' the dot, so it becomes dead center.
The actions required provided feedback for the steering mechanism, so the entire missile would 'bend' until the dot was dead center ( (simple method, direct pursuit - more on Wikipedia's Sidewinder Page
Unfortunately, this type of missile has a 10-15% kill ratio. (Though I have to admit those were 'harder targets')
To actually hit a 747, you would need to fire a handful of the rockets, just to make sure you hit a target.
If you want to actually take down a 747, you'd have to fire an entire barrage of them, because it cna survive multiple, ehm, engine failures.
Also an interesting note: The countermeasures mention they mess up the control beam.
This would imply they assume the terrorists use CLOS missiles, which need constant guidance and lots of training.
From Wikipedia
"Given these considerations, many experts believe that CLOS missiles are not as ideally suited for terrorist use as are IR missiles, which sometimes are referred to as "fire and forget" missiles"
From the sound of it, this systems protects aircraft from missiles the terrorists will not be using anyway.
Either they use fire-and-forget missiles (SARH, anyone?), or they go all-out and use non-jammable laser-guided SAMs:
Even though laser guided missiles require relatively extensive training and skill to operate, many experts consider these missiles particularly menacing in the hands of terrorists due to the missiles' resistance to most conventional countermeasures in use today
Fooling a sensor of that type depends on how the sensor is sampled. From what I know, most optical sensors 'freeze-frame' the image so it can be transferred to a buffer, which can be read at a 'normal' speed.
This means, that the entire image is 'sampled' at one point in time, then read in a stream or in blocks.
Then again, if you know you know the sampling frequency, you can 'fool' the sensor into thinking it's seeing something else.
You can either move the 'dot' with each frame, or place multiple dots in different places.
Depending on the software, you could get some spiffy effects (I never heard of a cross-eyed missile, but the original sidewinders got their name from the sensor being slightly off, in relation to the flight path, causing the missile to turn circles around its axis in-flight (hence the name)..
I have very little experience in ECM or ECCM, but I used to like flight sims and I studied Electronic Engineering a while back.
Digital systems are, by definition, predictable, so fooling them depends simply on figuring out how they work.
(That's why so much technical and tactical information is classified).
(You should see the number of troops that keep an on-line diary vua a terminal that can be easily traced to a physical location.)
What if you would make the laser strobe across 8 points at, say, 5 times the rotation speed of the sensor? ;-)
According to Nyquist, that should seriously throw off the sensor, no matter where or when it looks
So, if you really want to confuse the missile, you'll either blot random bright spots all over the place or make a trail of bright spots (breadcrumbs), so make the missile thing the plane is heading in another direction.
Still, I don't see how you'll paint a target that is not on the plane, due to the reflective nature of everything around the plane (as in air)
A place could drop flare but, in order to make the missile think the flare is the real thing, the plane needs to break away from the 'sight' of the missile real quick.
So, to REDIRECT the missile, you need to successsfully 'paint over' the official tracking signal, instead of merely disrupting it.
Maybe you can severly overpower the targeting laser, making the missile think the official signal is just noise.
But, in case of bad data, won't an IR missile simply default to 'hitting the really bright spot in its center'?
AFAIK, they had a rudimentary idea of doing that, without being told what to do.
Either way, I don't see this doing much against anything but the simplest of missiles.
Seeing as I don't see boeing's capable breaking and dropping flares, a simple SA-7 should do the trick. These should be available in about any bargain bin in eastern europe.
You will need to hit multiple engines in order for anything to happen to a 747, but that should not be much of a problem.
Authorities will guard all the major airports, but I'm sure there are plenty of smaller airfields where they don't really care about stuff like that.
Or the terrorist organization in question can spend a few extra grand on RADAR guided missiles and the entire Laser ECM stuff is for naught.
Either way, there are plenty other options that save many more lives per $$
Don't forget that you may need to get permission from the people living in the valley beyond the dam to build the thing.
- I.E. the inhabitants will not be pleased
Should the dam break, there is a definite pobbibility of the loss of lives and/or personal property
- I.E. your insurance cost goes through the roof
When the water rises, a fair number of trees will need to go and the inhabitants will be displaced.
- I.E. Greenpeace will not be pleased
In most mountainous regions, the problem is not (central) Power Generation, but distributing said power to the next village (and the one beyond that).
- I.E. at least 30% of your generated power will be used simply to 'heat the cables (transportation loss)
Personally, I don't mind, because we Dutch can 'buy' Green Power Karma from Scandinavian countries, so we can delay the inevitable until we find a way to get clean, renewable power that everyone agrees on.
In the Netherlands,
We have no mountains to speak of, and any river we have is used for transportation (doesn't go well with those damn dams)
We have fields of Wind Generators out in the sea, but Greenpeace says they spoil the view and scare the birds.
We have several wind generators inside the country, privately owned, but not every farmer can afford one (GP cannot tell people what to stick in their backyard).
We have toyed with Sea Wave/Tidal Power, but using it means blocking of sea traffic and it is only useful certain conditions, as to break the Generators. Oh, and is kills the little fishies, so we stopped working on that back in 1990.
Water power link (Dutch):
http://mediatheek.thinkquest.nl/~lla070/water_mogelijkheden.htm
There is an equal mountain of arguments against any form of power generation.
The only way forward is to keep working them, so they become safer, cleaner and more efficient.
That's nice, but those are plain carboard cards.
If you want to use special paper, the price flies up to $150 for a 250-card run minimum.
At that price, things get very expensive, very fast.
If I need a batch that big, I will do it on-line, but the person I set up the system for had 6 companies, each with its own business card design. Each of those companies have moved twice in the 3 years I was there.
That would have meant 18 runs of for the company cards, not counting the personal cards for management.
$300 gets you a very decent Business Inkjet (which supports optional continuous flow modules).
$200 will get you a box of heavy high-class card stock.
That means $500 plus hours for all the cards a manager can dream of.
With instant prototyping.
They're custom-design sets of cards made in small runs.
10 pages will make 100 business cards.
Also, the printer needs to be set up -just right-
for the card-cutting machine to do its work right.
Also, not many printers will make a decent print on heavy verge (slightly ribbed) cardboard.
Laser Printers are, by definition, not a good idea, because of the texture in the paper.
The 'lower parts' of the paper don't get heated by the fuser,
which means that half the toner falls off afterwards.
Actually, a lot of modern printers -do- stop printing when the printer decides that the cartridge is out of inkt.
It's to protect the quality of the prints, really!)
If you happen to have a printer with a 'tray monitoring tool', it will spout warnings hundreds of pages in advance.
This might not seem like much of a problem, but the company the printer resides at prints about 10 pages per week on that printer.
(It's used mainly for custom business cards). That means that the printer will start crying months in advance.
The printer (software) already knows this, because it monitors page and ink counters and projects cartridge lifetime, so you know how many to order, in case yhou need to print in bulk.
If people are given a choice between 'Free' Vista and 'Free' XP:
- Will they use it to try out an upgrade for free?
- Or will they simply use it to get a 'Free' license for Windows XP?
I think they already already got their answer,
and they're not very happy about it.
Will he work for bananas?
Numerical street names may make sense in your city, but not this may not always be the case.
Not all cities have rectangular blocks of buildings.
Worse, Amsterdam (where I live) is mainly circular in nature.
There is exactly one set of numbered streets, which are simply named in order of appearance when you travel across the highway around Amsterdam. (S101 - S118, starting at the northwest river Amstel and going up counter-clockwise)
What if there is a fork in the road?
Will it become 42.5th street?
But I still bought it (the 2.3GHz version, though).
I know it's not the fastest on the market and I know it has a bad rep,
but I'm an AMD guy and I intend to stick with them as long as I can.
I have a compatible (CrossFire) motherboard and the CPU will cost me about $250.
If I want to go to Intel, I would have to spend at least -twice- that much,
just for the MoBo and CPU (Never mind new cooler, etc).
Even if it might freak out under heavy load, It won't be that much of a problem, because it's only a game machine.
(I realize that means it will often be under a heavy load, but I can stand to lose the data on there, I have my Ghost Backup)
I've had about a half dozen 'freezes' in the past month and I don't think this CPU will make that much of a difference.
Just my 2c
Actually, writing linux -for- the 360 is not a problem (its DevStation is a PowerMac).
The problem lies in getting your own code to run on the DRM-infested, ehm, machine...
I'll bet you can get a fully-functional port of NetBSD onto any of those chips:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/11/1754253
The problem is getting the correct peripherals Video/Network/Storage interfaces connected to the thing and finding someone that will make it.
The XO Laptop has proven that there is a market for low-cost, medium-power rugged laptops.
In the meantime, you'll have to make do with a Psion, a souped-up Palm or some other exotic sub-notebook
If you look around, you can find a Sony VIAO PCG-C1VN for around $100
Repost, really sorry, I forgot to check the formatting :-S
Could someone please kill the previous post?
I know ARM/PXA/XScale can run some intensive applications (Tomtom is my favorite Killer App) on my PDA.
I also have an ARM in my (linux-enabled) router, so I know what it's capable of and some multi-core'ing would be nice (push data with samba and read with UPnP simultaneous).
I even have a Gamepark portable console with an ARM9 inside, that can play DivX and DOOM (!) full-screen at 320x200.
On the other hand, my PDA and my router run severely-stripped OS'es (busybox, for example) and the Gamepark can only run one task at a time (reboot, open next game).
I never said it was a poor CPU, I just said that most programs on it are built with highly optimized code.
Firefox it an excellent example of something that can be highly multi-threaded (simultaneously retrieve multiple pages/images, run Flash and Java applets, etc.
Unfortunately, it is also an absolute pig when it comes to memory consumption (around 500MB, a.t.m.) and some of the Flash applets kick my Core Duo into 75% CPU load (just a single applet).
There is also another problem: those cores need a complex architecture, if you want to stick over 4 cores on a single die.
The Quadcore is made of 2 DualCore CPU's that happen to share the same socket, like Pentium2's douls be run in DualCPU, by putting both of them on the same bus and toggling a single CPU bit.
This will not scale nicely over 4 cores and will get worse as more cores are stuck on the same bus.
AMD took a -very long time- to build a native QuadCore CPU with an efficient crossbar architecture. (I don't know how long it took Sun to design the Niagara CPU).
I have one of those wonderful next-gen PowerPC CPU's in my Playstation3, but the programmer's design guidelines tend to scare most programmers.
Each sub-cpu is linked to the main CPU, so traffic from one sub-CPU to the next (sending that downloaded image to the Firefox rendering engine is painstakingly slow.
Also, I haven't seen reports of multi-core architectures slowing down individual cores.
Because the core is linked to its bus at a (usually) fixed multiplier, slowing down individual cores means managing bus and multiplier speeds for each Core individually,
which will make the Interconnection architecture (Crossbar) more complex, and thus slower and more prone to bugs.
Yes, X86 is a dog that should be simply put to sleep.
Unfortunately, all other architectures (Itanium, Sun T2) are not built for mainstream use and thus are prohibitively expensive.
Transmeta has tried to build/sell a new CPU with a brand-new architecture, which could emulate X86 and 68K, but it failed miserably.
(It was even more power-efficient, but it was probably killed stone dead by Intel)
I really hope someone else will build a new Crusoe and, this time, succeed.
If they manage to make the interface (mostly) compatible with existing PCIe interfaces,
companies might even start building hardware for it
(otherwise, they would have to re-design their device, investing into something
that is unproven and might not even outlive the design process).