Google runs text ads and most people don't block them (they are often relevant anyway, and they don't hurt anyone.)
Aw, no more podcasts and webinars? Nobody watches them anyways.
A good percentage of webinars is ran by the industry - by companies like TI, Motorola, Analog Devices. Those companies don't have ads and they aren't interested in subscriptions, they run their Web sites to advertise, support and sell their own products. Those Web sites will stay, and they are the best part of the Web, IMO, compared to the rumor mill that "tech" sites run. So we may lose an opinion of a writer about some Abit motherboard, but www.abit.com.tw is not going anywhere, and we'll be always able to read about their products, and discuss them either right there or with some other mechanism, free or not.
But isn't it his problem too if all the sites he's ad blocking go out of business?
It's not a problem at all. If you remember first years of Internet (or even better, FidoNet, or BBS) then you know that money is not necessary for running a network. Sure, we'll lose slick, expensive sites that publish big name writers and employ staff. Not a major loss, I think. Most of comminication is occurring on peer to peer basis (just as I reply to you) and not on the client-server basis. We could discuss this over any number of free or nearly free technologies - some IM, FreeNet, Skype or whatever else is out there. It doesn't cost much today to run a reasonably sized web or mail server, to host a blog or to run a mailing list. And there is no requirement for any such site to have 10 million users. I read and post to some mailing lists that have maybe 50-100 active users. I don't charge for my contributions, and neither do other posters. But if there is anything worthy of a discussion we don't wait for Gods of Slashdot to accept an article, we do it ourselves, within minutes.
If you use an ad blocker then you consume a ridiculously small amount of bandwidth, probably a couple of kB per page - compared to half a megabyte for an ad-infested page.
* You are free to block their ads.
* They are free to deny you the content they paid to produce.
And that's the deal. You don't like it?
I personally like it very much and think this is the only civilized way to solve this problem. Everyone will be within their rights, and everyone's choice will be his own.
If they hide the content from adblockers then I do not know what I will do; my guess is that in 90% of cases I will just move to another web site, and in 10% I will whitelist them temporarily. If that's what they prefer me to do then they should just hide the content.
A photo might take care of the window, if looked at from a distance. But having small plastic mockups look way cooler.
It adds costs. Besides, many people already pointed out that Intel would be happy to provide its partners with "mechanical samples" of the processor - its early prototypes. All it takes is to apply some voltage/amperage to some pins to burn the bonding wires, and then the chip is dead. There is plenty of reasons to ship mechanical samples because customers would like to hold them in their hands - something you don't do with real parts. Milling or die-casting an aluminum hunk to look like the CPU does nothing to promote the product, costs extra money compared to free prototypes, and hurts Intel's credibility.
what if for some reason (building entire walls out of them...) Asian countries needed huge amounts of these demo boxes? Which would give them a plausible reason to manufacture these locally.
Reason - yes, but not the right. The boxes carry Intel's trademark and claim to contain Intel products inside. They even have the barcode that matches a real product. What reason could possibly exist to create a real barcode for a demo box while any fake one, with a wrong checksum, would do?
If this guy has so much motivation trying to do this as a hobby, ESA should step forward and hire him straight away.
There are many hams who build their own microwave radios for 10 or 24 GHz (and for other bands too) from parts. This guy, motivated and all, was mostly using off the shelf equipment. For example, look at these photos of ham rigs - and note that those are mobile setups because the rules of the contest encourage roving.
It is entirely probable that these items were just 'demo units' meant for store windows and displays
A demo box wouldn't contain anything inside. It would have anything you need just printed on the surface of the box. It wouldn't be weight-matched to the real deal. And it wouldn't include a stack of blank paper. Finally, it wouldn't include the fake CPU. If you must have something there, it would be a piece of cardboard with a photo, but as I said there is no need to have anything inside of a demo box. The box wouldn't have spelling errors either.
The distributor would be much too busy with Intel and the Feds to find time for fruitless libel suits.
I wouldn't be so quick here. The distributor can be a victim too. The CPUs were made in Costa Rica. There would be hundreds of opportunities to switch a truckload of CPUs on its way to the distributor, and someone like Mexican mafia would be perfectly positioned to do just that.
The "cheap RF meter" consists of one (per band) calibrated omni antenna on a plastic tripod, one wideband preamp, and one spectrum analyzer. This set will cost you maybe $20K to buy, or $500 to rent for a week - assuming that you know how to correctly operate it and how to interpret the results.
Anything cheaper than that will give you results that you can't bet your life on.
Whatever dollars the artist got, most of them probably were spent on manufacturing of the actual monument - site preparation, foundation, bronze, casting, etc.
You are certainly welcome to dispute those claims, though #2 is clearly a strawman. The thread is already deep and I don't see where you found that one.
But the #1 - some of "people who accept poor salaries and working conditions to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of truth and knowledge" are known to exaggerate or fake results to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Is there any sign on the horizon of a USB console connection?
There is no standard USB device class for serial adapters. There is communications device class, but it is huge and doesn't really help. So FTDI and Cygnal and others have to write their own drivers for tens of OSes and architectures. If you walk up to a device with a laptop and a USB cable, chances are that your laptop doesn't have a proper driver. To make things worse, many USB-Serial adapters have to use their own VID/PID/REV identifiers, and that makes it even harder to recognize the device. Class-compliant devices would "just work" like a USB drive does, or a mouse.
There is also no standard API in OSes to talk to *modern* serial devices. USB serial devices are emulated into a virtual COM port.
Where's the incentive for the developer to keep cost under control?
The "plus" part is usually small, smaller than the profit that could be had under other types of contracts. That makes "cost plus" contracts not always interesting. As I recall, they pay just enough to keep you afloat, but not much more. Also, the "cost" part is audited frequently; you can't go out, get a yacht and charge its upkeep to the contract - and get away with that.
Here is an example then. NASA orders a rocket made. The contractor orders tons of materials, hires 1,000 engineers, buys computers, software, rents a vehicle assembly building for 5 years, and signs a contract for range time. If at some point the "stop work" order comes, these costs and obligations must be accounted for. Some of those expenses are huge.
Maybe. That's for the mission designers to calculate.
Use a piezoelectric surface on the panel
The displacement will be very small - micrometers. Maybe it could be enough. But beware of resonances. Still this can be done, if only the method itself proves to be effective.
you can't replicate these experiments on earth, not easily at least -- most earth dust is organic
For a low, low sum of $1,000,000 I volunteer to build a test chamber that is large enough to contain the rover, and it will allow scientists to feed any materials into it as a dust source, even those that they didn't scoop up at the nearest garden:-) In fact, NASA has about a ton of genuine lunar dust, perhaps that's the best use for it.
Another idea -- move a statically charged rod over the surface
An AC replied to my initial comment and proposed static repulsor, and I replied with a link that says that something like that is being worked on. It's better to have no moving parts. Besides, if the electrostatic force was strong enough to dislodge dust some distance from the panel, it probably would be way too strong when the dust is in physical contact with the rod, making it hard to shake it off.
tilt the panels to ~20 degrees and then vibrate them until clean.
Even I can see problems with this (though it may work in very specific situations:)
Presumes sufficient gravity. Mars and Moon provide only weak gravity.
Presumes minimal "stickiness" of the dust. In reality the dust is statically charged and adheres to panels.
Requires motors to tilt the panels, moving parts that those motors move, and power for the motors. Eats into science payload.
It is very untrivial to vibrate large, flexible panels. There will be many vibration modes, and some may be destructive to panels. You also can't get the same displacement everywhere, and you will get plenty of bending. Solar panels are very rigid and don't bend well.
A simple experiment in most favorable conditions - on Earth - will demonstrate that a sheet of glass, once it gets dusty, can't be cleaned by any amount of vibration. Try with your window, for example. Dust is very light, but it adheres well. You'd need to try hard to even dislodge grains of sand from that glass.
I cannot make any predictions on luck, however, I might suggest some sort of brush or wiper.
You don't want to run wipers dry - the sand will scratch the glass (the windshield or the solar panel.) Rubber will not work in the range of temperatures that are found on other planets. If the material is soft the dust will embed itself into it; if the material is hard then it won't clean anything. I believe NASA went through this for the rovers, and decided to do nothing because they didn't see any solution that would be simple and effective.
We only write off legitimate expenses and we follow the rules...
Then you are good... as long as the tax man (federal or state) also follows the rules. And that is not always true. They may request so many hard to find documents to support your deduction that it's sometimes easier to remove the deduction (and pay the fine.)
For example (IANCPA,) you drove 1,000 miles to talk to a prospective client, and nothing came out of it. Prove it, or else the fuel and car mileage deductions are fraud. Can you prove that a year after the fact? Perhaps, but only if you are very organized and keep every single bit of paper. If you just got a phone call, jumped into the car and went there on a 3-day trip, you might be in trouble.
Those might work, but now we are pretty far from the original advice to students to fire up a terminal (a standard part of the OS) and type some commands.
Running exploits is *explicitly* against any AUP that I ever heard of, and students would be guilty of violation of several laws. They could easily go to jail for that.
It would be doubly stupid because they don't know what kind of paranoid security system is installed on their laptop. The school admin, Mike Perbix, is very good with UNIX, he could create tons of tripwires and store screenshots, camera frames and lists of processes somewhere out of sight, to be uploaded as soon as the computer is online. Such uncertainty is exactly why we treat infected or rooted computers with "reformat and reinstall" - because that's the only way to be sure.
As I see it, students were given bugged laptops, forbidden to touch anything in them, and the admins were hovering over them, waiting for any "furtive movement" to pounce. Essentially that's what they did with those "drugs" - I am of belief that the admins were monitoring random notebooks, either looking for CP or just out of boredom, and just stumbled upon this one.
Future more you can always bypass the the boot start up and launch a live cd
Please look at the URL that I provided. Here is the quote for you:
My final attempt was to try and boot the machine from a DVD so I could mount the filesystem and the hard disk and view the logs that way. Unfortunately, it looks like LMSD [...] had an Open Firmware Password in place, as any attempt to bring up the boot device selection men by holding down the option key at startup asked for a password
Your comment is currently at "2, Funny" but IMO Apple has plenty of grounds to sue the school district, primarily over the damage done to Apple's name and trust of users.
on Mac just use the terminal, if you can't do either because you don't know how then log off facebook and get some real skills that will serve you in life.
If only you did some research instead of pouring vitriol on non-geeks, you'd know that only whitelisted applications are allowed to run on those laptops, and Console isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't be even that bad:
Aw, no more gmail? ... Aw, no more search?
Google runs text ads and most people don't block them (they are often relevant anyway, and they don't hurt anyone.)
Aw, no more podcasts and webinars? Nobody watches them anyways.
A good percentage of webinars is ran by the industry - by companies like TI, Motorola, Analog Devices. Those companies don't have ads and they aren't interested in subscriptions, they run their Web sites to advertise, support and sell their own products. Those Web sites will stay, and they are the best part of the Web, IMO, compared to the rumor mill that "tech" sites run. So we may lose an opinion of a writer about some Abit motherboard, but www.abit.com.tw is not going anywhere, and we'll be always able to read about their products, and discuss them either right there or with some other mechanism, free or not.
But isn't it his problem too if all the sites he's ad blocking go out of business?
It's not a problem at all. If you remember first years of Internet (or even better, FidoNet, or BBS) then you know that money is not necessary for running a network. Sure, we'll lose slick, expensive sites that publish big name writers and employ staff. Not a major loss, I think. Most of comminication is occurring on peer to peer basis (just as I reply to you) and not on the client-server basis. We could discuss this over any number of free or nearly free technologies - some IM, FreeNet, Skype or whatever else is out there. It doesn't cost much today to run a reasonably sized web or mail server, to host a blog or to run a mailing list. And there is no requirement for any such site to have 10 million users. I read and post to some mailing lists that have maybe 50-100 active users. I don't charge for my contributions, and neither do other posters. But if there is anything worthy of a discussion we don't wait for Gods of Slashdot to accept an article, we do it ourselves, within minutes.
Websites have to pay bandwidth fees and the like.
If you use an ad blocker then you consume a ridiculously small amount of bandwidth, probably a couple of kB per page - compared to half a megabyte for an ad-infested page.
* You are free to block their ads.
* They are free to deny you the content they paid to produce.
And that's the deal. You don't like it?
I personally like it very much and think this is the only civilized way to solve this problem. Everyone will be within their rights, and everyone's choice will be his own.
If they hide the content from adblockers then I do not know what I will do; my guess is that in 90% of cases I will just move to another web site, and in 10% I will whitelist them temporarily. If that's what they prefer me to do then they should just hide the content.
A photo might take care of the window, if looked at from a distance. But having small plastic mockups look way cooler.
It adds costs. Besides, many people already pointed out that Intel would be happy to provide its partners with "mechanical samples" of the processor - its early prototypes. All it takes is to apply some voltage/amperage to some pins to burn the bonding wires, and then the chip is dead. There is plenty of reasons to ship mechanical samples because customers would like to hold them in their hands - something you don't do with real parts. Milling or die-casting an aluminum hunk to look like the CPU does nothing to promote the product, costs extra money compared to free prototypes, and hurts Intel's credibility.
what if for some reason (building entire walls out of them...) Asian countries needed huge amounts of these demo boxes? Which would give them a plausible reason to manufacture these locally.
Reason - yes, but not the right. The boxes carry Intel's trademark and claim to contain Intel products inside. They even have the barcode that matches a real product. What reason could possibly exist to create a real barcode for a demo box while any fake one, with a wrong checksum, would do?
If this guy has so much motivation trying to do this as a hobby, ESA should step forward and hire him straight away.
There are many hams who build their own microwave radios for 10 or 24 GHz (and for other bands too) from parts. This guy, motivated and all, was mostly using off the shelf equipment. For example, look at these photos of ham rigs - and note that those are mobile setups because the rules of the contest encourage roving.
It is entirely probable that these items were just 'demo units' meant for store windows and displays
A demo box wouldn't contain anything inside. It would have anything you need just printed on the surface of the box. It wouldn't be weight-matched to the real deal. And it wouldn't include a stack of blank paper. Finally, it wouldn't include the fake CPU. If you must have something there, it would be a piece of cardboard with a photo, but as I said there is no need to have anything inside of a demo box. The box wouldn't have spelling errors either.
The distributor would be much too busy with Intel and the Feds to find time for fruitless libel suits.
I wouldn't be so quick here. The distributor can be a victim too. The CPUs were made in Costa Rica. There would be hundreds of opportunities to switch a truckload of CPUs on its way to the distributor, and someone like Mexican mafia would be perfectly positioned to do just that.
Just get a cheap RF meter and check
The "cheap RF meter" consists of one (per band) calibrated omni antenna on a plastic tripod, one wideband preamp, and one spectrum analyzer. This set will cost you maybe $20K to buy, or $500 to rent for a week - assuming that you know how to correctly operate it and how to interpret the results.
Anything cheaper than that will give you results that you can't bet your life on.
Did the artist get public dollars?
Whatever dollars the artist got, most of them probably were spent on manufacturing of the actual monument - site preparation, foundation, bronze, casting, etc.
You are certainly welcome to dispute those claims, though #2 is clearly a strawman. The thread is already deep and I don't see where you found that one.
But the #1 - some of "people who accept poor salaries and working conditions to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of truth and knowledge" are known to exaggerate or fake results to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Is there any sign on the horizon of a USB console connection?
There is no standard USB device class for serial adapters. There is communications device class, but it is huge and doesn't really help. So FTDI and Cygnal and others have to write their own drivers for tens of OSes and architectures. If you walk up to a device with a laptop and a USB cable, chances are that your laptop doesn't have a proper driver. To make things worse, many USB-Serial adapters have to use their own VID/PID/REV identifiers, and that makes it even harder to recognize the device. Class-compliant devices would "just work" like a USB drive does, or a mouse.
There is also no standard API in OSes to talk to *modern* serial devices. USB serial devices are emulated into a virtual COM port.
Where's the incentive for the developer to keep cost under control?
The "plus" part is usually small, smaller than the profit that could be had under other types of contracts. That makes "cost plus" contracts not always interesting. As I recall, they pay just enough to keep you afloat, but not much more. Also, the "cost" part is audited frequently; you can't go out, get a yacht and charge its upkeep to the contract - and get away with that.
I'm not sure how this will be very complicated
Here is an example then. NASA orders a rocket made. The contractor orders tons of materials, hires 1,000 engineers, buys computers, software, rents a vehicle assembly building for 5 years, and signs a contract for range time. If at some point the "stop work" order comes, these costs and obligations must be accounted for. Some of those expenses are huge.
Please note that you are not entitled to life. You are only entitled to your right to life. How you implement this right is up to you.
even 50% efficiency would probably suffice
Maybe. That's for the mission designers to calculate.
Use a piezoelectric surface on the panel
The displacement will be very small - micrometers. Maybe it could be enough. But beware of resonances. Still this can be done, if only the method itself proves to be effective.
you can't replicate these experiments on earth, not easily at least -- most earth dust is organic
For a low, low sum of $1,000,000 I volunteer to build a test chamber that is large enough to contain the rover, and it will allow scientists to feed any materials into it as a dust source, even those that they didn't scoop up at the nearest garden :-) In fact, NASA has about a ton of genuine lunar dust, perhaps that's the best use for it.
Another idea -- move a statically charged rod over the surface
An AC replied to my initial comment and proposed static repulsor, and I replied with a link that says that something like that is being worked on. It's better to have no moving parts. Besides, if the electrostatic force was strong enough to dislodge dust some distance from the panel, it probably would be way too strong when the dust is in physical contact with the rod, making it hard to shake it off.
Some sort of electrostatic repulsion?
Perhaps - as long as you can guarantee that all the dust on an alien world is charged to the same polarity. In some cases it is possible.
tilt the panels to ~20 degrees and then vibrate them until clean.
Even I can see problems with this (though it may work in very specific situations:)
A simple experiment in most favorable conditions - on Earth - will demonstrate that a sheet of glass, once it gets dusty, can't be cleaned by any amount of vibration. Try with your window, for example. Dust is very light, but it adheres well. You'd need to try hard to even dislodge grains of sand from that glass.
I cannot make any predictions on luck, however, I might suggest some sort of brush or wiper.
You don't want to run wipers dry - the sand will scratch the glass (the windshield or the solar panel.) Rubber will not work in the range of temperatures that are found on other planets. If the material is soft the dust will embed itself into it; if the material is hard then it won't clean anything. I believe NASA went through this for the rovers, and decided to do nothing because they didn't see any solution that would be simple and effective.
We only write off legitimate expenses and we follow the rules...
Then you are good ... as long as the tax man (federal or state) also follows the rules. And that is not always true. They may request so many hard to find documents to support your deduction that it's sometimes easier to remove the deduction (and pay the fine.)
For example (IANCPA,) you drove 1,000 miles to talk to a prospective client, and nothing came out of it. Prove it, or else the fuel and car mileage deductions are fraud. Can you prove that a year after the fact? Perhaps, but only if you are very organized and keep every single bit of paper. If you just got a phone call, jumped into the car and went there on a 3-day trip, you might be in trouble.
How do I protect myself from a skimmer inside a gas pump?
Once you are inside the gas pump, relax - the skimmer won't see you there.
Those might work, but now we are pretty far from the original advice to students to fire up a terminal (a standard part of the OS) and type some commands.
Running exploits is *explicitly* against any AUP that I ever heard of, and students would be guilty of violation of several laws. They could easily go to jail for that.
It would be doubly stupid because they don't know what kind of paranoid security system is installed on their laptop. The school admin, Mike Perbix, is very good with UNIX, he could create tons of tripwires and store screenshots, camera frames and lists of processes somewhere out of sight, to be uploaded as soon as the computer is online. Such uncertainty is exactly why we treat infected or rooted computers with "reformat and reinstall" - because that's the only way to be sure.
As I see it, students were given bugged laptops, forbidden to touch anything in them, and the admins were hovering over them, waiting for any "furtive movement" to pounce. Essentially that's what they did with those "drugs" - I am of belief that the admins were monitoring random notebooks, either looking for CP or just out of boredom, and just stumbled upon this one.
Future more you can always bypass the the boot start up and launch a live cd
Please look at the URL that I provided. Here is the quote for you:
My final attempt was to try and boot the machine from a DVD so I could mount the filesystem and the hard disk and view the logs that way. Unfortunately, it looks like LMSD [...] had an Open Firmware Password in place, as any attempt to bring up the boot device selection men by holding down the option key at startup asked for a password
Screenshots are provided; see for yourself.
If I was Apple, I would also sue the school.
Your comment is currently at "2, Funny" but IMO Apple has plenty of grounds to sue the school district, primarily over the damage done to Apple's name and trust of users.
on Mac just use the terminal, if you can't do either because you don't know how then log off facebook and get some real skills that will serve you in life.
If only you did some research instead of pouring vitriol on non-geeks, you'd know that only whitelisted applications are allowed to run on those laptops, and Console isn't one of them.