Actually nuclear rocket engines are not new at all. The engine tests date back to the 1960s, and I have no doubt that the designs are much older. The problem was in the way the engines pushed hydrogen across a nuclear reactor core, then vented the hot gasses out a nozzle which produced not only thrust but also contaminated the engines. Incidentally the levels of radiation around an engine which had been test fired were so high, that a remotely operated locomotive was used to return the engine to the test build (I assume for decontamination of some sort. This new design seems to be a way around the contamination issues, and if it proves to be workable will produce very high levels of thrust for as long as you can provide fuel, and cool the rocket nozzle.
Try this page for a better over view.
http://www.lascruces.com/~mrpbar/rocket.html
The major engineering challenges were worked out and overcome years ago. What this is talking about is reducing environmental contamination. The engineering issue here is a new reactor design. The Gas Core Reactor, or Vapor Core Reactor ??have not been successfully taken from the drawing board and scaled laboratory experiments into prototype design.?
That is the real engineering problem here, and I rather suspect the only remaining one.
Actually the RCX unit (brain), uses a Hitachi H8. As far as the expense goes (which one of the posts further up in the thread mentioned), when you buy in massive bulk the costs go way down. I do not expect the RCX units to carry a very high production cost.
I agree about working too hard when telecommuting. How ever I do not agree with the bits about the office tyrants.
I was driving for an hour to an hour and a half each day to get to a small shop, where each day the owner's dog received better treatment than I did. It looked to be a dream job for a while, as I was the geek for small machine shop. Then I became the whipping boy, and I realized the the boss had a serious coke problem. Things became worse, degrading daily. There was nothing slack or relaxed about my work environment. I was gradually shifted from the things I loved doing to a set of menial tasks that made me little more than a glorified grease monkey. By the end of it even checking my email, let alone verifying log files on the server, or checking the router was cause for disciplinary action.
I quit this job in frustration. I was contacted a week later by one of my coworkers, to see if I was willing to contract back to the company to deal with the computers for which I was originally hired. I told them to give me a week to write a contract. Now I have to go on site twice a month, for less than an hour each time. To iterate, it is true that some times I work too hard. It is true that this leads to isolation, and depression, and I guess this could be called cabin fever. However I am still getting paid in what is a terrible job market, and nothing I am dealing with now, can hold a candle to any of the abuse I used to have to put up with. In this circumstance I feel that despite any of the personal problems I may have, telecommuting is the lesser of the two evils. Ironically two months ago I would not have believed that there would be any problems with telecommuting.
Ok, I gather that you don't do power electronics. This being the case (and I never thought I would say this), what pray thee do you think you are doing???? Electricity is not your friend, it will kill you, and not care at all.
Having done more panel work than I ever wanted to I will say this: If you do not understand what you are looking at you have no reason at all to be opening panels like that. It sucks that you tripped some breakers. Call a certified electrician.
There are two reasons for this: One, electricity can kill you, even those who know what they are doing really don't like to work on live circuts.
Two, IANAL however in most states electricians carry liability insurance. This is in case something bad happens, and your building burns down. If it was a wiring fault the insurance helps to deal with it. If you are not a certified electrician you cannot get this insurance, but you are still liable for any electrical work you do.
Hate to say it, but this means it is time to call an electrician, and possibly the power company, depending on where the box is located in relation to the rest of the building's electrical boxes.
Ok, I'm kind of curious. I have seen little detail about the actual engine design, other than to say that the fuel will be hydrogen peroxide with a silver mesh as a catalyst. This brings up a few questions. Hydrogen peroxide is notoriously unstable at high purities (I seem to recall it being very dangerous to work with after about 65%). Since your site lists the purity at 90% have you had or do you anticipate any particular difficulties with the fuel storage? Out of curiosity why use this system instead of other H2O2 fuel mixtures? And finally will using this fuel system present any unique engineering issues, does it provide an unusually high chamber pressure in the engine you will use (as opposed to a solid fuel), will there be temperature issues, etc.
Um, I was just there a few moths ago, the Redstone Arsenal was on the South (South East?), side of Huntsville. The Marshall Space Flight Center is almost across the interstate from the Museum, both of which are quite near UAH and just a few miles from a rather insipid Mall (a rather large one).
Look, I have seen many comments here about how bad or 'evil' the simulations being run on this machine are. The simple fact remains, nuclear weapons exist, and our country possesses a large number of nuclear weapons. Regardless of my personal opinions this remains a fact, and as such does not involve concepts such as 'bad' or 'evil'. Now, to take a step back from this and to look at other related software. Many years ago I worked with engineering company which among other things designed manufacturing processes for artificial fibers. The chemicals needed to do this are sometimes very toxic, and must be handled very carefully. When working for this company I saw for the first time simulation software for real world events. Basically there were several packages which given: a chemical, container, storage characteristics, weather, and a site location could from a selection of catastrophic events calculate the results of a chemical leak (explosion, toxic cloud release, etc.), would tell you what the effects of the nearest city would be. This definitely has what would be considered to bad or evil applications. However used properly in the hands of the engineers it would tell them that a given problem would have the following results. This data would allow them to modify their storage systems to prevent such things from happening (the modifications may not prevent a chemical release, but it would prevent the chemical from effecting the populations near a plant). And as such this software was not only a good thing, but from any stand point incredibly beneficial.
Now back to the ASCII system.
Given that I do not understand very much about these nuclear weapons I have to leave it in the hands of those who do have the proper education to deal with these things. And since we already possess these weapons I want people who know how these weapons work looking after them. Since I really do not want these weapons detonated for any reason, I am very happy to see software developed which can (or at least I hope), accurately simulate the use and life cycle of these weapons. It may be difficult to see past the immediate and obvious uses of such software, however I believe that there are beneficial uses of such simulations. As a result I am very happy to hear about this stuff and encourage its use.
You are correct companies do negotiate terms for the use of product lines. It does happen often, daily in fact. The point you are missing is that Microsoft's terms prohibit the instalation of a competeing OS; and that is where they cross the line. To take your example of common products we will look at Coke (Microsoft) and Pepsi (Competitor). Both are soft drinks, and both have fountain products. (And as I recall a similar thing happened in the mid to late eighties with the bottled products too), and both compete with each other to sell their products to distributors (Hardware Manufacturers). These Distributors then sell the products to the places of business which have soda fountains (The end users). Got it? Ok, here we go. Pepsi launched a lawsuit in 1998 against Coke for monopolistic practices with their fountain products. Basically Coke pulled it's product from distributors which decided to carry Pepsi products as well (sound familiar?), as a result the distributors were unable to supply their clients with the products that were needed. As a result distributors were/are? Not willing to carry Pepsi products. It is not a matter of marketing, it is not a matter of product placement or sales, or even money (or lack there of), it is a matter of one company refusing to sell product simply because the distributor wishes to offer its clients a choice by also carrying a competitor's product. To get back to the computers it would be like me loosing my license to use windows because I purchased a copy of WordPerfect (which competes with Microsoft word). It would be reasonable for Microsoft to say, "Ok, if you want to distribute our product you have to distribute all of our current products". It is unreasonable for Microsoft to say, "if you want to distribute a system that has our product it can contain *only* our product". This is where the problem lies, and I think the point that is being addressed by the article. A synopsis for the Coke Pepsi suit can be found at: http://www.beverage-digest.com/editorial/980508s.h tml
The article refers to this as a secret weapons program. Yet I am able to find all kinds of interesting info all over the web.
The Air Force: http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/factsheets/coil.html
The Academy of Sciences in Prague: http://www.fzu.cz/departments/gaslaser/chemlaser/r esearch.html
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: http://www.aae.uiuc.edu/Labs/chemlaser/chemlaser.h tml
And much more.
There is more than enough info to tell you not only how this works, but to suggest how to go about building one. The fact that they have scaled it to high power and seem to believe that a version that can be placed in an aircraft comes as no surprise. Especially considering how these devices work. It seems to be a kind of chemical rocket engine, which when used in conjunction with an optical lazing cavity will produce a high energy beam, most labs seem to have a 1-10Kw output.
Yeah, well I live in that area, and it is miserable here. The cost of living was 33K 10 years ago in Chaple Hill, and can only have gone up. Most tech people live in Cary, which is far worse in terms of living costs, and there are simply no jobs.
Take for example a video rental store near me. In october or november there were over 200 aplications for employment delivered to the manager, better than 25% were from Ph.D.s
This should give you some idea of what things are like around here. And it keeps getting worse. Those with any job at all are hanging on to them, and those with out jobs are pretty much SOL.
Wow, I do not think I have seen such juvenile ramblings come off the desk of any Suit type, ever. The email is in a word, pathetic.
But to look at just one of the arguments(?) listed, if MS has the best engineers (by which I assume they mean software engineers), why is the graphics subsystem slower under 2k than any other OS I dual boot with??
I used to belive that people in this industry were smart enough to choose for themselves. Now 15 years later I see things happening that I would have never belived before. This is a perfect example. These documents are targeting people with little or no technical skill. The people who (in my experience), make the decisions about OS and in my case the RTOSes have very little to do with the actual development process outside of a very high level managerial roll.
Based off of documents like the ones from the MS people I feel I can safely assume that this is often the case elswhere.
I guess the best question to ask is why the people who are the most qualified to make these desicions not the ones who make them?
It seems to me that a project engineer who is developing an embeded product should be the one to make the bussiness case for an embeded linux, XP, or whatever, not the division manager who understands the accounting and has little real skill or experience with code.
I guess a better question to ask is why in this case is the product image important? The people who are working with this stuff should (and I do understand that in some cases are), the ones who have the final word on OS choice?
-- sorry about the spelling I just woke up, and am on my firdt cup of coffee.
Ok, so you want to watch over Microsoft. This has of course generated much interest in the computer community. It is next to impossible for me to avoid hearing about this, every where I turn I see news about this, and all of my friends are talking about this. One of the things I do not hear or see mention anywhere; How do you plan to work in what is most likely going to be a very hostile environment?
For example, when I was working in a very politically oriented environment I noticed my coworkers and management behaving in a fashion that made it impossible for certain individuals to do their jobs properly, by either withholding data or modifying expectations in the middle of a job. In your case I would expect this be be slightly different, and to take the form of things like insufficient privileges to access some resources, lost data, deleted directories, and possibly even too much data. How do you plan to combat things like this?
Um, the sequencing circuts can be built for under $40 USD with parts at Radio $hack. Use a 555 timer (aproxamatly $15 to build a working circut), and use a decade sequencer(?), clock the sequencer off of the 555 timer. This will provide 10 VCC+ level outs for the magnets. This will work for a constant step rate, if you need to have a decreasing length of time between pulses you can use a resistor network with comparators on the cap from the 555 timer, which will provide a constant ramp to feed the comparators, thus providing a repeatable cycle of pulses, with a diffrent calculatable time between induvidual pulses in the cycle.
The Wicked Armadillo -- I cannot spell to save my life.
Well according to the article "Even if a watermark scheme is introduced, DTLA sources questioned whether the DTCP spec is the right place to implement it. "The DTLA and its member companies are certainly interested in pursuing Congress' goal on interindustry solutions," Ayers said. But he questioned the wisdom of asking technology companies to stretch their already-limited resources for copy protection development all the way to Washington."
So we may get something along these lines rammed down our throats anyway.
Re:This has been going on for 30 years
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No it is affecting geeks, who in this area had very little to do with the web. I was a systems geek, who designed control systems. Some of my friends wrote drivers, UIs, or network aps. We had very little to do with the web, and little use for the MS systems our company used for infrastructure, all of our work as on *nix systems. We are still out of work just the same. In each case it was sudden and with no warning. It was not from one of the dot-coms, this was (before this started) an old and stable company. A few people had just purchased houses (in my case I had just bought a new bike), and in retrospect it is obvious that managment had more than enough time to tell us that such things were not the best of ideas.
My skills are up to date. That is not an issue. Unfortunatly in my area this does not make a bit of difference. Companies are still laying off, with little appearence of changing soon. Rolling with the punches can be a bit tough when the same companies that do currently have job openings are laying of every other week.
I have to agree with Katz, laying off is one thing, but I seem to recall the companies doing things to help those affected. In my case, and the cases of my friends we got 'termination packages' that were at least reesonable only if we signed away all of our rights.
This is my complaint it is not the layoffs those are bad enough, but this idea that it is ok not only to lay people off and at the same time dangle carrots to see how high they will jump. Why should I do anything to help the company out when they have told me that not only are my services no longer needed, but that they *knew* this would be happening as much as 6 months before?
It is quite resonable to keep the work force informed as to the actions and health of the company. It is good for morale, and that makes it good for the company. Any other view is rationalazation.
Um, as I recall there is a Purple (fleshed) potato that grows in Peru(sp?). I became aware of these when my mother (An anthropoligist who is studying some sort of nutritional thing in Peru) served mashed potatos made from these purple ones. Blue potato chips which taste quite similar are also avalible here in the USA.
They are not to strange to see in the markets and health food stores here.
Re:Buffer overflow vulnerabilities
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1
(Probably flame bait and needs no response, but I feel I must)
No, that is what happens when you do not do any (I think it's called) bounds checking on the data you are getting ready to stick in a non dynamic space. It is possible to do the same think with any programming language I can think of (even basic but you would have to write your own routine for it). The problem although the result of a property of C/C++ is not caused by the language. This is caused by poor coding practices (like not checking the input data for a fixed space), and most likely project deadlines, and all of this coupled with poor QA on the product. Please do not blame the language for problems caused by poor code.
We have a well defined culture that is starting to revolve around technology. These tools are changing the way we choose to exist, and in a generation or two people will not understand how an individual could exist with out these tools. It is evolution of a sort, and is not much of a concern to me.
Another way to look at this is that as these tools develop people will either use them and benefit by their use, or not use them and not benefit by their lack. In the end if the tools make the people better able to function in the environments they live and work in, who cares what side effects the tools may have on a psychological level? It is simply Darwinian evolution in the modern world, deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually nuclear rocket engines are not new at all. The engine tests date back to the 1960s, and I have no doubt that the designs are much older. The problem was in the way the engines pushed hydrogen across a nuclear reactor core, then vented the hot gasses out a nozzle which produced not only thrust but also contaminated the engines. Incidentally the levels of radiation around an engine which had been test fired were so high, that a remotely operated locomotive was used to return the engine to the test build (I assume for decontamination of some sort. This new design seems to be a way around the contamination issues, and if it proves to be workable will produce very high levels of thrust for as long as you can provide fuel, and cool the rocket nozzle.
Try this page for a better over view.
http://www.lascruces.com/~mrpbar/rocket.html
The major engineering challenges were worked out and overcome years ago. What this is talking about is reducing environmental contamination. The engineering issue here is a new reactor design. The Gas Core Reactor, or Vapor Core Reactor ??have not been successfully taken from the drawing board and scaled laboratory experiments into prototype design.?
That is the real engineering problem here, and I rather suspect the only remaining one.
Actually the RCX unit (brain), uses a Hitachi H8. As far as the expense goes (which one of the posts further up in the thread mentioned), when you buy in massive bulk the costs go way down. I do not expect the RCX units to carry a very high production cost.
Man, and right after I moved out of that hole too.
I agree about working too hard when telecommuting. How ever I do not agree with the bits about the office tyrants.
I was driving for an hour to an hour and a half each day to get to a small shop, where each day the owner's dog received better treatment than I did. It looked to be a dream job for a while, as I was the geek for small machine shop. Then I became the whipping boy, and I realized the the boss had a serious coke problem. Things became worse, degrading daily.
There was nothing slack or relaxed about my work environment. I was gradually shifted from the things I loved doing to a set of menial tasks that made me little more than a glorified grease monkey. By the end of it even checking my email, let alone verifying log files on the server, or checking the router was cause for disciplinary action.
I quit this job in frustration. I was contacted a week later by one of my coworkers, to see if I was willing to contract back to the company to deal with the computers for which I was originally hired. I told them to give me a week to write a contract. Now I have to go on site twice a month, for less than an hour each time.
To iterate, it is true that some times I work too hard.
It is true that this leads to isolation, and depression, and I guess this could be called cabin fever. However I am still getting paid in what is a terrible job market, and nothing I am dealing with now, can hold a candle to any of the abuse I used to have to put up with.
In this circumstance I feel that despite any of the personal problems I may have, telecommuting is the lesser of the two evils.
Ironically two months ago I would not have believed that there would be any problems with telecommuting.
I have heard of this prefix being used by a catholic school of some sort in either TN, or OH. I rather suspect it is an accurate number.
BTW the school was trying to get the number changed.
Ok, I gather that you don't do power electronics. This being the case (and I never thought I would say this), what pray thee do you think you are doing????
Electricity is not your friend, it will kill you, and not care at all.
Having done more panel work than I ever wanted to I will say this:
If you do not understand what you are looking at you have no reason at all to be opening panels like that. It sucks that you tripped some breakers. Call a certified electrician.
There are two reasons for this:
One, electricity can kill you, even those who know what they are doing really don't like to work on live circuts.
Two, IANAL however in most states electricians carry liability insurance. This is in case something bad happens, and your building burns down. If it was a wiring fault the insurance helps to deal with it. If you are not a certified electrician you cannot get this insurance, but you are still liable for any electrical work you do.
Hate to say it, but this means it is time to call an electrician, and possibly the power company, depending on where the box is located in relation to the rest of the building's electrical boxes.
Ok, I'm kind of curious. I have seen little detail about the actual engine design, other than to say that the fuel will be hydrogen peroxide with a silver mesh as a catalyst.
This brings up a few questions. Hydrogen peroxide is notoriously unstable at high purities (I seem to recall it being very dangerous to work with after about 65%). Since your site lists the purity at 90% have you had or do you anticipate any particular difficulties with the fuel storage?
Out of curiosity why use this system instead of other H2O2 fuel mixtures?
And finally will using this fuel system present any unique engineering issues, does it provide an unusually high chamber pressure in the engine you will use (as opposed to a solid fuel), will there be temperature issues, etc.
Yes, I know that sticker, I have seen it often. It was on the patrol cars stationed off of N glenwood. Perhaps it represents some kind of police org.?
Um, I was just there a few moths ago, the Redstone Arsenal was on the South (South East?), side of Huntsville. The Marshall Space Flight Center is almost across the interstate from the Museum, both of which are quite near UAH and just a few miles from a rather insipid Mall (a rather large one).
Look, I have seen many comments here about how bad or 'evil' the simulations being run on this machine are. The simple fact remains, nuclear weapons exist, and our country possesses a large number of nuclear weapons. Regardless of my personal opinions this remains a fact, and as such does not involve concepts such as 'bad' or 'evil'.
Now, to take a step back from this and to look at other related software. Many years ago I worked with engineering company which among other things designed manufacturing processes for artificial fibers. The chemicals needed to do this are sometimes very toxic, and must be handled very carefully. When working for this company I saw for the first time simulation software for real world events. Basically there were several packages which given: a chemical, container, storage characteristics, weather, and a site location could from a selection of catastrophic events calculate the results of a chemical leak (explosion, toxic cloud release, etc.), would tell you what the effects of the nearest city would be. This definitely has what would be considered to bad or evil applications. However used properly in the hands of the engineers it would tell them that a given problem would have the following results. This data would allow them to modify their storage systems to prevent such things from happening (the modifications may not prevent a chemical release, but it would prevent the chemical from effecting the populations near a plant). And as such this software was not only a good thing, but from any stand point incredibly beneficial.
Now back to the ASCII system.
Given that I do not understand very much about these nuclear weapons I have to leave it in the hands of those who do have the proper education to deal with these things. And since we already possess these weapons I want people who know how these weapons work looking after them. Since I really do not want these weapons detonated for any reason, I am very happy to see software developed which can (or at least I hope), accurately simulate the use and life cycle of these weapons. It may be difficult to see past the immediate and obvious uses of such software, however I believe that there are beneficial uses of such simulations. As a result I am very happy to hear about this stuff and encourage its use.
You are correct companies do negotiate terms for the use of product lines. It does happen often, daily in fact. The point you are missing is that Microsoft's terms prohibit the instalation of a competeing OS; and that is where they cross the line.h tml
To take your example of common products we will look at Coke (Microsoft) and Pepsi (Competitor). Both are soft drinks, and both have fountain products. (And as I recall a similar thing happened in the mid to late eighties with the bottled products too), and both compete with each other to sell their products to distributors (Hardware Manufacturers). These Distributors then sell the products to the places of business which have soda fountains (The end users). Got it? Ok, here we go.
Pepsi launched a lawsuit in 1998 against Coke for monopolistic practices with their fountain products. Basically Coke pulled it's product from distributors which decided to carry Pepsi products as well (sound familiar?), as a result the distributors were unable to supply their clients with the products that were needed. As a result distributors were/are? Not willing to carry Pepsi products.
It is not a matter of marketing, it is not a matter of product placement or sales, or even money (or lack there of), it is a matter of one company refusing to sell product simply because the distributor wishes to offer its clients a choice by also carrying a competitor's product.
To get back to the computers it would be like me loosing my license to use windows because I purchased a copy of WordPerfect (which competes with Microsoft word).
It would be reasonable for Microsoft to say, "Ok, if you want to distribute our product you have to distribute all of our current products". It is unreasonable for Microsoft to say, "if you want to distribute a system that has our product it can contain *only* our product". This is where the problem lies, and I think the point that is being addressed by the article.
A synopsis for the Coke Pepsi suit can be found at: http://www.beverage-digest.com/editorial/980508s.
Hmm, seems to me that bad Douglas Adams quotes are lost here.
"Mostly Harmless, you have been there for over 15 years and that's all you could say?" Or something like that.
Mostly stupid? I've been around for well over 15 years and that's all you can say?
The article refers to this as a secret weapons program. Yet I am able to find all kinds of interesting info all over the web.r esearch.html
h tml
The Air Force: http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/factsheets/coil.html
The Academy of Sciences in Prague: http://www.fzu.cz/departments/gaslaser/chemlaser/
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: http://www.aae.uiuc.edu/Labs/chemlaser/chemlaser.
And much more.
There is more than enough info to tell you not only how this works, but to suggest how to go about building one. The fact that they have scaled it to high power and seem to believe that a version that can be placed in an aircraft comes as no surprise. Especially considering how these devices work. It seems to be a kind of chemical rocket engine, which when used in conjunction with an optical lazing cavity will produce a high energy beam, most labs seem to have a 1-10Kw output.
Yeah, well I live in that area, and it is miserable here. The cost of living was 33K 10 years ago in Chaple Hill, and can only have gone up. Most tech people live in Cary, which is far worse in terms of living costs, and there are simply no jobs.
Take for example a video rental store near me. In october or november there were over 200 aplications for employment delivered to the manager, better than 25% were from Ph.D.s
This should give you some idea of what things are like around here. And it keeps getting worse. Those with any job at all are hanging on to them, and those with out jobs are pretty much SOL.
Wow, I do not think I have seen such juvenile ramblings come off the desk of any Suit type, ever. The email is in a word, pathetic.
But to look at just one of the arguments(?) listed, if MS has the best engineers (by which I assume they mean software engineers), why is the graphics subsystem slower under 2k than any other OS I dual boot with??
I used to belive that people in this industry were smart enough to choose for themselves. Now 15 years later I see things happening that I would have never belived before. This is a perfect example. These documents are targeting people with little or no technical skill. The people who (in my experience), make the decisions about OS and in my case the RTOSes have very little to do with the actual development process outside of a very high level managerial roll.
Based off of documents like the ones from the MS people I feel I can safely assume that this is often the case elswhere.
I guess the best question to ask is why the people who are the most qualified to make these desicions not the ones who make them?
It seems to me that a project engineer who is developing an embeded product should be the one to make the bussiness case for an embeded linux, XP, or whatever, not the division manager who understands the accounting and has little real skill or experience with code.
I guess a better question to ask is why in this case is the product image important? The people who are working with this stuff should (and I do understand that in some cases are), the ones who have the final word on OS choice?
-- sorry about the spelling I just woke up, and am on my firdt cup of coffee.
Ok, so you want to watch over Microsoft. This has of course generated much interest in the computer community. It is next to impossible for me to avoid hearing about this, every where I turn I see news about this, and all of my friends are talking about this. One of the things I do not hear or see mention anywhere; How do you plan to work in what is most likely going to be a very hostile environment?
For example, when I was working in a very politically oriented environment I noticed my coworkers and management behaving in a fashion that made it impossible for certain individuals to do their jobs properly, by either withholding data or modifying expectations in the middle of a job. In your case I would expect this be be slightly different, and to take the form of things like insufficient privileges to access some resources, lost data, deleted directories, and possibly even too much data. How do you plan to combat things like this?
Um, the sequencing circuts can be built for under $40 USD with parts at Radio $hack. Use a 555 timer (aproxamatly $15 to build a working circut), and use a decade sequencer(?), clock the sequencer off of the 555 timer. This will provide 10 VCC+ level outs for the magnets. This will work for a constant step rate, if you need to have a decreasing length of time between pulses you can use a resistor network with comparators on the cap from the 555 timer, which will provide a constant ramp to feed the comparators, thus providing a repeatable cycle of pulses, with a diffrent calculatable time between induvidual pulses in the cycle.
The Wicked Armadillo -- I cannot spell to save my life.
Well according to the article "Even if a watermark scheme is introduced, DTLA sources questioned whether the DTCP spec is the right place to implement it. "The DTLA and its member companies are certainly interested in pursuing Congress' goal on interindustry solutions," Ayers said. But he questioned the wisdom of asking technology companies to stretch their already-limited resources for copy protection development all the way to Washington."
So we may get something along these lines rammed down our throats anyway.
No it is affecting geeks, who in this area had very little to do with the web. I was a systems geek, who designed control systems. Some of my friends wrote drivers, UIs, or network aps. We had very little to do with the web, and little use for the MS systems our company used for infrastructure, all of our work as on *nix systems. We are still out of work just the same. In each case it was sudden and with no warning. It was not from one of the dot-coms, this was (before this started) an old and stable company. A few people had just purchased houses (in my case I had just bought a new bike), and in retrospect it is obvious that managment had more than enough time to tell us that such things were not the best of ideas.
My skills are up to date. That is not an issue. Unfortunatly in my area this does not make a bit of difference. Companies are still laying off, with little appearence of changing soon. Rolling with the punches can be a bit tough when the same companies that do currently have job openings are laying of every other week.
I have to agree with Katz, laying off is one thing, but I seem to recall the companies doing things to help those affected. In my case, and the cases of my friends we got 'termination packages' that were at least reesonable only if we signed away all of our rights.
This is my complaint it is not the layoffs those are bad enough, but this idea that it is ok not only to lay people off and at the same time dangle carrots to see how high they will jump. Why should I do anything to help the company out when they have told me that not only are my services no longer needed, but that they *knew* this would be happening as much as 6 months before?
It is quite resonable to keep the work force informed as to the actions and health of the company. It is good for morale, and that makes it good for the company. Any other view is rationalazation.
Um, as I recall there is a Purple (fleshed) potato that grows in Peru(sp?). I became aware of these when my mother (An anthropoligist who is studying some sort of nutritional thing in Peru) served mashed potatos made from these purple ones. Blue potato chips which taste quite similar are also avalible here in the USA.
They are not to strange to see in the markets and health food stores here.
(Probably flame bait and needs no response, but I feel I must) No, that is what happens when you do not do any (I think it's called) bounds checking on the data you are getting ready to stick in a non dynamic space. It is possible to do the same think with any programming language I can think of (even basic but you would have to write your own routine for it). The problem although the result of a property of C/C++ is not caused by the language. This is caused by poor coding practices (like not checking the input data for a fixed space), and most likely project deadlines, and all of this coupled with poor QA on the product. Please do not blame the language for problems caused by poor code.
Ah, so that is what that is. I was looking at my server logs this morning, and figured it was a script kiddie. I was half right.
We have a well defined culture that is starting to revolve around technology. These tools are changing the way we choose to exist, and in a generation or two people will not understand how an individual could exist with out these tools. It is evolution of a sort, and is not much of a concern to me.
Another way to look at this is that as these tools develop people will either use them and benefit by their use, or not use them and not benefit by their lack. In the end if the tools make the people better able to function in the environments they live and work in, who cares what side effects the tools may have on a psychological level? It is simply Darwinian evolution in the modern world, deal with it.