You seem to be confusing a measure of resolution with a measure of sensitivity or accuracy.
It doesn't matter if it's 24 bits per colour if the results aren't accurate or if the thing can't detect any light in the first place.
When you can post up a picture of WASP-10b taken with your digi cam, I'll eat my hat.
Meh - I don't do graphic novels if you discount Viz, hence referencing the film. Whether the author intended it or the film just changed the emphasis slightly, I'm sure the US were kicking up the same old shit somewhere else back in the 80's that fits just as well.
The parallels with BTN and the US news channels, the military curfew, culture of fear etc. are fairly obvious, and the descriptions of the broken "US" in the film being "Godless", full of terrorists, "we should take the country back" etc. seem pretty straight with a lot of the stuff that's been bandied about at various times over Iraq/Iran/Whoever else has our oil.
The "UK" in V For Vendetta was supposed to be a parallel of the current state of the US, and the "US" of the film was a parallel for (can you guess?) Iraq. Personally I thought it was fairly thinly veiled, but perhaps not...
The thing is fully documented y'know:p as far as I'm aware you can run any fuel your engine is capable of burning.
You can display with a PC, PDA, Palm, Mobile phone, standalone touchscreen LCD, VFD or whatever else you can engineer. I'd suggest reading the manual if you want to know the full crack.
For the past 5 years I've been running my cars on open-source engine management hardware, firmware and software.
www.megasquirt.info
Given the potential benefits, financial, technological, and environmental, I'm surprised more people aren't interested in it. The project is actually pushing as close to the edge as some of the high end EMS from big car manufacturers.
Depends how anal you want to be - you could write code that would put out the relevant signals from a soundcard using 3 channels - one for X, one for Y, one for Z (brightness), or perhaps add another channel and run dual-trace with the second one generating the net along the bottom. A standard old dual trace scope for £50 from eBay would be fine for the display.
So you've not heard of such places as Bearing Suppliers, industrial hardware suppliers, etc.? Do they not have yellow pages where you are? Or the google?
Seriously, my local bearing shop can supply bearings, runners, castors, racks, pinions, gears, cogs, pulleys, belts, etc. from tiny precision bits to earthmover size.
I doubt the phone co are in cahoots, there are standard signalling methods you can use to hold the line open.
Emergency operators have the facility to seize the line to make sure it stays open.
The fact the marking co are using this is either really cheeky or plain against the rules, I'd ask your telco if they're supposed to be allowing it, it could be as simple as a misconfigured service to the marketing co that they're exploiting.
Bleach? As in Chlorine, the "really quite corrosive" chemical? Hmmm.
There are any number of industrial electronics production cleaning solutions that will work well and not harm components. Start with things such as PCB Flux Cleaner, Switch Contact Cleaner, Isopropyl Alcohol etc. and use cheap toothbrushes to scrub things clean. Look out for green fluff, that is where the copper tracks of the PCB have corroded so be very careful not to wipe the track out when removing it. You can reinstate tracks with care (any TV repair shop should be able to handle that) but really fast stuff like PC's won't thank you for it.
Optical drives in your equipment may suffer beyond repair simply because cleaning the important bits would mean disassembling something that was lined up to the micron in the factory.
You need to make sure everything is properly dry, sealing it into a container (EG plastic crate or sack) with some industrial desiccant packs for a week or so should make sure. Phone companies often use large quantities of these packs in roadside cabinets, so if you know any phone engineers, give them a nudge.
Mostly though, as long as it was powered down before it got wet and is now thoroughly dry, it should clean up OK and have a fighting chance of working. I'd be doing the first switch-on attempt through a well protected MCB/RCD though.
I think your best chance with old and weird media (EG beyond the floppy drive) is to dig up an old system that supported the drive, from memory most stuff would either just about support a 720k/1.44Mb floppy drive or be able to spit data out of a Serial port. Grabbing RS232 or 485 data and saving it as a file wouldn't be too hard with a terminal package.
Stuff on audio tape should be fairly easy to get in via your sound card, from memory things like C64 emulators often have this functionality.
Oh yes - remember to park those winchester hard drives when you're done with them!
I think you're gonna need a bigger box. I'm not blowing smoke up your arse here. Here's a clue - the US Government places restrictions on the available encryption capabilities of all network equipment sold in certain geographies.
Encrypting anything over an external link still has the flaw that you have to handshake/authenticate over that link (or some other equally easily monitored link). If any currently available encryption was up to much, no-one would be that interested in quantum cryptography, which is just about the only way to guarantee stuff hasn't been intercepted. Saying current encryption is OK is like saying DRM has stopped piracy.
Well I'm not about to document something like that in any further detail, at best it would get me fired. Do you really believe that the big network boxes have nothing in their vastly complex OS other than what's documented for the end user? If you were writing the OS for a beastie like that you'd at least stick a few "factory" commands in there to help unravel things when the customer stuffed it right up.
As for the relative security of any external link, I work on those links from analogue private wires to terabit fibres and haven't found a properly secure transmission medium yet - probably why people are so very keen on the whole quantum thing.
Secure or not, most big boxes have backdoors anyway - they're not exactly documented but they could be stumbled upon, or, as is more likely with the Chinese, discovered whilst reverse-engineering the kit.
Also, without spending vast sums of cash, there's no such thing as a secure WAN - unless your traffic goes from A to B on a sealed and tap-proof bearer (and even a direct point-to-point fibre can be monitored) there are hundreds of points of potential transparent intercept.
A normal day at the office then
on
Deep Puddle
·
· Score: 1
I was using a made-up figure to illustrate a point, no crack was harmed in the making of that post. I know artists get half of f*** all. That's why I'd love to pay the artist direct - I could pay maybe 10% of the commercial price, yet the artist would be getting many times more money than they are used to.
I also know that you do need some guys in the studio - although you are much less reliant on expensive studios these days, a decent home-recording setup is within most people's means, if you can afford a guitar & amp you can afford a mixer and a laptop. Unless you're trying to record an entire orchestra you can either buy your own equipment or hire a small independent studio for peanuts - last one I hired cost £150 per day including the tech guy. OK the setup is not as impressive as the labels' studios, but the "low end" tech is as good as the professional stuff that was used to record stuff perfectly well only a few years ago.
I disagree that you need marketing arseholes or $WEBSITE, if a band is gigging (and good) then word will spread, these days with social networks and such like the word (and the MP3 to go with it) can spread very quickly. All you really need is to be able to sell your music through your own website direct - traditional media (without the reliance on marketing suits) could fall back to the ludicrously old-fashioned methods of going to gigs and reporting back to people who's hot and who's not.
This is my rationale too - If an artist only gets 25% of my money currently, I'll happily pay them that amount directly (or a little more) as it is cutting out a huge swathe of arseholes all taking a cut and contributing nothing of value.
With the current system, buying music legitimately is a bit like funding terrorism - the vast majority of your money goes to the people who are responsible for all the stuff that's wrong with the industry.
Friendly fire isn't a myth, I suspect it goes somewhat unreported in the US compared to over here as it seems to be other countries' soldiers that are usually on the wrong end of it.
Hardware will put up with a lot more than many would believe. I've worked for years with stuff that works in a hole in the ground or a steel box by the side of the road that was never intended as such. It gets the full heat of the sun, it gets wind, rain, frost, dust, spiders, vibration from traffic and stands up surprisingly well.
I've seen server racks stood in deep water, with the data cables trailing down from the wall, across the floor under water and up into the rack. I've seen water running down the front of racks & air-con units which were still running - no-one would go near the 415v breaker with a stream of water trickling over it to kill them.
Then there's the kit in a black roadside cabinet by a white wall that got so hot in the sun you had to use an oven glove to open the cover, yet worked fine for 99% of the time (I'll admit that eventually the optic card lost timing, but by that point the cabinet alone was so hot you could boil water on it).
I've seen kit that has been next to a PBX that has caught fire and turned into a puddle of melted plastic and charred metal, then been hosed down by the fire brigade, and has come back online with the flick of a breaker.
As long as nothing critical gets too wet or melts, it's all good. If a bit of kit does get wet, the key is to kill it completely dead immediately and dry it out before re-applying power - any voltage present will just result in the electronics turning to green crystals very quickly.
It's a good job that there's no ready-made distribution method for digital data that doesn't involve physical media, or those guys would look pretty stupid about now.
I hear the next version will have album-art printed on the back of a panda using the tears of dolphins.
It's amazing how so many people can spend so much time and money pussy-footing around and coming up with a million different ways to not just sell a normal MP3 file at a sensible price. Ahhh, progress.
I have a friend who drives an old Discovery for his business, which was rated at maybe 30mpg. Being self employed, every penny counts, so he drives very carefully and can hit 50mpg on a long motorway run.
Modern engines are vastly more efficient, it's just that these days we fit much more powerful engines to our cars to keep up with the "arms race" of power and performance between manufacturers. Most modern family cars have more power than a 1960's Ferrari and do way more than double the MPG. If we gave them the same power as a 1960's family car, you could probably quadruple the MPG.
This was proven recently on the BBC show Top Gear, the presenters bought old supercars from the 60's and 70's and were raced round a track by a modern Vauxhall/Opel Astra diesel family hatchback. The hatchback blew them away.
Well Toyota are lying then, I know of a case of someone needing their complete set of batteries replaced after only a couple of years due to some fault. The cost of replacement was almost as much as the car.
Let's not forget just how environmentally unfriendly it is to make those batteries in the first place. Sorry but the Prius is not as green as everyone would like us to believe it is.
I drive a car which is 10 years old, and I will keep driving it and repairing it for as long as possible, as I believe that is far greener than buying a brand new car every 3-5 years and piling older cars on scrap heaps when they still have life left in them... but of course, that doesn't make money for the car manufacturers.
Re-use is even more energy efficient than recycling.
BT are too busy spending £12bn converting the core network to IP (dubbed "21CN" - 21st Century network). None of the current core networks are up to the growing load of existing broadband, never mind stuff 10x or 100x faster.
I agree BT is ineffectual, but please don't think engineers are that interested in the competition that they'd bother swapping an entire copper route onto a noisy pair.
For starters, the guy that does the exchange jumpering is not the same guy that does the route and customer end, and all the changes would need to be recorded in the routing system. It's really more hassle than it's worth.
More likely is that the rejumpering in the exchange introduces a fault, either a poor connection or dodgy protector module. Also, in many areas there just isn't enough good copper in the ground, which results in a lot of scrabbling round to find a functioning route.
ISDN2/2e is very definitely not fibre, it's delivered over exactly the same pair of wires as your normal phone line or your ADSL line for that matter.
The issues with connection are that the ISDN equipment is physically in a different place in the telephone exchange than your phone line, or the ADSL equipment, so an engineer must physically go to the exchange, pull out the wiring for your line and re-jumper it on the MDF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_frame).
Before some eagle-eyed pedant points it out, ISDN30 (for PABX) is delivered over 2Mbit/s plesiosyncronous digital carrier which is often a fibre bearer.
Have you been reading our mission statement? That was supposed to be encrypted! They used a popular modern cipher called "management" to encode it into incomprehensible babble.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be confusing a measure of resolution with a measure of sensitivity or accuracy. It doesn't matter if it's 24 bits per colour if the results aren't accurate or if the thing can't detect any light in the first place. When you can post up a picture of WASP-10b taken with your digi cam, I'll eat my hat.
Meh - I don't do graphic novels if you discount Viz, hence referencing the film. Whether the author intended it or the film just changed the emphasis slightly, I'm sure the US were kicking up the same old shit somewhere else back in the 80's that fits just as well.
The parallels with BTN and the US news channels, the military curfew, culture of fear etc. are fairly obvious, and the descriptions of the broken "US" in the film being "Godless", full of terrorists, "we should take the country back" etc. seem pretty straight with a lot of the stuff that's been bandied about at various times over Iraq/Iran/Whoever else has our oil.
The "UK" in V For Vendetta was supposed to be a parallel of the current state of the US, and the "US" of the film was a parallel for (can you guess?) Iraq. Personally I thought it was fairly thinly veiled, but perhaps not...
The thing is fully documented y'know :p as far as I'm aware you can run any fuel your engine is capable of burning.
You can display with a PC, PDA, Palm, Mobile phone, standalone touchscreen LCD, VFD or whatever else you can engineer. I'd suggest reading the manual if you want to know the full crack.
For the past 5 years I've been running my cars on open-source engine management hardware, firmware and software.
www.megasquirt.info
Given the potential benefits, financial, technological, and environmental, I'm surprised more people aren't interested in it. The project is actually pushing as close to the edge as some of the high end EMS from big car manufacturers.
Depends how anal you want to be - you could write code that would put out the relevant signals from a soundcard using 3 channels - one for X, one for Y, one for Z (brightness), or perhaps add another channel and run dual-trace with the second one generating the net along the bottom. A standard old dual trace scope for £50 from eBay would be fine for the display.
So you've not heard of such places as Bearing Suppliers, industrial hardware suppliers, etc.? Do they not have yellow pages where you are? Or the google?
Seriously, my local bearing shop can supply bearings, runners, castors, racks, pinions, gears, cogs, pulleys, belts, etc. from tiny precision bits to earthmover size.
I doubt the phone co are in cahoots, there are standard signalling methods you can use to hold the line open.
Emergency operators have the facility to seize the line to make sure it stays open.
The fact the marking co are using this is either really cheeky or plain against the rules, I'd ask your telco if they're supposed to be allowing it, it could be as simple as a misconfigured service to the marketing co that they're exploiting.
Bleach? As in Chlorine, the "really quite corrosive" chemical? Hmmm.
There are any number of industrial electronics production cleaning solutions that will work well and not harm components. Start with things such as PCB Flux Cleaner, Switch Contact Cleaner, Isopropyl Alcohol etc. and use cheap toothbrushes to scrub things clean. Look out for green fluff, that is where the copper tracks of the PCB have corroded so be very careful not to wipe the track out when removing it. You can reinstate tracks with care (any TV repair shop should be able to handle that) but really fast stuff like PC's won't thank you for it.
Optical drives in your equipment may suffer beyond repair simply because cleaning the important bits would mean disassembling something that was lined up to the micron in the factory.
You need to make sure everything is properly dry, sealing it into a container (EG plastic crate or sack) with some industrial desiccant packs for a week or so should make sure. Phone companies often use large quantities of these packs in roadside cabinets, so if you know any phone engineers, give them a nudge.
Mostly though, as long as it was powered down before it got wet and is now thoroughly dry, it should clean up OK and have a fighting chance of working. I'd be doing the first switch-on attempt through a well protected MCB/RCD though.
Good luck!
And a great excuse to buy an Amiga 1200.
I think your best chance with old and weird media (EG beyond the floppy drive) is to dig up an old system that supported the drive, from memory most stuff would either just about support a 720k/1.44Mb floppy drive or be able to spit data out of a Serial port. Grabbing RS232 or 485 data and saving it as a file wouldn't be too hard with a terminal package.
Stuff on audio tape should be fairly easy to get in via your sound card, from memory things like C64 emulators often have this functionality.
Oh yes - remember to park those winchester hard drives when you're done with them!
I think you're gonna need a bigger box. I'm not blowing smoke up your arse here. Here's a clue - the US Government places restrictions on the available encryption capabilities of all network equipment sold in certain geographies.
Encrypting anything over an external link still has the flaw that you have to handshake/authenticate over that link (or some other equally easily monitored link). If any currently available encryption was up to much, no-one would be that interested in quantum cryptography, which is just about the only way to guarantee stuff hasn't been intercepted. Saying current encryption is OK is like saying DRM has stopped piracy.
Well I'm not about to document something like that in any further detail, at best it would get me fired. Do you really believe that the big network boxes have nothing in their vastly complex OS other than what's documented for the end user? If you were writing the OS for a beastie like that you'd at least stick a few "factory" commands in there to help unravel things when the customer stuffed it right up.
As for the relative security of any external link, I work on those links from analogue private wires to terabit fibres and haven't found a properly secure transmission medium yet - probably why people are so very keen on the whole quantum thing.
Secure or not, most big boxes have backdoors anyway - they're not exactly documented but they could be stumbled upon, or, as is more likely with the Chinese, discovered whilst reverse-engineering the kit. Also, without spending vast sums of cash, there's no such thing as a secure WAN - unless your traffic goes from A to B on a sealed and tap-proof bearer (and even a direct point-to-point fibre can be monitored) there are hundreds of points of potential transparent intercept.
It's not deep until you're standing up - Until we get the website updated, search YouTube for "Ladoga Trophy" for more of the same.
I was using a made-up figure to illustrate a point, no crack was harmed in the making of that post. I know artists get half of f*** all. That's why I'd love to pay the artist direct - I could pay maybe 10% of the commercial price, yet the artist would be getting many times more money than they are used to.
I also know that you do need some guys in the studio - although you are much less reliant on expensive studios these days, a decent home-recording setup is within most people's means, if you can afford a guitar & amp you can afford a mixer and a laptop. Unless you're trying to record an entire orchestra you can either buy your own equipment or hire a small independent studio for peanuts - last one I hired cost £150 per day including the tech guy. OK the setup is not as impressive as the labels' studios, but the "low end" tech is as good as the professional stuff that was used to record stuff perfectly well only a few years ago.
I disagree that you need marketing arseholes or $WEBSITE, if a band is gigging (and good) then word will spread, these days with social networks and such like the word (and the MP3 to go with it) can spread very quickly. All you really need is to be able to sell your music through your own website direct - traditional media (without the reliance on marketing suits) could fall back to the ludicrously old-fashioned methods of going to gigs and reporting back to people who's hot and who's not.
This is my rationale too - If an artist only gets 25% of my money currently, I'll happily pay them that amount directly (or a little more) as it is cutting out a huge swathe of arseholes all taking a cut and contributing nothing of value.
With the current system, buying music legitimately is a bit like funding terrorism - the vast majority of your money goes to the people who are responsible for all the stuff that's wrong with the industry.
Friendly fire isn't a myth, I suspect it goes somewhat unreported in the US compared to over here as it seems to be other countries' soldiers that are usually on the wrong end of it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2921807.stm
Here's to 60 years of precision bombing - yeeee haaaaw!
Hardware will put up with a lot more than many would believe. I've worked for years with stuff that works in a hole in the ground or a steel box by the side of the road that was never intended as such. It gets the full heat of the sun, it gets wind, rain, frost, dust, spiders, vibration from traffic and stands up surprisingly well.
I've seen server racks stood in deep water, with the data cables trailing down from the wall, across the floor under water and up into the rack. I've seen water running down the front of racks & air-con units which were still running - no-one would go near the 415v breaker with a stream of water trickling over it to kill them.
Then there's the kit in a black roadside cabinet by a white wall that got so hot in the sun you had to use an oven glove to open the cover, yet worked fine for 99% of the time (I'll admit that eventually the optic card lost timing, but by that point the cabinet alone was so hot you could boil water on it).
I've seen kit that has been next to a PBX that has caught fire and turned into a puddle of melted plastic and charred metal, then been hosed down by the fire brigade, and has come back online with the flick of a breaker.
As long as nothing critical gets too wet or melts, it's all good. If a bit of kit does get wet, the key is to kill it completely dead immediately and dry it out before re-applying power - any voltage present will just result in the electronics turning to green crystals very quickly.
Any doubters, just mail me for photos!
It's a good job that there's no ready-made distribution method for digital data that doesn't involve physical media, or those guys would look pretty stupid about now.
I hear the next version will have album-art printed on the back of a panda using the tears of dolphins.
It's amazing how so many people can spend so much time and money pussy-footing around and coming up with a million different ways to not just sell a normal MP3 file at a sensible price. Ahhh, progress.
I have a friend who drives an old Discovery for his business, which was rated at maybe 30mpg. Being self employed, every penny counts, so he drives very carefully and can hit 50mpg on a long motorway run.
Modern engines are vastly more efficient, it's just that these days we fit much more powerful engines to our cars to keep up with the "arms race" of power and performance between manufacturers. Most modern family cars have more power than a 1960's Ferrari and do way more than double the MPG. If we gave them the same power as a 1960's family car, you could probably quadruple the MPG.
This was proven recently on the BBC show Top Gear, the presenters bought old supercars from the 60's and 70's and were raced round a track by a modern Vauxhall/Opel Astra diesel family hatchback. The hatchback blew them away.
Let's not forget just how environmentally unfriendly it is to make those batteries in the first place. Sorry but the Prius is not as green as everyone would like us to believe it is.
I drive a car which is 10 years old, and I will keep driving it and repairing it for as long as possible, as I believe that is far greener than buying a brand new car every 3-5 years and piling older cars on scrap heaps when they still have life left in them... but of course, that doesn't make money for the car manufacturers.
Re-use is even more energy efficient than recycling.
My other car is 30 years old and still going.
BT are too busy spending £12bn converting the core network to IP (dubbed "21CN" - 21st Century network). None of the current core networks are up to the growing load of existing broadband, never mind stuff 10x or 100x faster.
For starters, the guy that does the exchange jumpering is not the same guy that does the route and customer end, and all the changes would need to be recorded in the routing system. It's really more hassle than it's worth.
More likely is that the rejumpering in the exchange introduces a fault, either a poor connection or dodgy protector module. Also, in many areas there just isn't enough good copper in the ground, which results in a lot of scrabbling round to find a functioning route.
The issues with connection are that the ISDN equipment is physically in a different place in the telephone exchange than your phone line, or the ADSL equipment, so an engineer must physically go to the exchange, pull out the wiring for your line and re-jumper it on the MDF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_frame).
Before some eagle-eyed pedant points it out, ISDN30 (for PABX) is delivered over 2Mbit/s plesiosyncronous digital carrier which is often a fibre bearer.
Have you been reading our mission statement? That was supposed to be encrypted! They used a popular modern cipher called "management" to encode it into incomprehensible babble.