Many years ago, I read about how the military destroys hard disks that have contained highly secret data. (I believe this was in comp.risks or sci.military). The procedure was as follows:
overwrite the disk using something like Norton "wipedisk"
take the disk under armed guard to a secure facility
use thermite to melt the disk into slag. If any slag still looks like a recognizable part of a hard disk, use more thermite.
Would be to make this thing into a car MP3 player. It's got the hard disk and sound card, and in a car at least it would have access to some power.
Off Topic: All those ACs posting about open source girl friends must have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer last night and noticed the "Windows NT Explorer"-like internal interface on the girlfriend-bot.
The vi team won because the Emacs team wasn't used to only pushing one button/trigger at a time to issue a command/paintball. If there had been a Control-Alt-Meta-Cokebottle-trigger mode, then the emacs team would have won handily.
I got the impression that they made the decision to leave the radar on while on the mission. If there was a real problem activating the radar in time, rather than just a niggling fear that they might need to save some time in that eventuality, wouldn't they have discovered it in simulation? And if they'd simulated it, the computer would have had the same problem.
Actually, it didwork. Armstrong left the docking radar on when the procedure said to shut it off. This consumed processing cycles which meant that not all the events could be processed in the time allotted, which meant that some very critical calculations weren't getting done. The problem wasn't in the computer, it was in the astronauts not following procedure. The program was basically a big loop which had to be executed every 'n' milliseconds, and the engineers knew how many cycles they had to burn during those 'n' milliseconds, and designed and tested the procedures and programs accordingly. Once the astronauts deviated from the procedures, they were in unknown territory.
If you look on PalmGear you can find a variety of rugged Palm PDA cases, including titanium ones from RhinoSkin and neoprene ones from other companies. I've seen hard plastic ones that look like they'd be excellent for canoe trips as well, but they're not listed there.
However, if I might be presumptuous, might I suggest that you leave all that digital junk behind (except the camera) when you're going into the woods? I find losing the distractions of home (computers, telephones, schedules, etc) an essential part of the experience, whether it's a 2 hour mountain bike or a 2 week canoe trip.
I noticed that 2.4.0 didn't have ip_masq_quake and all those other ip_masq_* modules. Does this mean that 2.4.x doesn't need them any more, or that they haven't been written yet?
then be polite enough to put a "PS:" at the end of your message and appologise for the inconvienience and promise not to misuse their emails anymore.
Speaking as somebody who gets 20-30 spams a day with insincere apologies at the end, I can guarantee that that sort of bullshit just makes people madder.
If you can't afford to advertise legitimately, then you can't afford to be in business. Period. If spamming is the only way to keep your company alive, then shut the doors, sell off your assets and find something more honest and legitimate to do. Like selling crack.
We all know that Windows sucks. So why, oh why, do countless Open Source projects spring up that try to slavishly duplicate the look and feel of yet another crap Windows product while leaving out the only good parts of the functionality? And then they call it a "Windows:foo killer". Do they really think Microsoft are the sole arbiters of what constitutes good GUI design?
I don't like the look and feel of Outhouse. And as an email client it sucks big hairy ones. I do like the calendaring, or at least I would if I needed to schedule things with more than one person. So why is this "Outhouse killer" duplicating the look and feel of Outhouse, but not offering any way to do calendaring through a SexChange server?
No thanks. I'll stick to mutt, and occasionally when somebody sends me a Microsoft attachment that I can't read by piping it to strings, I'll fire up Mozilla's email client on my NT machine. It's not great, but at least it knows enough to open up my IMAP inbox by default, unlike Outhouse.
I have 5 computers at home, and I used to turn off all but the server and the ip_masq firewall when I wasn't using them. But now I'm in competition with friends to have the most seti@home units completed (2761 so far) so I leave them all on.
Speaking as somebody who is trying to hire a bunch of Solaris C++ developers, I know how hard it is.
But I've got to take some exception to your comment about "maybe you should re-evaluate the quality of your employees". I recruited a friend from a previous job. I'd worked with her on one small project, and I thought she'd done a pretty good job on it which is why I'd recruited her. But my boss doesn't like her much, and it muttering about firing her. The thing is, I knew she was a good person to work with, and I knew that she did well on that one small project we worked on, but I really couldn't tell you ahead of time how well she'd do on a huge project like this one. I'm inclined to believe she'll do really well once I get it through my boss's head this project isn't as easy to get up to speed on for us ordinary mortals who, unlike him, weren't around when it was first written. I know I'm 3 months ahead of her and I'm having a lot of trouble getting my head around the complexities of the server - fortunately my project has a further out due date.
I guess my point is that just because a friend you recruited isn't fitting in well is no reason to have your boss question your abilities!
(BTW: In spite of my misgivings about the company's growing pains, I have great confidence that it's getting worked out. It's really a great place to work, even if you have that slight possiblity that you might write a bug that could bring down western civilization hanging over your head.)
They are going to have separate left handed and right handed models. So if I buy a lefty one for myself, my wife won't be able to borrow it. That's really freaking handy.
Not that I care - I learned how to type when I was fairly young (even though boys didn't normally take typing in my school) because my handwriting is atrocious. The last thing I need is for a computer to start nagging me about that.
My site doesn't carry binaries. Neither do my main upstream sites. We have a very complete newsfeed and retain newsgroups in the big 8 for about 15 days.
By the way, alt may be a sewer, but there are a couple of islands of very high quality groups. Most of them are high quality because they are patrolled by a cadre of old-timers who attack anybody who tries to lower the standards.
Not to dump on Andre or anything, but I see writing like this all over the net. It's what happens when people who speak English as a second or third language try and be funny and breezy. Instead of being funny and flippant and informal, it just ends up reading like it was written by crack monkeys.
Remember when the consumer electronics makers were trying to get us to switch to CD from vinyl and tape? One way they did that was to put an extra track or two on the CD that wasn't on the vinyl or cassette version, claiming that there wasn't room for them on the vinyl and cassette media. Now the CDs are ubiquitous and my kids don't even know how to put vinyl on a record player, you don't see any more tracks on CDs than you used to see on vinyl. Even though a CD can hold 70 minutes, your average commercial CD is still 45 minutes, same as vinyl used to be.
So I think you're right - once DVD becomes the only game in town, you'll stop seeing all the extras.
Jim Lovell in Lost Moon says that the "suicide pill" is a myth. There are lots of easier ways to kill yourself if you decide you want to die, like cracking open the door and letting the air out.
Sure, if you know it's going to be compartmentalized and you know how it's going to compartmentalize ahead of time. But with Clearcase several people could be making changes in the same directory and seeing the other guy's changes as soon as he merged it back to the main. Not with CVS. Instead, I have to run a nightly cron job that merges changes in whole other directories into my branch.
I think what the industry is worried about is a "TiVo/Napster" - ie a device that you tell it what show you want to watch, and it will go out on the net and grab a copy right now, without you having to set your schedule around the networks' schedules. With people no longer a slave to live TV, they won't be watching the commercials (because it's easy to skip them or edit them out either on the server that's providing them, or on your playback unit). And the prospect of people watching their content without watching their commercials has network execs shitting their pants.
TiVo is already giving them nightmares, but a TiVo that had access to any TV show or movie in the world with essentially unlimited storage capacity (because it would stream off the server instead of storing it locally) would be too much for them to take.
I have had my TiVo for a month, and I watch a lot more TV, but see far fewer commercials because I fast forward through them. I expect if TiVo catches on that we're going to start seeing blipverts any day now.
I've used Clearcase for 3 years on a big project that involved 70-90 developers spread out over 4 sites (Rochester NY, Sydney Australia, Palo Alto CA, London England). We had a full time ClearCase administrator, and we needed it.
Right now I'm working on a much smaller development project, only 20 people in one office, and you just can't justify the expense of ClearCase for such a small project, so we're using CVS. Frankly, I'd rather have ClearCase.
My main objection to CVS versus ClearCase is that the support for branching in CVS sucks. Sure, you can branch, but every time somebody makes a change in the main branch, even in files you haven't touched in your branch, you have to merge the changes into your branch. In ClearCase, if you haven't modified a file in your branch, then you see the one in the main branch all the time, even if it changes. This means that unlike CVS, you don't have to run nightly cron jobs to keep merging everybody else's changes in area "A" of the code into your project that is only touching the code for area "B".
Besides that, the other thing I miss about ClearCase is the "-merge -xmerge" functionality for graphically resolving merge conflicts.
ClearCase's "winking" business I can do without on a small project like this. On the one where I was using ClearCase before, a full compile with no winking in took about 20 hours, so winking was a useful thing.
It would not be the first time that I'm looking up stuff while talking with someone to either check their story, look up and double check my own notes, or even when planning a meeting. That is kinda impossible with this device as far as I can see.
If you look at the web page, I think it's on the Shockwave "tour" of the phone, they do something very subtle. When they mention the ability to use your Visor for taking notes while you're on the phone, they juxtapose that text opposite a picture of a hands-free unit. So there is your solution - you plug a headset into the Visorphone, and then you can use the full functionality of the Visor while you are using it as a phone.
And given that the palm os is mature, RAM patches are not a bad idea. The visor will be obsolete before a new os would be required to run newer programs that will be produced several years from now.
Only one problem with that theory: there are already products out there (mostly Springboard modules) that only work with the two new Visors (Prism and Platinum) because they've got Palm OS 3.5 instead of 3.1. Handspring hasn't said anything about bringing out a 3.5 RAM patch for the older Visors, and even if they do, nobody knows if that will make these new Springboard modules work.
Don't get me wrong, my Visor is wonderful and does everything I bought it for and then some, but I don't believe that there will never be a need for an OS upgrade.
BTW: There are helicopters with ejection seats, all designed for the Soviet military. They blow the helicopter blades off with explosives before firing the seat.
Applications for this system are potentially frightening," said an intelligence source. "One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV -- a pilotless aircraft."
What a load of crap. The Joint Standoff Weapon, which is essentially a UAV that glides, is controlled by two 486s. You don't need 12-15 300MHz processors to do this. You could probably do it with a Palm Pilot (no pun intended) or two.
Note the careful weasel wording. The author is quoting an "intelligence source" which is quoting another "expert".
As others have said, you just repeated the conspiracy theory, while getting all your facts wrong. A few seconds with Google turned up this article from Transportation Quarterly, an article with a lot more references and facts than the conspiracy sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's secure.
Would be to make this thing into a car MP3 player. It's got the hard disk and sound card, and in a car at least it would have access to some power.
Off Topic: All those ACs posting about open source girl friends must have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer last night and noticed the "Windows NT Explorer"-like internal interface on the girlfriend-bot.
The vi team won because the Emacs team wasn't used to only pushing one button/trigger at a time to issue a command/paintball. If there had been a Control-Alt-Meta-Cokebottle-trigger mode, then the emacs team would have won handily.
I got the impression that they made the decision to leave the radar on while on the mission. If there was a real problem activating the radar in time, rather than just a niggling fear that they might need to save some time in that eventuality, wouldn't they have discovered it in simulation? And if they'd simulated it, the computer would have had the same problem.
Actualy, it didn't work.
Actually, it didwork. Armstrong left the docking radar on when the procedure said to shut it off. This consumed processing cycles which meant that not all the events could be processed in the time allotted, which meant that some very critical calculations weren't getting done. The problem wasn't in the computer, it was in the astronauts not following procedure. The program was basically a big loop which had to be executed every 'n' milliseconds, and the engineers knew how many cycles they had to burn during those 'n' milliseconds, and designed and tested the procedures and programs accordingly. Once the astronauts deviated from the procedures, they were in unknown territory.
If you look on PalmGear you can find a variety of rugged Palm PDA cases, including titanium ones from RhinoSkin and neoprene ones from other companies. I've seen hard plastic ones that look like they'd be excellent for canoe trips as well, but they're not listed there.
However, if I might be presumptuous, might I suggest that you leave all that digital junk behind (except the camera) when you're going into the woods? I find losing the distractions of home (computers, telephones, schedules, etc) an essential part of the experience, whether it's a 2 hour mountain bike or a 2 week canoe trip.
I noticed that 2.4.0 didn't have ip_masq_quake and all those other ip_masq_* modules. Does this mean that 2.4.x doesn't need them any more, or that they haven't been written yet?
then be polite enough to put a "PS:" at the end of your message and appologise for the inconvienience and promise not to misuse their emails anymore.
Speaking as somebody who gets 20-30 spams a day with insincere apologies at the end, I can guarantee that that sort of bullshit just makes people madder.
If you can't afford to advertise legitimately, then you can't afford to be in business. Period. If spamming is the only way to keep your company alive, then shut the doors, sell off your assets and find something more honest and legitimate to do. Like selling crack.
We all know that Windows sucks. So why, oh why, do countless Open Source projects spring up that try to slavishly duplicate the look and feel of yet another crap Windows product while leaving out the only good parts of the functionality? And then they call it a "Windows:foo killer". Do they really think Microsoft are the sole arbiters of what constitutes good GUI design?
I don't like the look and feel of Outhouse. And as an email client it sucks big hairy ones. I do like the calendaring, or at least I would if I needed to schedule things with more than one person. So why is this "Outhouse killer" duplicating the look and feel of Outhouse, but not offering any way to do calendaring through a SexChange server?
No thanks. I'll stick to mutt, and occasionally when somebody sends me a Microsoft attachment that I can't read by piping it to strings, I'll fire up Mozilla's email client on my NT machine. It's not great, but at least it knows enough to open up my IMAP inbox by default, unlike Outhouse.
I have 5 computers at home, and I used to turn off all but the server and the ip_masq firewall when I wasn't using them. But now I'm in competition with friends to have the most seti@home units completed (2761 so far) so I leave them all on.
Oh well, at least I turn off the monitors.
Speaking as somebody who is trying to hire a bunch of Solaris C++ developers, I know how hard it is.
But I've got to take some exception to your comment about "maybe you should re-evaluate the quality of your employees". I recruited a friend from a previous job. I'd worked with her on one small project, and I thought she'd done a pretty good job on it which is why I'd recruited her. But my boss doesn't like her much, and it muttering about firing her. The thing is, I knew she was a good person to work with, and I knew that she did well on that one small project we worked on, but I really couldn't tell you ahead of time how well she'd do on a huge project like this one. I'm inclined to believe she'll do really well once I get it through my boss's head this project isn't as easy to get up to speed on for us ordinary mortals who, unlike him, weren't around when it was first written. I know I'm 3 months ahead of her and I'm having a lot of trouble getting my head around the complexities of the server - fortunately my project has a further out due date.
I guess my point is that just because a friend you recruited isn't fitting in well is no reason to have your boss question your abilities!
(BTW: In spite of my misgivings about the company's growing pains, I have great confidence that it's getting worked out. It's really a great place to work, even if you have that slight possiblity that you might write a bug that could bring down western civilization hanging over your head.)
They are going to have separate left handed and right handed models. So if I buy a lefty one for myself, my wife won't be able to borrow it. That's really freaking handy.
Not that I care - I learned how to type when I was fairly young (even though boys didn't normally take typing in my school) because my handwriting is atrocious. The last thing I need is for a computer to start nagging me about that.
My site doesn't carry binaries. Neither do my main upstream sites. We have a very complete newsfeed and retain newsgroups in the big 8 for about 15 days.
By the way, alt may be a sewer, but there are a couple of islands of very high quality groups. Most of them are high quality because they are patrolled by a cadre of old-timers who attack anybody who tries to lower the standards.
Not to dump on Andre or anything, but I see writing like this all over the net. It's what happens when people who speak English as a second or third language try and be funny and breezy. Instead of being funny and flippant and informal, it just ends up reading like it was written by crack monkeys.
Remember when the consumer electronics makers were trying to get us to switch to CD from vinyl and tape? One way they did that was to put an extra track or two on the CD that wasn't on the vinyl or cassette version, claiming that there wasn't room for them on the vinyl and cassette media. Now the CDs are ubiquitous and my kids don't even know how to put vinyl on a record player, you don't see any more tracks on CDs than you used to see on vinyl. Even though a CD can hold 70 minutes, your average commercial CD is still 45 minutes, same as vinyl used to be.
So I think you're right - once DVD becomes the only game in town, you'll stop seeing all the extras.
Jim Lovell in Lost Moon says that the "suicide pill" is a myth. There are lots of easier ways to kill yourself if you decide you want to die, like cracking open the door and letting the air out.
That would be the "didn't we just post this a few days ago" department.
Sure, if you know it's going to be compartmentalized and you know how it's going to compartmentalize ahead of time. But with Clearcase several people could be making changes in the same directory and seeing the other guy's changes as soon as he merged it back to the main. Not with CVS. Instead, I have to run a nightly cron job that merges changes in whole other directories into my branch.
I think what the industry is worried about is a "TiVo/Napster" - ie a device that you tell it what show you want to watch, and it will go out on the net and grab a copy right now, without you having to set your schedule around the networks' schedules. With people no longer a slave to live TV, they won't be watching the commercials (because it's easy to skip them or edit them out either on the server that's providing them, or on your playback unit). And the prospect of people watching their content without watching their commercials has network execs shitting their pants.
TiVo is already giving them nightmares, but a TiVo that had access to any TV show or movie in the world with essentially unlimited storage capacity (because it would stream off the server instead of storing it locally) would be too much for them to take.
I have had my TiVo for a month, and I watch a lot more TV, but see far fewer commercials because I fast forward through them. I expect if TiVo catches on that we're going to start seeing blipverts any day now.
does this mean that the bread companies will be able to make toasters that will only toast their brand of bread?
Or computers that can only be sold with Microsoft operating systems?
Oh wait, we already have that!
I've used Clearcase for 3 years on a big project that involved 70-90 developers spread out over 4 sites (Rochester NY, Sydney Australia, Palo Alto CA, London England). We had a full time ClearCase administrator, and we needed it.
Right now I'm working on a much smaller development project, only 20 people in one office, and you just can't justify the expense of ClearCase for such a small project, so we're using CVS. Frankly, I'd rather have ClearCase.
My main objection to CVS versus ClearCase is that the support for branching in CVS sucks. Sure, you can branch, but every time somebody makes a change in the main branch, even in files you haven't touched in your branch, you have to merge the changes into your branch. In ClearCase, if you haven't modified a file in your branch, then you see the one in the main branch all the time, even if it changes. This means that unlike CVS, you don't have to run nightly cron jobs to keep merging everybody else's changes in area "A" of the code into your project that is only touching the code for area "B".
Besides that, the other thing I miss about ClearCase is the "-merge -xmerge" functionality for graphically resolving merge conflicts.
ClearCase's "winking" business I can do without on a small project like this. On the one where I was using ClearCase before, a full compile with no winking in took about 20 hours, so winking was a useful thing.
It would not be the first time that I'm looking up stuff while talking with someone to either check their story, look up and double check my own notes, or even when planning a meeting. That is kinda impossible with this device as far as I can see.
If you look at the web page, I think it's on the Shockwave "tour" of the phone, they do something very subtle. When they mention the ability to use your Visor for taking notes while you're on the phone, they juxtapose that text opposite a picture of a hands-free unit. So there is your solution - you plug a headset into the Visorphone, and then you can use the full functionality of the Visor while you are using it as a phone.
And given that the palm os is mature, RAM patches are not a bad idea. The visor will be obsolete before a new os would be required to run newer programs that will be produced several years from now.
Only one problem with that theory: there are already products out there (mostly Springboard modules) that only work with the two new Visors (Prism and Platinum) because they've got Palm OS 3.5 instead of 3.1. Handspring hasn't said anything about bringing out a 3.5 RAM patch for the older Visors, and even if they do, nobody knows if that will make these new Springboard modules work.
Don't get me wrong, my Visor is wonderful and does everything I bought it for and then some, but I don't believe that there will never be a need for an OS upgrade.
BTW: There are helicopters with ejection seats, all designed for the Soviet military. They blow the helicopter blades off with explosives before firing the seat.
Applications for this system are potentially frightening," said an intelligence source. "One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV -- a pilotless aircraft."
What a load of crap. The Joint Standoff Weapon, which is essentially a UAV that glides, is controlled by two 486s. You don't need 12-15 300MHz processors to do this. You could probably do it with a Palm Pilot (no pun intended) or two.
Note the careful weasel wording. The author is quoting an "intelligence source" which is quoting another "expert".
As others have said, you just repeated the conspiracy theory, while getting all your facts wrong. A few seconds with Google turned up this article from Transportation Quarterly, an article with a lot more references and facts than the conspiracy sites.