At the risk of perpetuating advertising for Unsanity... today I received this email from Unsanity (I use several of their "haxies"):
Dear friends,
When we saw MacOS X 10.1.5 out this morning, we got all excited about the ability of Carbon applications to use the native Quartz text rendering for ultra-smooth, antialiased text display. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, every Carbon application needs to be updated.
"That's not fair" - we thought, so we sat down and wrote a small freeware haxie, called Silk (smooth as silk, get the feeling?). Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 for all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and many others. And if it doesn't look right in some application, you can add it to the Exclude list to get it to the way it looked before.
The article is about antennas on the ground, but I'll give one example. You're right, the antenna is not likely to break. However, most antennas are dishes, pointed mechannically. It is certainly possible for the pointing mechanism to seize due to lubrication issues.
Spacecraft have multiple antennas -- usually a high or medium gain antenna, and at least one low gain antenna, used when the spacecraft is in a "safe" mode. There are switches to control which antenna to use; these can break or fuse, especially if they are switched while in a high-current state.
The electronics that 1)control the antenna or 2) receive/transmit the signal might break. For example, on SOHO, the phase-lock-loop (PLL) component of one of our receivers malfunctioned somehow (possibly due to tin whiskers), causing the uplink frequency (the frequency received by the spacecraft) to shift 400 kHz.
Returning to the article, the DSN antennas (or their ground systems) break frequently. In 2001, SOHO recorded about 500 ground anomalies. Fully half of them were due to some problem at the antenna site. (yes, boys and girls, that means almost one problem per day, and that's just SOHO) Most of the other half were network problems between the DSN site and the mission control center at GSFC.
To give specific examples of stuff that has broken (or had a glitch that caused a problem): hydraulics (failure), pointing motors, brakes (when the brake is on, the antenna stops moving and you very quickly are not pointing at the spacecraft), power amplifiers (transmitter), low-noise amplifiers (receive), telemetry systems (usually software crashes, have to reboot the system), ground receivers, exciters... too many to list here.
Not close enough -- you have to turn the case almost all the way around to open it up. Which probably means you'll be disconnecting all the cables first -- something you don't have to do with the G4.
If there's an emergency, the sitter should not be calling you--they should be calling 911
Um... yes, obviously. However, after that, I'd like to notified that my kid is in/going to the hospital!
If it's not an emergency, then there's no need for you to annoy the other people watching the movie (or whatever), right?
Thus, the "silent" mode -- and I would leave the theater/whatever in any case. In this case the combination of silent mode and proper behaviour (leaving the "quiet" area) should be enough -- jamming signals is not neccessary.
You are correct -- a child is a serious responsibility. However, having a child doesn't mean I become a slave to my home, especially when technology enables us to remain in contact just about anywhere. The restaurant scenario was only an example. Since you fixated on that one example instead of thinking about what I said, I'll point out others for you.
jamming:
on the train -- now I can't take the subway
in church -- I can't go to a service, wedding, or funeral without the kid? Would you rather I brought a screaming kid?
in the theather -- I can't go to a movie
Yeah, sure, I don't need movies to live; there are alternatives. However, I think business owners should recognize that they are limiting their customers if they do something like cellphone jamming.
I've seen a few comments from people saying how we've lived fine without cellphones for centuries. Apparently, they don't see the irony in typing out that comment on a computer, which we also got along fine without for centuries.
I don't have a cell phone, but I do have a pager which I keep on "silent/vibrate" at all times. I like the fact that I can leave the kid at home with a baby-sitter, and still be reachable just about anywhere if I'm needed.
However, if my favorite restaurant starts jamming cellphones/pagers, I'll think thrice about going there. If the price of a good meal includes being inaccessible to my child... I don't know that it's worth it.
I have to agree with the poster who said that there should be a device which automatically sets devices to silent mode -- a comprise between accessibility and annoyance of others.
"Commuters don't want to be stuck in a small metal capsule with people jabbering away on their mobile phones," he said.
Poor babies! What do they do when two people are holding a loud conversation? How is a cell phone converstation different? This is a manners issue, and shouldn't be corrected with technology, but with a polite request to keep his voice down.
zandesign said:
We need this in America, where any inconsiderate jerk with a cellphone can make or receive a call in the middle of a theatre, a church, a funeral, etc.
Again, a manners/behavioral issue. Ask them politely to leave. If they don't leave, kiss their ass in a precise, orderly, efficient manner.;-)
In some cars, the oil/tranmission drain plug is magnetic. Some transmissions have a magnet in the fluid pan to catch metal filings. Most cars have radios, and thus speakers with magnets.
There is already a project to port Darwin to x86. From the page:
Please remember that these files should be considered as alpha software, All the packages work, and we expect to go beta with this very soon, but there are still many problems. Join the project, if you want them fixed!
a) You should already know the answers to questions 1 and 2, and have enough of an understanding of 3 that removes the need to ask it. You should also already know, based on 1 1/2+ years here on the site, that this is *hardly* the forum for a real answer to that question.
Did I say I didn't know the answers?;-) My research philosophy is get as many sources as possible. I figured on a 1% S/N ratio on the replies -- and there have been some good points brought up here that I did not think of myself.
b) You just divulged some fairly major security-vulnerability information on the internet equivelent of Prime Time television.
True, perhaps. Though I'd argue that people who cared, already knew.
c) I would hope that nobody at your company gets wind of this posting, because it would not take a rocket scientist (*smirk*) to figure out who you are.
I've already done my research/presentation to the company, and it was well received by both management and customers. I'm secure in my job.
Just by asking this on Slashdot, you've brought more attention on satellite-hacking as a whole, thereby astronomically increasing the chance that someone takes a more "active" interest in figuring out how to send your company's prized birds into a flaming death spiral.
Yes, that would suck. Shame on me. I guessed (incorrectly) that it would not be a popular thread.
I have not been fired. (i.e. I'm not looking to destroy some satellites!):-P
I actually submitted this article to Ask Slashdot months ago. I had assumed it had been rejected, and didn't care enough to follow up. But good ol' Cliff came through.
Satellites don't directly use stars to track planets. The star tracker is used to track stars. If you know which star(s) you are tracking, you know how the spacecraft is pointed.
The reason other spacecraft could not track Venus before is that Venus is so close (angularly) to the Sun (the angular seperation never exceeds 48 degrees). Most telescopes are not designed to withstand that kind of brightness or radiation.
Excerpt from http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/spacecraft.html: The sunshade door is one of the most basic and important elements of the spacecraft system. This sunshade door remained closed until Chandra achieved pointing control in orbit. Now that it is opened, it shadows the entrance of the telescope to allow it to point as close as 45 degrees to the sun.
Looks like a safety margin of three degrees! Also, when you point a spacecraft at or nearly at the sun, you may be heating the spacecraft in places it was not designed for. This can be especially bad for some optics, especially if they are thermally controlled.
Other spacecraft, like SOHO are designed to point at the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of perpetuating advertising for Unsanity... today I received this email from Unsanity (I use several of their "haxies"):
.
Dear friends,
When we saw MacOS X 10.1.5 out this morning, we got all excited about the ability of Carbon applications to use the native Quartz text rendering for ultra-smooth, antialiased text display. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, every Carbon application needs to be updated
"That's not fair" - we thought, so we sat down and wrote a small freeware haxie, called Silk (smooth as silk, get the feeling?). Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 for all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and many others. And if it doesn't look right in some application, you can add it to the Exclude list to get it to the way it looked before.
So, grab it now:
http://download.unsanity.com/silk-10.sit
More information and some pretty screenshots:
http://www.haxies.com/silk/
Thank you for your support and participation!
You can very easily remap the control key to the caps lock key.
The article is about antennas on the ground, but I'll give one example. You're right, the antenna is not likely to break. However, most antennas are dishes, pointed mechannically. It is certainly possible for the pointing mechanism to seize due to lubrication issues.
... too many to list here.
Spacecraft have multiple antennas -- usually a high or medium gain antenna, and at least one low gain antenna, used when the spacecraft is in a "safe" mode. There are switches to control which antenna to use; these can break or fuse, especially if they are switched while in a high-current state.
The electronics that 1)control the antenna or 2) receive/transmit the signal might break. For example, on SOHO, the phase-lock-loop (PLL) component of one of our receivers malfunctioned somehow (possibly due to tin whiskers), causing the uplink frequency (the frequency received by the spacecraft) to shift 400 kHz.
The antenna on Galileo failed to deploy properly, and could not be used. Galileo now has to use their low gain antenna and some compression techniques to downlink its images and data.
Returning to the article, the DSN antennas (or their ground systems) break frequently. In 2001, SOHO recorded about 500 ground anomalies. Fully half of them were due to some problem at the antenna site. (yes, boys and girls, that means almost one problem per day, and that's just SOHO) Most of the other half were network problems between the DSN site and the mission control center at GSFC.
To give specific examples of stuff that has broken (or had a glitch that caused a problem): hydraulics (failure), pointing motors, brakes (when the brake is on, the antenna stops moving and you very quickly are not pointing at the spacecraft), power amplifiers (transmitter), low-noise amplifiers (receive), telemetry systems (usually software crashes, have to reboot the system), ground receivers, exciters
Not close enough -- you have to turn the case almost all the way around to open it up. Which probably means you'll be disconnecting all the cables first -- something you don't have to do with the G4.
The question should be, "Why do people who don't understand root access have it?"
:)
Perhaps you should lobby the companies these people work for to have their root (or admin) access removed
and so is your picture or internet service. As anyone with DirecTV can attest, Ku-band is horribly affected by bad weather.
Would this situation be improved with the transmitter on the ground instead of in space?
Um... yes, obviously. However, after that, I'd like to notified that my kid is in/going to the hospital!
If it's not an emergency, then there's no need for you to annoy the other people watching the movie (or whatever), right?
Thus, the "silent" mode -- and I would leave the theater/whatever in any case. In this case the combination of silent mode and proper behaviour (leaving the "quiet" area) should be enough -- jamming signals is not neccessary.
jamming:
on the train -- now I can't take the subway
in church -- I can't go to a service, wedding, or funeral without the kid? Would you rather I brought a screaming kid?
in the theather -- I can't go to a movie
Yeah, sure, I don't need movies to live; there are alternatives. However, I think business owners should recognize that they are limiting their customers if they do something like cellphone jamming.
I've seen a few comments from people saying how we've lived fine without cellphones for centuries. Apparently, they don't see the irony in typing out that comment on a computer, which we also got along fine without for centuries.
However, if my favorite restaurant starts jamming cellphones/pagers, I'll think thrice about going there. If the price of a good meal includes being inaccessible to my child... I don't know that it's worth it.
I have to agree with the poster who said that there should be a device which automatically sets devices to silent mode -- a comprise between accessibility and annoyance of others.
"Commuters don't want to be stuck in a small metal capsule with people jabbering away on their mobile phones," he said.
Poor babies! What do they do when two people are holding a loud conversation? How is a cell phone converstation different? This is a manners issue, and shouldn't be corrected with technology, but with a polite request to keep his voice down.
zandesign said:
We need this in America, where any inconsiderate jerk with a cellphone can make or receive a call in the middle of a theatre, a church, a funeral, etc.
Again, a manners/behavioral issue. Ask them politely to leave. If they don't leave, kiss their ass in a precise, orderly, efficient manner. ;-)
If your data is that important, make backups (i.e. more than one)
In some cars, the oil/tranmission drain plug is magnetic. Some transmissions have a magnet in the fluid pan to catch metal filings. Most cars have radios, and thus speakers with magnets.
One of their Sun boxes is running sendmail 8.8.8. Isn't that a bit out-of-date/insecure?
You have to contort your AD server to allow LDAP for this to work.
The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) is the successor to Hubble. It is scheduled to launch in 2009.
Please remember that these files should be considered as alpha software, All the packages work, and we expect to go beta with this very soon, but there are still many problems. Join the project, if you want them fixed!
bzzzt. X runs just fine under OSX. Check out the XonX project .
. It is under darwin but that is a seperate distro and not is the bundled OSX that comes default with all macs
What? Darwin is the same, with or without OSX "on top".
The only Unix things I can run in OSX is stuff like sed, awk, etc.
Dude, what have you been smoking? You've never even *seen* OSX, have you?
oooooooh, I'm supposed to be impressed? What microprocessor? My cordless phone runs at 2 GHz. :-/
Trademark does not apply -- the link you point to is for software, while IBM's handy-dandy miracle machine is hardware.
Is this true? If so, why?
You're confused -- you want that extra launch velocity from the Earth's rotation for everything except polar orbits.
Did I say I didn't know the answers? ;-) My research philosophy is get as many sources as possible. I figured on a 1% S/N ratio on the replies -- and there have been some good points brought up here that I did not think of myself.
b) You just divulged some fairly major security-vulnerability information on the internet equivelent of Prime Time television.
True, perhaps. Though I'd argue that people who cared, already knew.
c) I would hope that nobody at your company gets wind of this posting, because it would not take a rocket scientist (*smirk*) to figure out who you are.
I've already done my research/presentation to the company, and it was well received by both management and customers. I'm secure in my job.
Just by asking this on Slashdot, you've brought more attention on satellite-hacking as a whole, thereby astronomically increasing the chance that someone takes a more "active" interest in figuring out how to send your company's prized birds into a flaming death spiral.
Yes, that would suck. Shame on me. I guessed (incorrectly) that it would not be a popular thread.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I actually submitted this article to Ask Slashdot months ago. I had assumed it had been rejected, and didn't care enough to follow up. But good ol' Cliff came through.
Don't take it too hard, Larry. Stay with us!
The reason other spacecraft could not track Venus before is that Venus is so close (angularly) to the Sun (the angular seperation never exceeds 48 degrees). Most telescopes are not designed to withstand that kind of brightness or radiation.
Excerpt from http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/spacecraft.html:
The sunshade door is one of the most basic and important elements of the spacecraft system. This sunshade door remained closed until Chandra achieved pointing control in orbit. Now that it is opened, it shadows the entrance of the telescope to allow it to point as close as 45 degrees to the sun.
Looks like a safety margin of three degrees! Also, when you point a spacecraft at or nearly at the sun, you may be heating the spacecraft in places it was not designed for. This can be especially bad for some optics, especially if they are thermally controlled.
Other spacecraft, like SOHO are designed to point at the sun.
Disclaimer: I work on SOHO
You can download the Developer Tools for free if you register as a developer at https://connect.apple.com/