Well the mainstream took all the honor out of "hacker", associating it with the destructive, and sometimes formulaic clueless.
I don't like geek, as it does have old, and rather disparging meanings. Nerd seems to have a more honorable history, one (likey wrong) story is that it started out as Knurd, or drunK reversed, and was used to reffer to those that would rather study than party.
Anyhow when it came time to name our team, the challenge was coming up with a good bacronym...
Well each stage of the process is compress, radiate the heat of compression, and then expand, So the description I gave just needs the phrase "repeat as needed" tacked on the end...
-dp-
It just works better when that difference is large. You can extrat power when you have even a very small temprature difference. You can't get much power unless the machine is very large, but if you are good, you might be able to build something that has a little mechanical energy left, after it has overcome its internal friction. The current record is something like 0.5 (celsius) difference. But even with that machine, its not a reversable process. Its not a technology issue, its a second law of thermodynamics issue.
While you can use very small temprature differences to run an engine, you hit the thermodynamic wall pretty soon. Its possible for a reasonably skilled metalworker to build an engine that will run off the temperature difference between your hand and the air around you, (the plans are available for under $20, Howel's "Miser" low temp Sterling engine) but the ability for convection to keep that temperature difference, drastically limits the power available. Basically, to get one to generate more than internal friction at that difference takes VERY good machining skills, and some special materials (like graphite pistons). If you build one, and it will start itself from just the heat of your hand, you are a very good machinist. Many have to settle for one that runs off the heat from a coffee cup.
Almost all that cost is energy, the liquefaction process is not that efficent (and can be noisy as hell). (what isn't energy is cost of the machinery, the feedstock is ordinary air).
How do I know its not very efficient? Just look at a liquifier. Step one: Filter out the solids. Step two: BIG multi-stage compressor. Step 3: even BIGGER heat exchanger. The gas heats up when you compress it, and you have to get rid of that heat (while keeping the pressure) before you run it thru the expansion nozzle.
Nothing in the plant that you won't find in your ordinary household refrigerator, its just a different scale, and with a different working fluid. Anyone know the actual conversion effiency of a LN2 plant? If it makes it out of the single digits, I would consideer it a fine tribute to human persistance.
The engine would be interesting. You would want at least quadruple expansion, to make best use of the high pressure. You would be able to make it mostly from plastic, and you won't need the transmission, but the valvegear would be a real challenge to get "right". The problem isn't knowing when to open or close things, its an easy thing to get an embedded controller to do. The problem is coming up with the electromechanical side of the problem. You notice, despite many attempts, auto engines still have mechanically acutated valves, they haven't yet produced a solenoid system that can come close to the lifespan of the mechanical setup. (depending on engine speed and torque requirements, you need to be able to vary how much of the stroke you admit gas into. You want all of the expansion to happen in the engine. The exhaust wants to be as close to atmospheric pressure as you can manage, to get the most energy out of the gas. An steam engine "puffing mightily" is dumping a lot of energy out the exhaust. In return its developing peak torque.)
The air engine, like electrics, and even steam to some extent) does have the advantage in urban traffic that it doesn't consume fuel at a stop. And this will become important as we try to crowd ever more cars onto our urban roads, they will spend ever more of their day idling in near gridlock. (there comes a point where adding roads makes things worse, even if we had the space, or could afford to add roads to our cities) Right now a lot of urban traffic moves at the same pace that it did in 1900. (in the case of London, thats 11mph. In the case of NYC, its about 4mph (crosstown)). NYC has reached the faster to walk stage.
One potential soultion (assuming we won't get fundamental changes in traffic planning until long past the time when its unbearable) is the internal combustion/electric hybrids. Things like the Toyota Prius, and the Honda 2 seater, which shut the engine off when stopped, run off the electric when in "creep" mode, only starting the engine when needed to replenish the battery, or when moving steadily at speeds greater than 10mph.
What we really nead is a change in transport use patterns. If the private car had its acutal operating costs visible, we might make more sensible use of them. As a way to get several people a medium distance, they are fine things. As a way to get a single person, usually less than 2 miles, they are not so great. (the median trip length in the US is under 2 miles)
It should not take 3 tonnes of steel, a couple of ounces of petroleum, and an adult to transport a healthy teenager 2km to an athletic practice. Instead of trying to find better ways to keep our road crowding behavious viable, we should switch to a fundamentally more efficent way of doing things.
The obvious computing example is LISP, which engenders great amount of heat about syntax. Its my favorite, as operator presecedence is never an issue, and the written form is identical to the parse tree representation, so writing stuff that walks over code is not some "normal people never do this" technique.
Junkyard Wars is known by the name "Scrapheap Challenge" in the rest of the world.
10. You don't have to eat rats. You don't even have to catch rats. Rats fear you. So does everyone and everything else.
9. Your torch isn't from Pier 1 Imports. It's made by Airco and it can slice a railroad rail in half quicker than you can say "Mind The Gap."
8. You drive cool 4-wheel ATVs as fast as you dare. Sometimes a camera person is riding on the front rack to make it more of a challenge.
7. Forget the bathing suit. You get issued flame-resistant flight suits, two-way radios, safety goggles, hard hats and a Leatherman.
6. After 10 hours of unbelievably intense physical and mental effort, you get cold beer, hot showers, and rooms with real beds. The beer is not insipid either.
5. Which would _you_ rather play with: a fish-hook made from a rusty paper clip, or a 50-ton Caterpillar excavator/dredge?
4. Somebody else cleans up whatever mess you make. Even the holes in the steel floor.
3.The only sunblock you need is a flip-up welding helmet.
2. A camera worthy event is not your sharing the fish you caught. A camera worthy event is cutting a Land Rover in half (its not only encouraged, but considered educational.)
1. You don't get voted out by failing to backstab the right person. You get voted out by having your creation explode on-camera in a hail of flesh-rending shrapnel and fireballs of burning gasoline.
Original list from Crash (a fellow NERD), with some changes mine.
No, I am not kidding. I have a baseball cap with the logo on it. (there will even be telvised evidence of it shortly, I wore it during the "intro" shoot for our first Junkyard Wars heat)
They have the "police raid" style windbreakers (NSA in large letters, plus the logo), notebooks and clip boarsds, even Golf balls
In all seriousness, its actually a nice museum. A place where things of historic interest are kept. The only stuff with actual transistors in it is the old cray, and its robo-tape module.
As mentioned they have an enigma, but also a number of other even older machines. They have things like the almost entirely passive bug that they found in a gift wall decoration, a 17th century (french) text on codes, etc. Its a bit north of the DC beltway, but well worth a morning if you are already in town. I assume there is a public transit route there, but I don't know it. (for a real nerd day, rent a car, and combine it with a visit to the Garber facility, the suburban MD home to the Air and Space museum overflow and restoration shop. the two sites are 20 minutes apart when traffic is not at a standstill)
I am impressed, there were 20,000 hits to the site since it got mentioned on slashdot. Unfortunately LHPO is currently in 668 peices (not counting nuts and bolts), packed into a 6 meter ISO shipping container, sitting in Berlin. Its ready to travel on that tour, if someone wants to promote it. BTW: One of the builders of LHPO is one third of a Scrapheap Challenge ("Junkyard Wars" when show in the US) team, The NERDS. While we are under NDA about what we built/how we did, lets say american honor will have nothing to complain about...
If I felt a need for seriously anonymous posts
on
Privacy vs. Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
I would simply walk into one of the larger public libraries, and use one of the machines "just sitting there". In larger libraries, in these days of thin budgets, many just make the terminals self policing, they have better uses for their people than authenticating who uses the machine.
On my last trip out of town, I kept up with mail, etc by simply walking into the main branch of the Toronto Library, and waiting in line for an available pc. Sure they would have been able to track it to that machine, but the library keeps no record of users, nor did they require ID before I could use it (and they wouldn't be bothered by US statue that might require public terminals to keep records). And since there was a line to use the thing, I doubt that they could get usable fingerprints from the keyboard. Sure if I wanted to throw a lot of bricks, I would have to find different branches, different cities, but for a single broadside...
Other possibilites -- I have encountered public internet kiosks that took cash. (one was in the waiting area at the Hearst Castle). If you wanted to make a particular point, you could use the Library Of Congress (my usual way to connect when visiting DC) Yea, you have to show a card to get into the building, and do the metal detector thing (no log kept, getting a card is trivial - its while you wait), but once inside, there are machines in almost every public space. (about the only room that didn't have at least one, had a flush lever on the seat)
One chip accellerometer, standard part from Analog Devices. They are cheap. They were developed for the automotive crowd (smarter airbags), and those guys count mills. ($0.001). Its under $10 in singles. They have been available for 7 or 8 years now.
The "for the annual meeting" demo gadget was a small black plastic cube. Pick it up, it starts to whine. Tilt it, and the pitch changed. It was only two axis sensing (they only put one chip in it)
If you dissolved away the package, you would see one of the first high volume "micro-machined" devices. It had tuning forks made from poly, that was deposited on a very thick layer of glass. The glass beside and under the structure was etched away.
The fork was driven electrostatically, and by comparing the difference in the drive currents, you could infer any accellerations. Originally it was done in an extension to an existing mixed (bipolar and CMOS) process. (wound up adding something like 17 extra masks) For those that talk about 0.18u 2V cmos processes, this would be a very different experience. It was a 24V (max) process, minimum feature size was 3u. Metal was on something like 10u pitch. (Second metal was optional, 12u pitch, and via's were 4x4 if I remember correctly)
People do like color, even if it can't be justified. Many years ago, we were delivering a dedicated box for a commercial application. Color was a step down in resolution, and a step up in price. Yet color handily outsold the monochrome. The screens on palm and similar are comparable in size to the ones used as viewfinders on camcorders. They are larger than most used as viewfinders on digital cameras. So for some graphic uses, they are a good thing. Kodak is supposed to be shipping a camera clip-on accessory for the palm, 6 weeks ago. (don't know if they have actually started shipping -- anyone seen one?) Uses the screen as the finder, one of the buttons as the shutter, and clutters your memory with the images. Personally, when I finaly retired Liebnitz (Newton 110) I had the choice of color or mono, and went mono.
I think paragraph three would be even more to the point if you added the following two sentences...
(addition in italics) Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email. This isn't a new idea, its occured to a lot of other people. They all just had more sense than to include such an obvious security hole, in mass distribution software. Now MIME attachments aren't enough
The idea of a paperclip wagging its finger at me, left me speechless the first time I saw it... Wasn't there a notice recently that someone found a scripting hole with said paperclip? There is a name for what Microsloth is doing when it builds worm encouraging products: Breach of Professional Duty -- they are supposed to know better. Yea, they yammered "the customers want this"... A former BBC managing director said it best: "We know precisely what they want, and we will not give it to them". Like "Fiduciary responsibility" demanded of those that manage others money, if you know that something is truly stupid, you are required to say "NO". You are the expert, they are the common man. (take my retirement money and buy tulips...) If I were a 14yr old kid learning VBscript, when I read the bit about embedding in email, I would feel moraly obiligated to write a worm to exploit it. The grownups should know better.
You don't actually want to lap the heat sink flat, you want to scrape fit it to match the processor plate. You want look for gaps between them with clamps in place, preferably at something close to operating temprature. (as both the clips and the results of heating a non-constant thickness object will change the shape) For those that haven't read "Machine Tool Reconditioning" (published in 1936, and never superseeded), you need a marking compound, and a scraping tool. Apply the compound (these days usually a blue paste) to the cleaned surfaces, and assemble, pressing them into contact with each other with the clamps only. Separate, and "read" the spot pattern. It will show you the places where stuff doesn't touch. Use your scraper to adjust. Repeat till you get a reasonable bearing surface. The surface won't be "flat" like you would get with lapping, but the two parts are matched to each other, and mate without gaps. Scrape fitting is a whole lot faster than lapping. (and with lapping, you would still have to use the marking compound to tell when you had the parts flat enough to fit together, and that you wern't lapping a bow into the surface.) I am guessing that they used a "Dial Indicator" instead of a "dial micrometer". The only micrometers commonly found with a dial on them are so-called "indicating" micrometers, used primaraly for comparison measurements. (besides, a micrometers contact spot is too big to give the number of spots they indicated)
Quoting Steve Roberts: "Anything that stores a significant amount of electrical energy makes a good boat anchor" There are some good battery technologies, but high energy densisty, rechargable and cheap can't all be used in the same sentence. We might be able to give you a device that fits in your current battery slot, and gives you the duration you seek. Got $20k? per unit (not including development costs). Recharge will be simple (just add hydrogen). Unlike computer hardware, battery technology doesn't follow Moores Law. (unless you change the time term to 20 years or so) Its a whole lot easier to make the cpu take less power than it is to engineer the battery to hold more
The copyright office specifically says bibliograpic references are always legal -- you may not be able to use the text itself, but you can always tell someone where to find the originally published text. The only difference between "Journal of Irr. Results Vol 3.14159 number 1.735 (June 2003) pp 10-12" and www.JIR.joke/volpi/number_sqrt(3)/joes-stuff is one of formatting. I could write either down on the back of a biz card, and take it to a good research library, and be looking at the text in short order... In the case under discussion, posting the actual text (so it comes from a/. drive) is likely a violation for the user. Posting the URL of the page on the MS site, so the acutal bits of the article come from a drive in Redmond, is just citing the published article... (it meets the copyright definition of "fixed in a tangible form", so it counts as "published" -- published for copyright purposes includes so-claimed trade secrets)
Some of you may have seen a British tv show inspired by the MIT design competition. It was shown in the US as Junkyard Wars. (In the UK, it runs under the name Scrapheap Challenge)
Quick summary: Two three person teams, pair of matching workshops. Large pile of scrap metal as feedstock. Morning of competition, you find out what problem you get to solve. Say a 4 person amphibian, or a glider that can carry one human. A device that lets you retreive a Mini in 20 meters of water, a non-wheeled machine that can traverse a tank testing course... You get 10 hours construction time. Next day, the two teams machines are tested head to head. Winner moves on to the next round, and a harder challenge...
Well the US tv network wants a series with north american accents, and are willing to pay to get it. So they need 8 teams, ASAP. (they start filiming in August, applications are due the end of the month). The show will be taped in London, so teams selected get flown over and put up at the networks expense.
More details, can be found at Junkyard Wars Disclaimer: I don't work for the TV network, or the production company that is taping the show. They did just buy me plane tickets, I will be spending a week in London so I can play with their piles of stuff on camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the mainstream took all the honor out of "hacker", associating it with the destructive, and sometimes formulaic clueless.
I don't like geek, as it does have old, and rather disparging meanings. Nerd seems to have a more honorable history, one (likey wrong) story is that it started out as Knurd, or drunK reversed, and was used to reffer to those that would rather study than party.
Anyhow when it came time to name our team, the challenge was coming up with a good bacronym...
Well each stage of the process is compress, radiate the heat of compression, and then expand, So the description I gave just needs the phrase "repeat as needed" tacked on the end... -dp-
It just works better when that difference is large. You can extrat power when you have even a very small temprature difference. You can't get much power unless the machine is very large, but if you are good, you might be able to build something that has a little mechanical energy left, after it has overcome its internal friction. The current record is something like 0.5 (celsius) difference. But even with that machine, its not a reversable process. Its not a technology issue, its a second law of thermodynamics issue.
While you can use very small temprature differences to run an engine, you hit the thermodynamic wall pretty soon. Its possible for a reasonably skilled metalworker to build an engine that will run off the temperature difference between your hand and the air around you, (the plans are available for under $20, Howel's "Miser" low temp Sterling engine) but the ability for convection to keep that temperature difference, drastically limits the power available. Basically, to get one to generate more than internal friction at that difference takes VERY good machining skills, and some special materials (like graphite pistons). If you build one, and it will start itself from just the heat of your hand, you are a very good machinist. Many have to settle for one that runs off the heat from a coffee cup.
Almost all that cost is energy, the liquefaction process is not that efficent (and can be noisy as hell). (what isn't energy is cost of the machinery, the feedstock is ordinary air). How do I know its not very efficient? Just look at a liquifier. Step one: Filter out the solids. Step two: BIG multi-stage compressor. Step 3: even BIGGER heat exchanger. The gas heats up when you compress it, and you have to get rid of that heat (while keeping the pressure) before you run it thru the expansion nozzle. Nothing in the plant that you won't find in your ordinary household refrigerator, its just a different scale, and with a different working fluid. Anyone know the actual conversion effiency of a LN2 plant? If it makes it out of the single digits, I would consideer it a fine tribute to human persistance. The engine would be interesting. You would want at least quadruple expansion, to make best use of the high pressure. You would be able to make it mostly from plastic, and you won't need the transmission, but the valvegear would be a real challenge to get "right". The problem isn't knowing when to open or close things, its an easy thing to get an embedded controller to do. The problem is coming up with the electromechanical side of the problem. You notice, despite many attempts, auto engines still have mechanically acutated valves, they haven't yet produced a solenoid system that can come close to the lifespan of the mechanical setup. (depending on engine speed and torque requirements, you need to be able to vary how much of the stroke you admit gas into. You want all of the expansion to happen in the engine. The exhaust wants to be as close to atmospheric pressure as you can manage, to get the most energy out of the gas. An steam engine "puffing mightily" is dumping a lot of energy out the exhaust. In return its developing peak torque.) The air engine, like electrics, and even steam to some extent) does have the advantage in urban traffic that it doesn't consume fuel at a stop. And this will become important as we try to crowd ever more cars onto our urban roads, they will spend ever more of their day idling in near gridlock. (there comes a point where adding roads makes things worse, even if we had the space, or could afford to add roads to our cities) Right now a lot of urban traffic moves at the same pace that it did in 1900. (in the case of London, thats 11mph. In the case of NYC, its about 4mph (crosstown)). NYC has reached the faster to walk stage. One potential soultion (assuming we won't get fundamental changes in traffic planning until long past the time when its unbearable) is the internal combustion/electric hybrids. Things like the Toyota Prius, and the Honda 2 seater, which shut the engine off when stopped, run off the electric when in "creep" mode, only starting the engine when needed to replenish the battery, or when moving steadily at speeds greater than 10mph. What we really nead is a change in transport use patterns. If the private car had its acutal operating costs visible, we might make more sensible use of them. As a way to get several people a medium distance, they are fine things. As a way to get a single person, usually less than 2 miles, they are not so great. (the median trip length in the US is under 2 miles) It should not take 3 tonnes of steel, a couple of ounces of petroleum, and an adult to transport a healthy teenager 2km to an athletic practice. Instead of trying to find better ways to keep our road crowding behavious viable, we should switch to a fundamentally more efficent way of doing things.
The obvious computing example is LISP, which engenders great amount of heat about syntax. Its my favorite, as operator presecedence is never an issue, and the written form is identical to the parse tree representation, so writing stuff that walks over code is not some "normal people never do this" technique.
Anyone know of a human equivalent?
-dp-
The NERDS. New: Junyard Wars FAQ, Ten reasons why Scrapheap Challenge is better than Iron Chef, and Ten reasons why being on Junkyard Wars is better than being on Survivor
Take a look at nt6. Its a real turbine engine (120,000 rpm no less) that runs off cordwood. They even sell plans. (and it looks like fairly straightforward plumbing, for those that don't have an engine lathe in the basement).. Its on my list as one of the loudest noises you can make with wood.
-dp-
The NERDS. New: Junyard Wars FAQ, "Ten reasons why Scrapheap Challenge is better than Iron Chef", and Ten reasons why being on Junkyard Wars is better than being on Survivor
Junkyard Wars is known by the name "Scrapheap Challenge" in the rest of the world.
10. You don't have to eat rats. You don't even have to catch rats. Rats fear you. So does everyone and everything else.
9. Your torch isn't from Pier 1 Imports. It's made by Airco and it can slice a railroad rail in half quicker than you can say "Mind The Gap."
8. You drive cool 4-wheel ATVs as fast as you dare. Sometimes a camera person is riding on the front rack to make it more of a challenge.
7. Forget the bathing suit. You get issued flame-resistant flight suits, two-way radios, safety goggles, hard hats and a Leatherman.
6. After 10 hours of unbelievably intense physical and mental effort, you get cold beer, hot showers, and rooms with real beds. The beer is not insipid either.
5. Which would _you_ rather play with: a fish-hook made from a rusty paper clip, or a 50-ton Caterpillar excavator/dredge?
4. Somebody else cleans up whatever mess you make. Even the holes in the steel floor.
3.The only sunblock you need is a flip-up welding helmet.
2. A camera worthy event is not your sharing the fish you caught. A camera worthy event is cutting a Land Rover in half (its not only encouraged, but considered educational.)
1. You don't get voted out by failing to backstab the right person. You get voted out by having your creation explode on-camera in a hail of flesh-rending shrapnel and fireballs of burning gasoline.
Original list from Crash (a fellow NERD), with some changes mine.
They have the "police raid" style windbreakers (NSA in large letters, plus the logo), notebooks and clip boarsds, even Golf balls
In all seriousness, its actually a nice museum. A place where things of historic interest are kept. The only stuff with actual transistors in it is the old cray, and its robo-tape module.
As mentioned they have an enigma, but also a number of other even older machines. They have things like the almost entirely passive bug that they found in a gift wall decoration, a 17th century (french) text on codes, etc. Its a bit north of the DC beltway, but well worth a morning if you are already in town. I assume there is a public transit route there, but I don't know it. (for a real nerd day, rent a car, and combine it with a visit to the Garber facility, the suburban MD home to the Air and Space museum overflow and restoration shop. the two sites are 20 minutes apart when traffic is not at a standstill)
For those that are curious, and have cable, TLC will be showing two of last years episodes on Wed.
I am impressed, there were 20,000 hits to the site since it got mentioned on slashdot. Unfortunately LHPO is currently in 668 peices (not counting nuts and bolts), packed into a 6 meter ISO shipping container, sitting in Berlin. Its ready to travel on that tour, if someone wants to promote it. BTW: One of the builders of LHPO is one third of a Scrapheap Challenge ("Junkyard Wars" when show in the US) team, The NERDS. While we are under NDA about what we built/how we did, lets say american honor will have nothing to complain about...
I would simply walk into one of the larger public libraries, and use one of the machines "just sitting there". In larger libraries, in these days of thin budgets, many just make the terminals self policing, they have better uses for their people than authenticating who uses the machine.
On my last trip out of town, I kept up with mail, etc by simply walking into the main branch of the Toronto Library, and waiting in line for an available pc. Sure they would have been able to track it to that machine, but the library keeps no record of users, nor did they require ID before I could use it (and they wouldn't be bothered by US statue that might require public terminals to keep records). And since there was a line to use the thing, I doubt that they could get usable fingerprints from the keyboard. Sure if I wanted to throw a lot of bricks, I would have to find different branches, different cities, but for a single broadside...
Other possibilites -- I have encountered public internet kiosks that took cash. (one was in the waiting area at the Hearst Castle). If you wanted to make a particular point, you could use the Library Of Congress (my usual way to connect when visiting DC) Yea, you have to show a card to get into the building, and do the metal detector thing (no log kept, getting a card is trivial - its while you wait), but once inside, there are machines in almost every public space. (about the only room that didn't have at least one, had a flush lever on the seat)
One chip accellerometer, standard part from Analog Devices. They are cheap. They were developed for the automotive crowd (smarter airbags), and those guys count mills. ($0.001). Its under $10 in singles. They have been available for 7 or 8 years now.
The "for the annual meeting" demo gadget was a small black plastic cube. Pick it up, it starts to whine. Tilt it, and the pitch changed. It was only two axis sensing (they only put one chip in it)
If you dissolved away the package, you would see one of the first high volume "micro-machined" devices. It had tuning forks made from poly, that was deposited on a very thick layer of glass. The glass beside and under the structure was etched away.
The fork was driven electrostatically, and by comparing the difference in the drive currents, you could infer any accellerations. Originally it was done in an extension to an existing mixed (bipolar and CMOS) process. (wound up adding something like 17 extra masks) For those that talk about 0.18u 2V cmos processes, this would be a very different experience. It was a 24V (max) process, minimum feature size was 3u. Metal was on something like 10u pitch. (Second metal was optional, 12u pitch, and via's were 4x4 if I remember correctly)
Thanks, will have to check them out...
People do like color, even if it can't be justified. Many years ago, we were delivering a dedicated box for a commercial application. Color was a step down in resolution, and a step up in price. Yet color handily outsold the monochrome. The screens on palm and similar are comparable in size to the ones used as viewfinders on camcorders. They are larger than most used as viewfinders on digital cameras. So for some graphic uses, they are a good thing. Kodak is supposed to be shipping a camera clip-on accessory for the palm, 6 weeks ago. (don't know if they have actually started shipping -- anyone seen one?) Uses the screen as the finder, one of the buttons as the shutter, and clutters your memory with the images. Personally, when I finaly retired Liebnitz (Newton 110) I had the choice of color or mono, and went mono.
I think paragraph three would be even more to the point if you added the following two sentences...
(addition in italics)
Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email. This isn't a new idea, its occured to a lot of other people. They all just had more sense than to include such an obvious security hole, in mass distribution software. Now MIME attachments aren't enough
The idea of a paperclip wagging its finger at me, left me speechless the first time I saw it... Wasn't there a notice recently that someone found a scripting hole with said paperclip?
There is a name for what Microsloth is doing when it builds worm encouraging products: Breach of Professional Duty -- they are supposed to know better.
Yea, they yammered "the customers want this"... A former BBC managing director said it best: "We know precisely what they want, and we will not give it to them". Like "Fiduciary responsibility" demanded of those that manage others money, if you know that something is truly stupid, you are required to say "NO". You are the expert, they are the common man. (take my retirement money and buy tulips...)
If I were a 14yr old kid learning VBscript, when I read the bit about embedding in email, I would feel moraly obiligated to write a worm to exploit it. The grownups should know better.
You don't actually want to lap the heat sink flat, you want to scrape fit it to match the processor plate. You want look for gaps between them with clamps in place, preferably at something close to operating temprature. (as both the clips and the results of heating a non-constant thickness object will change the shape) For those that haven't read "Machine Tool Reconditioning" (published in 1936, and never superseeded), you need a marking compound, and a scraping tool. Apply the compound (these days usually a blue paste) to the cleaned surfaces, and assemble, pressing them into contact with each other with the clamps only. Separate, and "read" the spot pattern. It will show you the places where stuff doesn't touch. Use your scraper to adjust. Repeat till you get a reasonable bearing surface. The surface won't be "flat" like you would get with lapping, but the two parts are matched to each other, and mate without gaps. Scrape fitting is a whole lot faster than lapping. (and with lapping, you would still have to use the marking compound to tell when you had the parts flat enough to fit together, and that you wern't lapping a bow into the surface.) I am guessing that they used a "Dial Indicator" instead of a "dial micrometer". The only micrometers commonly found with a dial on them are so-called "indicating" micrometers, used primaraly for comparison measurements. (besides, a micrometers contact spot is too big to give the number of spots they indicated)
Quoting Steve Roberts: "Anything that stores a significant amount of electrical energy makes a good boat anchor" There are some good battery technologies, but high energy densisty, rechargable and cheap can't all be used in the same sentence. We might be able to give you a device that fits in your current battery slot, and gives you the duration you seek. Got $20k? per unit (not including development costs). Recharge will be simple (just add hydrogen). Unlike computer hardware, battery technology doesn't follow Moores Law. (unless you change the time term to 20 years or so) Its a whole lot easier to make the cpu take less power than it is to engineer the battery to hold more
The copyright office specifically says bibliograpic references are always legal -- you may not be able to use the text itself, but you can always tell someone where to find the originally published text. The only difference between "Journal of Irr. Results Vol 3.14159 number 1.735 (June 2003) pp 10-12" and www.JIR.joke/volpi/number_sqrt(3)/joes-stuff is one of formatting. I could write either down on the back of a biz card, and take it to a good research library, and be looking at the text in short order... In the case under discussion, posting the actual text (so it comes from a /. drive) is likely a violation for the user. Posting the URL of the page on the MS site, so the acutal bits of the article come from a drive in Redmond, is just citing the published article... (it meets the copyright definition of "fixed in a tangible form", so it counts as "published" -- published for copyright purposes includes so-claimed trade secrets)
Some of you may have seen a British tv show inspired by the MIT design competition. It was shown in the US as Junkyard Wars. (In the UK, it runs under the name Scrapheap Challenge)
Quick summary: Two three person teams, pair of matching workshops. Large pile of scrap metal as feedstock. Morning of competition, you find out what problem you get to solve. Say a 4 person amphibian, or a glider that can carry one human. A device that lets you retreive a Mini in 20 meters of water, a non-wheeled machine that can traverse a tank testing course... You get 10 hours construction time. Next day, the two teams machines are tested head to head. Winner moves on to the next round, and a harder challenge...
Well the US tv network wants a series with north american accents, and are willing to pay to get it. So they need 8 teams, ASAP. (they start filiming in August, applications are due the end of the month). The show will be taped in London, so teams selected get flown over and put up at the networks expense.
More details, can be found at Junkyard Wars
Disclaimer: I don't work for the TV network, or the production company that is taping the show. They did just buy me plane tickets, I will be spending a week in London so I can play with their piles of stuff on camera.
Check out my teams page -- The NERDS
-dp-
Organizer, The New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society; The NERDS