I chatted with a counter guy at a coffee shop the afternoon after they'd taken a counterfeit $20 and discovered it later. He showed it to me, and, yes, it sucked, but I could see how if you were slapping out drinks with a line out the door you'd just look at the denomination and drop it in the till.
"Good enough" is the point of counterfeiting, and there are lots of ways to offset the difficulties of obtaining good paper or getting the colors exactly right by trying to spend it in places with uneven lighting and rushed staff.
I've not built a telescope, but I've got a friend who's made a bunch, who runs TelescopeMaking.org, and in talking with him it seems like the key to success is to find your local telescope making group and hang out with them on their work nights.
You'll have the experience of people who've already made several, be able to borrow some of their tools, and share parts and ideas.
Besides which, you'll probably meet some cool people.
Yes! I've been doing this for over a year now, and it's amazing how well it works. A reasonable bank of flourescents (I use a fixture sold under the brand name "HappyLite" or something similar) makes me comfortably *want* to get up at most half an hour after the lights go on. But that's only on the sleepy mornings, normally it's just a wonderfully non-jarring way to wake up.
I think the next big advances are going to be in biology. No, I don't think we're going to live forever in the near future, there's not enough room for healthcare as a percent of GNP to make that a reality. The two big advances are going to be in:
1. Biology for manufacturing. Call your "nanotech" what you will, simulating large scale mechanics at a small scale just has too many problems. However, revamp bamboo to grow me a house, or corals to grow me dishes, and we're talking something that's got a market.
2. Computer interfaces. Right now we've got a few monkeys controlling robotic arms (and world superpowers, but I digress), and there are definitely parallels to be drawn to the world of various gliders and steam powered aircraft that were burgeoning around 1903. Something with huge economic and social potential, that can completely "change the world" in the way aviation promised to, is a moderate bandwidth back that bypasses our current sensory system.
Re:I snortled your chir-blek!
on
The Scar
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I read Perdido Street Station and although the language was often alien, I thought that this was one of the few places its use was justified. So often when SF writers try to write about creatures that are outside of human experience they end up being humans in other guises, but Perdido Street Station managed to make some of those characters the best realized because they were so strange.
Unfortunately, I found I didn't care enough for the more human characters to give a damn what happened, so in the end I thought the story was weak enough that I don't recommend the book, but the dense prose builds the best Giger-esque world I've read about.
So, yes the prose is dense, but it works. I won't be picking up the current version because I think that the story skills aren't up to the storytelling skills.
PerlFS has allowed you to do pretty much arbitrary things on a filesystem for years. It'd be an afternoon's hacking to make your favorite "rc" file accessible this way.
I think the reason it hasn't been done yet is that everyone has acknowledged that the registry is a bad idea carried out to perfection.
As an ex member of Pixar's Graphics R&D group: Yep, exactly that happens. Often times a scene will have some sort of issue that you otherwise wouldn't see, texture memory access patterns, whatever.
There's nothing like having a real world test case to get those optimization neurons working.
New features happen in the slack time, making them work fast happens when the production deadline is fast approaching.
Attitudes like this don't bode well for the company, so I wouldn't sweat it. By the time you'd end up making your way through the various levels of double-secret probation for your 3 warnings and get canned, the company will undoubtedly have wasted enough resources tracking down such flagrant miscreants and have gone down the tubes.
Real companies, companies with long-term prospects that are going to pay off for you and make a career, don't get anal about this stuff. They realize that you're human, and that what matters is what you produce for the company, not how well you dance in lock-step to the tune of the company culture or even how long you're there every day.
It's not you, it's them, and the sooner you take steps to find someone who values your work the better you'll do long-term.
This is going to sound like a troll, but it's really not.
If all of the marketing weenies and pointy haired ones that use Word and PowerPoint as an email format actually had to pay for their copies of Office, they'd quickly start looking for alternatives. Those of us who'd like to stop supporting Microsoft just becausee we have to read documents created by these folks can do something very simple:
Every time you see someone using a pirated version of a Microsoft product in a system that helps maintain the lock-in, mailing you Word docs or similar, inform the Business Software Alliance. If enough of the suits get bent over and reamed by Microsoft lawyers, eventually they'll start to discover that it doesn't make business sense to pirate software. If they stop doing that, then they'll discover that the costs of using MS Office are far higher than they'd previously thought, and they'll start looking for alternatives.
Seems pricey, & how to do it
on
Mini-Box M-100
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It isn't that much smaller than the iDot mini-ITX machines (I'm just a customer, I've bought a bunch for various embedded applications), which, by the time you stuff in some RAM you had lying around anyway are under $200. If you're going to spend an extra $295 for a display and a few buttons, going super small and super low power with one of the gazillion PC104 vendors seems smarter.
In my house we have two laptops with 802.11b that are almost always close at hand, so running the whole thing headless and just using one of those laptops with a web browser to control the media center seems like the obvious choice.
When I first got into the Internet back in the early '90s, we were looking for ways to build a local real-time network, and building an ISP was the only way we could think of to fund it. But some applications I'd like to see based on the things we were talking about back then:
If every business can afford to have a network, a lot of business that's currently ineffeciently conducted over the phone could be done via the network. Every restaurant with a take-out menu should, at the very least, be encouraged to put their menus on a server in the restaurant.
Hopefully some enterprising college student can leverage this into giving approximate wait times, or perhaps tying online ordering into a restaurant management system.
It's a dangerous one, but think about what public records could get put online. If there's a server in the town hall, putting minutes of meetings and everything else that gets typed into that LAN should then be easy. For a while we had one of our town councilmembers doing that on his personal pages, but if it can be automated that's so much the better.
Encourage manufacturing companies to think about what real-time high speed communication with other in-town companies could mean. "Just In Time" and inventory management becomes that much easier when you can get companies to share production information.
And if that's not bidirectional for $40/month, at least for in-town bandwidth, then do your best to fight it and let the phone companies and cable companies compete for your business. As a public utility, this only has value if it lets people communicate, rather than merely being an entertainment delivery system, ie: point-n-drool cable TV.
I'm using Via Eden boards for various embedded systems (motion controller, an Ogg Vorbis player for the house, and so forth), and with great trepidation sat down to build my own installs from source code.
It really isn't that hard.
First off, get an SFF to standard IDE adapter so you can put the hard disk in your main computer and copy stuff to it rather than having to copy stuff around on floppies 'til you get a network drive up. Costs you $20, you'll end up using it a few more times, I guarantee.
Mount that drive, create the basic file system (for me with a stripped down 2.4.19 kernel it was/boot,/bin,/dev,/dev/cciss,/etc,/lib,/opt,/proc,/sbin,/tmp,/var,/usr,/bin,/lib, and/etc/init.d, although I was using BusyBox for my utilities, more complex init situations will want more in/etc).
In your "/etc/lilo.conf" (on this new drive) do a "disk=/dev/hde" (or wherever the new drive ends up on your disk chain) and a "bios=0x80") to tell it that you're wanting to boot off the first BIOS drive, everything else as you normally would.
Then just use "ldd" to check what dependencies are for various files and copy 'em over.
It's unclear from the article whether that leaves the style information intact, and obviously Gary Edwards has an ax to grind, but in the systems I implement, sometimes I can't get users to adopt the use of style sheets, but I can extract the semantic information from stylistic patterns. It's not all that difficult to look at the formatting for a screenplay, for example, and pull out the meta information about what actors appear in what scenes based on the bold outdented bits.
If I can get to the presentation markup as well, if the style sheets are in an easy to use format, then this is no problem. If the XML is a simple export format rather than the full document then I may as well be printing to PostScript and trying to reverse engineer the semantics from that.
Look further. There are laptops out there with longer run times. If I swap the CD drive for the second battery in my Fujitsu Lifebook and am careful not to hit the disk too often and keep the backlight low, I can get 8 to 11 hours of run time.
I think the real reason nobody's building more laptops like this is that for most people laptops are a toy, and a brighter bigger screen to impress the other marketing dorks is far more important to those purchasers than being able to get away from everything for a full day. And, too, how often are you really away from being able to sneak wall power for that long? Even on flights to Asia, which is why I got the extra battery for this thing, I usually need to catch a few hours of sleep so that I'm functional when I get there, which makes the run time I really need if I want to work that whole trip (rather than, say, divert myself with something on dead trees) more like five or six hours.
Beyond just automated builds, my big issue with VisualStudio is that it sucks boulders through capillary tubes if you ever have to change compilation options on more than one build target, or add a bunch of "only slightly different" items to a build. Besides the fact that it's often bloody impossible to figure out where it's setting a given compiler option.
And when I've used the VC command line tools and called up Microsoft to report bugs I've gotten laughter, at best. They simply won't support anything but the visual environment.
This gives a full-featured development environment using real production quality tools in an environment that won't be blowing chunks every time I try to do something remotely outlandish with the USB bus. I've no problem with having a Windows box beside my Linux box for running the app, I just want a stable, full-featured development environment. Linux cross-compiling onto a Samba mount is closer to that than Microsoft's been in many years.
Think about it: Do you really want an MCSE fixing your computer? Licensing mandates a certain minimum competency, but in practice it means that all people fixing computers operate at that minimum competency. And you know that the big players like CompUSA are going to get involved in the licensing process in a way that makes their employees get the certification easier than independents.
Even if it means I have to be an informed consumer, I'd much rather have choice and make my own decisions. With choice there will be reasons for the good people to stay in the field.
Remember that since a trademark is specific to use, even if the complainer manages to steal this domain from the poor guy (assuming he's working in good faith) they haven't necessarily struck a blow for good. I mean, if you've had the trademark registered that long, why the hell didn't you register it first?
I've noticed quite a few instances recently where/. posters have ignored specific requests or instructions in the articles that they're replying to. Since/. posters can and do grow up to be scientists, I don't see why science should be any different?
I just set up a cron job that copies newly changed files and database records to (and from) my colo box, and the colo box is several thousand miles away. If you haven't got a colo machine, see if a friend will share resources with you. In these days of DSL and cable modem, finding a way to get copies of your files off-site is fairly easy. "find" with its various "-*newer" options and "touch" make this rather easy.
You might want to use a safe deposit box for the keys you encrypt those files with, but geographically disparate repositories done automatically works for me.
Well, think about it. Bond is the guy with the snappy suits and the perfect hair who wanders cluelessly through the machine room, poking at things and making them explode.
Q is the technical genius who ends up picking up after this schmuck.
Anyone who's ever been a sysadmin or programmer and had to support salesweasels has seen this one played out.
Hee hee hee. Those of us who understand morality resent Christians who appropriate the term "moral" in meaningless catch-phrases like "the moral community".
And yeesh, if you're concerned about that, how do you feel about Blair Brown's Ax of the Apostles?
(Hey,/. folks, how about allowing "cite" in your tags so we can properly mark-up our text?)
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the Hacker's Conference happened at or near Yosemite a few years back. I was told it was very cool.
I chatted with a counter guy at a coffee shop the afternoon after they'd taken a counterfeit $20 and discovered it later. He showed it to me, and, yes, it sucked, but I could see how if you were slapping out drinks with a line out the door you'd just look at the denomination and drop it in the till.
"Good enough" is the point of counterfeiting, and there are lots of ways to offset the difficulties of obtaining good paper or getting the colors exactly right by trying to spend it in places with uneven lighting and rushed staff.
I've not built a telescope, but I've got a friend who's made a bunch, who runs TelescopeMaking.org, and in talking with him it seems like the key to success is to find your local telescope making group and hang out with them on their work nights.
You'll have the experience of people who've already made several, be able to borrow some of their tools, and share parts and ideas.
Besides which, you'll probably meet some cool people.
Yes! I've been doing this for over a year now, and it's amazing how well it works. A reasonable bank of flourescents (I use a fixture sold under the brand name "HappyLite" or something similar) makes me comfortably *want* to get up at most half an hour after the lights go on. But that's only on the sleepy mornings, normally it's just a wonderfully non-jarring way to wake up.
I can't praise lights as an alarm clock enough.
I think the next big advances are going to be in biology. No, I don't think we're going to live forever in the near future, there's not enough room for healthcare as a percent of GNP to make that a reality. The two big advances are going to be in:
1. Biology for manufacturing. Call your "nanotech" what you will, simulating large scale mechanics at a small scale just has too many problems. However, revamp bamboo to grow me a house, or corals to grow me dishes, and we're talking something that's got a market.
2. Computer interfaces. Right now we've got a few monkeys controlling robotic arms (and world superpowers, but I digress), and there are definitely parallels to be drawn to the world of various gliders and steam powered aircraft that were burgeoning around 1903. Something with huge economic and social potential, that can completely "change the world" in the way aviation promised to, is a moderate bandwidth back that bypasses our current sensory system.
I read Perdido Street Station and although the language was often alien, I thought that this was one of the few places its use was justified. So often when SF writers try to write about creatures that are outside of human experience they end up being humans in other guises, but Perdido Street Station managed to make some of those characters the best realized because they were so strange.
Unfortunately, I found I didn't care enough for the more human characters to give a damn what happened, so in the end I thought the story was weak enough that I don't recommend the book, but the dense prose builds the best Giger-esque world I've read about.
So, yes the prose is dense, but it works. I won't be picking up the current version because I think that the story skills aren't up to the storytelling skills.
PerlFS has allowed you to do pretty much arbitrary things on a filesystem for years. It'd be an afternoon's hacking to make your favorite "rc" file accessible this way.
I think the reason it hasn't been done yet is that everyone has acknowledged that the registry is a bad idea carried out to perfection.
A9 CD 4C ED FD A9 C5 4C ED FD A9 8D ...
(I don't remember my Apple ][ ROM entry points perfectly, that could be "4C FD ED"...)
As an ex member of Pixar's Graphics R&D group: Yep, exactly that happens. Often times a scene will have some sort of issue that you otherwise wouldn't see, texture memory access patterns, whatever.
There's nothing like having a real world test case to get those optimization neurons working.
New features happen in the slack time, making them work fast happens when the production deadline is fast approaching.
Attitudes like this don't bode well for the company, so I wouldn't sweat it. By the time you'd end up making your way through the various levels of double-secret probation for your 3 warnings and get canned, the company will undoubtedly have wasted enough resources tracking down such flagrant miscreants and have gone down the tubes.
Real companies, companies with long-term prospects that are going to pay off for you and make a career, don't get anal about this stuff. They realize that you're human, and that what matters is what you produce for the company, not how well you dance in lock-step to the tune of the company culture or even how long you're there every day.
It's not you, it's them, and the sooner you take steps to find someone who values your work the better you'll do long-term.
This is going to sound like a troll, but it's really not.
If all of the marketing weenies and pointy haired ones that use Word and PowerPoint as an email format actually had to pay for their copies of Office, they'd quickly start looking for alternatives. Those of us who'd like to stop supporting Microsoft just becausee we have to read documents created by these folks can do something very simple:
Every time you see someone using a pirated version of a Microsoft product in a system that helps maintain the lock-in, mailing you Word docs or similar, inform the Business Software Alliance. If enough of the suits get bent over and reamed by Microsoft lawyers, eventually they'll start to discover that it doesn't make business sense to pirate software. If they stop doing that, then they'll discover that the costs of using MS Office are far higher than they'd previously thought, and they'll start looking for alternatives.
It isn't that much smaller than the iDot mini-ITX machines (I'm just a customer, I've bought a bunch for various embedded applications), which, by the time you stuff in some RAM you had lying around anyway are under $200. If you're going to spend an extra $295 for a display and a few buttons, going super small and super low power with one of the gazillion PC104 vendors seems smarter.
In my house we have two laptops with 802.11b that are almost always close at hand, so running the whole thing headless and just using one of those laptops with a web browser to control the media center seems like the obvious choice.
I need to finish up with code for the web server and media play control, but I've got some instructions on building one of these to boot off CompactFlash into stripped down Linux if anyone cares.
Or appointing Henry Kissinger to lead a "fact finding" commission.
And if that's not bidirectional for $40/month, at least for in-town bandwidth, then do your best to fight it and let the phone companies and cable companies compete for your business. As a public utility, this only has value if it lets people communicate, rather than merely being an entertainment delivery system, ie: point-n-drool cable TV.
I'm using Via Eden boards for various embedded systems (motion controller, an Ogg Vorbis player for the house, and so forth), and with great trepidation sat down to build my own installs from source code.
/boot, /bin, /dev, /dev/cciss, /etc, /lib, /opt, /proc, /sbin, /tmp, /var, /usr, /bin, /lib, and /etc/init.d, although I was using BusyBox for my utilities, more complex init situations will want more in /etc).
It really isn't that hard.
First off, get an SFF to standard IDE adapter so you can put the hard disk in your main computer and copy stuff to it rather than having to copy stuff around on floppies 'til you get a network drive up. Costs you $20, you'll end up using it a few more times, I guarantee.
Mount that drive, create the basic file system (for me with a stripped down 2.4.19 kernel it was
In your "/etc/lilo.conf" (on this new drive) do a "disk=/dev/hde" (or wherever the new drive ends up on your disk chain) and a "bios=0x80") to tell it that you're wanting to boot off the first BIOS drive, everything else as you normally would.
Then just use "ldd" to check what dependencies are for various files and copy 'em over.
Yeah, but...
It's unclear from the article whether that leaves the style information intact, and obviously Gary Edwards has an ax to grind, but in the systems I implement, sometimes I can't get users to adopt the use of style sheets, but I can extract the semantic information from stylistic patterns. It's not all that difficult to look at the formatting for a screenplay, for example, and pull out the meta information about what actors appear in what scenes based on the bold outdented bits.
If I can get to the presentation markup as well, if the style sheets are in an easy to use format, then this is no problem. If the XML is a simple export format rather than the full document then I may as well be printing to PostScript and trying to reverse engineer the semantics from that.
Look further. There are laptops out there with longer run times. If I swap the CD drive for the second battery in my Fujitsu Lifebook and am careful not to hit the disk too often and keep the backlight low, I can get 8 to 11 hours of run time.
I think the real reason nobody's building more laptops like this is that for most people laptops are a toy, and a brighter bigger screen to impress the other marketing dorks is far more important to those purchasers than being able to get away from everything for a full day. And, too, how often are you really away from being able to sneak wall power for that long? Even on flights to Asia, which is why I got the extra battery for this thing, I usually need to catch a few hours of sleep so that I'm functional when I get there, which makes the run time I really need if I want to work that whole trip (rather than, say, divert myself with something on dead trees) more like five or six hours.
Beyond just automated builds, my big issue with VisualStudio is that it sucks boulders through capillary tubes if you ever have to change compilation options on more than one build target, or add a bunch of "only slightly different" items to a build. Besides the fact that it's often bloody impossible to figure out where it's setting a given compiler option.
And when I've used the VC command line tools and called up Microsoft to report bugs I've gotten laughter, at best. They simply won't support anything but the visual environment.
This gives a full-featured development environment using real production quality tools in an environment that won't be blowing chunks every time I try to do something remotely outlandish with the USB bus. I've no problem with having a Windows box beside my Linux box for running the app, I just want a stable, full-featured development environment. Linux cross-compiling onto a Samba mount is closer to that than Microsoft's been in many years.
Think about it: Do you really want an MCSE fixing your computer? Licensing mandates a certain minimum competency, but in practice it means that all people fixing computers operate at that minimum competency. And you know that the big players like CompUSA are going to get involved in the licensing process in a way that makes their employees get the certification easier than independents.
Even if it means I have to be an informed consumer, I'd much rather have choice and make my own decisions. With choice there will be reasons for the good people to stay in the field.
Remember that since a trademark is specific to use, even if the complainer manages to steal this domain from the poor guy (assuming he's working in good faith) they haven't necessarily struck a blow for good. I mean, if you've had the trademark registered that long, why the hell didn't you register it first?
I've noticed quite a few instances recently where /. posters have ignored specific requests or instructions in the articles that they're replying to. Since /. posters can and do grow up to be scientists, I don't see why science should be any different?
For other Brewster Kahle interviews, see also the Slashdot story that pointed to the O'Reilly interview and the Slashdot story that pointed to the Feed magazine interview (which is currently unaccessible from my machine).
I just set up a cron job that copies newly changed files and database records to (and from) my colo box, and the colo box is several thousand miles away. If you haven't got a colo machine, see if a friend will share resources with you. In these days of DSL and cable modem, finding a way to get copies of your files off-site is fairly easy. "find" with its various "-*newer" options and "touch" make this rather easy.
You might want to use a safe deposit box for the keys you encrypt those files with, but geographically disparate repositories done automatically works for me.
Well, think about it. Bond is the guy with the snappy suits and the perfect hair who wanders cluelessly through the machine room, poking at things and making them explode.
Q is the technical genius who ends up picking up after this schmuck.
Anyone who's ever been a sysadmin or programmer and had to support salesweasels has seen this one played out.
Hee hee hee. Those of us who understand morality resent Christians who appropriate the term "moral" in meaningless catch-phrases like "the moral community".
/. folks, how about allowing "cite" in your tags so we can properly mark-up our text?)
And yeesh, if you're concerned about that, how do you feel about Blair Brown's Ax of the Apostles?
(Hey,