What happens when your "skills" are commonplace and the job market is no longer tight?
The shame on you for not keeping yourself marketable. I really is as simple as that.
Anybody can be a code monkey, just as anyone can flip burgers. You think that being able to code PHP or Perl gives you some kind of right to a good wage?
Personally, I'm a pretty good programmer and okay hardware designer. But it's my passion for these things (especially hardware) which drives me to better myself and my broad range of interests give me many different ways to attack a problem. This sets me apart from many other people or even EEs who went to school, got their papers and sat on their laurels. If I ever become complacent then yes I will fall by the wayside. Is that someone else's fault? Should I have some kind of prop? Of course not.
(And yes, I do have a young family, four other mouths to feed, car loans, a mortgage and credit cards. Telling me to grow up and "wait till I have a life" aren't valid.)
... But I am positive that this is what every union in existance has started with.
And if you think you can just LEAVE for another job, think again. The dotcoms have fallen. The party is over.
Only for the people who have no skills and aren't living up to what they said they could do. I'm a pretty damn good embedded systems designer (HW+SW) with "enough" skill in DB and IT to get a decent paying job no matter where I go. The party is still in full force for me, and will likely continue to do so until I decide I don't want to play anymore.
Being from Detroit (the home of the auto industry) and having a good number of family and friends in the industry, I can tell you that this is simply not true. Tomorrow when you get in your car and it doesn't explode three times on your way to the office, be thankful that your vehicle was assembled by people who are skilled and take pride in their work. Yes, it's repetitive, but so is designing and building apps that all look like nothing more than modified spreadsheets. And yes, there are those who do fulfill the stereotype, but there are slackers in every working venue in every industry -- look around you, for cryin' out loud!
I disagree. The reason your car doesn't explode is because it's engineered that way. I am honstly awestruck when my auto mechanic friend pulls parts out of a vehicle to repair and they are in such a state of disrepair that you have to shake your head... I mean if your CV joints go, they usually cripple the vehicle instead of locking up and causing an accident. If your tie rods go... well then you're fucked but usually these things are built such that when a piece dies, it dies gracefully. I would hate to think what vehicles designed by web programmers would do.
Back to the point: I am not disputing that your relatives are dedicated, hardworking people. The thing I'm disputing is that that has anything to do with the vechicle not working when it gets out. Auto plants are built with so many checks and balances that bad product just doesn't get out of the place: It's either reworked or scrapped. Take a moment and think about the ratio of QA-related tasks to actual assembly tasks and you'll see what I mean.
If a job requires a level of skill then pay for it. Don't pay the twitt stamping out metal pieces $28/hr to watch a machine work and take the product and put it on a shelf for post-processing. That is promoting mediocrity. Make him responsible for making the product good (maintaining the machine, etc.) or pay him minimum + seniority. That's my opinion, anyway.
Couldn't you argue that DirecTV hacked their own subscribers and destroyed their property? Some of these cards were bought and sold on E-Bay, so it's clearly *owned* by the subscriber.
Not too bright today, are ya...
Those cards are property of DirecTV and Huges. Whoever sold them had no right to sell them and whoever bought them bought stolen goods. Last I checked you can't (or at least it hasn't been tested that you can) buy stolen goods and then sue when the rightful owner "reclaims" them, so to speak.
Remember, Huges OWNS those cards. You own the receiver. The receiver's fine; just call Huges and get their defective card replaced.
but should Microsoft be able to self-destruct your PC if they discover you stole a copy of Windows?
Microsoft doesn't own your computer. They could destroy the CD you installed from since that is (supposedly) theirs but the situations are completely different. If Microsoft LEASED the computer to you then they could nuke the hardware at their discretion... If they hosed your data then that's another story.
Why post a story that sounds like Evil Corporation is battling innocent hackers, when in reality it's a company fighting THEFT of service. If this were on the cable side of things, it'd be illegal. Amazing how people can forget the ethics of things.
Ahh but look at the comments: almost everyone is congradulating DirecTV -- they pulled off a riteous hack and deserve praise here. I'm sorry to say that if I were one of the DTV hackers I would have fallen for this lock stock and barrel too. I'm up in Canada and actually subscribe to Bell ExpressVu (similar, almost identical tech, different satellite and programming) but I know a fair number of people around here who will be bit by this.
Kudos to DTV engineers. Get rid of a few lawyers and give these guys a big raise!
As an EE student in college, that for some reason sounds like it would be possible to bypass in hardware. Solder the output pin(s) of this chip here, break this connection, etc. Can any real EEs comment on this?
Unfortunately the various signals you're looking for probably don't exist on any pins; the chip which does teh decode also does the conversion for various output formats. Flip a bit in a register and certain outputs are disabled from within the chip itself.
As a longtime hacker The proliferation of ASICs and FPGAs are disheartening. As a designer they're great. It's not easy being me.
actually I've always been afraid of "the country". A number of times I've gone out to a rural area and almost gone insane during the day. It's just so quiet! I find it hard to maintain a single line of thought in my head without background noise. During the night it's a different story. Trying to sleep in a rural town is totally dependant on the whether anyone has mowed the lawn that day. If they have, you lie in your bed totally incapable of falling asleep. You have no problem falling which is how I feel in complete silence. If the lawn hasn't been mowed that day you have the standard background noise of traffic replaced with crickets and other green what-have-you's. I dont know how people can stand it. Give me the sweet background noise of traffic and an occasional tram. There is only two other background noises that I can stand. A fan in summer or a thunder storm. But even a thunder storm in the country is ruined by the constant croaking of frogs.
Odd, I find the opposite... Absolute silence is wonderful sometimes, and summer nights a hundred or so miles from any kind of city are incredible... The crickets and frogs, a crackling fire perhaps... and the sky! You don't see even 1/10 as many stars in the city because of all the light pollution.
My ideal place to live would be in the middle of nowhere with a fiber connection. Hell I'll pipe in city noise if I ever feel I need it.:-)
If it needs a fan, then that's a sign of a BAD DESIGN.
Are you a designer?
I install radio repeater controllers on mountain tops for various communications companies (radio, TV, cellular relay, business 2-way, etc.)
Nope. Kindly keep your opinions stated as such and not as fact. Fans do NOT indicate bad design.
Now to get on with business: Fans in designs are NOT a bad thing if the design calls for them. Your communications equipment won't be spitting out too much heat since the control likely runs off of 24VDC bussed from a single (redundant) power supply which can probably endure a colder environment. Your actual transmitters will throw out heat in proportion to their strength.
Then you go on to say that the ambient is 80 below (degrees Farenheit) -- of course you won't need much to get rid of the heat! You've got a freaking 200 degree C temperature differential! If I'm not mistaken, you'll have heaters in the enclosures in order to keep the temp within component tolerances!
Now let's come to the Real World (in the sense of consumer equipment) -- People like to be in a 20 degree C ambient, so their equipment will be in there as well. Commercial components are spec'd to operate between 0 and 70 degrees C. So there's 50 degrees to play with there, not counting heat thrown out by the power supply, hard drives, motherboard chipset and expansion cards. Heat sinks can only distribute and radiate so much heat. While I'm not saying that 60W for a processor is an efficient design, it is by no means poor. Poor design is when you don't meet the design spec.
In the world of industrial equipment (I design for this environment) your components are rated -40 (I think, we don't run into the low end much) to 85 degrees C but you usually use commercial-rated components since your rarely in an enclosure that gets below zero. We too have equipment in the middle of nowhere where it's cold enough to freeze spit before it hits the ground and the location is unmanned. Know what though? It's the hot and/or high elevation remote locations which give us the most trouble. We literally have equipment in the amazon rainforest and in the Chillean mountain ranges (Andes?). Even when we have our power electronics bypassed we can't avoid generating 1 Watt / Phase / Amp (three phase equipment). This stuff has to go into NEMA 4 enclosures to keep the crap out. Fans are unacceptable here (watertight) so we need to oversize the enclosure in order to increase the air volume inside the enclosure and help get the heat radiated. In some cases we have to use industrial air conditioners (want to talk expensive? Try a NEMA 3R air conditioner!) in order to keep the heat down and that is in a design where we are already generating minimal heat! (you can't get much less minimal than a slab of copper!)
Fans are out in this environment. Fans gunk up with dust and die. And a trip to fix it costs thousands of dollars. Actually *anything* with moving parts is out. The oil in fan motors and even in hard drive motors can gel up when it gets that cold. So we use solid state flash+static ram drives, and 486/25s that need no fans. Cursoe may finally be the next CPU upgrade because it runs cool without help.
Yes and you have the money to spend on lower power equipment and cold-temp tech. The industrial world has MUCH higher price margins than even the least competitive commercial sales environment. Please try to keep that in perspective before bashing commercial designers.
Fans are cheap, not perfect. Just because you have the advantage of a 200 degree temperature differential to improve your radiated heat transfer doesn't mean we all do. And just because you can afford to sell expensive technology (flash vs HDD) doesn't mean we all do.
I have encountered FS that were unwriteable or even completely unusuable after a serious crash/problem. THIS is the problem I see.
That's because of the fs drivers in the OS; not an inherent fault in the fs itself. Personally I have never seen a FAT[16|32|VFAT] system die as horribly as you've described and I have been using these filesystems since the DOS 3 days. Mind you I've seen some nasty corruption but almost always restoring from the 2nd copy of the FAT has been successful in gaining access to the data (or at least the vast majority of it)
You're right; people will not accept this in an appliance. However with a system mounted RO 99% of the time I really don't see this happenning.
Brownout - power failure during any phase of operation. This includes especially writing operations.
You combat this by having simple chkdsk-like functions which just ignore errors (flag them, free the sectors allocated without directory entries, whatever) -- remember you're storing MP3s on here, not term papers. MP3s can be replaced so this isn't really all THAT critical if music starts disappearing, so long as the rest of the songs are unaffected.
FAT even worse (deadly self-crippling easily possible).
As I said in an earlier post... you guys are going WAY overboard here. VFAT (long filename extensions on top of FAT) is more than adequate. You don't need to worry about fragmentation, you don't need to worry about packing tails, you don't need to worry about journalling. It's an MP3 player, not a file server.
would recommend a journalling file system, because you don't want to lose your MP3 selection if you don't unmount your drive properly (which could happen otherwise).
Don't do much real-world design I take it...
Why not just use FAT32, it's an extraordinarily simple fs, you can put the drive in a plain-jane computer and get data on and off it for debugging the FS if need be. To combat shutdown problems, just mount the damn thing Read-Only unless you're going to be putting data on it. There is absolutely no reason to keep the entire fs in a read-write state. The playlist can be brought into memory (simple index) and any changes to it can be made permanent via a "commit" button which remounts rw, updates and remounts ro again.
Hell you don't even need a "commit" button -- when the device gets hooked up to change the fs you could commit the changes then. The amount of data which changes on an MP3 player is minimal.
Also, although you don't say it's portable, if it is, a normal hard drive won't be suitable since they won't stand the movement. If it is portable, use a solid-state device.
With drives as cheap as they are and as rugged as they are, you should have no problems using desktop-grade hard drives in a portable environment. No, they won't last forever. Laptop drives are getting pretty cheap too and they will last quite a bit longer but saying that desktop-grade equipment won't last is deceptive at best.
Finally, as to hard drive vs. cd, cd is much more flexible, since you imply that the device is a music player in function and hence there won't be any advantage from being able to download music onto the hard drive, and music players aren't much good unless you can change the album.
I agree with you here; either give the player a network jack and use SMB (nothing would be cooler to the class than plugging it into the network and just copying stuff on and off it); you don't want to have to pull the drive out and hook it up to a computer. USB may be nice too, depending on how you want it to work.
MP3 players I've concieved worked off the simple principle that there was an ATAPI interface and whatever you happened to hook up (generic HDD, CD, DVD or CF (in IDE mode)) the player would have to have drivers for. That way you have some choice in what to use for media while the base software stays the same.
To give you experience in setting up another system?
That's not a convincing reason. I don't tear down and rebuild engines just to get more experience doing so; I tear down and rebuild my own and engines like it. It may seem shortsighted but I don't have all the time in the world like I used to; taking up my time learning something that is likely not to change much isn't (IMO) a good idea.
You make it sound like it would be the end of the world to switch to BSD from Linux. I did that switch 4 years ago and never regretted it.
No no no... I don't consider it a drastic move by any means, I am just trying to weigh the pros and cons. I'm comfortable on Linux and, while I know I can become comfortable elsewhere (it didn't happen with Linux overnight), I am wondering why to consider it.
i know it has rate-limiting to make DOS attacks not work as well...
I'm sorry, but once that barrage of packets is queued up at the remote end you have NO hope in averting it. rate-limiting only works if you are doing the rate-limiting on the remote end of the network.
On a slightly different note: I've considered going to BSD firewalls off and on over the years since learning about Linux and Unix in general but I haven't been able to find a really strong reason to. Ok it's more mature. Sure it's got a better stack. But honestly, unless you're running on super fast networks the Linux stack seems good enough and Linux seems mature enough. A reasonably-skilled admin can lock it down and anything short of a kernel exploit keeps it secure. For me, it just doesn't seem worth it to pick up an entirely new OS.
Yeah it smells like firelighters but I'm being honest. Anyone who's been on/. as long as I have should know that I'm no troll. Are there any really convincing reasons to move to BSD?
It can be done, but a 2.2 kernel needs to be patched to do it. I've not tried it, but the 2.4 kernel should allow you to "port-forward" the tcp connection and the GRE tunnel back to the Win2k system.
Interesting. I avoided that whole mess by putting the pptpd server on my firewall and having the sales critters either dial into modems on the firewall itself (800 #) or through their favourite ISP.
It's been a while since I've tried it but I believe that I can establish a VPN connection with the office from my system at home, which goes through a 2.2 firewall. (80386DX33 named pokey:-)
Do you have any links to the patches and whatnot? pppd was the hardest to do in my setup, as it needed MPPE patches and stateless patches to the MPPE patch and so on and so on. It does work remarkably well and is more secure than having NT do the server end (it rejects MSCHAPV1 requests)
I use a minimum of 4 public IP addresses, 2 for my DNS machines, 1 for my webserver, and the other for my NAT box.
Why on earth do you have both your DNS servers on the same network? It was my understanding that the whole reason for multiple DNS servers was to aid in removing network dependency.
Also, what's wrong with having your webserver on the internal network and portforwarding port 80? (and the other various ports, for other servers, even DNS)
I agree with your completely about public IPs if you're going to be splitting off that bandwidth for others and it's always nice to have extra IPs for things which just plain don't work through a firewall. But as the other poster said, waste is not necessary.
Wouldn't most internet companies/backbone sites/universities have uninterruptable power anyway? If the net shut down everytime the power in CA did, we'd be in bad shape.
Communications equipment usually runs off of 48 volts DC. The fiber terminators and other telco equipment (LIUs, concentrators, etc.) usually run off of a few lead-acid batteries which are continuously float-charged. Interruptions in the grid don't even phase them.
As for generators: many facilities have them as well to cover critical equipment. Every hospital with an OR has one. Hell even we have one, but it's for testing our starters with transfer switches and the like.:-)
does it have running gag references to Beowulf clusters, grits, or Natalie Portman?
Hate to tell you, but none of the things you mentioned are running gags. Running gags are funny.
Maybe it's because your UID starts in the couple-hundreds of thousands but those things were even only slightly funny the first MILLION times they've been brought up. Now (and for quite some time) they're just idiotic.
(Person gets you arrested for felony hit and run and says, -- um, -- if you pay us, 1000$ we won't file these charges against you (in CA they have the option sometimes)
Now THAT is criminal!!
If the police were about upholding the law then this would not be an option. Fuck with a system like that the cops would be making their own money. "Um yeah we'll just write up this guy. That takes care of our Christmas party!"
they have this thing called the mks toolkit... and while it isn't a unix filesystem, they do add lots and lots of unix commands and tools so you can run shell scripts, emacs, and stuff on nt. it should work on 2k, not sure.
A longtime friend of mine (known him since grade 4) had a co-op term or three at MKS in Waterloo, ON, Canada. The new stuff is utter shit compared to the old tools. I wouldn't reccomend it unless you need the cardboard box for something.
Looking at the thing, I assume the white is 0 and black 1 and I can only wonder why they didn't do it the other way around. white 1, black 0, after all, there is more white on this page than back, and what is more noticeable? an absence of signal or a signal?
Ahh but the whole message is a signal, 1 or 0. If I recall the transmission is made so that a 0 is one frequency and a 1 another (FM). The carrier is there no matter what is transmitted so it really makes no difference whether it is mostly 1s or mostly 0s.
... or any other IM which does not have the ONE THING that ICQ has over all the others: A fucking systray icon which changes when messages are pending.
I mean how hard is it? I don't want to keep a window open on my screen all the time and I absolutely do not want windows to pop up on their own. Gimme a systray icon/dock/wharf icon which changes and I can either click on or (even better!) have wm-global keybindings stuck to to pull up a message. Jabber, gtkICQ, AIM, GAIM, EveryBuddy, GnomeICU... NONE of these have this feature. LICQ's QT client does and that's about it.
People tell me to get so-and-so IM client. "Does it pop up messages?" is my first question. The second is "Does it have a systray/wharf/dock icon?" is my second. If either of these questions are answered wrong the IM doesn't have a hope in hell of being installed on my machine.
Once law enforcement gets involved, even those uncooperative ISPs become pretty cooperative. That or the people in charge spend a night in jail for obstruction. Then suddenly change their mind and help the investigation.
The ISP I help admin at doesn't keep RADIUS logs past 24 hours for this exact reason. We can't match an IP to a user after 24h, so what are you going to do? Throw us in prison? It's not obstruction, we're not hiding anything.
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What happens when your "skills" are commonplace and the job market is no longer tight?
The shame on you for not keeping yourself marketable. I really is as simple as that.
Anybody can be a code monkey, just as anyone can flip burgers. You think that being able to code PHP or Perl gives you some kind of right to a good wage?
Personally, I'm a pretty good programmer and okay hardware designer. But it's my passion for these things (especially hardware) which drives me to better myself and my broad range of interests give me many different ways to attack a problem. This sets me apart from many other people or even EEs who went to school, got their papers and sat on their laurels. If I ever become complacent then yes I will fall by the wayside. Is that someone else's fault? Should I have some kind of prop? Of course not.
(And yes, I do have a young family, four other mouths to feed, car loans, a mortgage and credit cards. Telling me to grow up and "wait till I have a life" aren't valid.)
... But I am positive that this is what every union in existance has started with.
And if you think you can just LEAVE for another job, think again. The dotcoms have fallen. The party is over.
Only for the people who have no skills and aren't living up to what they said they could do. I'm a pretty damn good embedded systems designer (HW+SW) with "enough" skill in DB and IT to get a decent paying job no matter where I go. The party is still in full force for me, and will likely continue to do so until I decide I don't want to play anymore.
Being from Detroit (the home of the auto industry) and having a good number of family and friends in the industry, I can tell you that this is simply not true. Tomorrow when you get in your car and it doesn't explode three times on your way to the office, be thankful that your vehicle was assembled by people who are skilled and take pride in their work. Yes, it's repetitive, but so is designing and building apps that all look like nothing more than modified spreadsheets. And yes, there are those who do fulfill the stereotype, but there are slackers in every working venue in every industry -- look around you, for cryin' out loud!
I disagree. The reason your car doesn't explode is because it's engineered that way. I am honstly awestruck when my auto mechanic friend pulls parts out of a vehicle to repair and they are in such a state of disrepair that you have to shake your head... I mean if your CV joints go, they usually cripple the vehicle instead of locking up and causing an accident. If your tie rods go... well then you're fucked but usually these things are built such that when a piece dies, it dies gracefully. I would hate to think what vehicles designed by web programmers would do.
Back to the point: I am not disputing that your relatives are dedicated, hardworking people. The thing I'm disputing is that that has anything to do with the vechicle not working when it gets out. Auto plants are built with so many checks and balances that bad product just doesn't get out of the place: It's either reworked or scrapped. Take a moment and think about the ratio of QA-related tasks to actual assembly tasks and you'll see what I mean.
If a job requires a level of skill then pay for it. Don't pay the twitt stamping out metal pieces $28/hr to watch a machine work and take the product and put it on a shelf for post-processing. That is promoting mediocrity. Make him responsible for making the product good (maintaining the machine, etc.) or pay him minimum + seniority. That's my opinion, anyway.
Couldn't you argue that DirecTV hacked their own subscribers and destroyed their property? Some of these cards were bought and sold on E-Bay, so it's clearly *owned* by the subscriber.
Not too bright today, are ya...
Those cards are property of DirecTV and Huges. Whoever sold them had no right to sell them and whoever bought them bought stolen goods. Last I checked you can't (or at least it hasn't been tested that you can) buy stolen goods and then sue when the rightful owner "reclaims" them, so to speak.
Remember, Huges OWNS those cards. You own the receiver. The receiver's fine; just call Huges and get their defective card replaced.
but should Microsoft be able to self-destruct your PC if they discover you stole a copy of Windows?
Microsoft doesn't own your computer. They could destroy the CD you installed from since that is (supposedly) theirs but the situations are completely different. If Microsoft LEASED the computer to you then they could nuke the hardware at their discretion... If they hosed your data then that's another story.
Why post a story that sounds like Evil Corporation is battling innocent hackers, when in reality it's a company fighting THEFT of service. If this were on the cable side of things, it'd be illegal. Amazing how people can forget the ethics of things.
Ahh but look at the comments: almost everyone is congradulating DirecTV -- they pulled off a riteous hack and deserve praise here. I'm sorry to say that if I were one of the DTV hackers I would have fallen for this lock stock and barrel too. I'm up in Canada and actually subscribe to Bell ExpressVu (similar, almost identical tech, different satellite and programming) but I know a fair number of people around here who will be bit by this.
Kudos to DTV engineers. Get rid of a few lawyers and give these guys a big raise!
In other news, apples are compared to oranges, and found to be different
Actually, no they haven't.
(don't worry it's a safe link and actually relevant)
As an EE student in college, that for some reason sounds like it would be possible to bypass in hardware. Solder the output pin(s) of this chip here, break this connection, etc. Can any real EEs comment on this?
Unfortunately the various signals you're looking for probably don't exist on any pins; the chip which does teh decode also does the conversion for various output formats. Flip a bit in a register and certain outputs are disabled from within the chip itself.
As a longtime hacker The proliferation of ASICs and FPGAs are disheartening. As a designer they're great. It's not easy being me.
actually I've always been afraid of "the country". A number of times I've gone out to a rural area and almost gone insane during the day. It's just so quiet! I find it hard to maintain a single line of thought in my head without background noise. During the night it's a different story. Trying to sleep in a rural town is totally dependant on the whether anyone has mowed the lawn that day. If they have, you lie in your bed totally incapable of falling asleep. You have no problem falling which is how I feel in complete silence. If the lawn hasn't been mowed that day you have the standard background noise of traffic replaced with crickets and other green what-have-you's. I dont know how people can stand it. Give me the sweet background noise of traffic and an occasional tram. There is only two other background noises that I can stand. A fan in summer or a thunder storm. But even a thunder storm in the country is ruined by the constant croaking of frogs.
Odd, I find the opposite... Absolute silence is wonderful sometimes, and summer nights a hundred or so miles from any kind of city are incredible... The crickets and frogs, a crackling fire perhaps... and the sky! You don't see even 1/10 as many stars in the city because of all the light pollution.
My ideal place to live would be in the middle of nowhere with a fiber connection. Hell I'll pipe in city noise if I ever feel I need it. :-)
If it needs a fan, then that's a sign of a BAD DESIGN.
Are you a designer?
I install radio repeater controllers on mountain tops for various communications companies (radio, TV, cellular relay, business 2-way, etc.)
Nope. Kindly keep your opinions stated as such and not as fact. Fans do NOT indicate bad design.
Now to get on with business: Fans in designs are NOT a bad thing if the design calls for them. Your communications equipment won't be spitting out too much heat since the control likely runs off of 24VDC bussed from a single (redundant) power supply which can probably endure a colder environment. Your actual transmitters will throw out heat in proportion to their strength.
Then you go on to say that the ambient is 80 below (degrees Farenheit) -- of course you won't need much to get rid of the heat! You've got a freaking 200 degree C temperature differential! If I'm not mistaken, you'll have heaters in the enclosures in order to keep the temp within component tolerances!
Now let's come to the Real World (in the sense of consumer equipment) -- People like to be in a 20 degree C ambient, so their equipment will be in there as well. Commercial components are spec'd to operate between 0 and 70 degrees C. So there's 50 degrees to play with there, not counting heat thrown out by the power supply, hard drives, motherboard chipset and expansion cards. Heat sinks can only distribute and radiate so much heat. While I'm not saying that 60W for a processor is an efficient design, it is by no means poor. Poor design is when you don't meet the design spec.
In the world of industrial equipment (I design for this environment) your components are rated -40 (I think, we don't run into the low end much) to 85 degrees C but you usually use commercial-rated components since your rarely in an enclosure that gets below zero. We too have equipment in the middle of nowhere where it's cold enough to freeze spit before it hits the ground and the location is unmanned. Know what though? It's the hot and/or high elevation remote locations which give us the most trouble. We literally have equipment in the amazon rainforest and in the Chillean mountain ranges (Andes?). Even when we have our power electronics bypassed we can't avoid generating 1 Watt / Phase / Amp (three phase equipment). This stuff has to go into NEMA 4 enclosures to keep the crap out. Fans are unacceptable here (watertight) so we need to oversize the enclosure in order to increase the air volume inside the enclosure and help get the heat radiated. In some cases we have to use industrial air conditioners (want to talk expensive? Try a NEMA 3R air conditioner!) in order to keep the heat down and that is in a design where we are already generating minimal heat! (you can't get much less minimal than a slab of copper!)
Fans are out in this environment. Fans gunk up with dust and die. And a trip to fix it costs thousands of dollars. Actually *anything* with moving parts is out. The oil in fan motors and even in hard drive motors can gel up when it gets that cold. So we use solid state flash+static ram drives, and 486/25s that need no fans. Cursoe may finally be the next CPU upgrade because it runs cool without help.
Yes and you have the money to spend on lower power equipment and cold-temp tech. The industrial world has MUCH higher price margins than even the least competitive commercial sales environment. Please try to keep that in perspective before bashing commercial designers.
Fans are cheap, not perfect. Just because you have the advantage of a 200 degree temperature differential to improve your radiated heat transfer doesn't mean we all do. And just because you can afford to sell expensive technology (flash vs HDD) doesn't mean we all do.
I have encountered FS that were unwriteable or even completely unusuable after a serious crash/problem. THIS is the problem I see.
That's because of the fs drivers in the OS; not an inherent fault in the fs itself. Personally I have never seen a FAT[16|32|VFAT] system die as horribly as you've described and I have been using these filesystems since the DOS 3 days. Mind you I've seen some nasty corruption but almost always restoring from the 2nd copy of the FAT has been successful in gaining access to the data (or at least the vast majority of it)
You're right; people will not accept this in an appliance. However with a system mounted RO 99% of the time I really don't see this happenning.
Brownout - power failure during any phase of operation. This includes especially writing operations.
You combat this by having simple chkdsk-like functions which just ignore errors (flag them, free the sectors allocated without directory entries, whatever) -- remember you're storing MP3s on here, not term papers. MP3s can be replaced so this isn't really all THAT critical if music starts disappearing, so long as the rest of the songs are unaffected.
FAT even worse (deadly self-crippling easily possible).
As I said in an earlier post... you guys are going WAY overboard here. VFAT (long filename extensions on top of FAT) is more than adequate. You don't need to worry about fragmentation, you don't need to worry about packing tails, you don't need to worry about journalling. It's an MP3 player, not a file server.
would recommend a journalling file system, because you don't want to lose your MP3 selection if you don't unmount your drive properly (which could happen otherwise).
Don't do much real-world design I take it...
Why not just use FAT32, it's an extraordinarily simple fs, you can put the drive in a plain-jane computer and get data on and off it for debugging the FS if need be. To combat shutdown problems, just mount the damn thing Read-Only unless you're going to be putting data on it. There is absolutely no reason to keep the entire fs in a read-write state. The playlist can be brought into memory (simple index) and any changes to it can be made permanent via a "commit" button which remounts rw, updates and remounts ro again.
Hell you don't even need a "commit" button -- when the device gets hooked up to change the fs you could commit the changes then. The amount of data which changes on an MP3 player is minimal.
Also, although you don't say it's portable, if it is, a normal hard drive won't be suitable since they won't stand the movement. If it is portable, use a solid-state device.
With drives as cheap as they are and as rugged as they are, you should have no problems using desktop-grade hard drives in a portable environment. No, they won't last forever. Laptop drives are getting pretty cheap too and they will last quite a bit longer but saying that desktop-grade equipment won't last is deceptive at best.
Finally, as to hard drive vs. cd, cd is much more flexible, since you imply that the device is a music player in function and hence there won't be any advantage from being able to download music onto the hard drive, and music players aren't much good unless you can change the album.
I agree with you here; either give the player a network jack and use SMB (nothing would be cooler to the class than plugging it into the network and just copying stuff on and off it); you don't want to have to pull the drive out and hook it up to a computer. USB may be nice too, depending on how you want it to work.
MP3 players I've concieved worked off the simple principle that there was an ATAPI interface and whatever you happened to hook up (generic HDD, CD, DVD or CF (in IDE mode)) the player would have to have drivers for. That way you have some choice in what to use for media while the base software stays the same.
To give you experience in setting up another system?
That's not a convincing reason. I don't tear down and rebuild engines just to get more experience doing so; I tear down and rebuild my own and engines like it. It may seem shortsighted but I don't have all the time in the world like I used to; taking up my time learning something that is likely not to change much isn't (IMO) a good idea.
You make it sound like it would be the end of the world to switch to BSD from Linux. I did that switch 4 years ago and never regretted it.
No no no... I don't consider it a drastic move by any means, I am just trying to weigh the pros and cons. I'm comfortable on Linux and, while I know I can become comfortable elsewhere (it didn't happen with Linux overnight), I am wondering why to consider it.
i know it has rate-limiting to make DOS attacks not work as well...
I'm sorry, but once that barrage of packets is queued up at the remote end you have NO hope in averting it. rate-limiting only works if you are doing the rate-limiting on the remote end of the network.
On a slightly different note: I've considered going to BSD firewalls off and on over the years since learning about Linux and Unix in general but I haven't been able to find a really strong reason to. Ok it's more mature. Sure it's got a better stack. But honestly, unless you're running on super fast networks the Linux stack seems good enough and Linux seems mature enough. A reasonably-skilled admin can lock it down and anything short of a kernel exploit keeps it secure. For me, it just doesn't seem worth it to pick up an entirely new OS.
Yeah it smells like firelighters but I'm being honest. Anyone who's been on /. as long as I have should know that I'm no troll. Are there any really convincing reasons to move to BSD?
It can be done, but a 2.2 kernel needs to be patched to do it. I've not tried it, but the 2.4 kernel should allow you to "port-forward" the tcp connection and the GRE tunnel back to the Win2k system.
Interesting. I avoided that whole mess by putting the pptpd server on my firewall and having the sales critters either dial into modems on the firewall itself (800 #) or through their favourite ISP.
It's been a while since I've tried it but I believe that I can establish a VPN connection with the office from my system at home, which goes through a 2.2 firewall. (80386DX33 named pokey :-)
Do you have any links to the patches and whatnot? pppd was the hardest to do in my setup, as it needed MPPE patches and stateless patches to the MPPE patch and so on and so on. It does work remarkably well and is more secure than having NT do the server end (it rejects MSCHAPV1 requests)
This is why you can send mail without a stamp - it still gets delivered.
No it doesn't; it gets returned "insufficient postage. Canada's lienient, not stupid.
I use a minimum of 4 public IP addresses, 2 for my DNS machines, 1 for my webserver, and the other for my NAT box.
Why on earth do you have both your DNS servers on the same network? It was my understanding that the whole reason for multiple DNS servers was to aid in removing network dependency.
Also, what's wrong with having your webserver on the internal network and portforwarding port 80? (and the other various ports, for other servers, even DNS)
I agree with your completely about public IPs if you're going to be splitting off that bandwidth for others and it's always nice to have extra IPs for things which just plain don't work through a firewall. But as the other poster said, waste is not necessary.
Wouldn't most internet companies/backbone sites/universities have uninterruptable power anyway? If the net shut down everytime the power in CA did, we'd be in bad shape.
Communications equipment usually runs off of 48 volts DC. The fiber terminators and other telco equipment (LIUs, concentrators, etc.) usually run off of a few lead-acid batteries which are continuously float-charged. Interruptions in the grid don't even phase them.
As for generators: many facilities have them as well to cover critical equipment. Every hospital with an OR has one. Hell even we have one, but it's for testing our starters with transfer switches and the like. :-)
does it have running gag references to Beowulf clusters, grits, or Natalie Portman?
Hate to tell you, but none of the things you mentioned are running gags. Running gags are funny.
Maybe it's because your UID starts in the couple-hundreds of thousands but those things were even only slightly funny the first MILLION times they've been brought up. Now (and for quite some time) they're just idiotic.
(Person gets you arrested for felony hit and run and says, -- um, -- if you pay us, 1000$ we won't file these charges against you (in CA they have the option sometimes)
Now THAT is criminal!!
If the police were about upholding the law then this would not be an option. Fuck with a system like that the cops would be making their own money. "Um yeah we'll just write up this guy. That takes care of our Christmas party!"
they have this thing called the mks toolkit... and while it isn't a unix filesystem, they do add lots and lots of unix commands and tools so you can run shell scripts, emacs, and stuff on nt. it should work on 2k, not sure.
A longtime friend of mine (known him since grade 4) had a co-op term or three at MKS in Waterloo, ON, Canada. The new stuff is utter shit compared to the old tools. I wouldn't reccomend it unless you need the cardboard box for something.
Looking at the thing, I assume the white is 0 and black 1 and I can only wonder why they didn't do it the other way around. white 1, black 0, after all, there is more white on this page than back, and what is more noticeable? an absence of signal or a signal?
Ahh but the whole message is a signal, 1 or 0. If I recall the transmission is made so that a 0 is one frequency and a 1 another (FM). The carrier is there no matter what is transmitted so it really makes no difference whether it is mostly 1s or mostly 0s.
... or any other IM which does not have the ONE THING that ICQ has over all the others: A fucking systray icon which changes when messages are pending.
I mean how hard is it? I don't want to keep a window open on my screen all the time and I absolutely do not want windows to pop up on their own. Gimme a systray icon/dock/wharf icon which changes and I can either click on or (even better!) have wm-global keybindings stuck to to pull up a message. Jabber, gtkICQ, AIM, GAIM, EveryBuddy, GnomeICU... NONE of these have this feature. LICQ's QT client does and that's about it.
People tell me to get so-and-so IM client. "Does it pop up messages?" is my first question. The second is "Does it have a systray/wharf/dock icon?" is my second. If either of these questions are answered wrong the IM doesn't have a hope in hell of being installed on my machine.
Once law enforcement gets involved, even those uncooperative ISPs become pretty cooperative. That or the people in charge spend a night in jail for obstruction. Then suddenly change their mind and help the investigation.
The ISP I help admin at doesn't keep RADIUS logs past 24 hours for this exact reason. We can't match an IP to a user after 24h, so what are you going to do? Throw us in prison? It's not obstruction, we're not hiding anything.