This is why I've been hoarding data since about 1992 or so. Anything that I deem worth keeping I keep a local copy of, whether it be my old Bluemail.qwk archives, newsgroup postings, HTML pages adobe acrobat files from where and whenever, old.mod and.stm/s3ms, you name it. I've got.zip files I'll probably never use again, but I've kept them specifically because I got sick and tired of so-called "permanent" sites taking them off.
Whenever my hard drive gets full, I do a couple categorization passes (I try to keep them categorized as I go but it's never quite perfect; there's always too many files in my/data/dump directory) and then make an.iso. Two copies are burned, one for my bookshelf and one for work or safe storage.
As Signal11 once had in his.sig (and ripped from somewhere I'm not sure, but I've seen it in the old taglines of yore): I don't have a solution but I admire your problem.
(ever tried to use an 286 after using some almost-gigahertz machine ? the letters appear on the screen with a smaaal delay after you press the keys. When all i had was an 286 - i didn't noticed that, but now i do and after 10 minutes it becomes annoying)
I use an NEC-V20 (19MHz XT) now and again and there is NO noticeable delay between keypress and display. Either you're superhuman or you've got your video card set to about 3 trillion wait states...
it's true. GNU stuff is bloated. take glibc for example. gcc helloworld.c -o helloworld -static and you've got a whopping big ~700k binary on my system. strip it down and it's still at least 250k.
Granted, I only get about 16 bytes' worth of savings with -O2, but that's still under 1/2 of your 250k "estimate". Dynamically linked the binary hits 2.5k. So yeah it's kinda bloated. But not quite like you would suggest. I can't get LCC to generate a statically-linked win32 file, but a dynamic, static win32 hello world requires CRTDLL.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL and is 3.6k. My dynamic compile on Linux is 2.5k. Apples to oranges, yes, but there's the numbers.
If you want a Linux distro that is reasonably secure by default, give Slack a try.
Now I am a big Slack fan, been using it since it was still Yggdrasil (or something), bug are you mad?! Slack has some pretty big problems, too. Think RPC, wu-FTPd, sendmail, telnet, pop3d, all the small servers, etc., etc.
When I install a Slack7/7.1 system, I don't install any internet apps. No sendmail, no apache, no DNS. I then install the following (as necessary): qmail/nullmail, daemontools, BIND (I'm starting to take a closer look at DJB's DNS implementation), Apache (+mod_perl/PHP/SSL, etc.), OpenSSH, proFTPd and probably a half dozen others. I usually install stuff into/opt since I can then nuke or update it without worrying about it leaving bits and pieces around my filesystem; I just create softlinks to move binaries into the path as necessary.
Then I go through and pretty much nuke inetd (the only thing I usually leave is auth). I'm really liking svscan... D. J. Bernstein is a hell of a coder but why the hell can't he comment or write decent documentation? <sigh> I also set up multimail with most of the important logs, since syslog tends to run a lot of CPU if it gets too much data and also tends to drop messages on me.
Slack rox muh sox, but it sure as hell ain't secure on a default install.
um... good luck DDOS'ing the root servers. hope you have a couple million computers.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of hardware do the root servers run? Is each root server actually a cluster or are they each just a Really Big Machine?
That's second reality, dude. And yes that was a cool demo, but there were many other cool groups out there. I've got most of them on one of my many "checkpoint" burned CDs. Basically whenever my hard drive gets full from my information packrat nature (N64, Z64, C64, electronics, RF, C, exploits, backdoors, cracks, satellite, acrobat files, email, packet mail (.QWK), my own software and hardware, etc., etc.) I burn the data out to CD and wipe the drive. Then I make a duplicate copy and keep it in a different physical location. It makes me feel good that I've still got the data and that if one copy gets destroyed that I haven't lost something I likely won't find for a long LONG time, if at all. URLs disappear, iformation gets lost. All I needs is a really great way to index it all (file_id.diz anyone?) and I should be able to pull out info from anytime from the early '90s on.
I have to agree with you when you say that Dan's stuff is great. I just wish the guy could code so others could understand it. Not a single comment, dubious variable names, half the programs don't have any kind of -h or --help (decent web documentation though)... About the only thing he does do is formatting.
I get the feeling this explains the windows telnet client. There's few things more depressing than seeing a room of 20 people simultaniously decide that "Linux sucks" because they can't use the cursor keys in vi.
Turn on VT100 Arrows in the Telnet options. Works for me...
True, you may have larger aggregate bandwidth; however, any individual connection can only download/upload at the modem rate. Special exceptions can be made when you own the servers on the other ends of modems, but in a normal circumstance, it's not possible. In which case the whole system is kinda pointless, and everyone would be better off with their own modems.
Untrue
I personally had 4 modems dialled into the same NAS on my provider (with different accounts) and the link speed was a little under the theoretical maximum for a single modem *4. This was because the NAS allowed pooling. This was back in the 2.0.x days of the Linux kernel and the program which enslaved the individual ppp links was a little kludgy, but it worked wonders. So long as the other end is a Total Control center or a Cisco AS5200/5300, you should be fine, so long as the guy running it kept modem banding enabled.:-)
"Did linuxconf just change that BACK?" - Ever have Windows change your custom resources setting back on your SoundBlaster? Its like windows didn't think I was smart enough to look at the jumpers. and enter the correct settings myself.
Solution: don't use linuxconf. It's eeee-vil
"What the hell does this crap in sendmail.cf *mean*?" - If local mail is too complicated, just employ the Windows solution (don't install it).
Solution: Get Nullmailer. Or if you really need a full blown MTA, qmail. Sendmail is a relic.
"Oh, there it is. What the %#*@! does this %#$# *mean*?" - Fatal Execption at OE 8231:xxxxx in NDIS.vxd, 'nuff said. Even MS tech support will give youa big "ummmmm.....yeah....".
Solution: Regexps are a bitch in an OS.:-p
I'm not really sure what the point of this post was. I've been doing software testing since Monday and that'll continue through the end of the week, so perhaps that's it.
True. But inside a tight (albeit non-airtight) enclosure? And with 3-5V? First the gasoline vapour must get inside the phone which, as I said, isn't airtight, but is pretty tight in its own. Then you actually need to close a switch somewhere (keypresses don't count) which rules out everything except the flip phones.
Again, if they're worried about phones this much, why aren't they outlawing getting out of your vehicle altogether? Or minding their vapour?
Conceivably, there's a safety issue in petrol stations where a spark from a mobile phone could ignite fuel vapour, but I'd have thought that it's a slim risk.
A spark? From what in the phone, exactly? I'd me far more worried about the spark from the static electricity zap you get when you get out of some fabric seats and touch the frame of the car.
A spark... from a cellphone... Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
I don't know whether that's the acronym or not, but I'm pretty sure I ran across that program. Fractal data compression on the order of 100:1, almost as quick as pkzip, [this was around '93, I think...I was young and naive then:( ] and all of this by way of simply indexing the "compressed archive" to the existing larger file, and padding it with random info. Soo.... if you deleted the old file, poof, no more working archive. And that's, I think, where tzanger got the "bad sectors" thing; rather than giving "hey, you deleted the file I needed to 'restore' your archive" as an error message, it spat some hoopla about file corruption and bad disk sectors.
Yup; that's the one. Was it really '93? Wow that kinda dates me hehe... I remember downloading it skeptically (back at 2400 baud...) and running it on a test program. I'm pretty sure it hid the original file (not deleted as I'd originally stated) and then reported wondrous compression. I viewed the "archive" with good old Norton Commander (I still use this program today, and it's Linux counterpart, Midnight (I call it Morton) Commander) and wondered how the hell it could store a 300k program in approximately 27 bytes (I believe all the archives were about 27 bytes long, regardless of the original size), when 15 of those bytes took up the path and filename.
Wow this is starting to bring back memories... 232 characters a second at a time.:-)
My mom had one for 7-8 years on 24/7 and none of us had any health problems. I regularly played with high-frequency high voltage (lots of arcs and ozone, way more than the ionizers you can buy) and I've never felt chest pain or anything like what that article suggests. I'm not saying it's not bad for you, I am just suggesting that they are blowing it out of proportion.
More specifically, however, I tried the ionizers in order to charge the airborne particles and keep them from just floating around. Sticking to the walls/floor is better, because at least then you can get rid of them easier.:-)
Of course, there's always the popular conspiracy theory!
I've never heard of this before... hydrogen proxide is deadly poison to any kind of cell. I remember in bio taking plant and animal tissue (leaves and beef I believe) and putting H2O2 in each and shaking the test tube... I don't remember which now (I think it was the beef), but one didn't react very well, but the other had such a violent reaction that it blew your thumb off the top of the test tube. I am not surprised that drinking the stuff would keep the nasties from getting hold of you from ingesting them.
I've heard many people talk about their love of silver ions though...
As to which filters I've used -- they were just whatever was at the local Canadian Tire store... certainly not large by any means (12"x8"x6" tops) which is why I think they were ineffective... they were too small to really influence the entire room.
is quite "leaky" when it comes to air. I really don't have to worry about this problem too much. Heating it is a bitch, though.:-)
My furnace has an electrostatic air cleaner which keeps most of the dirt, pollen and light hair from getting recycled over and over, but I like to keep my furnace fan on all the time just to keep the air moving so this works 24/7. If you've got smokers your problem is amplified, not only for your air quality but for your personal health and general cleanliness of the place.
I've also tried several ionizer/filter combinations (room size) but generally they are useless for anything but the actual ionization, which helps to keep dust and crap down to a minimum. A little air circulator in the corner of the room isn't going to move much air and it sure isn't going to move all the air. The area around the ionizer will be okay I guess.
Hope this helps, I'm no HVAC guru, just someone who's done some thinking on it.:-)
It just dosen't make sense for me (or, I think, for your average computer user) to compress image files, given the currently available hardware.
That arguement makes absolutely no sense. JPG and PNG are two examples of compressed image files which are used extensively today, in the world of gigahertz speed processors and tens of gigabytes of storage on your typical machine. People still compress files to transfer them (self-extracting.zip and.zip,.rar and.tar.gz), even though their connection is many times faster than before.
I believe the question the author wanted answered is what happened to fractal compression? Tech seems to have locked on to wavelet compression (for images I believe) and still uses LZW and the more "normal" forms of compression for binary files.
personally the only fractal compressor I ever saw was around '95 or so and all it did was store the compressed file as bad sectors on the disk and indicate where and how many were in the "fractally-compressed archive" itself. OLW I think it was called.
Taking the output from the IR receiver/transistor as either 1 or 0 means they have to set the adjustment potentiometers fairly accurately. It could be more intelligent to use an A/D converter and then figure out the threshold while scanning. Getting a uC (PIC for example) with an A/D converters might raise the cost ever so slightly that it might be more expensive than the simple fixed threshold transistor circuit.
Nah, just use a recovery circuit similar to that found on almost every T1/E1 installation. Your threshhold actually "moves" since it incorperates an integrator. Let's say that the scanner is not seeing infrared so it outputs a 0. The integrator moves the threshhold towards 0 so that when a bright flash comes by it can easily see it. Similarly when it sees the infrared reflecting off the white surface it moves towards the upper boundary. This can be done easily and cheaply and the integration can be tuned precisely how you need it.
The waveform on the output of one of these puppies looks kind of like a jagged line since the user is scanning across a barcode and the threshhold is jumping around slightly. The detection is still great though since you aren't trying to differentiate between #c0c0c0 and #d0d0d0, you're looking for #ffffff or #000000 and, with the trigger level varying between let's say #404040 and #c0c0c0. That's a wide wide range on a high-contrast medium such as paper. The whole thing is a textbook bit detector.
If that detector is a phototransistor the output will be pretty much digital. the edges of the bars will cause the transistor to come out of saturation as it races for the other level but an A/D isn't much good here at all.
Interesting pics... I wonder why they put so much hardware on the thing? An PIC12 could probably do everything I've heard to date about the cuecat, and a PIC16 could certainly do it if a PIC12 couldn't. There seems to be an *awful* lot of hardware there for such a device.
I've designed barcode readers before... it's not that difficult.
This would make it difficult to read out the program. However it doesn't sound like it would be too much work to re-write the code from scratch.
Exactly. I've done this kind of thing before and I doubt that phototransistor is going to any kind of analog in. It's likely either pulled high or low (depending on if it's NPN or PNP) and the chip sees a 1 or 0, or the output of the detector is being brought into an on-chip comparator. Big whoop. This kind of thing can be done in an afternoon and on an 8-pin PIC (less than $1 in the quantites they're talking).
Most of the comments here are saying the same thing: Go to school for the fun, not for the education. This is true.
I didn't go to university or college although I was going to go before I got hired where I am. My dad nearly disowned me but I am making a very nice living (not superrich, but I don't have to worry too much about money) with my young family now. If I'd gone to uni I'd just be getting out now and getting started, possibly $30-50k in debt from school loans if I didn't get into co-op.
Some things I miss about not going to university/college: friends. Most of my friends went that route. I do keep in touch, we party and stuff but at the same time, I know I'm an outsider in most of their circles. I also missed taking courses just for the hell of it, learning things that I normally wouldn't learn and a lot of social interaction with people my age.
Things I don't miss: bar crawls, school, paying for books, not having money/car/family and again, school. I dropped out of my senior (Grade 13 in Ontario) year twice because I just couldn't take school anymore. I was grabbing some extra credits before I ploughed off into university and just started hating it more and more and more until I just walked out of my physics class one day.
Don't get me wrong. I love learning, and I loved physics and calculus (the courses I was taking that fateful semester). I just couldn't stand school.
So what should you do? Weigh your options carefully. If you've got a lot of friends near you going to university/college, make sure you keep in close contact so you don't "lose your age". For the first while I was surrounded by people 15 years my senior, but that's better now.:-) Having a family early is a big plus for me (I'll be 45 and my 3-4 kids will (hopefully) be off to college/uni/working!) as I've got the energy now to pump into work, family and work. I won't be able to do that when I'm 35.
Finally, I love what I'm doing. I knew what I wanted to do ever since I was a young'un. I didn't need the "wide exposure to everything" that college/university gives you. If you don't know what you're doing, perhaps working a shit job and taking a few courses on the side is a better idea than blowing 30-40k to find out. You can always switch careers.
I think that's enough advice-giving for one post, sonny.:-)
I notice a hostility to unions on this board. It basically seems to be based on the idea that "Unions are corrupt."
Power corrupts. It is almost inevitable. And with a union, when they reach "critical mass" they are able to do whatever they want, including shutting down entire sectors of work to force an issue in a small subsection of their unionship.
Unions don't have to be corrupt, they are simply a way for people to group together for a common goal. There are good unions and bad unions, a union is just a political organization designed to serve a group of workers.
Well put. However my first statment still stands: Power corrupts. What starts out as a good thing ultimately becomes bigger and bigger and those running it start to care less about what is actually happenning "on the field" and start pushing their own pet agendas.
Perhaps some kind of hard limit needs to be set on a union's size. I've no clue what the rule would be, but something needs to be done. Large unions are dangerous.
The leader's of the industries, in groups like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA certainly have no problem banding together for common goals, why should the worker's feel they are better served by not organizing?
I wouldn't go that far; you've switched modes of thought. In one, you are talking about labor unions and in the next you are talking about "political" unions. In a sense they are identical but in another sense they are completely different.
A union is like a political party, whether it is good or bad depends on what kind of leaders are voted in. The right to have a union, like the right to be part of a political party, is a good thing. In fact, it is part of our constitutional freedom of assembly.
You describe it well here, and you've stated it above as well. However the point still stands that power corrupts. In both labor unions and special interest groups. You get too large and you can start pushing your own agendas well beyond what is "sane". I'm at a loss for how to fix it but something needs to be done.
My friend, you have obviously never worked a day of hard labor in your life.
Obviously not. I didn't work construction for a couple years under a smart-as-a-tack contractor and subsequenly learn all kinds of tips and tricks and advanced techniques. I didn't work in two or three auto manufacturers assembling window assemblies (9s per part, I was faster than anyone else there and my quality was perfect). Obviously I didn't do any hard labor, union or no.
Being part of a Union, I was entitled to work everyday (or not, I got between 15 and 30 dollars an hour.. I didn't really HAVE to work everyday), be tought the ropes by people who were not only in the business for a long time, but were accomplished teachers.
So if I'm not in a union, I can't find a job in which there are intelligent, experienced workers from which I can learn? Or did you mean that the union enabled you to learn from other union members? From what I read from your post, the union got you an entry level position at a very good wage. I've never worked concrete so I can't say for certain that that is an entry level wage, but if it is, I'll tell my kids to go work concrete in the summers.
Also, I had the opportunity to go to conferences on advanced techniques (like coloring concrete, making it look like marble and other stones, patterning, generally artistic stuff) and meet new people all over the world.
All very intersting and I'm glad you were able to see and learn these things, but does my not being in a union mean I can't experience these things too? I go to 2-3 conferences a year (by choice, I don't like many conferences) where I work now and meet people from all over the world and learn from them. Hell even when I worked part time at a repair shop/backroom engineering shop I got to go to a few conferences.
Sounds like the teamsters really got to you. However, none of the things you have experienced (except perhaps the wage) were because of the union. Any company would have the same opportunities to learn from others, and any decent company would see that you were a bright and upstanding worker and want to further your education to make you more valuable. I'm not saying this with malice, although it does seem to come across with a bit of an edge. I do not like unions and I've expressed why. Your arguements for pro-union don't seem to have any teeth to them and are unpursuasive. This (tech) is a worker's market. If you're not happy where you are, go elsewhere. You don't need to stand around and take it. It's a labor shortage not a work shortage. There are 10 companies looking for someone and if who you're working for now is not treating you fairly, why do you need a union to defend you instead of defending yourself?
An aside: I witnessed my ex-girlfriend's father and cowokers turn into raving lunatics when the government-run health facility where they worked was being shut down. These are normally wonderful people whom I really like. The union called for HUGE strikes for all public sector workers. Totally unrelated fields were setting up shutdowns and strikes, all the while calling others "scabs" and being downright violent, just for the difference in opinion. They let the union get between them because some of them had had enough of this bullshit and wanted out while the others were whipped into this frenzy. What kind of idiocy is this? Are you that afraid of standing for your own rights that you'll lower yourself to this? Becoming the slobbering thugs of an organization which doesn't give a shit about you, so long as you pay your dues?
Unions are a GOOD thing. They protect the employees and help the employers get good, qualified employees.
Unions prevent employers from hiring whom they desire and impose the union's ideals, not the ideals of the company. I've seen (labor-intensive) companies shut down because the unions forced a wage increase which ultimately priced the company right out of the market. (another aside: If there were a non-union auto manufacturer I'm willing to bet we'd see the difference at the dealerships, too. We don't notice this, however, because they're all unionized.)
Next time, keep your trap shut when you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I've been hoarding data since about 1992 or so. Anything that I deem worth keeping I keep a local copy of, whether it be my old Bluemail .qwk archives, newsgroup postings, HTML pages adobe acrobat files from where and whenever, old .mod and .stm/s3ms, you name it. I've got .zip files I'll probably never use again, but I've kept them specifically because I got sick and tired of so-called "permanent" sites taking them off.
Whenever my hard drive gets full, I do a couple categorization passes (I try to keep them categorized as I go but it's never quite perfect; there's always too many files in my /data/dump directory) and then make an .iso. Two copies are burned, one for my bookshelf and one for work or safe storage.
As Signal11 once had in his .sig (and ripped from somewhere I'm not sure, but I've seen it in the old taglines of yore): I don't have a solution but I admire your problem.
(ever tried to use an 286 after using some almost-gigahertz machine ? the letters appear on the screen with a smaaal delay after you press the keys. When all i had was an 286 - i didn't noticed that, but now i do and after 10 minutes it becomes annoying)
I use an NEC-V20 (19MHz XT) now and again and there is NO noticeable delay between keypress and display. Either you're superhuman or you've got your video card set to about 3 trillion wait states...
Here is the babelfish translation:
Now that would be a truly useful babelfish language... Legalese to English!
it's true. GNU stuff is bloated. take glibc for example. gcc helloworld.c -o helloworld -static and you've got a whopping big ~700k binary on my system. strip it down and it's still at least 250k.
I'm calling you on that.
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
puts("Hello, world!");
return 1;
}
$gcc -o hello hello.c -static
$ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 andrew users 109919 Sep 17 10:47 hello*
$strip hello
$ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 andrew users 95448 Sep 17 10:47 hello*
Granted, I only get about 16 bytes' worth of savings with -O2, but that's still under 1/2 of your 250k "estimate". Dynamically linked the binary hits 2.5k. So yeah it's kinda bloated. But not quite like you would suggest. I can't get LCC to generate a statically-linked win32 file, but a dynamic, static win32 hello world requires CRTDLL.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL and is 3.6k. My dynamic compile on Linux is 2.5k. Apples to oranges, yes, but there's the numbers.
If you want a Linux distro that is reasonably secure by default, give Slack a try.
Now I am a big Slack fan, been using it since it was still Yggdrasil (or something), bug are you mad?! Slack has some pretty big problems, too. Think RPC, wu-FTPd, sendmail, telnet, pop3d, all the small servers, etc., etc.
When I install a Slack7/7.1 system, I don't install any internet apps. No sendmail, no apache, no DNS. I then install the following (as necessary): qmail/nullmail, daemontools, BIND (I'm starting to take a closer look at DJB's DNS implementation), Apache (+mod_perl/PHP/SSL, etc.), OpenSSH, proFTPd and probably a half dozen others. I usually install stuff into /opt since I can then nuke or update it without worrying about it leaving bits and pieces around my filesystem; I just create softlinks to move binaries into the path as necessary.
Then I go through and pretty much nuke inetd (the only thing I usually leave is auth). I'm really liking svscan... D. J. Bernstein is a hell of a coder but why the hell can't he comment or write decent documentation? <sigh> I also set up multimail with most of the important logs, since syslog tends to run a lot of CPU if it gets too much data and also tends to drop messages on me.
Slack rox muh sox, but it sure as hell ain't secure on a default install.
um... good luck DDOS'ing the root servers. hope you have a couple million computers.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of hardware do the root servers run? Is each root server actually a cluster or are they each just a Really Big Machine?
Future crew - 2nd unreality
That's second reality, dude. And yes that was a cool demo, but there were many other cool groups out there. I've got most of them on one of my many "checkpoint" burned CDs. Basically whenever my hard drive gets full from my information packrat nature (N64, Z64, C64, electronics, RF, C, exploits, backdoors, cracks, satellite, acrobat files, email, packet mail (.QWK), my own software and hardware, etc., etc.) I burn the data out to CD and wipe the drive. Then I make a duplicate copy and keep it in a different physical location. It makes me feel good that I've still got the data and that if one copy gets destroyed that I haven't lost something I likely won't find for a long LONG time, if at all. URLs disappear, iformation gets lost. All I needs is a really great way to index it all (file_id.diz anyone?) and I should be able to pull out info from anytime from the early '90s on.
I have to agree with you when you say that Dan's stuff is great. I just wish the guy could code so others could understand it. Not a single comment, dubious variable names, half the programs don't have any kind of -h or --help (decent web documentation though)... About the only thing he does do is formatting.
I get the feeling this explains the windows telnet client. There's few things more depressing than seeing a room of 20 people simultaniously decide that "Linux sucks" because they can't use the cursor keys in vi.
Turn on VT100 Arrows in the Telnet options. Works for me...
True, you may have larger aggregate bandwidth; however, any individual connection can only download/upload at the modem rate. Special exceptions can be made when you own the servers on the other ends of modems, but in a normal circumstance, it's not possible. In which case the whole system is kinda pointless, and everyone would be better off with their own modems.
Untrue
I personally had 4 modems dialled into the same NAS on my provider (with different accounts) and the link speed was a little under the theoretical maximum for a single modem *4. This was because the NAS allowed pooling. This was back in the 2.0.x days of the Linux kernel and the program which enslaved the individual ppp links was a little kludgy, but it worked wonders. So long as the other end is a Total Control center or a Cisco AS5200/5300, you should be fine, so long as the guy running it kept modem banding enabled. :-)
"Did linuxconf just change that BACK?" - Ever have Windows change your custom resources setting back on your SoundBlaster? Its like windows didn't think I was smart enough to look at the jumpers. and enter the correct settings myself.
Solution: don't use linuxconf. It's eeee-vil
"What the hell does this crap in sendmail.cf *mean*?" - If local mail is too complicated, just employ the Windows solution (don't install it).
Solution: Get Nullmailer. Or if you really need a full blown MTA, qmail. Sendmail is a relic.
"Oh, there it is. What the %#*@! does this %#$# *mean*?" - Fatal Execption at OE 8231:xxxxx in NDIS.vxd, 'nuff said. Even MS tech support will give youa big "ummmmm.....yeah....".
Solution: Regexps are a bitch in an OS. :-p
I'm not really sure what the point of this post was. I've been doing software testing since Monday and that'll continue through the end of the week, so perhaps that's it.
all switches can create a spark
True. But inside a tight (albeit non-airtight) enclosure? And with 3-5V? First the gasoline vapour must get inside the phone which, as I said, isn't airtight, but is pretty tight in its own. Then you actually need to close a switch somewhere (keypresses don't count) which rules out everything except the flip phones.
Again, if they're worried about phones this much, why aren't they outlawing getting out of your vehicle altogether? Or minding their vapour?
Conceivably, there's a safety issue in petrol stations where a spark from a mobile phone could ignite fuel vapour, but I'd have thought that it's a slim risk.
A spark? From what in the phone, exactly? I'd me far more worried about the spark from the static electricity zap you get when you get out of some fabric seats and touch the frame of the car.
A spark... from a cellphone... Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
I don't know whether that's the acronym or not, but I'm pretty sure I ran across that program. Fractal data compression on the order of 100:1, almost as quick as pkzip, [this was around '93, I think...I was young and naive then :( ] and all of this by way of simply indexing the "compressed archive" to the existing larger file, and padding it with random info. Soo.... if you deleted the old file, poof, no more working archive. And that's, I think, where tzanger got the "bad sectors" thing; rather than giving "hey, you deleted the file I needed to 'restore' your archive" as an error message, it spat some hoopla about file corruption and bad disk sectors.
Yup; that's the one. Was it really '93? Wow that kinda dates me hehe... I remember downloading it skeptically (back at 2400 baud...) and running it on a test program. I'm pretty sure it hid the original file (not deleted as I'd originally stated) and then reported wondrous compression. I viewed the "archive" with good old Norton Commander (I still use this program today, and it's Linux counterpart, Midnight (I call it Morton) Commander) and wondered how the hell it could store a 300k program in approximately 27 bytes (I believe all the archives were about 27 bytes long, regardless of the original size), when 15 of those bytes took up the path and filename.
Wow this is starting to bring back memories... 232 characters a second at a time. :-)
As for cleaning ability, doesn't it create a fine dust that gets all over the floor? Must be troublesome to clean!
Actually those swiffer-style things (electrostatic cleaning cloths) work wonders... I love 'em!
Aren't ionizers bad for your health?
My mom had one for 7-8 years on 24/7 and none of us had any health problems. I regularly played with high-frequency high voltage (lots of arcs and ozone, way more than the ionizers you can buy) and I've never felt chest pain or anything like what that article suggests. I'm not saying it's not bad for you, I am just suggesting that they are blowing it out of proportion.
More specifically, however, I tried the ionizers in order to charge the airborne particles and keep them from just floating around. Sticking to the walls/floor is better, because at least then you can get rid of them easier. :-)
Of course, there's always the popular conspiracy theory!
I've never heard of this before... hydrogen proxide is deadly poison to any kind of cell. I remember in bio taking plant and animal tissue (leaves and beef I believe) and putting H2O2 in each and shaking the test tube... I don't remember which now (I think it was the beef), but one didn't react very well, but the other had such a violent reaction that it blew your thumb off the top of the test tube. I am not surprised that drinking the stuff would keep the nasties from getting hold of you from ingesting them.I've heard many people talk about their love of silver ions though...
As to which filters I've used -- they were just whatever was at the local Canadian Tire store... certainly not large by any means (12"x8"x6" tops) which is why I think they were ineffective... they were too small to really influence the entire room.
is quite "leaky" when it comes to air. I really don't have to worry about this problem too much. Heating it is a bitch, though. :-)
My furnace has an electrostatic air cleaner which keeps most of the dirt, pollen and light hair from getting recycled over and over, but I like to keep my furnace fan on all the time just to keep the air moving so this works 24/7. If you've got smokers your problem is amplified, not only for your air quality but for your personal health and general cleanliness of the place.
I've also tried several ionizer/filter combinations (room size) but generally they are useless for anything but the actual ionization, which helps to keep dust and crap down to a minimum. A little air circulator in the corner of the room isn't going to move much air and it sure isn't going to move all the air. The area around the ionizer will be okay I guess.
Hope this helps, I'm no HVAC guru, just someone who's done some thinking on it. :-)
It just dosen't make sense for me (or, I think, for your average computer user) to compress image files, given the currently available hardware.
That arguement makes absolutely no sense. JPG and PNG are two examples of compressed image files which are used extensively today, in the world of gigahertz speed processors and tens of gigabytes of storage on your typical machine. People still compress files to transfer them (self-extracting .zip and .zip, .rar and .tar.gz), even though their connection is many times faster than before.
I believe the question the author wanted answered is what happened to fractal compression? Tech seems to have locked on to wavelet compression (for images I believe) and still uses LZW and the more "normal" forms of compression for binary files.
personally the only fractal compressor I ever saw was around '95 or so and all it did was store the compressed file as bad sectors on the disk and indicate where and how many were in the "fractally-compressed archive" itself. OLW I think it was called.
Any water or water-bearing object in the way will dampen your signal.
Ha! Thanks for the subtle pun, it made my night!
Taking the output from the IR receiver/transistor as either 1 or 0 means they have to set the adjustment potentiometers fairly accurately. It could be more intelligent to use an A/D converter and then figure out the threshold while scanning. Getting a uC (PIC for example) with an A/D converters might raise the cost ever so slightly that it might be more expensive than the simple fixed threshold transistor circuit.
Nah, just use a recovery circuit similar to that found on almost every T1/E1 installation. Your threshhold actually "moves" since it incorperates an integrator. Let's say that the scanner is not seeing infrared so it outputs a 0. The integrator moves the threshhold towards 0 so that when a bright flash comes by it can easily see it. Similarly when it sees the infrared reflecting off the white surface it moves towards the upper boundary. This can be done easily and cheaply and the integration can be tuned precisely how you need it.
The waveform on the output of one of these puppies looks kind of like a jagged line since the user is scanning across a barcode and the threshhold is jumping around slightly. The detection is still great though since you aren't trying to differentiate between #c0c0c0 and #d0d0d0, you're looking for #ffffff or #000000 and, with the trigger level varying between let's say #404040 and #c0c0c0. That's a wide wide range on a high-contrast medium such as paper. The whole thing is a textbook bit detector.
If that detector is a phototransistor the output will be pretty much digital. the edges of the bars will cause the transistor to come out of saturation as it races for the other level but an A/D isn't much good here at all.
Interesting pics... I wonder why they put so much hardware on the thing? An PIC12 could probably do everything I've heard to date about the cuecat, and a PIC16 could certainly do it if a PIC12 couldn't. There seems to be an *awful* lot of hardware there for such a device.
I've designed barcode readers before... it's not that difficult.
This would make it difficult to read out the program. However it doesn't sound like it would be too much work to re-write the code from scratch.
Exactly. I've done this kind of thing before and I doubt that phototransistor is going to any kind of analog in. It's likely either pulled high or low (depending on if it's NPN or PNP) and the chip sees a 1 or 0, or the output of the detector is being brought into an on-chip comparator. Big whoop. This kind of thing can be done in an afternoon and on an 8-pin PIC (less than $1 in the quantites they're talking).
Most of the comments here are saying the same thing: Go to school for the fun, not for the education. This is true.
I didn't go to university or college although I was going to go before I got hired where I am. My dad nearly disowned me but I am making a very nice living (not superrich, but I don't have to worry too much about money) with my young family now. If I'd gone to uni I'd just be getting out now and getting started, possibly $30-50k in debt from school loans if I didn't get into co-op.
Some things I miss about not going to university/college: friends. Most of my friends went that route. I do keep in touch, we party and stuff but at the same time, I know I'm an outsider in most of their circles. I also missed taking courses just for the hell of it, learning things that I normally wouldn't learn and a lot of social interaction with people my age.
Things I don't miss: bar crawls, school, paying for books, not having money/car/family and again, school. I dropped out of my senior (Grade 13 in Ontario) year twice because I just couldn't take school anymore. I was grabbing some extra credits before I ploughed off into university and just started hating it more and more and more until I just walked out of my physics class one day.
Don't get me wrong. I love learning, and I loved physics and calculus (the courses I was taking that fateful semester). I just couldn't stand school.
So what should you do? Weigh your options carefully. If you've got a lot of friends near you going to university/college, make sure you keep in close contact so you don't "lose your age". For the first while I was surrounded by people 15 years my senior, but that's better now. :-) Having a family early is a big plus for me (I'll be 45 and my 3-4 kids will (hopefully) be off to college/uni/working!) as I've got the energy now to pump into work, family and work. I won't be able to do that when I'm 35.
Finally, I love what I'm doing. I knew what I wanted to do ever since I was a young'un. I didn't need the "wide exposure to everything" that college/university gives you. If you don't know what you're doing, perhaps working a shit job and taking a few courses on the side is a better idea than blowing 30-40k to find out. You can always switch careers.
I think that's enough advice-giving for one post, sonny. :-)
I notice a hostility to unions on this board. It basically seems to be based on the idea that "Unions are corrupt."
Power corrupts. It is almost inevitable. And with a union, when they reach "critical mass" they are able to do whatever they want, including shutting down entire sectors of work to force an issue in a small subsection of their unionship.
Unions don't have to be corrupt, they are simply a way for people to group together for a common goal. There are good unions and bad unions, a union is just a political organization designed to serve a group of workers.
Well put. However my first statment still stands: Power corrupts. What starts out as a good thing ultimately becomes bigger and bigger and those running it start to care less about what is actually happenning "on the field" and start pushing their own pet agendas.
Perhaps some kind of hard limit needs to be set on a union's size. I've no clue what the rule would be, but something needs to be done. Large unions are dangerous.
The leader's of the industries, in groups like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA certainly have no problem banding together for common goals, why should the worker's feel they are better served by not organizing?
I wouldn't go that far; you've switched modes of thought. In one, you are talking about labor unions and in the next you are talking about "political" unions. In a sense they are identical but in another sense they are completely different.
A union is like a political party, whether it is good or bad depends on what kind of leaders are voted in. The right to have a union, like the right to be part of a political party, is a good thing. In fact, it is part of our constitutional freedom of assembly.
You describe it well here, and you've stated it above as well. However the point still stands that power corrupts. In both labor unions and special interest groups. You get too large and you can start pushing your own agendas well beyond what is "sane". I'm at a loss for how to fix it but something needs to be done.My friend, you have obviously never worked a day of hard labor in your life.
Obviously not. I didn't work construction for a couple years under a smart-as-a-tack contractor and subsequenly learn all kinds of tips and tricks and advanced techniques. I didn't work in two or three auto manufacturers assembling window assemblies (9s per part, I was faster than anyone else there and my quality was perfect). Obviously I didn't do any hard labor, union or no.
Being part of a Union, I was entitled to work everyday (or not, I got between 15 and 30 dollars an hour.. I didn't really HAVE to work everyday), be tought the ropes by people who were not only in the business for a long time, but were accomplished teachers.
So if I'm not in a union, I can't find a job in which there are intelligent, experienced workers from which I can learn? Or did you mean that the union enabled you to learn from other union members? From what I read from your post, the union got you an entry level position at a very good wage. I've never worked concrete so I can't say for certain that that is an entry level wage, but if it is, I'll tell my kids to go work concrete in the summers.
Also, I had the opportunity to go to conferences on advanced techniques (like coloring concrete, making it look like marble and other stones, patterning, generally artistic stuff) and meet new people all over the world.
All very intersting and I'm glad you were able to see and learn these things, but does my not being in a union mean I can't experience these things too? I go to 2-3 conferences a year (by choice, I don't like many conferences) where I work now and meet people from all over the world and learn from them. Hell even when I worked part time at a repair shop/backroom engineering shop I got to go to a few conferences.
Sounds like the teamsters really got to you. However, none of the things you have experienced (except perhaps the wage) were because of the union. Any company would have the same opportunities to learn from others, and any decent company would see that you were a bright and upstanding worker and want to further your education to make you more valuable. I'm not saying this with malice, although it does seem to come across with a bit of an edge. I do not like unions and I've expressed why. Your arguements for pro-union don't seem to have any teeth to them and are unpursuasive. This (tech) is a worker's market. If you're not happy where you are, go elsewhere. You don't need to stand around and take it. It's a labor shortage not a work shortage. There are 10 companies looking for someone and if who you're working for now is not treating you fairly, why do you need a union to defend you instead of defending yourself?
An aside: I witnessed my ex-girlfriend's father and cowokers turn into raving lunatics when the government-run health facility where they worked was being shut down. These are normally wonderful people whom I really like. The union called for HUGE strikes for all public sector workers. Totally unrelated fields were setting up shutdowns and strikes, all the while calling others "scabs" and being downright violent, just for the difference in opinion. They let the union get between them because some of them had had enough of this bullshit and wanted out while the others were whipped into this frenzy. What kind of idiocy is this? Are you that afraid of standing for your own rights that you'll lower yourself to this? Becoming the slobbering thugs of an organization which doesn't give a shit about you, so long as you pay your dues?
Unions are a GOOD thing. They protect the employees and help the employers get good, qualified employees.
Unions prevent employers from hiring whom they desire and impose the union's ideals, not the ideals of the company. I've seen (labor-intensive) companies shut down because the unions forced a wage increase which ultimately priced the company right out of the market. (another aside: If there were a non-union auto manufacturer I'm willing to bet we'd see the difference at the dealerships, too. We don't notice this, however, because they're all unionized.)
Next time, keep your trap shut when you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Tow the line, tow the line...