Does anyone happen to have made a working mirror of this site yet? How many millions of hits does it take to knock down both a site and its mirror??
...including the new airports (external jack)
on
Open Node In A Bag
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· Score: 1
Unforuntately clueless people will read it and assume that in order to use wireless they'll have to drill and void their warranty. The fact is there are plenty of other products for which none of that is necessary.
My office got a shiny new "Airport Extreme" about two weeks ago. Not only does it have a built in print-server, but it also has an external antenna jack. I wonder how many Airports were returned to Apple service/repair with hole drilled in the sides before the company decided to spend the $0.07 to add an external jack...
Anyone else find it odd that after 12 comments posted, both the main site and its mirror are slashdotted?
some Airports have an antenna connection
on
Open Node In A Bag
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Some of the newer Airports (AirPort Extreme perhaps) have an external antenna jack. There's even a company selling a matching external antenna, no drilling required.
I've often though about the possibilies of a metro LAN or WAN setup. It would require a lot of security and gobs of bandwidth, but could be a interesting test case for "the future city". Consider linking dozens of downtown businesses with GigE or faster fiber. I would imagine the first few applications would be gimmicky, but may eventually bring about some rather innovative uses. I doubt a bakery would have much use for such a setup, but they may be others that would.
Why send expensive tanks into battle when a beowulf cluster of used AK-47s can theoretically do as much damage?
While many Xerox engineers and even more techies outside of the company were sad to see Xerox discontinue GUI efforts beyond the Alto and Star, this was the full intention of the company's executives. At the time, Xerox was a copy machine company, the powers that be had no interest in making any sort of computer. In return for information, cooperation, and to somewhat return the favor, Apple gave Xerox a large amount of Apple stock. Apple didn't "buy" the GUI from Xerox, neither did they "steal" the GUI. About the only thing they "stole" were some engineers that moved to Apple to continue GUI work (Apple's former chief scientist, Larry Tessler, for example).
The early Lisa and Macintosh machines were less powerful than the last generation Xerox machines, but had better software support. The Xerox had several impressive demos, but most were incomplete. By 1985, the Macintosh had Mac Write, Mac Paint, Mac Draw, Hypercard, several Postscript-based illustration and DTP applications, and the very first GUI versions of MS Word and Excel.
Search the web for Apple/Xerox myths, you'll find the real story from several credible sources, including Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) who was still with the company at the time. www.woz.org may be a good start.
If it makes you feel any better, you may want to think of Apple as getting a taste of their own medicine with the Newton project. Like Xerox that pioneered a new area of computing, but allowed other companies to mass market smaller/cheaper models, Apple left the PDA market just as it began to take off. The Newtons were impressive technology demos, but were large and expensive and still had some quirks. Two years after Apple discontinued the Newton, everyone had a Palm.
Dr Pepper's flavor comes mostly from vanillin, which is similar to, but not quite the same as artifical almond. (We're talking organic chemistry, where a couple moved carbons can turn a safe sweet compound into a deadly poison -- this is why I'm a MechE and not a ChemE major!!). Vanillin is also used to flavor marshmallows.
Good article for those that don't already have access to PCB milling equipment. There really is no reason to do the old-school etching method anymore, in fact, I don't even know any hobbyists that do that anymore. Milling equipment can be found, borrowed, or made pretty easily these days. I've even seen a working setup made from Lego Mindstorms and a cordless Dremel! Hey, it works and beats the heck outta the mask-and-acid roll of the dice method.
Does anyone happen to know if Red Hat will be releasing a patch for version 6.2 of their distibution? I suppose I could patch it manually, but it'd be nice to stick with Red Hat fixes until I migrate to a newer version early this summer.
I ask as I belive this weekend is the offical EOL for 6.2 errata.
I don't see why not. If big dumb dudes can make millions by tossing a ball around a few hours a week, I don't see why a gamer shouldn't be able to make at least a few dollars by using his skills. 3D accelerator card makers may even pick a few of the best players to help promote their products.
The article author called River City Ransom the best co-op fighting game of all time. If anyone disagrees with this, it's because he hasn't played this simple but FUN and addicting game! Let me put this another way... if you haven't played River City Ransom for the NES... DO SO NOW!!!
Time Crisis and its sequels and clones were some fun light gun games, but I have a feeling we won't see many more in the future. One reason is the shift from CRT displays to DLP projection and Plasma/LCD/OLED thin panel displays. There simply isn't an easy or cheap way to make a light gun work with a non-scanning display. Light guns and light pens were cheap hacks back in the day, but doing something similar with a more modern display will require much more precise and expensive optics.
I'm glad to see that someone is finally putting high resolution map pan/zoom apps into the market, the technology has been available for awhile and continues to get cheaper. Silicon Graphics used to demonstrate a similar application years ago to promote their InfiniteReality graphics engine... they had ~500 GB of earth texure data on a massive disk array and were able to zoom down to 0.125m (aerial photo) resolution in a few cities. All realtime and at almost any speed. Butter-smooth. Crazy cool. The most impressive (or nauseating!) demo was the moon-to-DisneyWorld bungie jump, which made the audience gasp and the RAID grind like mad. These days I've heard their texure database is large and now even has elevation/terrain data. I'd love to see what the IR4 can do! On the PC side of things I would imagine this is now possible on a much smaller budget. High-end PCs finally have the gfx and I/O thruput (8x AGP and PCI-X, for example) to pipe the texture data fast enough. Keep blurring that line, it makes the games more impressive and gives even more possibilities for real world applications.
As someone who has been working with a large number of new P4 and Athlon PCs, I can tell you that most new PCs still use one single 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus. Even wiz-bang mobos with onboard RAID controllers tend to use a single PCI bus of this type... a major I/O bottleneck if you plan on moving more than 100 MB/sec of data. (granted, RAM, AGP, and CPU still have lots of legroom) Keep this in mind when building your next server... you may want to consider a board with 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI or even 133 MHz PCI-X.
While I haven't done this with Linux PCs, I have seen it done with some of our SGIs at work. The big Onyx systems can be easily configured (just a few tweaks to the X server setup files) to support mutliple users, each with their own keyboard/mouse and one or more gfx subsystems. It's even easier on the Onyx 300 and 3000 series, as all the keys and mice can be run off one USB channel.
This can also be done on the Octane, but requires a PS/2 keys/mouse interface PCI card.
I would suggest looking at the XFree86 config files for some pointers. You may also want to seek out ways to address different sets of USB keys and mice.
The article claims that Mac OS X has vector (resolution independant) icons. This is incorrect. Mac OS X uses 128 x 128 pixel icons, which are scaled to the requested size.
The only desktop environment i can think of with vector based icons is SGI's "Indigo Magic" or "IRIX Interactive Desktop".
There's no reason to run more than half a meter of cable...
Use a small external radio, the sort that has three connectors: power, ethernet, antenna.
Keep the computer, hub, etc indoors and just run cat5 ethernet and some low voltage power cable up the the roof.
On the roof, mount the antenna and the radio. Put the radio in a small weatherpoof box, or even a reinforced plastic bag. You shouldn't need more than 40cm of cable. Heck, use a small adapter and mount the radio TO the antenna itself without any cable. Nearly zero loss.
These little radios aren't too expensive and can handle extreme temperatures. There's no reason to have long cable runs or a PCI/PCMCIA radio card.
I can't think of many common appliances around that have serial ports on them. I guess my TiVo is the only one I can think of, that I own.
As this gizmo is designed for manufacturers to integrate in their new products, it's not really designed for the home user to just plug into a serial line. If you were to stick one of these to your TiVo, I can guarantee you that it's not going to work without significant software hackery.
However... if you're handy, and know how to work with microcontrollers (68hc12, basic stamp, etc) you can web-enable almost any electronic device in your home by linking the webserver to the uController and the uController's A/D circuits to your appliance. Write some simple software and away you go. Linking up your dish washer, vcr, and modern toaster isn't all that hard if you have the proper (affordable) parts.
my toaster does not have a little computer with AtoD converters to keep track of the temperature or little electronic switches to control whether the toast pops up. It is all analog and mechanical.
Many newer models of toasters are electronically controlled, and have been for several years. These typically cost $45 and up. The average $15 Walmart special will still be the analog/mechanical type and will probably never be web-enabled at that price.
Most security-concious businesses do not active ports on their switches until both A) a request is put in by the right people and B) the MAC address on the machine at the other end has been verified. Modern managed switches can be easily configured to only talk to a single predetermined MAC address per port.
Granted there is still the possibility of MAC address spoofing, but this prevents most hurried "Dreamcast Planters". A much greater threat comes from open WAPs, weak firewall, and weak passwords.
What's the reason for their upgrade? Windows 95 + Office 95 is still a decent combination and probably does more than what 99% of their users will ever need. Security isn't too great out of the box, but it's not that hard to configure the clients and/or a firewire in a sane manner.
I don't understand this "we must upgrade" mindset. If the wiz-bang product worked wonders when it was new, isn't is still working just as good today? My office recently replaced hundreds of P3/933 machines (running Win2K + Office2K) with P4/2.5G machines running WinXP + OfficeXP. Aside from the different default color and button theme, nobody really noticed a difference.... other than having to migrate files to the new boxes. The new machine rollout wasn't needed and was expensive... but the IT department said it "NEEDED TO BE DONE".
We have a couple SGI Indys that do various low-bandwidth server tasks... they do their jobs so well that one almost forgets about 'em. Last I checked both boxes had been up for over 600 days. IRIX 6.5.x quarterly rollups tend to improve performance over time, so it may be worthwhile to update the OS the next time we do a daemon/security update.
I suppose the same can be said for many Linux boxes running kernel 2.0 and 2.2... (though the IRIX kernel updates are move of a gradual evolution from quarter to quarter, moreso than a big step every couple years).
This thread that gotten me wondering, what sort of legal options would one have should they find an employee coding in backdoors?
Would this be considered felony fraud? The more I think about it, the more I hope so. Think about this -- one coder acting alone could cost a company millions of dollars in lost profit and trust. This would be more than that coder will probably earn in normal income thruout his entire life. I think this is one case where a jury SHOULD seriously consider decades of imprisonment. This isn't a simple case of a kid using DeCSS or defacing a website, this is case of one person destroying the image and trust of an entire company.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone happen to have made a working mirror of this site yet? How many millions of hits does it take to knock down both a site and its mirror??
Unforuntately clueless people will read it and assume that in order to use wireless they'll have to drill and void their warranty. The fact is there are plenty of other products for which none of that is necessary.
My office got a shiny new "Airport Extreme" about two weeks ago. Not only does it have a built in print-server, but it also has an external antenna jack. I wonder how many Airports were returned to Apple service/repair with hole drilled in the sides before the company decided to spend the $0.07 to add an external jack...
Anyone else find it odd that after 12 comments posted, both the main site and its mirror are slashdotted?
Some of the newer Airports (AirPort Extreme perhaps) have an external antenna jack. There's even a company selling a matching external antenna, no drilling required.
While browsing around, I ran across this press release:
p ril/prod_san.html
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/a
I've often though about the possibilies of a metro LAN or WAN setup. It would require a lot of security and gobs of bandwidth, but could be a interesting test case for "the future city". Consider linking dozens of downtown businesses with GigE or faster fiber. I would imagine the first few applications would be gimmicky, but may eventually bring about some rather innovative uses. I doubt a bakery would have much use for such a setup, but they may be others that would.
Why send expensive tanks into battle when a beowulf cluster of used AK-47s can theoretically do as much damage?
While many Xerox engineers and even more techies outside of the company were sad to see Xerox discontinue GUI efforts beyond the Alto and Star, this was the full intention of the company's executives. At the time, Xerox was a copy machine company, the powers that be had no interest in making any sort of computer. In return for information, cooperation, and to somewhat return the favor, Apple gave Xerox a large amount of Apple stock. Apple didn't "buy" the GUI from Xerox, neither did they "steal" the GUI. About the only thing they "stole" were some engineers that moved to Apple to continue GUI work (Apple's former chief scientist, Larry Tessler, for example).
The early Lisa and Macintosh machines were less powerful than the last generation Xerox machines, but had better software support. The Xerox had several impressive demos, but most were incomplete. By 1985, the Macintosh had Mac Write, Mac Paint, Mac Draw, Hypercard, several Postscript-based illustration and DTP applications, and the very first GUI versions of MS Word and Excel.
Search the web for Apple/Xerox myths, you'll find the real story from several credible sources, including Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) who was still with the company at the time. www.woz.org may be a good start.
If it makes you feel any better, you may want to think of Apple as getting a taste of their own medicine with the Newton project. Like Xerox that pioneered a new area of computing, but allowed other companies to mass market smaller/cheaper models, Apple left the PDA market just as it began to take off. The Newtons were impressive technology demos, but were large and expensive and still had some quirks. Two years after Apple discontinued the Newton, everyone had a Palm.
almond-food flavor (Dr.Pepper flavor)
Dr Pepper's flavor comes mostly from vanillin, which is similar to, but not quite the same as artifical almond. (We're talking organic chemistry, where a couple moved carbons can turn a safe sweet compound into a deadly poison -- this is why I'm a MechE and not a ChemE major!!). Vanillin is also used to flavor marshmallows.
Dr Pepper does not contain any prune compounds.
Don't get me started on Mr. Pibb......
My linksys router smells like peanut butter, I always figured it was due to the funky plastics. None of my other equipment has a food-like smell.
Good article for those that don't already have access to PCB milling equipment. There really is no reason to do the old-school etching method anymore, in fact, I don't even know any hobbyists that do that anymore. Milling equipment can be found, borrowed, or made pretty easily these days. I've even seen a working setup made from Lego Mindstorms and a cordless Dremel! Hey, it works and beats the heck outta the mask-and-acid roll of the dice method.
Does anyone happen to know if Red Hat will be releasing a patch for version 6.2 of their distibution? I suppose I could patch it manually, but it'd be nice to stick with Red Hat fixes until I migrate to a newer version early this summer.
I ask as I belive this weekend is the offical EOL for 6.2 errata.
Should it be a viable profession?
I don't see why not. If big dumb dudes can make millions by tossing a ball around a few hours a week, I don't see why a gamer shouldn't be able to make at least a few dollars by using his skills. 3D accelerator card makers may even pick a few of the best players to help promote their products.
The article author called River City Ransom the best co-op fighting game of all time. If anyone disagrees with this, it's because he hasn't played this simple but FUN and addicting game!
Let me put this another way... if you haven't played River City Ransom for the NES... DO SO NOW!!!
Time Crisis and its sequels and clones were some fun light gun games, but I have a feeling we won't see many more in the future. One reason is the shift from CRT displays to DLP projection and Plasma/LCD/OLED thin panel displays. There simply isn't an easy or cheap way to make a light gun work with a non-scanning display. Light guns and light pens were cheap hacks back in the day, but doing something similar with a more modern display will require much more precise and expensive optics.
I'm glad to see that someone is finally putting high resolution map pan/zoom apps into the market, the technology has been available for awhile and continues to get cheaper. Silicon Graphics used to demonstrate a similar application years ago to promote their InfiniteReality graphics engine... they had ~500 GB of earth texure data on a massive disk array and were able to zoom down to 0.125m (aerial photo) resolution in a few cities. All realtime and at almost any speed. Butter-smooth. Crazy cool. The most impressive (or nauseating!) demo was the moon-to-DisneyWorld bungie jump, which made the audience gasp and the RAID grind like mad. These days I've heard their texure database is large and now even has elevation/terrain data. I'd love to see what the IR4 can do!
On the PC side of things I would imagine this is now possible on a much smaller budget. High-end PCs finally have the gfx and I/O thruput (8x AGP and PCI-X, for example) to pipe the texture data fast enough.
Keep blurring that line, it makes the games more impressive and gives even more possibilities for real world applications.
As someone who has been working with a large number of new P4 and Athlon PCs, I can tell you that most new PCs still use one single 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus. Even wiz-bang mobos with onboard RAID controllers tend to use a single PCI bus of this type... a major I/O bottleneck if you plan on moving more than 100 MB/sec of data. (granted, RAM, AGP, and CPU still have lots of legroom) Keep this in mind when building your next server... you may want to consider a board with 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI or even 133 MHz PCI-X.
While I haven't done this with Linux PCs, I have seen it done with some of our SGIs at work. The big Onyx systems can be easily configured (just a few tweaks to the X server setup files) to support mutliple users, each with their own keyboard/mouse and one or more gfx subsystems. It's even easier on the Onyx 300 and 3000 series, as all the keys and mice can be run off one USB channel.
This can also be done on the Octane, but requires a PS/2 keys/mouse interface PCI card.
I would suggest looking at the XFree86 config files for some pointers. You may also want to seek out ways to address different sets of USB keys and mice.
The article claims that Mac OS X has vector (resolution independant) icons. This is incorrect. Mac OS X uses 128 x 128 pixel icons, which are scaled to the requested size.
The only desktop environment i can think of with vector based icons is SGI's "Indigo Magic" or "IRIX Interactive Desktop".
There's no reason to run more than half a meter of cable...
Use a small external radio, the sort that has three connectors: power, ethernet, antenna.
Keep the computer, hub, etc indoors and just run cat5 ethernet and some low voltage power cable up the the roof.
On the roof, mount the antenna and the radio. Put the radio in a small weatherpoof box, or even a reinforced plastic bag. You shouldn't need more than 40cm of cable. Heck, use a small adapter and mount the radio TO the antenna itself without any cable. Nearly zero loss.
These little radios aren't too expensive and can handle extreme temperatures. There's no reason to have long cable runs or a PCI/PCMCIA radio card.
I can't think of many common appliances around that have serial ports on them. I guess my TiVo is the only one I can think of, that I own.
As this gizmo is designed for manufacturers to integrate in their new products, it's not really designed for the home user to just plug into a serial line. If you were to stick one of these to your TiVo, I can guarantee you that it's not going to work without significant software hackery.
However... if you're handy, and know how to work with microcontrollers (68hc12, basic stamp, etc) you can web-enable almost any electronic device in your home by linking the webserver to the uController and the uController's A/D circuits to your appliance. Write some simple software and away you go. Linking up your dish washer, vcr, and modern toaster isn't all that hard if you have the proper (affordable) parts.
my toaster does not have a little computer with AtoD converters to keep track of the temperature or little electronic switches to control whether the toast pops up. It is all analog and mechanical.
Many newer models of toasters are electronically controlled, and have been for several years. These typically cost $45 and up. The average $15 Walmart special will still be the analog/mechanical type and will probably never be web-enabled at that price.
http://www.sgi.com/products/remarketed/o2/
Most security-concious businesses do not active ports on their switches until both A) a request is put in by the right people and B) the MAC address on the machine at the other end has been verified. Modern managed switches can be easily configured to only talk to a single predetermined MAC address per port.
Granted there is still the possibility of MAC address spoofing, but this prevents most hurried "Dreamcast Planters". A much greater threat comes from open WAPs, weak firewall, and weak passwords.
What's the reason for their upgrade? Windows 95 + Office 95 is still a decent combination and probably does more than what 99% of their users will ever need. Security isn't too great out of the box, but it's not that hard to configure the clients and/or a firewire in a sane manner.
I don't understand this "we must upgrade" mindset. If the wiz-bang product worked wonders when it was new, isn't is still working just as good today? My office recently replaced hundreds of P3/933 machines (running Win2K + Office2K) with P4/2.5G machines running WinXP + OfficeXP. Aside from the different default color and button theme, nobody really noticed a difference.... other than having to migrate files to the new boxes. The new machine rollout wasn't needed and was expensive... but the IT department said it "NEEDED TO BE DONE".
I don't get it.
I hear ya...
We have a couple SGI Indys that do various low-bandwidth server tasks... they do their jobs so well that one almost forgets about 'em. Last I checked both boxes had been up for over 600 days. IRIX 6.5.x quarterly rollups tend to improve performance over time, so it may be worthwhile to update the OS the next time we do a daemon/security update.
I suppose the same can be said for many Linux boxes running kernel 2.0 and 2.2... (though the IRIX kernel updates are move of a gradual evolution from quarter to quarter, moreso than a big step every couple years).
This thread that gotten me wondering, what sort of legal options would one have should they find an employee coding in backdoors?
Would this be considered felony fraud? The more I think about it, the more I hope so. Think about this -- one coder acting alone could cost a company millions of dollars in lost profit and trust. This would be more than that coder will probably earn in normal income thruout his entire life. I think this is one case where a jury SHOULD seriously consider decades of imprisonment. This isn't a simple case of a kid using DeCSS or defacing a website, this is case of one person destroying the image and trust of an entire company.