I use a laptop backpack for the bulky items and carry the PDA in the pocket. Mostly what I carry around is static. Laptop, camera(digital), tripods(big and mini), power strip, power supplies, extra battries, etc. It also provides room for notes, books, etc. When I don't need the laptop it's evicted along with it's power supply, but generally the bag is stuffed with all the geek toys and accesories I need to keep me going all day.
This backpack looks like a regular backpack on the outside while providing padded storage for the notebook. It's by Jansport and I found it in an EMS store (Eastern Mountain Sports). Unfortunatel I don't see it listed on their site.
As some others have mentiond, what you want is a pannel PC. These are embedded PCs that have a flatpannel for the screen, commonly also have a touch screen interface. They can be purchased with or without HD. Usually they have some sort of network connection. 10/100 twisted pair being the most common. Many manufacturers make em, but the prices can be a bit high in compairison to a regular PC. It's both a combination of low volume and that flat pannel display.
When you select one, don't go for super high speed CPU. As you will be mounting it in the wall, where will the heat go? Mounting a small low speed fan, blowing up, below the unit in the wall cavity can do wonders for cooling the unit even though it dosen't draw any air from outside the wall cavity. It will better distribute the heat up and down the wall cavity making a better heat sink.
My personal opinion is you wish to sell host names then you must provide atleast one root name server for all to use for each TLD you sell names under, and if you have multiple name servers you must have them geographically dispersed. Your root name servers will provide lookups for all the TLDs. If you can't provide that, then you don't get to sell domain names. You want to start a new TLD, then provide the root name server. This would show a certin level of commitment.
To do this all the root name servers would need to agree on a means for updating domain name service information in real time, but that should be possible.
Yes, I know a root name server is a beast to operate, but then you are providing a service that can't suffer outtages.
Re:Beyond Majority Rule
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Republic.Com
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· Score: 2
I am very comfortable with what the society calls "Quaker process." Yeah, it takes time, but it works -- which is more than you can say for democracy, capitalism, or any other organizational/principled form.
Knowing social dynamics, I think the Quaker Process would have a hard time scaling. Also it think it would need people who are genuinly interested in control of their own lives, yet also respect others wishes. Another problem is it doesn't deal well with is people moving around. The Quaker process only really works in long term stable communities. I'd have to say most communities are either to large or dynamic for it to work.
As a country, the US needs to work on getting it's citizens truly involved in government. To the extent that they know the issues facing the communities they are living in. Know the relavant details, etc. Unfortunately most people only just want to slip by on the path of least resistance. If this means giving over control to someone else and following that other person's decisions, so be it.
The one thing a cult can't survive is a bunch of free thinkers. A democracy needs them.
If you are using Linux boxes, it is possible to do a full shutdown on modern hardware by calling the regular shutdown program from a screensaver like program. One would modify one of the activity moniter programs so it will shut the system down if there is no activity for a period of time. This would shut the system down over night, and durring slow days in the lab.
There is also a patch available that does HD spindown for Linux. From what I hear it now works on IDE drives. That alown will get you 5-10 Watts per machine.
The nightly scripts run by cron can have their run times changed so they are run just after lab close, then an automated shutdown run. Watch that you provide enough spacing between script runs so the previous one's output is available to the next script. This is important for the accounting scripts. You can even do some simple recoding of them to serialize them to shorten the time it takes to get them all done in the right sequence. This would allow one to have cron start them, then the last would shutdown the system when it is finished.
I remember a serial device that you could get for your computer that did the same thing. This was back in 85-87 time frame. I know Stride Micro resold them to use with their Stride series boxes. You attached this box to the top of your terminal and it bounced an infrared signal off of a holographic patch you stuck on your head. It looked at the reflectance level. This then was used to control your cursor. I never bought one as I couldn't justify it. I think it was between $150 and $200, but my memory is foggy on stuff that far back.
Yes the pay stinks compared to here, but how else do you think they will raise their standard of living?
The real problem is they aren't getting paid a decent wage for their area, let alown for any where else. The reason why the US has such a high standard of living is the union activity we had that forced higher wages. Even in the US work places where there isn't union support for the workers the paychecks are on average lower, significantly lower. At one time in the US you were able to support a family on the wages of a store clerk. Just try that now. It's not just the third world workers that are getting exploited.
Cost: An old laptop is still worth alot more than an old PC from the same era. Old P75 computers are dirt cheep. Usually $50 or less, please, please take them off our hands.
Expandability: A laptop usually has at most 2 slots for expansion. That's it. An old P75 will likely have 3 PCI slots plus 3-4 ISA slots. This allows it to be a firewall for both a local network as well as a DMZ, and have each segment physically separate. I evicted the PCI graphics card from my firewall and replaced it with an old ISA VGA card so I could use the PCI slot for a NIC. I have three PCI 10/100 NICs in it as well as a PCI SCSI card for the logging hard disks.
What about 1 handed keyboards.
IT depends on who you have use the chords,
but 1 hour spend teaching someone to use it would make it still worthwhile.
And it would be smaller, so less area to pick crap up in.
I can see you haven't worked with guys from the shop floor ever. Each person needing to use the machine woud have to be tought chording. That's not praticle. Most of the shop floor people won't even know how to touch type, let alown be very familiar with computers. You need to keep the learning curve as low as possible. This isn't to say they are dumb, but it's yet another skill they must learn to use the machine. Another thing. Shop floors are dirty, any hole to let dirt in will collect it. It dosen't matter how few you have. You don't want any. They recommend computers that go onto shop floors be fully sealed and air tight. Yes this makes cooling a P-III a bit difficult, but it can be done.
Actually FLASH ram drives can be quite reliable. What you do is mount your root read only them make a ram disk to mount/tmp on. Do the same for any partition you need to do writes in. If you need more space than your flash card has you can do the trick they do on boot floppies and compress the root partition and load it into a ram disk. Sure this burns more ram, but then how much ram does a router need? 32MB should do just fine for most routers. I only have 16MB in mine. If you had 64MB or 128MB of memory in the system, you would have plenty for the OS and a sizeable ram disk.
I've been looking at doing something along the same lines for my firewall and web server. For the web server I'd use 2 raided 80GB hard disks and not use a flash disk, but the firewall would be run off of one. The main reason I'm looking at this is power consumption. Right now I'm sucking down about 200 Watts between the firewall and web server. If figure I could lower this to less than 50watts total for both.
Get the BS or MS degree, or Pile it Higher and Deeper. It'll improve your chances of getting a good job with higher pay doing what you want to do. Try to do it with the minimum amount of loans possible. If you do have to take out loans, pay them off as fast as possible after you get out. Get a cheap appartment (if single) and use the money you save on the appartment to pay the loans off that much faster.
Ever thought about just what technologies are neede to build a CD-ROM? It's surprising how much is needed to be known, and how many tools have to be built before the CD-ROM can be built.
Go with a USB web cam. You can always rip the lense off and use a video camera lense if needed. Making a C-mount isn't all the hard. The reason I say go with the web cam is fully due to the high power draw of all the frame grabbers I've seen. Another advantage is you get direct to digital which removes the sync problems associated with digitising a video feed. The other reason is cost. They are cheap, real chaep.
If you need to use a frame grabber, look at the Matrox Meteor. Supported under Linux and they have a PC-104+ version. I don't know the status of support for the Meteor II, last I knew it was in progress.
I have seen some programs that have artisic uses (digital recording and graphics programs for example) but a computer program is closer to a camera than a photograph.
So just what is a fractile landscape generator?
Can you really say? Who is the artist of what work? Can we separate them out? The programmer as artist of the clever code to generate the landscape, or the user who manipulates the controls to generate a new landscape image?
You know, some instrument makers are considered artists for the quality of the job they do making the instrument. How would this apply to programmers?
After years of programming I'd have to say that all programming is art, atleast in the vein that it is a creative endevor much like writing. It's just that some examples are much better artistically than others. As with all art, some is excelent, some is good, and then you have the trash that is without merrit. By nature, art is in the eye of the beholder. Each observer has his or her own ideas as to what constitutes true art. Nobody is correct, it's all relative.
Get your parents involved. As said, untill your 18 you generally have very little rights and then only the rights others (over 18) are willing to fight for for you.
Did your parrents sign a document allowing the censorware software to track you browsing habbits? I bet not. This is where you fight. FInd a few parrents that are outraged at that. Get the most articulate ones to spearhead the suit to throw out that nasty software that is tracking kids browsing habbits. Only use the censorware's inabillity to properly as an additional hook to kick it out.
Adding in a good cache server will help tremendously with the load on the outside network link. You will need to get everybody to use it, but that isn't as hard as it seams. You may find that is all that is needed to restore reasonable network performance for all. Considering you have 600 clients, you will likely need to have multiple NAT boxes just to have enough ports to work smoothly. Each of these could then also be provisioned with a big HD for caching HTTP and FTP data. The caches can be setup in a peering configuration where if one has a document cached, the others won't have to fetch it from the source, just the peer.
I haven't looked at Pipes yet. I will tonight when I have more time, on the other hand...
I've been independently thinking of a Plugable GUI. What I was thinking of is a GUI library interface for programs. A program defines each data socket it has, what data is presented at it and how it can be manipulated. A separate part of the definition places the data sockets on windows in their correct places and defines the visual representation. At this point I feel the window definition part would be an XMLish like syntax to provide comonality across platforms and leverage existing knowledge. One of the things I wanted to make sure of is that the data sockets could be placed on multiple windows if desired. Because the window and data definitions are separated it's also possible to make multiple window repesentations for a prorgam and also to have some or all of the data sockets controlled by another program. A control socket library would be provided that allows a program to connect up to and manipulate the data sockets provided by another program. Note: this is what the GUI uses to attach to a program. The visual representation tells it what data sockes are there and how they are to be displayed. A program that is the combination of a few sub programs would have a visual representation that linked into one or more of the sub programs to control the data sockets that aren't controlled by the other programs. It would be an error to define a data socket without providing a visual representation, connection to a control socket or explicitly not giving it a visual representation.
Another part of the design is a network layer that allows one to hook up data sockes across systems seamlessly. It would be activated by changing the address of the socket to additionally specify a system and process group on that system rather than just the process group.
I unfortunatley haven't had much time to work on this idea even though I first dreamed it up back in 1989/1990. It had a little different form back then. It was to be the GUI interface for a flexible syntax programming language. Be thankfull I never release that upon the world.:) Right now I think I would implement it in Java or Nomen (when it's finished). Robots and robotic vision systems aare consuming all my time now.
The problem is game. It's immediatly invokes competition in most minds. One person "wins" over the other(s) who lose. One needs a game design that fosters cooperation between all the participants to win together rather than pitting them against each other individually or in groups.
This is one of the best Ask Slashdot topics in awhile. To bad I can't think of a good game that meets it. I was initially thinking of "Once Apon a Time" (I think that's it's name) which is a story building game which uses cards and the player's creativity to build a story. I haven't played it myself, but have watched a few games in action. It can be quite entertaining. Another game that came to mind is "Mission Statement" where one generates mission statements from buzwords, but it's still a player against player compeditive game and it isn't in wide distibution yet.
Even though it will be my job of getting it working for the developers at work I'll wait a few days before I download. Likley start to download it this weekend and hope it properly completes by Monday.
We're still using RH6.2 on most developers desks due to compiler issues in RH7.0. Sure we can get the latest RPM updates, but it's really a hastle making the build scripts to automatically incorporate them on each desktop for each computer type.
"In fact, 98 percent of the computers the department uses are seized property, the chief said. He plans to give one of the cameras seized from the van to his accident reconstruction officer."
Considering where Salem NH is and where many of it's people work, The Boston Globe is a good one contact. I'd also go for the Nashua, Portsmouth, and Manchester papers to get some more coverage.
I hate to break it to ya, but a vast majority of cops don't have a degree in criminal justice. Just what they got in police acadamy, if they even went to one. Some are just locally trained by the training department which is usually just the Sheriff.
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This backpack looks like a regular backpack on the outside while providing padded storage for the notebook. It's by Jansport and I found it in an EMS store (Eastern Mountain Sports). Unfortunatel I don't see it listed on their site.
So what are they going to do if there is a major pipeline break that puts the pipeline out of service for an extended period?
When you select one, don't go for super high speed CPU. As you will be mounting it in the wall, where will the heat go? Mounting a small low speed fan, blowing up, below the unit in the wall cavity can do wonders for cooling the unit even though it dosen't draw any air from outside the wall cavity. It will better distribute the heat up and down the wall cavity making a better heat sink.
My personal opinion is you wish to sell host names then you must provide atleast one root name server for all to use for each TLD you sell names under, and if you have multiple name servers you must have them geographically dispersed. Your root name servers will provide lookups for all the TLDs. If you can't provide that, then you don't get to sell domain names. You want to start a new TLD, then provide the root name server. This would show a certin level of commitment.
To do this all the root name servers would need to agree on a means for updating domain name service information in real time, but that should be possible.
Yes, I know a root name server is a beast to operate, but then you are providing a service that can't suffer outtages.
Knowing social dynamics, I think the Quaker Process would have a hard time scaling. Also it think it would need people who are genuinly interested in control of their own lives, yet also respect others wishes. Another problem is it doesn't deal well with is people moving around. The Quaker process only really works in long term stable communities. I'd have to say most communities are either to large or dynamic for it to work.
As a country, the US needs to work on getting it's citizens truly involved in government. To the extent that they know the issues facing the communities they are living in. Know the relavant details, etc. Unfortunately most people only just want to slip by on the path of least resistance. If this means giving over control to someone else and following that other person's decisions, so be it.
The one thing a cult can't survive is a bunch of free thinkers. A democracy needs them.
If you are using Linux boxes, it is possible to do a full shutdown on modern hardware by calling the regular shutdown program from a screensaver like program. One would modify one of the activity moniter programs so it will shut the system down if there is no activity for a period of time. This would shut the system down over night, and durring slow days in the lab.
There is also a patch available that does HD spindown for Linux. From what I hear it now works on IDE drives. That alown will get you 5-10 Watts per machine.
The nightly scripts run by cron can have their run times changed so they are run just after lab close, then an automated shutdown run. Watch that you provide enough spacing between script runs so the previous one's output is available to the next script. This is important for the accounting scripts. You can even do some simple recoding of them to serialize them to shorten the time it takes to get them all done in the right sequence. This would allow one to have cron start them, then the last would shutdown the system when it is finished.
I remember a serial device that you could get for your computer that did the same thing. This was back in 85-87 time frame. I know Stride Micro resold them to use with their Stride series boxes. You attached this box to the top of your terminal and it bounced an infrared signal off of a holographic patch you stuck on your head. It looked at the reflectance level. This then was used to control your cursor. I never bought one as I couldn't justify it. I think it was between $150 and $200, but my memory is foggy on stuff that far back.
The real problem is they aren't getting paid a decent wage for their area, let alown for any where else. The reason why the US has such a high standard of living is the union activity we had that forced higher wages. Even in the US work places where there isn't union support for the workers the paychecks are on average lower, significantly lower. At one time in the US you were able to support a family on the wages of a store clerk. Just try that now. It's not just the third world workers that are getting exploited.
Heat: As others have mentioned, laptops run hot.
Cost: An old laptop is still worth alot more than an old PC from the same era. Old P75 computers are dirt cheep. Usually $50 or less, please, please take them off our hands.
Expandability: A laptop usually has at most 2 slots for expansion. That's it. An old P75 will likely have 3 PCI slots plus 3-4 ISA slots. This allows it to be a firewall for both a local network as well as a DMZ, and have each segment physically separate. I evicted the PCI graphics card from my firewall and replaced it with an old ISA VGA card so I could use the PCI slot for a NIC. I have three PCI 10/100 NICs in it as well as a PCI SCSI card for the logging hard disks.
What about 1 handed keyboards.
IT depends on who you have use the chords,
but 1 hour spend teaching someone to use it would make it still worthwhile.
And it would be smaller, so less area to pick crap up in.
I can see you haven't worked with guys from the shop floor ever. Each person needing to use the machine woud have to be tought chording. That's not praticle. Most of the shop floor people won't even know how to touch type, let alown be very familiar with computers. You need to keep the learning curve as low as possible. This isn't to say they are dumb, but it's yet another skill they must learn to use the machine. Another thing. Shop floors are dirty, any hole to let dirt in will collect it. It dosen't matter how few you have. You don't want any. They recommend computers that go onto shop floors be fully sealed and air tight. Yes this makes cooling a P-III a bit difficult, but it can be done.
1100 series from Storm.
I've been looking at doing something along the same lines for my firewall and web server. For the web server I'd use 2 raided 80GB hard disks and not use a flash disk, but the firewall would be run off of one. The main reason I'm looking at this is power consumption. Right now I'm sucking down about 200 Watts between the firewall and web server. If figure I could lower this to less than 50watts total for both.
Get the BS or MS degree, or Pile it Higher and Deeper. It'll improve your chances of getting a good job with higher pay doing what you want to do. Try to do it with the minimum amount of loans possible. If you do have to take out loans, pay them off as fast as possible after you get out. Get a cheap appartment (if single) and use the money you save on the appartment to pay the loans off that much faster.
Ever thought about just what technologies are neede to build a CD-ROM? It's surprising how much is needed to be known, and how many tools have to be built before the CD-ROM can be built.
If you need to use a frame grabber, look at the Matrox Meteor. Supported under Linux and they have a PC-104+ version. I don't know the status of support for the Meteor II, last I knew it was in progress.
I have seen some programs that have artisic uses (digital recording and graphics programs for example) but a computer program is closer to a camera than a photograph.
So just what is a fractile landscape generator?
Can you really say? Who is the artist of what work? Can we separate them out? The programmer as artist of the clever code to generate the landscape, or the user who manipulates the controls to generate a new landscape image?
You know, some instrument makers are considered artists for the quality of the job they do making the instrument. How would this apply to programmers?
After years of programming I'd have to say that all programming is art, atleast in the vein that it is a creative endevor much like writing. It's just that some examples are much better artistically than others. As with all art, some is excelent, some is good, and then you have the trash that is without merrit. By nature, art is in the eye of the beholder. Each observer has his or her own ideas as to what constitutes true art. Nobody is correct, it's all relative.
Did your parrents sign a document allowing the censorware software to track you browsing habbits? I bet not. This is where you fight. FInd a few parrents that are outraged at that. Get the most articulate ones to spearhead the suit to throw out that nasty software that is tracking kids browsing habbits. Only use the censorware's inabillity to properly as an additional hook to kick it out.
Adding in a good cache server will help tremendously with the load on the outside network link. You will need to get everybody to use it, but that isn't as hard as it seams. You may find that is all that is needed to restore reasonable network performance for all. Considering you have 600 clients, you will likely need to have multiple NAT boxes just to have enough ports to work smoothly. Each of these could then also be provisioned with a big HD for caching HTTP and FTP data. The caches can be setup in a peering configuration where if one has a document cached, the others won't have to fetch it from the source, just the peer.
I haven't looked at Pipes yet. I will tonight when I have more time, on the other hand...
I've been independently thinking of a Plugable GUI. What I was thinking of is a GUI library interface for programs. A program defines each data socket it has, what data is presented at it and how it can be manipulated. A separate part of the definition places the data sockets on windows in their correct places and defines the visual representation. At this point I feel the window definition part would be an XMLish like syntax to provide comonality across platforms and leverage existing knowledge. One of the things I wanted to make sure of is that the data sockets could be placed on multiple windows if desired. Because the window and data definitions are separated it's also possible to make multiple window repesentations for a prorgam and also to have some or all of the data sockets controlled by another program. A control socket library would be provided that allows a program to connect up to and manipulate the data sockets provided by another program. Note: this is what the GUI uses to attach to a program. The visual representation tells it what data sockes are there and how they are to be displayed. A program that is the combination of a few sub programs would have a visual representation that linked into one or more of the sub programs to control the data sockets that aren't controlled by the other programs. It would be an error to define a data socket without providing a visual representation, connection to a control socket or explicitly not giving it a visual representation.
Another part of the design is a network layer that allows one to hook up data sockes across systems seamlessly. It would be activated by changing the address of the socket to additionally specify a system and process group on that system rather than just the process group.
I unfortunatley haven't had much time to work on this idea even though I first dreamed it up back in 1989/1990. It had a little different form back then. It was to be the GUI interface for a flexible syntax programming language. Be thankfull I never release that upon the world. :) Right now I think I would implement it in Java or Nomen (when it's finished). Robots and robotic vision systems aare consuming all my time now.
This is one of the best Ask Slashdot topics in awhile. To bad I can't think of a good game that meets it. I was initially thinking of "Once Apon a Time" (I think that's it's name) which is a story building game which uses cards and the player's creativity to build a story. I haven't played it myself, but have watched a few games in action. It can be quite entertaining. Another game that came to mind is "Mission Statement" where one generates mission statements from buzwords, but it's still a player against player compeditive game and it isn't in wide distibution yet.
Even though it will be my job of getting it working for the developers at work I'll wait a few days before I download. Likley start to download it this weekend and hope it properly completes by Monday.
We're still using RH6.2 on most developers desks due to compiler issues in RH7.0. Sure we can get the latest RPM updates, but it's really a hastle making the build scripts to automatically incorporate them on each desktop for each computer type.
"In fact, 98 percent of the computers the department uses are seized property, the chief said. He plans to give one of the cameras seized from the van to his accident reconstruction officer."
Considering where Salem NH is and where many of it's people work, The Boston Globe is a good one contact. I'd also go for the Nashua, Portsmouth, and Manchester papers to get some more coverage.
I hate to break it to ya, but a vast majority of cops don't have a degree in criminal justice. Just what they got in police acadamy, if they even went to one. Some are just locally trained by the training department which is usually just the Sheriff.