Swapping the controller card normally will work, but be aware that usually you'll end up with some problems due to the difference in the bad track mapping on the new vs the old drive.
Specifically, a lot of drives have their defect map hard-coded into eprom at the factory and as a result if you swap boards, the sectors which wer bad and were redirected to a good spot on the new drive won't be where it expects them.
I was talking to a friend about "mystery email attachments", and wanted to find this user friendly strip.
So, without thinking I fire up google and type the search:
"user friendly the comic strip" email attachment
and then clicked on search. The first hit is the cartoon I wanted, so I click on it. When I pull up the page, I realize that the text words "email attachment" don't appear anywhere on the screen other than the graphic text in the comic itself, so google shouldn't have found the page - at least according to how I thought google worked. So I pulled up the source to see if there was a meta tag there which would explain this. Nope.
The only thing I can think of is that google either OCR's the pictures (seems scary, and that font which Illiad uses doesn't look very OCR-able). The other thing I thought about is that perhaps google also matches text found within <A> tags which link to that page or something.
I've shot a message off to google to ask about this but I haven't heard back yet. I'll be interested to find out how the *@(#*$ they did this.
I think that I saw an ad somewhere which said "How the @(#$* did they do that?" was the highest praise one web designer could give to another. If that's true, they've definately earned my praise in this case. Regardless, some wizard at google got their search engine to do exactly what I wanted with whatever technology they used. Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. And google is definately magic.
Re:Where to put angular momentum
on
Hack in Space
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· Score: 5, Informative
This technology is also being used (with great success) on the Amateur Radio satellite AO-40 which was on Slashdot a while back.
Specifically, it was used to de-spin the satellite from almost 18 RPM down to the desired 5 RPM.
Some more relevant quotes I found while looking around on the web about AO-40's system:
Magnetorquer
In the satellite, several electro-magnets, also named magnetorquer, are distributes that can be used in the interplay with the Earth's magnetic field close to perigee for the attitude-control of the satellite. The satellite acts as the rotor of an electric motor while the magnet-field of the Earth forms the stator. The process of this movement is named as magnetorquing. With the magnetorquing, the flight-attitude of the satellite and the spin-speed can be changed during perigee-passes.
The onboard magnetorquing system--which consists of solenoid coils--makes use of Earth's magnetic field to control the spacecraft's spin and orientation. Magnetorquing is most effective when Earth's magnetic field is strongest, so it typically only takes place at perigee--when the satellite is closest to the Earth. Ground controllers have been making incremental adjustments during each perigee.
I also remember someone saying that this was somewhat "experimental" on AO-40. I can't find a quote though...
I agree fully that it's good to see the NASA engineers thinking "Well it's broke, we can't send someone up to fix it, so what can we do to make it work?" What I would like to know is who came up with the original idea (pre AO-40, or this satellite). It sure doesn't seem like the type of thing which I would have thought about when trying to figure out how to control the attitude of a spacecraft.
I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the "what is rural?" question. I live in Montana. Population of the entire state is around a Million. Most of the eastern part's population density is measured in square miles per person instead of people per square mile.
I'm in the 5th largest city. Population about 50,000 or so in the "Greater" area. As an ISP We service people in what we call rural areas which don't even have phone service (we do a lot of wireless) because how far out they are. We're discussing expanding into areas with population of under a thousand in the local dialing area.
The problem is that I don't think that some people get it... It cost a LOT to drag bandwidth out here. Especially when you're dragging a DS3 equivalent a hundred miles to service 1000 people assuming if you get everyone in town.
I'm getting 2.26MB/s downloading netscape from a unix box on our core network. I've seen as high as 4MB/s, depending on network conditions and what server at ftp.netscape.com I connect to... They seem to have two tuning settings, one which limits me to about half of the other one based most likely on maximum window size and the delay product.
But again, I'm not on the same network with a hundred other students running a napster server.....
I think you misunderstand what unemployment *INSURANCE* is and how it works.
Unemployment *INSURANCE* is federally and state mandated insurance. As an employer you HAVE to carry it. You have no choice. As a libertarian, I think that government forcing this down employers and employee's throats is not good. As an employer in the State of Montana, I have to pay a certain percentage of wages into the program. This is employer-paid, and adds to the cost of running a business.
If an employer lays someone off and they collect unemployment, in my state at least, my unemployment percentage rate goes up. Or, in more insurance-like terms, if there is a claim against my policy as an employer, they are going to increase my premium.
Unemployment insurance is supposed to be 100% funded by the employers. This is not a tax that the population necessarily pays, but instead is forced on employers.
As a libertarian, I would like to see a government mandated program such as this go away. Since it is here, I see no reason why someone shouldn't take full advantage of it. The problem I have with the government going after this guy is that from the limited information we have it appears to me that he is, in fact, out of work. I suspect he also did look for work during those days he was getting benefits, and is still looking. The question really comes down to what are the requirements for drawing unemployment. If he met the letter of the law, he shouldn't be being pursued by the government.
Unfortunately, the government tends to go after the people who makes them look the worst. This guy decides to start trying to make it on his own - one way or another - and as a result, gets stomped by the unemployment cops. Obviously this guy is trying to make an income instead of truly leaching off the government. The problem is that he decided to portray himself as someone who just sets around all day doing nothing and not attempting to work. I'm not sure if this the case or not, but I'm sure that his little cartoon doesn't reflect reality.
Let me put this a little differently. Lets say you've been looking for work for a lot of months and you decide this isn't working so, while still looking for work - but perhaps not as hard as the first few months, you decide to pursue trying to broaden your skillset or decide to start working on your own business. Should your unemployment benefits end?
Again, the real question is EXACTLY what are the rules they say he's broken. The fact that they interrogated him make me suspect that they are simply fishing for something they can construe as a rules violation and are hoping they find it.
It will be interesting to see what happens long-term.
If this ever ends up in court, there is about a hundred ways that you could explain this.
Looking at some unemployment requirements, most of them require you to be making "contacts looking for work". If his web site has had a million visitors, well I think I could argue that he's made a million potential work contacts. I suspect if times weren't so bad in his chosen field, he probably would have had dozens of job offers by now.
After all, isn't looking for a job simply marketing? I think he's done a pretty good job at marketing, although I'm not sure what type of picture he's portrayed of himself...
Answering emails all day could also count. Perhaps he was answering emails to prove to people he could be useful. Perhaps each email is a job contact.
I could go on all day. Someone could really have fun with this....
Basically what you are doing is giving them 45 days to steal all your intellectual property. You said it yourself, you're going to do the "information transfer" and then they have the option of paying you or not. Do you think that the information you transfer is going to be able to be removed from the brains of the people who look at it?
If you've figured out how to do something they want, they should pay for it up front. Period. None of this "let us look at it for 45 days and then we might pay you if we decide we still want it".
About the only way this isn't going to turn bad is if this is something they really can't do themselves. If they can do it themselves, what is stopping them? Perhaps they hope to figure that out from looking at your stuff.
If you really do want to do this you need to get about 3 DIFFERENT lawyers involved, preferably an Intellectual Property lawyer, a Corporate (agreements) lawyer, and probably a third one for good measure. You have to make sure there isn't anything that they can gain from this, or if they do gain something they have to pay you for it.
In addition, you need to figure out exactly what they are wanting to see. If they just want to make sure the code isn't a nightmare and it is reasonably written, perhaps getting a third party involved to do the review might be a good idea. Or as someone else suggested, get them over to your place of business.
The key here is to transfer as little as possible before they commit to paying you. It sounds like you guys are giving them everything before they pay you. I think I'll repeat myself and say that this is a very bad idea. Get the vaseline ready. You'll need it.
The other question is the long term piece of this. A lot of the time these types of deals end up being great for a couple of years and then the two companies either split the sheets and one ends up going broke, or one eats the other one. As you're the smaller company, the chances of you being on the bottom when this happens are quite good. Are you thinking about the long term repercussions of this?
One last thing I'll say. Don't let your greed get in the way of your common sense. Quite often people loose their good judgement when lots of dollar signs flash in front of their eyes.
There's a passage in the book that iterates what caused the decay in the first place, and it was very definately censorship. The passage talks about how it got started- they removed one piece because someone got offended, then another because some other group was offended, then another piece and another and another. Eventually, there wasn't anything controversial left in the "official" literature, and the government got the Firemen to burn the books.
I think I would agree with a statement that the book has a lot of non-censorcism meat to it. I wouldn't agree that it wasn't specifically about the effects of censorcism.
I think that I would summarise the "moral" of the book is that we need those "evil, controversial ideas" to continue to be thoughtful, intelligent beings. And censorship only serves to remove those ideas from circulation.
Joe asked, "Why should we go to the store?" Jim replied, "To get some Jolt Cola, of course."
vs.
After you see the login prompt, type the username "joe" followed by the password "brown".
What I referred to as the url problem is this:
Please visit our sales page at http://www.ourdomain.com/sales.html.
If you put the period as above, then some times you'll accidentally grab it especially when you're right clicking on it in certain terminal programs which auto-scrape the url and stuff it into a web browser.
So what do you do? "sales.html." looks lame. "sales.html " (no period) looks worse, especially when you have a second sentence after: "Please visit our page at sales.html We list our best stuff there."
(Of course I've mis-spelled half of this post in the process... Where is the @#)$* spellcheck button?...)
There's a lot of information missing from the posters query.
First of all, if these MUST be in standard CD-audio format, then the answer to the question about how many disks you can burn of 30 minutes of audio in a given time can be calculated by dividing 30 minutes by the speed of the reader (say 15x), and then adding a minute or two for lead-in lead-out, toc, loading, etc. In this case, a 15x drive should be able to burn a 30 min CD in about 3-4 mins. A single drive should be able to turn out around 15-20 an hour.
The poster did say he wanted to do this on the cheap. The bandwidth bottleneck in a PC environment will most likely be the PCI bus. Even with two IDE drives on an IDE chain, you should be able to keep up with the burning at 15x (150MB/min per drive). If I was going to do this on the cheap, I'd get me a used Pentium-II/Celeron class machine, or possibly a higher end pentium machine, get 4 IDE chains in it, and load it up with 6 CDR drives. Total cost should be under $1000, assuming you use linux or freebsd or similar. ($600 for drives, $50 for controller card, $350 for used machine). You may need to add a little for memory expansion, as I think the idea of a Ramdisk (300Megish) would be good, but memory is cheap (512 total MB should be sufficient). If you need more drives, add another machine. If you find that the machine can't keep up with this many, drop one or two and put them on a second machine.
If these are for delivery to students which aren't at the lecture, or for review, perhaps the best thing would be to not focus on bulk duplication, but instead to figure out an on-demand system. What I mean is that if a student WANTS the lecture, then they can visit a computer at a specific location, select the date of the lecture, insert media and wait 5 mins for it to spit it out. That would be *Really* cheap (linux box w/CDR and suitably sized hard drive).
You know, this is just what we needed. More supplies for creative people to use for purposes other than what they were intended for.
I have a Friend who is collecting AOL cd's. He's going to shingle his Dog's doghouse with them (and at the rate we're giving them to him, maybe his house too).
For more ideas, I wholehartedly recommend this Google Search.
I think we both agree, I just didn't do a good job at stating my opnion. Let me try to fix this without inserting my other foot in my mouth.
The problem I have is that there tends to be a group of people who expect to get everything for next to free and then complains loudly when they start having to pay for something which costs real money to provide. "I'm pissed because the cable company wants to at least cover their costs on the bandwidth I'm consuming". They seem to think it's their right to take as much as they want and not have to pay for it.
I don't have a problem with people looking for a bargain. And, I agree if the cable company marketed it as a 24x7xfull bandwidth service, then the cable company deserves what they get. I just know that in a lot of cases the provider company HAS told their customers (perhaps in the fine print) that there is an acceptable level of use - but people STILL Ream them out.
I agree with arcade's general statement. In our neck of the woods, an OC3 costs roughly $35,000 a month if we dig and dig and don't care the quality we get. More realistically, your looking at $50,000 or so a month for a good solid working OC3.
Let's say you have some bad users which are using 512kb/s continuously. For sake of argument, we'll say we're charging them $50/month. An OC3 is 155mb/s, so we should be able to support 300 of the 1/2mb/s (512kb/s) users. 300x50 is only 15,000. So we're loosing 20,000 a month if we buy the cheap OC3's, just to support those bandwidth hogs. And that is just on the bandwidth.
The only way this is going to work long-term is if you can either deliver very large bandwidth quantities around for a lot less than the backbone providers are charging now, or people are going to have to learn to live with some sort of tiered pricing based on bits.
The problem is that the ratio between average usage for an average user and the peak usage for an average user is all screwed up on the broadband products. A typical home user will likely average under 1-2kb/s over the course of a month. A gigabyte of data is only about 3kb/s when spread out over a month. How many "typical" users download a gigabyte/month?
You can support a LOT of users on an OC3 if all they transfer is a GB/month or so. Now, it's bursty, so you might take your GB in 1Mb/s bursts, but you still take the same amount.
The problem is that now you've provided customers with the ability to burst to their 1Mb/s, some people will insist on taking the full pipe 24x7. That is 1000kb/s versus the 3kb/s average, or 333 times as much as the average.
Let's go a little further. Lets say that only 1 in 100 use it 24x7 and the rest are pretty much average at 3kb/s typ. Now you've got a hundred users using a total of 300Kb/s (please ignore the off-by-one bug), and one user using a total of 1000Kb/s. Do you take the 1300 total and divide it out by 100 users and charge everyone for 13kb/s of bandwidth on average or do you charge most people for 3kb/s of bandwidth and the abuser for 1000kb/s of bandwidth? Look at the figure difference. If you average it, it costs the 100 people over four times as much as if they charged the bandwidth hog separately.
In my opinion, the only viable option is to figure out how to separate out those users who are using more than their share of bandwidth and make sure they pay for it. I know people will flame me for this, but I don't think it is fair for people to expect everyone else to pay for their bandwidth. How would you feel if you paid a fixed monthly fee for gasoline no matter how much you used, and the price was calculated by taking the total fuel used and dividing it by the number of customers. The poor elderly couple who drives their car to the store a couple of miles round trip once a week would pay exactly the same as the semi truck driver who drives thousands of miles in a month. Does this sound fair? I have a severe problem with people who think it's their right to take as much as they can for as little as they can. And, I think that a lot of the people who are griping about this fall squarely into that category.
I'm sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen a ask slashdot with such a wide variety of what I believe to be wrong answers, and I suspect some of the things I say won't probably be applicable to everyone else because the laws differ from state to state.
The first thing *ANYONE* should do is to talk to people who know. Read the IRS documentation. Get the appropriate forms and iformation from your local State Government (most likely your equivalent of The SEcretary of State, The Department of Revenue or Taxation, and the Department of Commerce.). Talk to an accountant and lawyer you feel you can trust. Talk to other friends who have started and ran succesful businesses.
What we are really talking about is starting a business. This isn't something to take lightly. There are hidden pitfalls and taxes and licenses and expenses and a hundred other things most people don't realize happen when you start a business. You have to get a business license. Usually your personal property which you use in a business starts being taxed locally as property. You have oodles of forms to fill out (or pay someone to fill out). You usually have to start paying unemployment insurance. You might have to start paying for worker's compensation on yourself. If you do the wrong thing on your taxes, the irs might get suspicious and audit you. And on and on and on.
That said, I run a corporation. I am the sole employee, other than my wife. Is it worth it to me? Yep. Is it a pain sometimes? Yep.
In Montana, where I live, there's a form of corporation called the "Close Corporation". Basically with under a certain number of shareholders you basically run the corporation like a sole proprietorship. Combine that with the Small Corporation regs and you end up with a Subchapter-S Close Corporation which is essentially taxed as a partnership, which means you are taxed for the Corporate Profits. There is no "double taxation" which really refers to when a normal "C" corp earns it it is taxed and when they pay dividends the dividend recipients get taxed. There are other differences. And there are a hundred different strategies and options which vary from state to state to state. I can't tell you what is best for you.
One thing to think about. Someone has to pay the appropriate taxes (Social Security and Medicare and possibly other local and federal taxes). If you are a corporation and they pay the corporation, the corporation pays them when it pays you. If you are a sole proprietor you pay them when you pay Self Employment Tax (Form SE). If they pay you as a W-2, then you are an employee and they are paying them. And, in case we didn't make it clear, there are both employer and employee portions of the taxes - you usually never see the employer part, but I can assure you they hurt to pay. If they are saying "We'll pay you $50/hr no matter if it is W2 (employee) or 1099 (contractor)", take the W-2 and don't even bother with the contractor side. If they're paying you 10% more on the contractor side, STILL take the W-2. If they're paying you more than that talk to an accountant.
IANAL BUT: I want to touch back on the corporation side. I personally wouldn't start a business without the liability protection of a corporation. If you do something intentially wrong, it probably won't protect you. However, if you are diligent in keeping the roles separate and make sure you have the assets you care about (The house and the car for instance) in your name, then you have some personal protection against fiscal liability. Let me give you a for instance. Let's say you have credit strictly in your company's name (and you have been very careful not to sign any personal guarantees), and you buy a truckload of computers for a client who subsequently takes the computers and doesn't pay you or goes bankrupt. Now the corporation is on the hook to pay for a truckload of computers which it neither has nor has the funds to pay for. As a result, the corporation goes bankrupt - and as a general rule, you go unscathed. Yes, there are ways for people to get around the corporate protection, but as long as you didn't do anything wrong other than trusting the bankrupt client generally the company you bought the stuff from can't come after you. Again, IANAL, and you definately will want to talk to one.
Let me reiterate - Talk to people and understand EXACTLY what you are in for. I realize that is probably what you are doing here, but remember that things vary from locality to locality.
One more thing. Other than lawyer fees it costs around $70 in my state to become incorporated for companies authorized for less than 50,000 shares. Someone else through out thousands of dollars. That is hogwash. However, the second you do this, it does trigger a whole bunch of other expenses, probably nowhere near thousands of dollars, but again different from place to place. Generally getting stuff set up is inexpensive, but you MUST understand what you are getting yourself into.
Let's assume you store 640x480 images (better than NTSC) in full color in "standard average" jpg compression. These usually are around 60K.
1 Minute would be 60 images
1 Hour would be 360 images
1 Day would be 8640 images
8640 images x 60K is about 518MB/day.
Buy yourself a pair of 120GB drives. Interleave the images between the two (write even seconds to drive #1 and odd seconds to drive #2), and you can store a YEAR of data on about $400 worth of drives, for a single camera with 1FPS.
However, a better way to do this is to do a difference comparison between the two frames.
I.E. snap a frame, compare it with the previous one and don't store it unless it is different enough from the previously stored one.
When a camera is idle you might store 1 per hour or something. I'd suspect that in a lot of cases quite a few of the 16 cameras would be mostly idle. If you were talking a typical convienence store for instance, during the day, store area and pump area cameras would be active most of the day, but only 1 or two would be active at night. Back room (cooler, storeroom, etc.) would generally be mostly idle.
For sake of argument let's say that you would be snapping an image every second on 8 cameras and the rest quiescent. This would bring your total to just over 4.1GB/day. A 120GB drive would hold just under a month of data. I still reccommend two or more in an interleaved fashion.
Most secuity cameras are NOT on a permanent retention basis. A month may be plenty. If this is the case, then 240GB would be fine. If longer retention is necessary, streaming these off to tape once a month doesn't sound too unreasonable. You could also further weed these down by being pickier on your difference stuff or just throwing away every other image.
Another note is that a 640x480 image jpeg compressed is roughly 600kbits. With reducing this down to 320x240 and cranking the jpeg compression ratio (reducing quality), you could conceivably reduce this down under 100kbits. This is definately in the realm of reason as far as pushing images to an off-site server via DSL. You may have to settle for 1/8 fps or less if all 16 cameras are active. If I was doing this, I would probably set it up so it would rotate through the cameras in order and send the most recent of each image (after being through the "difference" change procedure) unless it hadn't been updated. This would provide protection if the criminal stole the equipment storing the data.
I can't vouch for the current product rev, but I quit using the Borland Compilers back about the time Windows 3.1 was out but most people still used DOS apps.
The reason I quit was because of the buggy compilers. Mind you, this was 10 years ago, but what I do recall was lots of fun with things just plain not working which should have.
I DO recall that one of the most common things to do was to remove/add whitespace or comments. E.G. something like:
a=b;
b=c;
wouldn't compile, but something like
a=b;
b=c;
would. And of course, the next time you wrote code, just the opposite would be true. I also think I remember the IDE getting confused about whether you changed something or not, and not rebuilding the file you just added 100 lines of code to.
I still avoid Borland Compilers. I also avoid Microsoft compilers as they are about as slow as cold tar running uphill mid-winter.
The problem with bayonne-as far as I can tell-is that it runs on fairly expensive IVR hardware. It's too bad it doesn't support more traditional Hardware Voice Modems (such as the USR ones).
Now if someone would like to correct me if I'm wrong, I'd sure appreciate it as I'm trying to figure out an inexpensive IVR solution myself.
When we started to do nuclear plants the idea was to build the plants we have today which basically "burn" Uranium. These plants usually take an enriched 3.5% U-235/ 96.5% U-238 mix (U-235 is what actually is Fissioned). After enough U-235 is spent to prevent efficient fuel usage, they remove the fuel and end up with a waste product which includes both U-235 and U-238 along with Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) isotopes and other radioactive isotopes.
What was supposed to happen is that this spent fuel would be reprocessed to extract the unused U-235, the Pu-239, and the other products. These would then be used in a fast neutron reactor which would actually burn not only the fuel itself but the waste products, producing as a result waste with a half-life of about 30 years (safe after 300 years and a lot less volume to store).
In the 1970's someone realized that the Plutonium-239 was also useful as bomb-making material. They decided that the risk of some of this being diverted to some third-world country which wanted a nuclear bomb was too high to take and so President Carter canceled the research project.
There is still a lot of debate over the real risks involved. From everything I've read I think the real story is twofold - first the Plutionium isn't really "weapons grade" when it is reprocessed in this manner, so the risks are over emphasized. And second, I think that the people running the power plants don't want to do this because it is cheaper to just run the uranium through their plants once.
Plus, most intellegent readers can read the data when swiped in either direction. Sometimes you'll get set of data which is either mangled enough or just a "difficult" pattern to read forwards - if you have a good reader, you can swipe the card in the opposite direction of "normal" motion and a lot of times you can get a good read off of a card which is almost impossible to read the other way.
My understanding of the encoding is that it is a LOT like barcodes - in fact I've dealt with a percon barcode reader in the past which you could just replace the barcode wand with a mag stripe reader and read magstripes. They also had a barcode reader which worked like a magstripe "slot" reader. Imagine the mess if you had to "clock" a barcode with a mechanical roller or similar. Goodbye automatic package handling.
I agree with the posters, but disagree with the steel option.
I'd pull innerduct or plastic flexible conduit or whatever you want to call it. (If I ask at the electrical supply place for innerduct they know what I am talking about.)
Essentially, this is a flexible tube, probably about 1" in diameter for your application, which is DESIGNED To have data cable ran in it. I've seen this stuff at home depot but I think they call it something else there. Generally it has ridges or "ripples" circularly around the tube. I have pulled many a wire through metal conduit and have also had my fair share of problems. Recently, people have been using the innderduct instead, and the cables are much easier to pull through, etc.
Installation is also a breeze. It's a lot more like running a slightly-stiff garden hose than say pipe. You might need to staple/strap it in key spots, and check code requirements. Since it's data, generally you can get away with almost anything.
Get a spool of Innerduct, a big juction box to connect everything into, and put at least one dual-gang box on each wall, if not more. I've also seen one Innerduct ran to the first one and a second one "jumpering" to a second (or third) box on the wall, so you can actually terminate the wires anywhere you want.
Once you have the innerduct in, it doesn't matter what you put in it.... Fiber, Coax, CAT5, CAT6, etc. etc. etc.
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
No but it runs NetBSD.... or at least it will, soon....
There is a short story written by Jules Vern entitiled "In the Year 2889" (online copy of story) which describes a day in the life of a Journalist in the 29th century.
There are three things which are scary about this short... First that it was written in 1885 (over 100 years ago). Second, how accurate his predictions are. And finally (and perhaps most scarily) that his predictions were off by a factor of 10 - 100 years in the future instead of 1000.
Assuming that the ONLY thing stored in the MD5 hash is the IP Address, you can easily use a dictionary attack of all 256^4 to recover the original IP address.
Or better put, it effectively would end up being a 32 bit encryption key, which is VERY easy to break.
Slashdot Mirror
Swapping the controller card normally will work, but be aware that usually you'll end up with some problems due to the difference in the bad track mapping on the new vs the old drive.
Specifically, a lot of drives have their defect map hard-coded into eprom at the factory and as a result if you swap boards, the sectors which wer bad and were redirected to a good spot on the new drive won't be where it expects them.
Use this as a last resort only.
So, without thinking I fire up google and type the search:
"user friendly the comic strip" email attachment
and then clicked on search. The first hit is the cartoon I wanted, so I click on it. When I pull up the page, I realize that the text words "email attachment" don't appear anywhere on the screen other than the graphic text in the comic itself, so google shouldn't have found the page - at least according to how I thought google worked. So I pulled up the source to see if there was a meta tag there which would explain this. Nope.
The only thing I can think of is that google either OCR's the pictures (seems scary, and that font which Illiad uses doesn't look very OCR-able). The other thing I thought about is that perhaps google also matches text found within <A> tags which link to that page or something.
I've shot a message off to google to ask about this but I haven't heard back yet. I'll be interested to find out how the *@(#*$ they did this.
I think that I saw an ad somewhere which said "How the @(#$* did they do that?" was the highest praise one web designer could give to another. If that's true, they've definately earned my praise in this case. Regardless, some wizard at google got their search engine to do exactly what I wanted with whatever technology they used. Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. And google is definately magic.
Specifically, it was used to de-spin the satellite from almost 18 RPM down to the desired 5 RPM.
Some more relevant quotes I found while looking around on the web about AO-40's system:
From http://www.amsat-dl.org/journal/adlj40ge.htm
Magnetorquer In the satellite, several electro-magnets, also named magnetorquer, are distributes that can be used in the interplay with the Earth's magnetic field close to perigee for the attitude-control of the satellite. The satellite acts as the rotor of an electric motor while the magnet-field of the Earth forms the stator. The process of this movement is named as magnetorquing. With the magnetorquing, the flight-attitude of the satellite and the spin-speed can be changed during perigee-passes.
From http://www.rac.ca/spacenws.htm:
The onboard magnetorquing system--which consists of solenoid coils--makes use of Earth's magnetic field to control the spacecraft's spin and orientation. Magnetorquing is most effective when Earth's magnetic field is strongest, so it typically only takes place at perigee--when the satellite is closest to the Earth. Ground controllers have been making incremental adjustments during each perigee.
I also remember someone saying that this was somewhat "experimental" on AO-40. I can't find a quote though...
I agree fully that it's good to see the NASA engineers thinking "Well it's broke, we can't send someone up to fix it, so what can we do to make it work?" What I would like to know is who came up with the original idea (pre AO-40, or this satellite). It sure doesn't seem like the type of thing which I would have thought about when trying to figure out how to control the attitude of a spacecraft.
What is 'rural' to you?
I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the "what is rural?" question. I live in Montana. Population of the entire state is around a Million. Most of the eastern part's population density is measured in square miles per person instead of people per square mile.
I'm in the 5th largest city. Population about 50,000 or so in the "Greater" area. As an ISP We service people in what we call rural areas which don't even have phone service (we do a lot of wireless) because how far out they are. We're discussing expanding into areas with population of under a thousand in the local dialing area.
The problem is that I don't think that some people get it... It cost a LOT to drag bandwidth out here. Especially when you're dragging a DS3 equivalent a hundred miles to service 1000 people assuming if you get everyone in town.
But again, I'm not on the same network with a hundred other students running a napster server.....
Unemployment *INSURANCE* is federally and state mandated insurance. As an employer you HAVE to carry it. You have no choice. As a libertarian, I think that government forcing this down employers and employee's throats is not good. As an employer in the State of Montana, I have to pay a certain percentage of wages into the program. This is employer-paid, and adds to the cost of running a business.
If an employer lays someone off and they collect unemployment, in my state at least, my unemployment percentage rate goes up. Or, in more insurance-like terms, if there is a claim against my policy as an employer, they are going to increase my premium.
Unemployment insurance is supposed to be 100% funded by the employers. This is not a tax that the population necessarily pays, but instead is forced on employers.
As a libertarian, I would like to see a government mandated program such as this go away. Since it is here, I see no reason why someone shouldn't take full advantage of it. The problem I have with the government going after this guy is that from the limited information we have it appears to me that he is, in fact, out of work. I suspect he also did look for work during those days he was getting benefits, and is still looking. The question really comes down to what are the requirements for drawing unemployment. If he met the letter of the law, he shouldn't be being pursued by the government.
Unfortunately, the government tends to go after the people who makes them look the worst. This guy decides to start trying to make it on his own - one way or another - and as a result, gets stomped by the unemployment cops. Obviously this guy is trying to make an income instead of truly leaching off the government. The problem is that he decided to portray himself as someone who just sets around all day doing nothing and not attempting to work. I'm not sure if this the case or not, but I'm sure that his little cartoon doesn't reflect reality.
Let me put this a little differently. Lets say you've been looking for work for a lot of months and you decide this isn't working so, while still looking for work - but perhaps not as hard as the first few months, you decide to pursue trying to broaden your skillset or decide to start working on your own business. Should your unemployment benefits end?
Again, the real question is EXACTLY what are the rules they say he's broken. The fact that they interrogated him make me suspect that they are simply fishing for something they can construe as a rules violation and are hoping they find it.
It will be interesting to see what happens long-term.
Looking at some unemployment requirements, most of them require you to be making "contacts looking for work". If his web site has had a million visitors, well I think I could argue that he's made a million potential work contacts. I suspect if times weren't so bad in his chosen field, he probably would have had dozens of job offers by now.
After all, isn't looking for a job simply marketing? I think he's done a pretty good job at marketing, although I'm not sure what type of picture he's portrayed of himself...
Answering emails all day could also count. Perhaps he was answering emails to prove to people he could be useful. Perhaps each email is a job contact.
I could go on all day. Someone could really have fun with this....
Basically what you are doing is giving them 45 days to steal all your intellectual property. You said it yourself, you're going to do the "information transfer" and then they have the option of paying you or not. Do you think that the information you transfer is going to be able to be removed from the brains of the people who look at it?
If you've figured out how to do something they want, they should pay for it up front. Period. None of this "let us look at it for 45 days and then we might pay you if we decide we still want it".
About the only way this isn't going to turn bad is if this is something they really can't do themselves. If they can do it themselves, what is stopping them? Perhaps they hope to figure that out from looking at your stuff.
If you really do want to do this you need to get about 3 DIFFERENT lawyers involved, preferably an Intellectual Property lawyer, a Corporate (agreements) lawyer, and probably a third one for good measure. You have to make sure there isn't anything that they can gain from this, or if they do gain something they have to pay you for it.
In addition, you need to figure out exactly what they are wanting to see. If they just want to make sure the code isn't a nightmare and it is reasonably written, perhaps getting a third party involved to do the review might be a good idea. Or as someone else suggested, get them over to your place of business.
The key here is to transfer as little as possible before they commit to paying you. It sounds like you guys are giving them everything before they pay you. I think I'll repeat myself and say that this is a very bad idea. Get the vaseline ready. You'll need it.
The other question is the long term piece of this. A lot of the time these types of deals end up being great for a couple of years and then the two companies either split the sheets and one ends up going broke, or one eats the other one. As you're the smaller company, the chances of you being on the bottom when this happens are quite good. Are you thinking about the long term repercussions of this?
One last thing I'll say. Don't let your greed get in the way of your common sense. Quite often people loose their good judgement when lots of dollar signs flash in front of their eyes.
Good luck! And remember the vaseline.
You have to be more unique than that. Maybe "respiration while sleeping" or "respiration while reading slashdot".
Hey I got it... "Loud respiration over the telephone". I don't think anyone has done that before :)
I think I would agree with a statement that the book has a lot of non-censorcism meat to it. I wouldn't agree that it wasn't specifically about the effects of censorcism.
I think that I would summarise the "moral" of the book is that we need those "evil, controversial ideas" to continue to be thoughtful, intelligent beings. And censorship only serves to remove those ideas from circulation.
I agree.
." looks lame. "sales.html " (no period) looks worse, especially when you have a second sentence after: "Please visit our page at sales.html We list our best stuff there."
It's like the @#($* periods at the end of URL's.
Quote sample:
Joe asked, "Why should we go to the store?" Jim replied, "To get some Jolt Cola, of course."
vs.
After you see the login prompt, type the username "joe" followed by the password "brown".
What I referred to as the url problem is this:
Please visit our sales page at http://www.ourdomain.com/sales.html.
If you put the period as above, then some times you'll accidentally grab it especially when you're right clicking on it in certain terminal programs which auto-scrape the url and stuff it into a web browser.
So what do you do? "sales.html
(Of course I've mis-spelled half of this post in the process... Where is the @#)$* spellcheck button?...)
First of all, if these MUST be in standard CD-audio format, then the answer to the question about how many disks you can burn of 30 minutes of audio in a given time can be calculated by dividing 30 minutes by the speed of the reader (say 15x), and then adding a minute or two for lead-in lead-out, toc, loading, etc. In this case, a 15x drive should be able to burn a 30 min CD in about 3-4 mins. A single drive should be able to turn out around 15-20 an hour.
The poster did say he wanted to do this on the cheap. The bandwidth bottleneck in a PC environment will most likely be the PCI bus. Even with two IDE drives on an IDE chain, you should be able to keep up with the burning at 15x (150MB/min per drive). If I was going to do this on the cheap, I'd get me a used Pentium-II/Celeron class machine, or possibly a higher end pentium machine, get 4 IDE chains in it, and load it up with 6 CDR drives. Total cost should be under $1000, assuming you use linux or freebsd or similar. ($600 for drives, $50 for controller card, $350 for used machine). You may need to add a little for memory expansion, as I think the idea of a Ramdisk (300Megish) would be good, but memory is cheap (512 total MB should be sufficient). If you need more drives, add another machine. If you find that the machine can't keep up with this many, drop one or two and put them on a second machine.
If these are for delivery to students which aren't at the lecture, or for review, perhaps the best thing would be to not focus on bulk duplication, but instead to figure out an on-demand system. What I mean is that if a student WANTS the lecture, then they can visit a computer at a specific location, select the date of the lecture, insert media and wait 5 mins for it to spit it out. That would be *Really* cheap (linux box w/CDR and suitably sized hard drive).
I have a Friend who is collecting AOL cd's. He's going to shingle his Dog's doghouse with them (and at the rate we're giving them to him, maybe his house too).
For more ideas, I wholehartedly recommend this Google Search.
I think we both agree, I just didn't do a good job at stating my opnion. Let me try to fix this without inserting my other foot in my mouth.
The problem I have is that there tends to be a group of people who expect to get everything for next to free and then complains loudly when they start having to pay for something which costs real money to provide. "I'm pissed because the cable company wants to at least cover their costs on the bandwidth I'm consuming". They seem to think it's their right to take as much as they want and not have to pay for it.
I don't have a problem with people looking for a bargain. And, I agree if the cable company marketed it as a 24x7xfull bandwidth service, then the cable company deserves what they get. I just know that in a lot of cases the provider company HAS told their customers (perhaps in the fine print) that there is an acceptable level of use - but people STILL Ream them out.
Let's say you have some bad users which are using 512kb/s continuously. For sake of argument, we'll say we're charging them $50/month. An OC3 is 155mb/s, so we should be able to support 300 of the 1/2mb/s (512kb/s) users. 300x50 is only 15,000. So we're loosing 20,000 a month if we buy the cheap OC3's, just to support those bandwidth hogs. And that is just on the bandwidth.
The only way this is going to work long-term is if you can either deliver very large bandwidth quantities around for a lot less than the backbone providers are charging now, or people are going to have to learn to live with some sort of tiered pricing based on bits.
The problem is that the ratio between average usage for an average user and the peak usage for an average user is all screwed up on the broadband products. A typical home user will likely average under 1-2kb/s over the course of a month. A gigabyte of data is only about 3kb/s when spread out over a month. How many "typical" users download a gigabyte/month? You can support a LOT of users on an OC3 if all they transfer is a GB/month or so. Now, it's bursty, so you might take your GB in 1Mb/s bursts, but you still take the same amount.
The problem is that now you've provided customers with the ability to burst to their 1Mb/s, some people will insist on taking the full pipe 24x7. That is 1000kb/s versus the 3kb/s average, or 333 times as much as the average.
Let's go a little further. Lets say that only 1 in 100 use it 24x7 and the rest are pretty much average at 3kb/s typ. Now you've got a hundred users using a total of 300Kb/s (please ignore the off-by-one bug), and one user using a total of 1000Kb/s. Do you take the 1300 total and divide it out by 100 users and charge everyone for 13kb/s of bandwidth on average or do you charge most people for 3kb/s of bandwidth and the abuser for 1000kb/s of bandwidth? Look at the figure difference. If you average it, it costs the 100 people over four times as much as if they charged the bandwidth hog separately.
In my opinion, the only viable option is to figure out how to separate out those users who are using more than their share of bandwidth and make sure they pay for it. I know people will flame me for this, but I don't think it is fair for people to expect everyone else to pay for their bandwidth. How would you feel if you paid a fixed monthly fee for gasoline no matter how much you used, and the price was calculated by taking the total fuel used and dividing it by the number of customers. The poor elderly couple who drives their car to the store a couple of miles round trip once a week would pay exactly the same as the semi truck driver who drives thousands of miles in a month. Does this sound fair? I have a severe problem with people who think it's their right to take as much as they can for as little as they can. And, I think that a lot of the people who are griping about this fall squarely into that category.
The first thing *ANYONE* should do is to talk to people who know. Read the IRS documentation. Get the appropriate forms and iformation from your local State Government (most likely your equivalent of The SEcretary of State, The Department of Revenue or Taxation, and the Department of Commerce.). Talk to an accountant and lawyer you feel you can trust. Talk to other friends who have started and ran succesful businesses.
What we are really talking about is starting a business. This isn't something to take lightly. There are hidden pitfalls and taxes and licenses and expenses and a hundred other things most people don't realize happen when you start a business. You have to get a business license. Usually your personal property which you use in a business starts being taxed locally as property. You have oodles of forms to fill out (or pay someone to fill out). You usually have to start paying unemployment insurance. You might have to start paying for worker's compensation on yourself. If you do the wrong thing on your taxes, the irs might get suspicious and audit you. And on and on and on.
That said, I run a corporation. I am the sole employee, other than my wife. Is it worth it to me? Yep. Is it a pain sometimes? Yep.
In Montana, where I live, there's a form of corporation called the "Close Corporation". Basically with under a certain number of shareholders you basically run the corporation like a sole proprietorship. Combine that with the Small Corporation regs and you end up with a Subchapter-S Close Corporation which is essentially taxed as a partnership, which means you are taxed for the Corporate Profits. There is no "double taxation" which really refers to when a normal "C" corp earns it it is taxed and when they pay dividends the dividend recipients get taxed. There are other differences. And there are a hundred different strategies and options which vary from state to state to state. I can't tell you what is best for you.
One thing to think about. Someone has to pay the appropriate taxes (Social Security and Medicare and possibly other local and federal taxes). If you are a corporation and they pay the corporation, the corporation pays them when it pays you. If you are a sole proprietor you pay them when you pay Self Employment Tax (Form SE). If they pay you as a W-2, then you are an employee and they are paying them. And, in case we didn't make it clear, there are both employer and employee portions of the taxes - you usually never see the employer part, but I can assure you they hurt to pay. If they are saying "We'll pay you $50/hr no matter if it is W2 (employee) or 1099 (contractor)", take the W-2 and don't even bother with the contractor side. If they're paying you 10% more on the contractor side, STILL take the W-2. If they're paying you more than that talk to an accountant.
IANAL BUT: I want to touch back on the corporation side. I personally wouldn't start a business without the liability protection of a corporation. If you do something intentially wrong, it probably won't protect you. However, if you are diligent in keeping the roles separate and make sure you have the assets you care about (The house and the car for instance) in your name, then you have some personal protection against fiscal liability. Let me give you a for instance. Let's say you have credit strictly in your company's name (and you have been very careful not to sign any personal guarantees), and you buy a truckload of computers for a client who subsequently takes the computers and doesn't pay you or goes bankrupt. Now the corporation is on the hook to pay for a truckload of computers which it neither has nor has the funds to pay for. As a result, the corporation goes bankrupt - and as a general rule, you go unscathed. Yes, there are ways for people to get around the corporate protection, but as long as you didn't do anything wrong other than trusting the bankrupt client generally the company you bought the stuff from can't come after you. Again, IANAL, and you definately will want to talk to one.
Let me reiterate - Talk to people and understand EXACTLY what you are in for. I realize that is probably what you are doing here, but remember that things vary from locality to locality.
One more thing. Other than lawyer fees it costs around $70 in my state to become incorporated for companies authorized for less than 50,000 shares. Someone else through out thousands of dollars. That is hogwash. However, the second you do this, it does trigger a whole bunch of other expenses, probably nowhere near thousands of dollars, but again different from place to place. Generally getting stuff set up is inexpensive, but you MUST understand what you are getting yourself into.
Generally 1 fps would be fine.
Let's assume you store 640x480 images (better than NTSC) in full color in "standard average" jpg compression. These usually are around 60K.
1 Minute would be 60 images 1 Hour would be 360 images 1 Day would be 8640 images 8640 images x 60K is about 518MB/day. Buy yourself a pair of 120GB drives. Interleave the images between the two (write even seconds to drive #1 and odd seconds to drive #2), and you can store a YEAR of data on about $400 worth of drives, for a single camera with 1FPS.
However, a better way to do this is to do a difference comparison between the two frames. I.E. snap a frame, compare it with the previous one and don't store it unless it is different enough from the previously stored one.
When a camera is idle you might store 1 per hour or something. I'd suspect that in a lot of cases quite a few of the 16 cameras would be mostly idle. If you were talking a typical convienence store for instance, during the day, store area and pump area cameras would be active most of the day, but only 1 or two would be active at night. Back room (cooler, storeroom, etc.) would generally be mostly idle.
For sake of argument let's say that you would be snapping an image every second on 8 cameras and the rest quiescent. This would bring your total to just over 4.1GB/day. A 120GB drive would hold just under a month of data. I still reccommend two or more in an interleaved fashion.
Most secuity cameras are NOT on a permanent retention basis. A month may be plenty. If this is the case, then 240GB would be fine. If longer retention is necessary, streaming these off to tape once a month doesn't sound too unreasonable. You could also further weed these down by being pickier on your difference stuff or just throwing away every other image.
Another note is that a 640x480 image jpeg compressed is roughly 600kbits. With reducing this down to 320x240 and cranking the jpeg compression ratio (reducing quality), you could conceivably reduce this down under 100kbits. This is definately in the realm of reason as far as pushing images to an off-site server via DSL. You may have to settle for 1/8 fps or less if all 16 cameras are active. If I was doing this, I would probably set it up so it would rotate through the cameras in order and send the most recent of each image (after being through the "difference" change procedure) unless it hadn't been updated. This would provide protection if the criminal stole the equipment storing the data.
I can't vouch for the current product rev, but I quit using the Borland Compilers back about the time Windows 3.1 was out but most people still used DOS apps.
The reason I quit was because of the buggy compilers. Mind you, this was 10 years ago, but what I do recall was lots of fun with things just plain not working which should have.
I DO recall that one of the most common things to do was to remove/add whitespace or comments. E.G. something like:
a=b;
b=c;
wouldn't compile, but something like
a=b;
b=c;
would. And of course, the next time you wrote code, just the opposite would be true. I also think I remember the IDE getting confused about whether you changed something or not, and not rebuilding the file you just added 100 lines of code to.
I still avoid Borland Compilers. I also avoid Microsoft compilers as they are about as slow as cold tar running uphill mid-winter.
The problem with bayonne-as far as I can tell-is that it runs on fairly expensive IVR hardware. It's too bad it doesn't support more traditional Hardware Voice Modems (such as the USR ones).
Now if someone would like to correct me if I'm wrong, I'd sure appreciate it as I'm trying to figure out an inexpensive IVR solution myself.
When we started to do nuclear plants the idea was to build the plants we have today which basically "burn" Uranium. These plants usually take an enriched 3.5% U-235/ 96.5% U-238 mix (U-235 is what actually is Fissioned). After enough U-235 is spent to prevent efficient fuel usage, they remove the fuel and end up with a waste product which includes both U-235 and U-238 along with Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) isotopes and other radioactive isotopes.
What was supposed to happen is that this spent fuel would be reprocessed to extract the unused U-235, the Pu-239, and the other products. These would then be used in a fast neutron reactor which would actually burn not only the fuel itself but the waste products, producing as a result waste with a half-life of about 30 years (safe after 300 years and a lot less volume to store).
In the 1970's someone realized that the Plutonium-239 was also useful as bomb-making material. They decided that the risk of some of this being diverted to some third-world country which wanted a nuclear bomb was too high to take and so President Carter canceled the research project.
There is still a lot of debate over the real risks involved. From everything I've read I think the real story is twofold - first the Plutionium isn't really "weapons grade" when it is reprocessed in this manner, so the risks are over emphasized. And second, I think that the people running the power plants don't want to do this because it is cheaper to just run the uranium through their plants once.
My understanding of the encoding is that it is a LOT like barcodes - in fact I've dealt with a percon barcode reader in the past which you could just replace the barcode wand with a mag stripe reader and read magstripes. They also had a barcode reader which worked like a magstripe "slot" reader. Imagine the mess if you had to "clock" a barcode with a mechanical roller or similar. Goodbye automatic package handling.
I'd pull innerduct or plastic flexible conduit or whatever you want to call it. (If I ask at the electrical supply place for innerduct they know what I am talking about.)
Essentially, this is a flexible tube, probably about 1" in diameter for your application, which is DESIGNED To have data cable ran in it. I've seen this stuff at home depot but I think they call it something else there. Generally it has ridges or "ripples" circularly around the tube. I have pulled many a wire through metal conduit and have also had my fair share of problems. Recently, people have been using the innderduct instead, and the cables are much easier to pull through, etc.
Installation is also a breeze. It's a lot more like running a slightly-stiff garden hose than say pipe. You might need to staple/strap it in key spots, and check code requirements. Since it's data, generally you can get away with almost anything.
Get a spool of Innerduct, a big juction box to connect everything into, and put at least one dual-gang box on each wall, if not more. I've also seen one Innerduct ran to the first one and a second one "jumpering" to a second (or third) box on the wall, so you can actually terminate the wires anywhere you want.
Once you have the innerduct in, it doesn't matter what you put in it.... Fiber, Coax, CAT5, CAT6, etc. etc. etc.
No but it runs NetBSD.... or at least it will, soon....
There are three things which are scary about this short... First that it was written in 1885 (over 100 years ago). Second, how accurate his predictions are. And finally (and perhaps most scarily) that his predictions were off by a factor of 10 - 100 years in the future instead of 1000.
Definately a must read in this type of study.
Or better put, it effectively would end up being a 32 bit encryption key, which is VERY easy to break.