You know, I've never seen punch card porn, but I did come across a reel of 5-bit Baudot tape for an ancient teletype that printed out as a three-page picture (ASCII art style) of a naked woman with her foot on a stool. Totally pre-computer. I hate to think how much time it took to create originally.
Yeah, that brings back memories. For us, the hard part was getting fake accounts on the local adult BBSes, when they all required validation calls. I figured out a social engineering solution to that problem - just put down a totally unpronounceable foreign name, and the sysops would never call to validate for fear of mispronouncing the user's name.
Then it was just a matter of dialing up at 2400 baud and batch downloading everything we could find. Of course, this was using Telix in DOS, so to actually see anything in real-time we'd use a TSR program (ShowGIF?) that'd decode the image as it was written to disk. We'd stare at the image as it came across line by line, and try to figure out what body parts we were looking at.
"Is that an elbow?" "No, I think it's a knee." "No, no, it's the back of someone's neck..." "No it's not, it's a... oh, God! Cancel!! Hit cancel!! My eyes!"
Great fun, and really challenging when you've got four or more people in an unusual configuration in the picture.
Of course, the 40 meg hard drive didn't leave much room for pr0n archives. We had to start offloading it to 200 meg QIC tapes at some point. Ah, the good old days.
I've been keeping an eye on this project for a couple of years. Nice to see they've finally got something to demonstrate.
At 75 mA, it's still going to draw too much power to be useful in a wrist watch. I'm going to have to settle for my WWVB-synchronized Casio for now.
While wristwatches aren't a big concern, you've got to remember that these things can't keep time if they're not powered. You could have a system clock on an isolated computer that actually keeps time accurately, but it's going to need a pretty big battery if you're going to have it shut off for long.
Still, this'll be extremely cool for things like GPS and RF communications.
"This is the defcon form of entertainment? I'll pass"
Dude, have you seen the dance floor at DefCon? That's got to be the most pathetic sight I've ever seen. Imagine about 200 nerds just standing against the walls, and three of the six females in attendance dancing with a handful of guys that are either hotel staff or horrendously drunk.
People have been doing radio direction finding as a sport for decades. I learned a lot from weekend transmitter hunts - we'd have one team hide somewhere in the general vicinity of the city (had to be heard from the starting point), transmit a signal on the 2 meter band, and the rest of the teams would hunt them down.
Sometimes it would be a tiny unattended transmitter. One of our favorite tricks was to bury the whole thing and use a 1/4 wave brass rod as an antenna, and insert it into a dry weed in a vacant lot. Still, a good team starting 10 miles away could often find it in 30 minutes.
We got a lot of weird looks driving around town with big home-built quad or yagi antennas hanging out the window, but there's no better way to learn practical RDF stills. And I'm still using those skills - Sunday evening I was out DFing an ELT signal from a crashed plane. Most search and rescue folks do this infrequently, and have a textbook education in how to triangulate the source of a signal, but there's no substitute for practice. I can hunt down a transmitter using a handheld scanner and omnidirectional antenna faster than most of them can do it with an expensive DF unit.
How fast can you safely cool a carbonated soft drink? Seriously, there is a limit, but I'm not sure what it is.
You see, I once had a warm 12-pack of Dr. Pepper in the kitchen, and 20 liters of liquid nitrogen in the garage, and I was thirsty... anyway, I had the sense to only try one can at a time, and I opened the can first. Only took a few seconds to get it cooled down to a slushy consistency, but in the process half of the Dr. Pepper came foaming and frothing out the top of the can, ran down the sides, and froze into a solid block of carbonated foam.
The end result was drinkable, but a bit wasteful and really messy. Perhaps next time I'll just try the dry ice, but I really don't think the heat transfer rate is going to be enough.
How's that going to work with Orion? I can't imagine an M2P2 setup withstanding the force of a nuclear blast. Seems to me you've got to be pretty close to the propulsion unit to capture any decent fraction of its energy. It'd be like subjecting a soap bubble to a firecracker.
Supposedly plate ablation can be avoided by spraying a thin coat of oil on the plate between pulses.
Of course, it's never going to be a popular idea for ground-launched vehicles. Can't beat it for raw power, though. I say we build one and let all of Greenpeace protest to their hearts' content right at the launch site.
Proper apostrophe use is a lost cause. There's this place in the local mall call Sportscard Fantasy's. I've always wanted to go rip that damned apostrophe off their sign, but Fantasys isn't the proper plural either. In fact, it sounds more like the merger of a fruit juice company and computer consulting firm.
I was a fast enough typist that when some joker hit the 'bold' key on my typewriter and it had to double-strike everything, I'd have a whole line in the buffer by the end of a timed test. The teacher would call 'stop' and all the noise in the room would stop, except for one single typewriter - mine - going clickety-click, clickety-clik all by itself.
Then there was the blonde next to me who always used 'bold' because it sounded like she was typing faster...
Funny? That should be modded 'informative.' I've never been hospitalized, but I did wind up with a wrist brace for a week or two thanks to some RA-92 hard drives.
Seriously, if anyone wants a free VAX 6000-510, let me know. I need the garage space back. I'm on the central coast of California. I'll even throw in a MicroVAX II or two if you want. They make good end tables.
Seriously. I thought maybe I'd missed some important announcement, but I can't find anything. What's the deal? I thought I heard at one point that it was caused by RSS load, but I haven't heard any more on that subject.
I haven't been to Def Con in a couple of years. I went the first year they were at the Alexis Park, and it was OK. Went back the next year, and they'd clearly outgrown the venue. Wasn't able to get a seat for ANY of the talks.
I don't know if they've signed some sort of long-term contract, or maybe they've just gotten kicked out of everywhere else, but I'm not going back until they get a considerably larger place.
If the brass is hitting your target, you've probably got the gun rotated about 90 degrees to the left. It's the lead bits you want hitting the bad guy. They come out the end of the gun with the round hole in it.
That's not exactly true. My iron (Weller WESD51) has a 50W element and I use it for very fine SMT soldering all the time. The difference is that it's a temperature-controlled iron - the wattage only affects how fast the temperature recovers. But you're right, for irons without temperature control, 15 watts is fine.
You're not in the next cubicle over from me, are you?
I did that for a friend a while back when he managed to break a couple of pins off his P4. I used 30ga wire-wrap wire. And that was before I had my stereo microscope for such things.
You've got to clean off the pad where the pin goes and tin it with a bit of solder - silver-bearing works good for mechanical strength. Then you touch the end of the (untrimmed) wire to the pad, add more solder, and use the tip of the iron to draw the solder up the wire which helps secure it to the chip and make it more stiff. Then you just use diagonal cutters to trim it off level with the other pins.
Helps to have a really fine-tipped iron, good eyes, and four arms.
"I've been bitten by low ampreage 220, 80 (don't ask) 24, 12, and 460. Just a jolt."
Ok, I'm not asking, but I know how I managed to get an 80 or 90 volt AC shock. I was climbing around in the attic, trying to figure out which phone line was my newly-installed ISDN line. I'd grabbed an antique test set from the living room (Dad was GTE tech for 30 years) and was listening for the tick-tick-tick of the ISDN. I'd just clipped on to what turned out to be the main voice line, when my girlfriend called. I could feel every cycle of that ring voltage in time with the dinging of the mechanical bell on the old phone downstairs.
Of course, that wasn't really as stupid as when I got hit with 40 volts. That involved stripping live telephone wires with my teeth.
I do a lot of the embedded system equivalent of a print statement - usually this means a short pulse on a spare output pin. It's not much information, but having a reference marker really helps when staring at a logic analyzer screen...
Yeah, it's still a lot of energy. But having a nuclear plant at the base of the elevator to power it is going to be a lot more efficient than using chemical rockets that have to lift their own fuel. I think the last estimate I saw put the energy cost at $100 to $200 per pound. That's at least two orders of magnitude cheaper than rockets.
Still, I think hauling waste up there is going to be too expensive and more hazardous than necessary. If you really want it gone for the long term, go bury it in a subduction zone or something.
"The NASA folks should be able to get it close enough so that the Sun's gravity will bring it on in."
I don't think you understand the problem. The Earth moves around the sun at about 30 km/sec. Anything in Earth orbit is also moving at that speed relative to the sun. Push something toward the sun, and you just shift its orbit a bit. You need to cancel a large portion of that 30 km/sec velocity before the sun's gravity can actually pull it in.
Yes, I am. I have no clue how they got / planned to get that thing over 166. Must be articulated.
You're at Abro Computers? I visited you guys a while back... needed to restock my junk box and you guys sold me a bunch of boards and CPUs. I think my main Linux box and OpenBSD firewall are still using some of those parts.
No, it's not. It's still going to be very expensive to cancel its orbital velocity and actually get it to the sun.
We can dispose of radioactive waste here on Earth, much more safely and cheaply. A semi trailer with a police escort is a very safe mode of transportation, and far cheaper than a rocket. It's just politics holding us back.
First, there's cost. Getting a payload to geosynchronous orbit will cost you about $5,000 to $10,000 a pound. That's NOT the sun. And you CAN'T just 'push it toward the sun' and expect it to get there. Remember, we're orbiting the sun at a pretty good clip. The energy required to cancel that velocity and drop a payload into the sun is something like 18 times what's required to put it in Earth orbit.
And of course there's the issue of launch failure. Current failure rates are around 5% to 20% for expendable launch vehicles (depending partly on what you're counting as a failure), and for our safest manned vehicles, around 2%.
Of course, it'd be just stupid to throw away perfectly good plutonium, so we're probably talking about lots of bulky contaminated secondary waste anyway. Really, it's a whole lot safer, cheaper, and more practical to bury the stuff under a mountain in Nevada than to try to shoot it into space.
There's a 304 foot trailer on its way to my location at the moment. I've never heard anyone suggest using a monster like this for nuclear waste, though. The shipping containers I've seen have been much smaller than that.
Slashdot Mirror
"The building at the Cape were only designed to with stand winds of apx. 110 mph, this hurricane out there is what 145+"
That's why we need to rebuild the Shuttle facilities here at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. They were almost ready to go in '86.
Aaannddd tthhheheerree aarrreee aaabbbsssooolllutteellyy nnnooo hhhuuurrriiicccaaannneesss iiiinnn CCCCCaaaalllliifffoooorrrnniiaaaa!!!!!
You know, I've never seen punch card porn, but I did come across a reel of 5-bit Baudot tape for an ancient teletype that printed out as a three-page picture (ASCII art style) of a naked woman with her foot on a stool. Totally pre-computer. I hate to think how much time it took to create originally.
Yeah, that brings back memories. For us, the hard part was getting fake accounts on the local adult BBSes, when they all required validation calls. I figured out a social engineering solution to that problem - just put down a totally unpronounceable foreign name, and the sysops would never call to validate for fear of mispronouncing the user's name.
Then it was just a matter of dialing up at 2400 baud and batch downloading everything we could find. Of course, this was using Telix in DOS, so to actually see anything in real-time we'd use a TSR program (ShowGIF?) that'd decode the image as it was written to disk. We'd stare at the image as it came across line by line, and try to figure out what body parts we were looking at.
"Is that an elbow?" "No, I think it's a knee." "No, no, it's the back of someone's neck..." "No it's not, it's a... oh, God! Cancel!! Hit cancel!! My eyes!"
Great fun, and really challenging when you've got four or more people in an unusual configuration in the picture.
Of course, the 40 meg hard drive didn't leave much room for pr0n archives. We had to start offloading it to 200 meg QIC tapes at some point. Ah, the good old days.
I've been keeping an eye on this project for a couple of years. Nice to see they've finally got something to demonstrate.
At 75 mA, it's still going to draw too much power to be useful in a wrist watch. I'm going to have to settle for my WWVB-synchronized Casio for now.
While wristwatches aren't a big concern, you've got to remember that these things can't keep time if they're not powered. You could have a system clock on an isolated computer that actually keeps time accurately, but it's going to need a pretty big battery if you're going to have it shut off for long.
Still, this'll be extremely cool for things like GPS and RF communications.
"This is the defcon form of entertainment? I'll pass"
Dude, have you seen the dance floor at DefCon? That's got to be the most pathetic sight I've ever seen. Imagine about 200 nerds just standing against the walls, and three of the six females in attendance dancing with a handful of guys that are either hotel staff or horrendously drunk.
People have been doing radio direction finding as a sport for decades. I learned a lot from weekend transmitter hunts - we'd have one team hide somewhere in the general vicinity of the city (had to be heard from the starting point), transmit a signal on the 2 meter band, and the rest of the teams would hunt them down.
Sometimes it would be a tiny unattended transmitter. One of our favorite tricks was to bury the whole thing and use a 1/4 wave brass rod as an antenna, and insert it into a dry weed in a vacant lot. Still, a good team starting 10 miles away could often find it in 30 minutes.
We got a lot of weird looks driving around town with big home-built quad or yagi antennas hanging out the window, but there's no better way to learn practical RDF stills. And I'm still using those skills - Sunday evening I was out DFing an ELT signal from a crashed plane. Most search and rescue folks do this infrequently, and have a textbook education in how to triangulate the source of a signal, but there's no substitute for practice. I can hunt down a transmitter using a handheld scanner and omnidirectional antenna faster than most of them can do it with an expensive DF unit.
How fast can you safely cool a carbonated soft drink? Seriously, there is a limit, but I'm not sure what it is.
You see, I once had a warm 12-pack of Dr. Pepper in the kitchen, and 20 liters of liquid nitrogen in the garage, and I was thirsty... anyway, I had the sense to only try one can at a time, and I opened the can first. Only took a few seconds to get it cooled down to a slushy consistency, but in the process half of the Dr. Pepper came foaming and frothing out the top of the can, ran down the sides, and froze into a solid block of carbonated foam.
The end result was drinkable, but a bit wasteful and really messy. Perhaps next time I'll just try the dry ice, but I really don't think the heat transfer rate is going to be enough.
How's that going to work with Orion? I can't imagine an M2P2 setup withstanding the force of a nuclear blast. Seems to me you've got to be pretty close to the propulsion unit to capture any decent fraction of its energy. It'd be like subjecting a soap bubble to a firecracker.
Supposedly plate ablation can be avoided by spraying a thin coat of oil on the plate between pulses.
Of course, it's never going to be a popular idea for ground-launched vehicles. Can't beat it for raw power, though. I say we build one and let all of Greenpeace protest to their hearts' content right at the launch site.
Proper apostrophe use is a lost cause. There's this place in the local mall call Sportscard Fantasy's. I've always wanted to go rip that damned apostrophe off their sign, but Fantasys isn't the proper plural either. In fact, it sounds more like the merger of a fruit juice company and computer consulting firm.
I was a fast enough typist that when some joker hit the 'bold' key on my typewriter and it had to double-strike everything, I'd have a whole line in the buffer by the end of a timed test. The teacher would call 'stop' and all the noise in the room would stop, except for one single typewriter - mine - going clickety-click, clickety-clik all by itself.
Then there was the blonde next to me who always used 'bold' because it sounded like she was typing faster...
Funny? That should be modded 'informative.' I've never been hospitalized, but I did wind up with a wrist brace for a week or two thanks to some RA-92 hard drives.
Seriously, if anyone wants a free VAX 6000-510, let me know. I need the garage space back. I'm on the central coast of California. I'll even throw in a MicroVAX II or two if you want. They make good end tables.
Seriously. I thought maybe I'd missed some important announcement, but I can't find anything. What's the deal? I thought I heard at one point that it was caused by RSS load, but I haven't heard any more on that subject.
I haven't been to Def Con in a couple of years. I went the first year they were at the Alexis Park, and it was OK. Went back the next year, and they'd clearly outgrown the venue. Wasn't able to get a seat for ANY of the talks.
I don't know if they've signed some sort of long-term contract, or maybe they've just gotten kicked out of everywhere else, but I'm not going back until they get a considerably larger place.
If the brass is hitting your target, you've probably got the gun rotated about 90 degrees to the left. It's the lead bits you want hitting the bad guy. They come out the end of the gun with the round hole in it.
"Don't use anything larger than 15W"
That's not exactly true. My iron (Weller WESD51) has a 50W element and I use it for very fine SMT soldering all the time. The difference is that it's a temperature-controlled iron - the wattage only affects how fast the temperature recovers. But you're right, for irons without temperature control, 15 watts is fine.
You're not in the next cubicle over from me, are you?
I did that for a friend a while back when he managed to break a couple of pins off his P4. I used 30ga wire-wrap wire. And that was before I had my stereo microscope for such things.
You've got to clean off the pad where the pin goes and tin it with a bit of solder - silver-bearing works good for mechanical strength. Then you touch the end of the (untrimmed) wire to the pad, add more solder, and use the tip of the iron to draw the solder up the wire which helps secure it to the chip and make it more stiff. Then you just use diagonal cutters to trim it off level with the other pins.
Helps to have a really fine-tipped iron, good eyes, and four arms.
"I've been bitten by low ampreage 220, 80 (don't ask) 24, 12, and 460. Just a jolt."
Ok, I'm not asking, but I know how I managed to get an 80 or 90 volt AC shock. I was climbing around in the attic, trying to figure out which phone line was my newly-installed ISDN line. I'd grabbed an antique test set from the living room (Dad was GTE tech for 30 years) and was listening for the tick-tick-tick of the ISDN. I'd just clipped on to what turned out to be the main voice line, when my girlfriend called. I could feel every cycle of that ring voltage in time with the dinging of the mechanical bell on the old phone downstairs.
Of course, that wasn't really as stupid as when I got hit with 40 volts. That involved stripping live telephone wires with my teeth.
I do a lot of the embedded system equivalent of a print statement - usually this means a short pulse on a spare output pin. It's not much information, but having a reference marker really helps when staring at a logic analyzer screen...
"Wasn't it more likely that the motivation was hunger, so people followed the food?"
How do you know there aren't lots of tasty aliens out there if you don't look?
Yeah, it's still a lot of energy. But having a nuclear plant at the base of the elevator to power it is going to be a lot more efficient than using chemical rockets that have to lift their own fuel. I think the last estimate I saw put the energy cost at $100 to $200 per pound. That's at least two orders of magnitude cheaper than rockets.
Still, I think hauling waste up there is going to be too expensive and more hazardous than necessary. If you really want it gone for the long term, go bury it in a subduction zone or something.
"The NASA folks should be able to get it close enough so that the Sun's gravity will bring it on in."
I don't think you understand the problem. The Earth moves around the sun at about 30 km/sec. Anything in Earth orbit is also moving at that speed relative to the sun. Push something toward the sun, and you just shift its orbit a bit. You need to cancel a large portion of that 30 km/sec velocity before the sun's gravity can actually pull it in.
Yes, I am. I have no clue how they got / planned to get that thing over 166. Must be articulated.
You're at Abro Computers? I visited you guys a while back... needed to restock my junk box and you guys sold me a bunch of boards and CPUs. I think my main Linux box and OpenBSD firewall are still using some of those parts.
No, it's not. It's still going to be very expensive to cancel its orbital velocity and actually get it to the sun.
We can dispose of radioactive waste here on Earth, much more safely and cheaply. A semi trailer with a police escort is a very safe mode of transportation, and far cheaper than a rocket. It's just politics holding us back.
First, there's cost. Getting a payload to geosynchronous orbit will cost you about $5,000 to $10,000 a pound. That's NOT the sun. And you CAN'T just 'push it toward the sun' and expect it to get there. Remember, we're orbiting the sun at a pretty good clip. The energy required to cancel that velocity and drop a payload into the sun is something like 18 times what's required to put it in Earth orbit.
And of course there's the issue of launch failure. Current failure rates are around 5% to 20% for expendable launch vehicles (depending partly on what you're counting as a failure), and for our safest manned vehicles, around 2%.
Of course, it'd be just stupid to throw away perfectly good plutonium, so we're probably talking about lots of bulky contaminated secondary waste anyway. Really, it's a whole lot safer, cheaper, and more practical to bury the stuff under a mountain in Nevada than to try to shoot it into space.
There's a 304 foot trailer on its way to my location at the moment. I've never heard anyone suggest using a monster like this for nuclear waste, though. The shipping containers I've seen have been much smaller than that.