And there's probably a certain amount of hysteresis too, so maybe that 0.3 gets overwritten with a 1 to become 0.93, and then with another 0 to become 0.393, and you can recover previous values to a degree limited by the amount of hysteresis, sensitivity of the detector, and noise floor. Or at least that's the theory I've always heard on why you're supposed to overwrite hard drives multiple times... I've never actually heard of it being done, but the assumption has always been that 'they' have the ability to do it. Anyone care to provide more substantial information on the feasibility of this sort of recovery?
No problem sending messages from Verizon in the US to China, either. Doesn't look like Verizon even overcharged me for it, which is really out of character for them.
>Generally, that is a man's solution. Women just want someone to nod, agree and sympathise.
I'll second that. It's not universally true (I have a few female friends who aren't like this - granted, they're all lesbians) but it's something I've learned the hard way. Men discuss problems to find solutions. Women don't always want solutions, they want sympathy and understanding. Trying to solve their problems logically can make you seem insensitive, or make them think you're minimizing their problems and their emotional impact. Nod, agree, and sympathize, and only offer suggestions if they make it clear that's what they want.
Nope, much smaller, but I think we touched on some of the same projects.
I had a guest show up as I was finishing the last post and I cut it a little short. I was trying to say that I'm more satisfied working for myself because I work on what I believe in. Whether I can make a living at it in the long term remains to be seen, but I'm happier than I was at a comfortable desk job with a nice salary and vaguely defined work goals.
Smart and happy are a difficult combination. I wish I had more advice to give on the subject, but I'm grateful just to be reasonably content without medication. Most days, anyway.
Hasn't it been fairly well established that more intelligent people are less likely to be happy in general? Being good at IT security (and not just an appliance operator, trained to run a few tools and read the generated reports) requires a fair amount of creative thinking and intelligence. I've worked in the field in the past, and I don't think it's specifically the adversarial mindset that causes unhappiness. I actually had a lot of fun doing that stuff - at least, when my work was appreciated by those I was advising and I wasn't seen as an interloper. That depends more on people skills, both on the working level and in management.
On the other hand, for the last few years I've worked on projects that are ostensibly for the public good, ensuring safe water supplies and such, but I've been rather unhappy with it. Why? Because the company I was working for was far better at securing grants and government contracts than at building anything useful and actually putting it to use beyond carefully controlled tests and demos. I came to realize that nothing I ever did there would ever really matter.
Since then I've been self-employed, doing ten times as much work but I'm happier.
Yes, but there's also an attraction. The end result is that every girl at the event will end up with a halo of geeks around her, separated by a 1-2 meter buffer zone.
Hey, it's possible. I'll never forget the first time we ran l0phtcrack on our 3000-user domain, back before any password policy was in place. It cracked 60% or 70% of the passwords in the first 30 minutes, and the list was full of good blackmail material.
I remember scanning down the password list and coming across 'nosexforme'. Then I looked at the user name and collapsed laughing. The guy was someone everyone in the department knew, and he was a friendly, personable guy. Everyone ALSO knew his wife - the Ice Queen, who worked on the financial side and ruled over our department with an iron fist.
Every person who came over to the console to see what the laughter was about did the same thing - looked at the password, followed the line over to the username, figured out who it was, realized the implication, and collapsed laughing.
Ok, so it was maybe a little unprofessional of us, but we couldn't help it. And we all liked the guy, so it really engendered more sympathy than ridicule... and reinforced what we all thought of his wife anyway.
No, it's not good enough - because He3 fusion is LONG way off by all accounts, and you're assuming that you can't find a suitable fuel here on Earth. And it's not like He3 doesn't exist on this planet. I've got some here on my desk, for that matter - self-luminous tritium glow tubes that by my math should have decayed to about 30% He3 by now.
And IIRC, the He3 on the moon is still pretty thin on the ground. You've got to process a lot of regolith to extract it.
I'm all for going back to the moon and staying there, but He3 is not the reason. Learning to live there IS a good reason, IMHO. I'm just looking forward to the day when automated fabrication technology gets to the point where we can build maybe 80-90% of what we need in-situ without huge factories and manual labor. I'm not expecting magical nanotech assemblers any time soon, but you don't need to make EVERYTHING there. Just make the big, heavy stuff - and learn to design what you need using the materials you've got, even if it's sub-optimal.
The day when an off-world colony can produce enough wealth to pay for what it must get from Earth is the day we stop being an Earth-bound species. We'll get there by working both ends - reducing what needs to be sent up (and reducing the cost of doing so), and increasing the economic output of an off-world colony. But we need to go there first, even though it's expensive, and start learning the lessons that need to be learned.
Got any figures on just how much slower the liftoff is? Based on some numbers I looked up quick, the shuttle has a gross liftoff weight of around 4,500,000 pounds and a payload capacity of 50,000 pounds. That means cargo accounts for around 1.1% of the liftoff weight.
Now, maybe they're carrying less fuel on lighter launches, but I've never heard that before. I can't imagine a 1% variation in liftoff weight making a big difference in time to clear the pad.
Anyone care to contribute some actual time measurements?
I did get screwed by PayPal as a buyer once - bought two of an item and only received one, but I was told that as long as I received *something*, even an empty package, that PayPal wouldn't help me out. Maybe that's changed.
I've made thousands of sales through PayPal without any problems, but there are a couple of reasons for that. First, I'm not selling on eBay - all of the sales are through my own site, which doesn't attract scammers (Indonesian credit card fraudsters aside) like eBay does. Second, I've got a low enough return rate and high enough margins that I can afford a liberal return/replacement policy. Sending a prepaid return mailer and issuing a full refund to the rare dissatisfied customer does a very good job of defusing conflicts.
Yes, PayPal's fees are a little high. Not vastly higher than the discount rate on a card-not-present merchant account, though. Dropping PayPal as a payment option would mean losing many of my sales to certain countries.
But parent is right - they want to be a bank but without the regulation. For the fee they take, they provide very little protection, compared to the credit card companies. I would imagine that ramping up a large enough fraud department to properly handle the number of disputes they get would be VERY costly, and short of the government forcing them into it, I can't see it ever happening. As long as that great sales engine of eBay keeps cranking along with a 99% success rate, people will just accept it.
Get a ham radio license. The first six channels or so of 802.11b fall into an amateur frequency allocation, and I think the power limit is 1 watt, with no EIRP limit - which means you can run it into a 12-foot dish, if you so desire. Yeah, you can't legally run encryption over it, but I think you're still on better legal footing than just ignoring the Part 15 rules.
Or if it needs to be sent across the country, use registered mail. Registered mail (not certified mail) gets locked up and tracked very closely. It's way more expensive than regular first class mail (about $10 for a letter) but it's cheaper and more secure than, say, FedEx.
Only if something else was going faster. Metabolism is limited by available energy. What if you're so far from your sun on a geologically dead planet that you've got very, very little energy available for life? Everything in those conditions will likely be slow-moving. Sure, you might have fast predators - but fast is relative.
Oddly enough, I've seen the hardware specifications for at least one of the command destruct transmitters. That part wasn't classified, but I'm not sure where I came across it - might have been in some old Range documentation I found in the office I inherited. I don't remember much, but I'm pretty sure there were at least a couple of different designs in use. I think one was a redundant 68HC11-based system. All I really remember is that the design struck me as very conservative and architecturally simple. I don't recall any mention of crypto procedures and protocols - what I read only concerned getting the destruct message from its origin to the vehicle.
I'm sure the codes are tightly controlled. It's really not hard to design a very secure system, when it only needs to send one message, and that very rarely. An arbitrarily long, purely random key generated and distributed to the transmitter and receiver under tight security would do it. Denial-of-service would be a more difficult problem to address, but then jamming the signals isn't exactly easy when you're competing with some fairly high-power transmitters on high-gain dishes aimed right at the receiver. And they've got RF measurement vans that I assume patrol for interfering signals, malicious or otherwise.
And if you need an example of why those destruct systems are required, watch this.
I've met at least one of the Range Safety Officers while working out at Cape Canaveral. It's not something they like to talk about much, when it comes to the Shuttle.
This sounds like trolling to me, but I'll bite. IP addresses can't be pinpointed to a user? Maybe not 100%, but certainly in most circumstances well enough to hold up in court, assuming you have a timestamp and the provider has proper logs. It's good enough for the FBI, why wouldn't it be good enough for the RIAA?
Why would you have to be authorized by the government to monitor file sharing traffic and send take-down notices? I'm sure there are regulations covering private investigators, but it's not at all clear to me that monitoring online activity and looking up IP addresses in WHOIS constitutes PI activities.
Really, who cares that much? If I want something to be UV-resistant to hang on the wall or something, I'll go get professional prints.
For the other 99.9% of the stuff I print, my cheap Chinese continuous inking system is the best 300 Yuan (~$43) I ever spent. The whole package, plus some extra ink, cost me less than a full change of manufacturer's ink for my Epson RX580.
On glossy photo paper, it looks just as good as the OEM stuff. Most of the time I'm just printing regular business graphics, though, and it does just as well there. I no longer hesitate at all to print lots of graphics-heavy stuff, and the kids get a lot of use out of it. My son got elected 6th grade class president thanks in part to a series of lolcats-themed campaign posters he printed. (lolcats... is there anything they can't do?)
I've been using it for several months now, and would normally have gone through a couple of cartridges. As it is, I can barely tell that the reservoir levels have changed.
Now if only some honest printer manufacturer would embrace this sort of thing - I'd gladly pay a lot more for a printer with easily replaceable heads and nice, big refillable ink reservoirs that the printer can't lie about and doesn't waste excessively. I don't expect to ever see that happen, though.
I'm curious what the list looks like for embedded programming - particularly at the low end. For my money, C is hard to beat on small systems - it's a good compromise between efficiency and manageability. If you know how the compiler works, it's not hard to write code that's nearly as efficient as hand-optimized assembly.
I'm sure Java ranks high there, too, but I don't consider it to be in the same class. Native Java hardware is relatively expensive, and running a VM takes a significant amount of memory and processing power.
My latest project is pure C (aside from about 100 lines of assembly for a firmware upgrade bootloader), around 30 pages of source code at present, and it compiles to about 9k of object code. It's targeted for a $2.50 processor, and I'm able to do things like simultaneous Bell 202 and DTMF decoding in software because I know exactly how C arithmetic is implemented on the processor and can take advantage of that without having to actually do the implementation in assembler. Doing the same thing in Java would cost a lot more. And when $5 saved on the bill of materials means an extra $5-10k in my bank account at the end of the year, that's a big deal.
So what other languages can compete in that space?
That brings an interesting thought to mind, though. I know that we can't sequester carbon very well in a gaseous form, and that other forms are expensive to produce, but what if we were to grow plants, cut them down, and stick them underground in some salt mines or something?
It's been done before. Works great, until some stray asteroid happens by and wipes out your civilization, and 65 million years later those scrappy little mammals that survived the nuclear winter in their cozy burrows have evolved a civilization of their own and are busy pumping all your carefully sequestered carbon back to the surface to be burned and released into the atmosphere...
I think the real problem here is that no big-screen movie treatment could possibly do justice to the actual WoW experience in the same way that South Park did.
I was reasonably impressed with the hardware. Had to cram some folded paper into the battery compartment to stop the rattling, but other than that the construction seemed solid. The keyboard is mushy, though, and probably the most annoying I've used since the Timex Sinclair 1000.
I've had the touch pad start freaking out in odd ways, with the pointer randomly jumping when I lift my finger to reposition it.
The screen is very impressive, especially for the cost. The camera is surprisingly good. The software is, IMHO, a steaming pile of crap in its current state, wholly unsuitable for its target audience. It's slow to load, simple operations like exiting programs are inconsistent between applications, and there seems to be little to no built-in help.
Both of my kids (ages 9 and 12) gave up on using it. My daughter (the 9-year-old) much prefers her old Gateway P2-550 laptop running Windows 2000, despite the machine being an ancient cast-off that ceased being a useful business computer several years ago. Firefox on that machine is vastly superior to the XO-1's browser, and the overall experience is much less frustrating.
Despite my doubts about the OLPC project from the beginning, I've WANTED it to succeed, and I still hope to see it succeed. I want to believe that the open source community can build something that will make a real difference in the developing world, but it looks like there's still a long way to go.
Perhaps, but you can buy your tigers direct - though I hear they're inferior Chinese tigers, and you'll never actually get your mail-in rebate on them.
People have been doing this stuff in the ham radio world for years - it's called APRS for Automated Packet Reporting System. I run a small business (www.argentdata.com) developing low-cost hardware for it.
The advantage of using dumb old radios is that you can operate independent of any fixed infrastructure, so it's usable even where you don't have cell coverage.
Tracking something small like a dog (I've had inquiries about kangaroos, too) introduces the problem of antenna placement, though. APRS is typically used on the 2-meter band, which means a quarter-wave vertical antenna is half a meter long. I did once put a passive data logger on my cat, and found that she roams a little more widely than I thought, but that doesn't really count.
The advantage of relatively low frequencies and high transmit power is that you can cover a radius of 20 miles from one mountaintop digipeater (equivalent to a cell site), and they're not difficult to make solar powered.
There's a nationwide digipeater network in the US, and most of Europe is covered as well, along with much of New Zealand, Australia, and many other countries. I think there are at least two APRS-capable satellites on orbit too, though PCSAT-1 is dying. Internet gateways are all over the place, so you can map APRS stations online, and not have to maintain any receive-side hardware of your own.
I'm constantly surprised by the applications people come up with for this stuff. The most recent I heard was someone with a cable TV company who found that he could drive around and transmit at low power every couple of seconds and use a receiver back at the headend to plot ingress leaks in the cable system.
Add to that the fact that you can do two-way text messaging, weather, and telemetry, and it's more than worth the hassle of taking a simple multiple-choice license exam. It's this sort of thing that's going to save ham radio (if anything can) - talking to people around the world just doesn't interest people as much these days, when it's so easy to do on the Internet or the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
And there's probably a certain amount of hysteresis too, so maybe that 0.3 gets overwritten with a 1 to become 0.93, and then with another 0 to become 0.393, and you can recover previous values to a degree limited by the amount of hysteresis, sensitivity of the detector, and noise floor. Or at least that's the theory I've always heard on why you're supposed to overwrite hard drives multiple times... I've never actually heard of it being done, but the assumption has always been that 'they' have the ability to do it. Anyone care to provide more substantial information on the feasibility of this sort of recovery?
No problem sending messages from Verizon in the US to China, either. Doesn't look like Verizon even overcharged me for it, which is really out of character for them.
>Generally, that is a man's solution. Women just want someone to nod, agree and sympathise.
I'll second that. It's not universally true (I have a few female friends who aren't like this - granted, they're all lesbians) but it's something I've learned the hard way. Men discuss problems to find solutions. Women don't always want solutions, they want sympathy and understanding. Trying to solve their problems logically can make you seem insensitive, or make them think you're minimizing their problems and their emotional impact. Nod, agree, and sympathize, and only offer suggestions if they make it clear that's what they want.
Nope, much smaller, but I think we touched on some of the same projects.
I had a guest show up as I was finishing the last post and I cut it a little short. I was trying to say that I'm more satisfied working for myself because I work on what I believe in. Whether I can make a living at it in the long term remains to be seen, but I'm happier than I was at a comfortable desk job with a nice salary and vaguely defined work goals.
Smart and happy are a difficult combination. I wish I had more advice to give on the subject, but I'm grateful just to be reasonably content without medication. Most days, anyway.
Hasn't it been fairly well established that more intelligent people are less likely to be happy in general? Being good at IT security (and not just an appliance operator, trained to run a few tools and read the generated reports) requires a fair amount of creative thinking and intelligence. I've worked in the field in the past, and I don't think it's specifically the adversarial mindset that causes unhappiness. I actually had a lot of fun doing that stuff - at least, when my work was appreciated by those I was advising and I wasn't seen as an interloper. That depends more on people skills, both on the working level and in management.
On the other hand, for the last few years I've worked on projects that are ostensibly for the public good, ensuring safe water supplies and such, but I've been rather unhappy with it. Why? Because the company I was working for was far better at securing grants and government contracts than at building anything useful and actually putting it to use beyond carefully controlled tests and demos. I came to realize that nothing I ever did there would ever really matter.
Since then I've been self-employed, doing ten times as much work but I'm happier.
Yes, but there's also an attraction. The end result is that every girl at the event will end up with a halo of geeks around her, separated by a 1-2 meter buffer zone.
Or haven't you ever been to DefCon?
Hey, it's possible. I'll never forget the first time we ran l0phtcrack on our 3000-user domain, back before any password policy was in place. It cracked 60% or 70% of the passwords in the first 30 minutes, and the list was full of good blackmail material.
I remember scanning down the password list and coming across 'nosexforme'. Then I looked at the user name and collapsed laughing. The guy was someone everyone in the department knew, and he was a friendly, personable guy. Everyone ALSO knew his wife - the Ice Queen, who worked on the financial side and ruled over our department with an iron fist.
Every person who came over to the console to see what the laughter was about did the same thing - looked at the password, followed the line over to the username, figured out who it was, realized the implication, and collapsed laughing.
Ok, so it was maybe a little unprofessional of us, but we couldn't help it. And we all liked the guy, so it really engendered more sympathy than ridicule... and reinforced what we all thought of his wife anyway.
No, it's not good enough - because He3 fusion is LONG way off by all accounts, and you're assuming that you can't find a suitable fuel here on Earth. And it's not like He3 doesn't exist on this planet. I've got some here on my desk, for that matter - self-luminous tritium glow tubes that by my math should have decayed to about 30% He3 by now.
And IIRC, the He3 on the moon is still pretty thin on the ground. You've got to process a lot of regolith to extract it.
I'm all for going back to the moon and staying there, but He3 is not the reason. Learning to live there IS a good reason, IMHO. I'm just looking forward to the day when automated fabrication technology gets to the point where we can build maybe 80-90% of what we need in-situ without huge factories and manual labor. I'm not expecting magical nanotech assemblers any time soon, but you don't need to make EVERYTHING there. Just make the big, heavy stuff - and learn to design what you need using the materials you've got, even if it's sub-optimal.
The day when an off-world colony can produce enough wealth to pay for what it must get from Earth is the day we stop being an Earth-bound species. We'll get there by working both ends - reducing what needs to be sent up (and reducing the cost of doing so), and increasing the economic output of an off-world colony. But we need to go there first, even though it's expensive, and start learning the lessons that need to be learned.
Got any figures on just how much slower the liftoff is? Based on some numbers I looked up quick, the shuttle has a gross liftoff weight of around 4,500,000 pounds and a payload capacity of 50,000 pounds. That means cargo accounts for around 1.1% of the liftoff weight.
Now, maybe they're carrying less fuel on lighter launches, but I've never heard that before. I can't imagine a 1% variation in liftoff weight making a big difference in time to clear the pad.
Anyone care to contribute some actual time measurements?
I did get screwed by PayPal as a buyer once - bought two of an item and only received one, but I was told that as long as I received *something*, even an empty package, that PayPal wouldn't help me out. Maybe that's changed.
I've made thousands of sales through PayPal without any problems, but there are a couple of reasons for that. First, I'm not selling on eBay - all of the sales are through my own site, which doesn't attract scammers (Indonesian credit card fraudsters aside) like eBay does. Second, I've got a low enough return rate and high enough margins that I can afford a liberal return/replacement policy. Sending a prepaid return mailer and issuing a full refund to the rare dissatisfied customer does a very good job of defusing conflicts.
Yes, PayPal's fees are a little high. Not vastly higher than the discount rate on a card-not-present merchant account, though. Dropping PayPal as a payment option would mean losing many of my sales to certain countries.
But parent is right - they want to be a bank but without the regulation. For the fee they take, they provide very little protection, compared to the credit card companies. I would imagine that ramping up a large enough fraud department to properly handle the number of disputes they get would be VERY costly, and short of the government forcing them into it, I can't see it ever happening. As long as that great sales engine of eBay keeps cranking along with a 99% success rate, people will just accept it.
Get a ham radio license. The first six channels or so of 802.11b fall into an amateur frequency allocation, and I think the power limit is 1 watt, with no EIRP limit - which means you can run it into a 12-foot dish, if you so desire. Yeah, you can't legally run encryption over it, but I think you're still on better legal footing than just ignoring the Part 15 rules.
Or if it needs to be sent across the country, use registered mail. Registered mail (not certified mail) gets locked up and tracked very closely. It's way more expensive than regular first class mail (about $10 for a letter) but it's cheaper and more secure than, say, FedEx.
Only if something else was going faster. Metabolism is limited by available energy. What if you're so far from your sun on a geologically dead planet that you've got very, very little energy available for life? Everything in those conditions will likely be slow-moving. Sure, you might have fast predators - but fast is relative.
Oddly enough, I've seen the hardware specifications for at least one of the command destruct transmitters. That part wasn't classified, but I'm not sure where I came across it - might have been in some old Range documentation I found in the office I inherited. I don't remember much, but I'm pretty sure there were at least a couple of different designs in use. I think one was a redundant 68HC11-based system. All I really remember is that the design struck me as very conservative and architecturally simple. I don't recall any mention of crypto procedures and protocols - what I read only concerned getting the destruct message from its origin to the vehicle.
I'm sure the codes are tightly controlled. It's really not hard to design a very secure system, when it only needs to send one message, and that very rarely. An arbitrarily long, purely random key generated and distributed to the transmitter and receiver under tight security would do it. Denial-of-service would be a more difficult problem to address, but then jamming the signals isn't exactly easy when you're competing with some fairly high-power transmitters on high-gain dishes aimed right at the receiver. And they've got RF measurement vans that I assume patrol for interfering signals, malicious or otherwise.
And if you need an example of why those destruct systems are required, watch this.
I've met at least one of the Range Safety Officers while working out at Cape Canaveral. It's not something they like to talk about much, when it comes to the Shuttle.
This sounds like trolling to me, but I'll bite. IP addresses can't be pinpointed to a user? Maybe not 100%, but certainly in most circumstances well enough to hold up in court, assuming you have a timestamp and the provider has proper logs. It's good enough for the FBI, why wouldn't it be good enough for the RIAA?
Why would you have to be authorized by the government to monitor file sharing traffic and send take-down notices? I'm sure there are regulations covering private investigators, but it's not at all clear to me that monitoring online activity and looking up IP addresses in WHOIS constitutes PI activities.
Really, who cares that much? If I want something to be UV-resistant to hang on the wall or something, I'll go get professional prints.
For the other 99.9% of the stuff I print, my cheap Chinese continuous inking system is the best 300 Yuan (~$43) I ever spent. The whole package, plus some extra ink, cost me less than a full change of manufacturer's ink for my Epson RX580.
On glossy photo paper, it looks just as good as the OEM stuff. Most of the time I'm just printing regular business graphics, though, and it does just as well there. I no longer hesitate at all to print lots of graphics-heavy stuff, and the kids get a lot of use out of it. My son got elected 6th grade class president thanks in part to a series of lolcats-themed campaign posters he printed. (lolcats... is there anything they can't do?)
I've been using it for several months now, and would normally have gone through a couple of cartridges. As it is, I can barely tell that the reservoir levels have changed.
Now if only some honest printer manufacturer would embrace this sort of thing - I'd gladly pay a lot more for a printer with easily replaceable heads and nice, big refillable ink reservoirs that the printer can't lie about and doesn't waste excessively. I don't expect to ever see that happen, though.
I'm curious what the list looks like for embedded programming - particularly at the low end. For my money, C is hard to beat on small systems - it's a good compromise between efficiency and manageability. If you know how the compiler works, it's not hard to write code that's nearly as efficient as hand-optimized assembly.
I'm sure Java ranks high there, too, but I don't consider it to be in the same class. Native Java hardware is relatively expensive, and running a VM takes a significant amount of memory and processing power.
My latest project is pure C (aside from about 100 lines of assembly for a firmware upgrade bootloader), around 30 pages of source code at present, and it compiles to about 9k of object code. It's targeted for a $2.50 processor, and I'm able to do things like simultaneous Bell 202 and DTMF decoding in software because I know exactly how C arithmetic is implemented on the processor and can take advantage of that without having to actually do the implementation in assembler. Doing the same thing in Java would cost a lot more. And when $5 saved on the bill of materials means an extra $5-10k in my bank account at the end of the year, that's a big deal.
So what other languages can compete in that space?
That brings an interesting thought to mind, though. I know that we can't sequester carbon very well in a gaseous form, and that other forms are expensive to produce, but what if we were to grow plants, cut them down, and stick them underground in some salt mines or something?
It's been done before. Works great, until some stray asteroid happens by and wipes out your civilization, and 65 million years later those scrappy little mammals that survived the nuclear winter in their cozy burrows have evolved a civilization of their own and are busy pumping all your carefully sequestered carbon back to the surface to be burned and released into the atmosphere...
I think the real problem here is that no big-screen movie treatment could possibly do justice to the actual WoW experience in the same way that South Park did.
I was reasonably impressed with the hardware. Had to cram some folded paper into the battery compartment to stop the rattling, but other than that the construction seemed solid. The keyboard is mushy, though, and probably the most annoying I've used since the Timex Sinclair 1000.
I've had the touch pad start freaking out in odd ways, with the pointer randomly jumping when I lift my finger to reposition it.
The screen is very impressive, especially for the cost. The camera is surprisingly good. The software is, IMHO, a steaming pile of crap in its current state, wholly unsuitable for its target audience. It's slow to load, simple operations like exiting programs are inconsistent between applications, and there seems to be little to no built-in help.
Both of my kids (ages 9 and 12) gave up on using it. My daughter (the 9-year-old) much prefers her old Gateway P2-550 laptop running Windows 2000, despite the machine being an ancient cast-off that ceased being a useful business computer several years ago. Firefox on that machine is vastly superior to the XO-1's browser, and the overall experience is much less frustrating.
Despite my doubts about the OLPC project from the beginning, I've WANTED it to succeed, and I still hope to see it succeed. I want to believe that the open source community can build something that will make a real difference in the developing world, but it looks like there's still a long way to go.
Perhaps, but you can buy your tigers direct - though I hear they're inferior Chinese tigers, and you'll never actually get your mail-in rebate on them.
It's been a problem with tumbleweeds and migratory ducks before....
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2001/C/200113639.html
And that one 29-year old must keep them all in business, while the rest of us go to Usenet for our fix.
The advantage of using dumb old radios is that you can operate independent of any fixed infrastructure, so it's usable even where you don't have cell coverage.
Tracking something small like a dog (I've had inquiries about kangaroos, too) introduces the problem of antenna placement, though. APRS is typically used on the 2-meter band, which means a quarter-wave vertical antenna is half a meter long. I did once put a passive data logger on my cat, and found that she roams a little more widely than I thought, but that doesn't really count.
The advantage of relatively low frequencies and high transmit power is that you can cover a radius of 20 miles from one mountaintop digipeater (equivalent to a cell site), and they're not difficult to make solar powered.
There's a nationwide digipeater network in the US, and most of Europe is covered as well, along with much of New Zealand, Australia, and many other countries. I think there are at least two APRS-capable satellites on orbit too, though PCSAT-1 is dying. Internet gateways are all over the place, so you can map APRS stations online, and not have to maintain any receive-side hardware of your own.
I'm constantly surprised by the applications people come up with for this stuff. The most recent I heard was someone with a cable TV company who found that he could drive around and transmit at low power every couple of seconds and use a receiver back at the headend to plot ingress leaks in the cable system.
Add to that the fact that you can do two-way text messaging, weather, and telemetry, and it's more than worth the hassle of taking a simple multiple-choice license exam. It's this sort of thing that's going to save ham radio (if anything can) - talking to people around the world just doesn't interest people as much these days, when it's so easy to do on the Internet or the phone.