BE very careful of static with plastic tupperware. YOu could very easily fry your gear.
For sure!
I use a similar no-no for non-CMOS electronic components. I have a huge stockpile of passive components - resistors, capacitors, etc - and things like tubes, bipolar transistors, etc. Over 20,000 vacuum tubes alone, according to my last inventory.
What I use is 4x8" generic ZipLock-ish baggies which I buy at the local head shop. The guy must think I'm a mega-dealer, because every few weeks I go in wearing a shirt and tie and buy 100 (or more) 4x8" baggies for $6.
I drop a piece of cardboard with a label into each baggie, then I stuff it with components. Then I put the baggie into a 4" wide cardboard parts tray (Bankers Box # 7353). The trays are then stored in cheap metal shelving units with 9" space between shelves. I have 6 shelves for vacuum tubes alone.
Unlike doing this with other methods (small drawers), I can simply insert a weird resistor value between standard values. I can drop a bag of #6-32x0.75" screws between the #6-32x0.5" and #6-32x1" screws. If I fill a baggie with 1k 1/4W resistors, I just add another baggie. Suddenly find a 12AX7A? Stick it in a new bag behind the 10 or so full of 12AX7s. I can take a group out, throw them into my toolbox and take them with me, not worrying that I'm going to spill them. It's very handy.
For static sensitive stuff, I use 4x8" antistat baggies which I purchase from Newark or DigiKey.
I can't claim that I invented or discovered this method - I first saw it while I was working for Litton, and I loved it.
Doesn't work for big stuff like transformers, stepper motors, complete assemblies. For that, I still have to use TupperWare (or the disposable resealable containers.)
Having an inventory of parts is useless if you can't find what you need when you need it. But it's even worse if you *can* find it but it doesn't work. Remember to think about static.
Why do we need to have small, power-efficient supercomputers? Isn't the main goal of the supercomputer to be fast as hell? Granted, if this can be achieved while simultaneously minimizing power and size then by all means go for it. However, as stated by my parent, what sacrafices are being made?
The increase in speed is related to the reduction in size.
For a moment, let's pretend that electricity within a wire travels at the speed of light.
Now, let's pretend that we wish to carry pulses of electricity from one end of the computer to the other at a very high speed.
At some point, the distance the signal has to travel will become significant to the speed of the computer.
This is already happening in PCs. If you take a close look at the motherboard in your computer, chances are you'll see weird places where the traces just zig-zag back and forth (notice the angles on them, that's not by accident either, but I'm not going to try to explain a fourth-year university course in microwave and RF design here). These zig-zags add length to the traces so that they have the same length as other traces within the same bus, and all the signals on that bus arrive at the same time. Think of them as being "equal length headers", if you're into the throb of a big-block V8.
Length of interconnecting wires is non-trivial at this point. Stray capacitance and inductance caused by any conductor are non-trivial at this point. As a result, a terrific limiting factor to the speed of a computer is now its size.
Power consumption is also related. Modern ICs are made of millions of MOSFET transistors which behave as switches. These switches are not perfect: during the transition between a logic high and a logic low, the transistors spend time in the linear state where they are resistive. As a result, they waste energy as heat.
Stray capacitance and inductance - even within the junctions of the transistors themselves - slow their ability to switch instantaneously. As a result, they must be made as small as possible to reduce capacitance (C) and inductance (L).
This also explains why newer generations of a processor can run faster than their predecessors: smaller and smaller features on the IC mean less stray C and L, which means that the transistors can switch states faster, which means that they spend less time in the linear state and therefore heat up less. This means less energy wasted as heat.
--I think this guy should just be given a slap on the wrist and undergo some counseling; after all, using an ice pick on a spammer is just PRIMITIVE.;-)
Yeah. I agree. If he'd said he wanted to use a rusty camshaft, now that would have been all about inflicting pain.
My favorite for brandishing is the camshaft from a Pontiac 2.5L I-4, the "Iron Duke" engine used in everything from Chevrolet Citations and Celebrities to Pontiac 6000 and Fieros. It's about the same length as a baseball bat, and has a really nice comfortable weight in your hands.
I'm sure it would make a really nice sound as it collapses a spammer's sinus cavities. We'll have to wait until legislation is drafted which recognizes spammers as being sub-human. But then PETA will probably get involved somehow...
He should have concentrated on getting FP instead.
That is, itself, rather spammish. But provides a convenient anchor for self-proclaimed karma whores like me.
What really disappoints me about this whole thing is that the dude only threatened to go postal on spammers.
If he had actually done it, I'd clip out the newspaper pictures of the dude and frame them. They'd sit on my little shrine amoungst the framed pictures of Newton, Edison, Einstein and Bohr.
Incidentally, almost every power producing reactor in the western hemisphere is water moderated.... As you say, water moderation means that if the coolant boils off the chain reaction will stop. CANDU is in no way unique in this aspect.
I thought it was? If I recall, CANDU is the only reactor design to combine water moderation and use U-238. Most other reactor designs use U-235, which it seems to me is fissile without moderation.
The problem is that the fuel will continue to generate a significant amount of heat even after the chain reaction is stopped, because of the radioactive decay of very short-lived fission products.
True. But again, tests with CANDU reactors (in particular the now-decommissioned NRX research reactor at Chalk River) have shown that the temperature never reaches a point where there's a danger of fuel melting - or even of damage to the bundles.
On the other hand, PLWR like Three Mile Island absolutely need backup cooling.
are you serious?! That themal expansion will be enough to [... what would you call that:] unmoderate [?] the reaction?
That's what I read, too.
If true, it's ingenious, but still Not Ready For Primetime. There's still the possibility of catastrophic accidents which would pulverize the balls, and then you're stuck with the Great Ukrainian Marshmallow Roast all over again.
That just seems iffy. Anyways, that just means that the reaction will reach an equilibrium where the heat of the reaction is just enough to expand the spheres to keep the reaction going at that speed.
You want a complete shutdown when you walk away, not an indefinite intermediate equilibrium.
Of course. It's better than a complete runaway, but it's still far from a good situation.
I'd live right next door to a CANDU reactor. But there's no way in hell I'd want to be anywhere near this thing.
Airports are a special kind of hell.
on
Public BSOD Sightings?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The ones at Minneapolis International run Windows 95! Windows 95!!!! They're constantly crashing. I wonder which H-1B suggested that one.
Actually, many of them do, for a variety of reasons.
I used to work installing and managing a FIDS (Flight Information Display System) at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Several pictures of the FIDS systems I used to manage are in those BSoD picture pages that a couple of other posters have mentioned.
The company that wrote the FIDS had precisely one programmer. He was excellent, but the company was crap, constantly over-extending him and making ridiculous promises to airports and their stuff.
Working with FIDS systems requires a lot of reverse-engineering. Airports don't like to change their technology; they're even more conservative than banks. (Consider the potential real-world implications: two planes colliding in mid-air over a city.)
Consequently, things are old, and usually the people who wrote them didn't document very well, or the documentation can't be found, or the systems are completely proprietary. Then there's the almost weekly cycle of airport amalgamations, airline mergers, fuelling contractor changes, etc. The IT department has to run around patching existing stuff together to try to keep up.
There was one VAX system in the GTAA (Toronto airport administration) headquarters building which, according to legend, hadn't been touched in 6 years because no one knew if it would come back up on its own after a reboot.
You can imagine in this environment that people are loathe to give you a space on a hub to sniff records off an airside server. Cut off one pin and serial is a one-way street; it's pretty hard for an outside contractor's computer systems to screw things up.
The displays around the terminals tended to be ANSI color dumb terminals all driven off serial data. Very reliable, but very hard to upgrade. Data feeds for new FIDS systems typically have to come from several sources, all of different data formats, and be merged.
At Pearson, we had three data streams for three terminals. Two of them came from one source, down a serial line, simultaneously but with completely different data formats. A third was yet another completely different format, provided by an airline which would change the format of the data at a whim.
Our software to read this stuff had to be reading directly off the serial port with direct hardware access (needed to be able to make the weird handshaking requirements on some systems). The programmer who wrote it did so before Windows NT, and certainly before Linux hit it big, and didn't have time to port it.
The other big issue, of course, is the computers themselves. Arrivals, departures and gate monitors frequently receive the same data streams and therefore have to be independenly configured on what to display and what to ignore. Not to mention the internal stuff for fuelling and maintenance companies, baggage throwers, food services, cargo flights, etc. Almost all of these displays are driven by PCs which are usually stuffed into horrible places - ceilings, under desks, janitor closets. Half the runaround of maintaining these things is actually getting four security escorts (even if you have all the security clearances in the world!) to let you into some room somewhere where you THINK there might be a computer where you THINK the power supply fan might be failing because you keep on having vmm.vxd crashes.
You'll note that a vmm.vxd BSoD is usually caused by a hardware failure. In my not inconsequential experience with public display computers, usually caused by overheating because some idiot decided to store his large collection of empty Tim Horton's coffee cups in the little space behind the mysterious computer under his desk. Or because of the massive dustbunnies which accumulate in a suspended ceiling 25 feet above the International Departures concourse.
If you had the opportunity to do the whole thing over from scratch, of course, you'
I would love an alternative to buying the LCD picture frames on sale at Thinkgeek.com for more than the cost of a brand new LCD monitor of equal or larger size...
I agree. Though ThinkGeek has all sorts of other cool stuff.
But as part of the software loaded onto these things, maybe they should offer a distributed client of some sort? I'm sure it would work as a selling feature: "Your new frame will display pictures and work on finding a cure for cancer."
Of course, if these are all >= Pentiums, they have a HALT instruction to reduce power consumption at idle. But this might be a neat feature for people who don't pay for electricity.
the problem that most people have with nuclear power is tchernobyl(or similar catastrophy that would release radioactivity to a wide area).
I'm glad you mentioned Chernobyl...
'is packed with tennis ball-size graphite "pebbles," each containing thousands of tiny uranium dioxide particles'... Proponents insist that the reactor's design features make it 'meltdown-proof' and 'walk-away safe'."
... because apparently these people haven't learned anything from it.
The most important lesson of Chernobyl is that graphite burns. So if you lose control of this thing, it will catch fire. And the fire will spread radioactive decay daughters all over the place.
I am a big proponent of nuclear power, but only of one design: CANDU (CANadian Deuterium-Uranium). It's inherently impossible for it to melt down. It uses U-238 (natural uranium, in the form of "ceramic" pellets of uranium dioxide) which is NOT capable of a chain reaction without a heavy water moderator. (Heavy water is just water where the hydrogens have neutrons. Non-radioactive, naturally occurring, and just slightly heavier than normal water.)
As a result, if you lose control of a CANDU reactor, the reactor will overheat. Pressure will build up in the heavy water system until something breaks. The moderator will escape as steam, and since the fuel is essentially non-water soluble, with only extraordinarily small trace amounts of radioactive materials. With no moderator, the chain reaction stops, and the reactor cools down. This process occurs as a result of the laws of physics; in other words, Chernobyl cannot happen at Pickering or Darlington even if all the control systems fail or someone goes to extraordinary lengths to circumvent them.
The other great lesson is not to let boobs run the reactor. All nuclear power programs have had problems with this in the past; a "walk away" approach simply encourages this.
They couldn't filter out on IP. Many companies and plenty of ISPs use NAT and/or proxying. This means that you can have a sometimes large cloud of users all coming in on one IP.
True. I hadn't stopped to think that the people who respond to spam are probably also the people who know nothing about computers and therefore use (primarily) their work connections.
If formfucker doesn't have a good time delay between signups then they could delete the records between time A and B. Finding times would would be obvious with a count(*) group by hour (or minute) type statement. Or maybe I give the spammers too much credit.
FormFucker should probably sleep a random interval between submissions.
The bigger problem which would make it easier to filter out would be IP address. Your spammer gets ten responses from the same IP address, all with different data, and they're clearly bogus. So the usefulness of FormFucker is limited to being once against each spammer from a given IP address.
Many times, I'm seeing the forms have an ID number of some sort which would be passed when the link is followed:
A HREF = http://www.spammer.com/form.pl?recipent@email.com
or
A HREF = http://www.spammer.com/form.pl?ID=666
Again, same problem. Different data from ten submissions with the same ID or e-mail address, and the spammer knows the data is garbage.
Same if the spammer crosses a randomly-generated e-mail address against his list and finds that it's not there. Garbage data, easily culled.
Furthermore, if you run FormFucker, the data would have to include your e-mail address or ID number so the spammer can't weed it out as illegitimate. What's he gonna do when he finds out that it's taken him half an hour to pursue your dead lead? He's got your e-mail address, and because you fought back against his assault on your mailbox, I'd bet money the bastard would pull a joe-job on your address.
FormFucker is a great idea, but I wouldn't use it on the spam that comes into my e-mail addresses.
Plus, the actual amount of radioactive material would be tremendously small (think ounces per hundreds of people). If the waste became a concern, a standard battery slot could be developed so that batteries with longer lives could be manufactured. Those 10+ year batteries could simply be moved from computer to computer over the years.
Depending on whether or not the material is fissionable, with enough such batteries (not large quantities at the wholesale level), I'm sure you could build a bomb.
And in any case, a dirty bomb.
I think, in this world climate, it's unlikely to ever happen. Never mind the reactions from all the ill-informed hippies who think nuclear power is inherently evil.
Even so, you'll never get all the batteries back at the end of their service lives. Some will get thrown out. Some dude will get pissed off when his girlfriend calls him to dump him and throw his nuclear-powered cell phone into a lake. A kid will take apart the old pager he found.
I love nuclear power. It's far from perfect or even the panacea that it was claimed to be in the 1950s. And while I think it's still the best overall solution for our energy demands, it's like hydrogen-powered cars: I would be very afraid to see it in the hands of consumers.
First let me say that I hope your rambling diatribe is not indicative of the writing abilities of the average Princeton employee. If it is, then Princeton has indeed fallen as a school.
Many of those spams to which you compare open source software are now being sent using mass-mailing viruses. Funny thing about viruses is that they usually exploit security flaws - stupid things like buffer overruns - which are by and large eliminated by the peer review process in open source software. (Never mind the poor Windows security model which allows these viruses to do actual damage.)
The writers of open-source software, which you dismiss as being a bunch of children, include organizations like IBM and NASA's JPL. The rogue programmers at NASA must alone be accountable for half the world's virus problems.
I know that when I reboot my FreeBSD webservers (which happens only when the power goes out or I have to vacuum the inside of the computer), the list of credits in the dmesg as it starts up makes me seriously consider how intelligent the choice of open source was, in the face of the legendary reliability, security and standards-compliance of Microsoft IIS.
Not for one second would any reasonable person suggest that student labor is a suitable choice for managing proprietary university systems. But that wouldn't be open source anyway. Nor would there be enough open source interest in developing systems like WebCT (which I haven't personally found to work that well anyway, being all too familiar with administration of WebCT 3.2).
Open source solutions like Linux remain generally unsuitable for the desktop - the very things which make it excel in a server environment are the very things which hobble its mass acceptance and usefulness as a desktop operating system. But that will be fixed before too long.
Where open source currently excels - and has almost since the first newsgroup message where someone said, "You know, I think you could improve your program by..." - is in the implementation of the open standards-based systems which are the very infrastructure of the network.
Open source isn't free. Download a source tarball. Compile it. Use it. Enjoy it. And if you find a feature is broken or missing, your contribution will be to edit the source code and send it back so that other people can share the changes.
And so what if a 14-year-old kid with a cable modem reviews the source, finds a bug or missing feature, and contributes a patch? That patch is still subject to the same peer review process. And it's still public, so that it can be documented by others if not by him.
The most important thing I learned as a student in university is that higher education is not a barometer of intelligence, creativity or aptitude, but a barometer of diligence and funding. Over the years since, I've hired several gifted programmers with ability far eclipsing many of the university graduates I've employed. Mostly they were gifted programmers because that's what they loved to do... kind of like a 14-year-old kid who may have started into C++ when he was 10, has a natural mind for developing algorithms, and is capable of developing efficient software while freshly-minted science degrees are still writing bubble sorts.
Frankly, the ignorance displayed in your article is an embarrassment to you, your professional reputation, and your university.
Are there really that many.biz domains used for spamming? One of my more used email address is a.biz address and I wouldn't want people blocking my email. Yikes!
Sorry, man. Most of the spam I get is advertising *.biz URLs, or sites like www.biz-dot.net.
I've come to the conclusion that, with the apparently singular exception of your domain, if there's a "biz" anywhere in any URL the entire e-mail is crap and the sender should be beaten in the face with a nine iron.
The.biz TLD doesn't seem to be used by any legitimate sites. And I don't think I need to worry about mass-deleting e-mails from www.yahoo.biz or www.amazon.biz. Just from ebhelper2003.biz and other fly-by-night sites peddling crap to the stupid.
With the three of them behind bars, spam will pretty much cease to exist forever.
You know, I'm considering grepping my incoming e-mail for any messages which contain URLs with the term "biz" anywhere. Especially when.biz is the TLD. Discarding the message and teergrubing the originating server the moment they send an URL like that.
By my quick estimate, that would get rid of everything except the Nigerian spams... which are hopefully a thing of the past; I hope the sender - like all other spammers - gets colorectal cancer.
I have never flown a plane...so, you're telling me, that if I were suddenly thrust into the field of aviation, say, then I would suddenly begin falling for penis enlargement scams and etc? Or are you speaking for yourself?;)
Steady on the yoke. It's not like a car, you can't rest your thumbs in the corners or you'll tend to dive. (Actually, don't do that in a car, either. If you have an accident, you're almost guaranteed a broken thumb.)
You fucking arrogant little shithead. Not everybody is as saavy with computers as you are. Some people are a bit overwhelmed being in front of a computer, and take for granted that the information presented to them is factual and authoritative. I'm sure there are lots of scams YOU would fall for if you were placed into another field without training. Say, an aircraft pilot. Or an auto mechanic.
Caveat emptor, my ignorant and - by the defensive tone - gullible friend. No matter what the media, caveat emptor.
If you were more astute, I'd point out the folly of your reference, given my nickname here. But I think it would be lost on you. So would the fact that I did own a Douglas A-26 Invader, even if it was only for a few weeks and it contained nearly 4,000lbs of pigeon crap.
I stand by my statements, and I've got a very nice nail gun to affix your helmet to your head. You know, so you don't misplace it while you're excitedly running down to the bank to help out a poor Nigerian man who is down on his luck.
With the three of them behind bars, spam will pretty much cease to exist forever.
As long as there are lusers stupid enough to fall for it, someone will take their place.
With every caught spammer - fraudulent or "not fraudulent", authorities should be compiling lists of their customers for at least public humiliation, if not prosecution for aiding the spammers.
I'd love to see FTC ads: "The following is a public service announcement. Joe Brinkerhoff of Lubbock, Texas [show unflattering picture] purchased baste-on Magical Penis Enlargement Potion on January 16, 2003. You can thank him for giving spammers a reason to fill your mailbox with crap. Just thought you'd like to know." Add the threat of public humiliation and the stupid will think twice. I'm sure the PSAs could even become a TV show in their own right.
If it were up to me, they'd also be neutered and forced to wear bright red helmets with strobe lights for the rest of their natural lives.
The carpets aren't for decoration, they help dampen engine and outside noises.
Of course they do.
But what's wrong with engine noise? Again, it's a CAR, not a living room.
Forget the obvious impracticality of having carpets where you put muddy boots - especially in SUVs which claim to be off-road vehicles. Maybe if we didn't have carpets in cars, the increased noise would drown out cellphones, nullifying the hazards of drivers with telephones planted to their ears.
Improve the safety of your car: remove the carpet today!
On FDR & West Side Hwy I was doing speed of traffic to avoid being the "I'm-doing-the-speed-limit-so-I'm-not-the-cause-of -the-accident,-Officer" guy.
That's acceptable, since travelling at the prevailing speed is less likely to cause an accident than being the one guy who is doing the speed limit. Also, those are controlled access highways, if memory serves, so you don't have situations where people will be making left turns in front of you, or pedestrians, or cyclists, or...
But it's still not preferable.
On 5th (from 110th all the way to Washington Park) I was merely trying to catch all the lights green - which I did. (excepting 28th Street which was out of phase from the rest of the lights) Only scared one pedestrian who was reading a paper while walking against the light around the lower 60's.
Not a good idea. Ever.
Having done it the once is not reason enough to do it again, or advise others to try it. Though from personal experience *most* Manhattan traffic will go as fast as they can, within their acceleration envelope, for as long as they can before having to stop again.
I'd stay within 10 MPH of the speed limit on city streets. It's not that I care especially about the laws; I care about safety.
As a car guy, I've owned several cars which were capable of doing 100+ MPH within a quarter mile. I've had serious power-to-weight ratios. 340-4bbl with 12:1 compression ratio in a lightweight Plymouth Duster, 3.8L Buick V6 stuffed into a <2000lb Chevette, 400CID and 440CID (6.6L and 7.2L) big-block V8s in Dodge Ram pickup trucks. With power comes responsibility - it's like having a root account. You *can* do anything you want, but it only takes a couple of close calls - or the funerals of a couple of friends - to take it easy on the gas pedal.
Having said that, stoplight confrontations are, essentially, drag racing. I still like to stomp the Ram's gas pedal and smoke the rear tires off, blowing away the silly little Honda with tinted windows next to me. But when I get to the speed limit, I let off the gas.
On a long, straight, empty stretch of freeway where I'm only risking myself and maybe the occasional deer, I'll crack open the throttles a little more just for the fun of it. (There's nothing like hearing a big-block V8 at 4500RPM with the throttle wide-open. It's a religious experience.)
Worst this is that the 131 km/h was just before impact. The previous 2 seconds of data indicated that the moron lifted his foot off the gas and slowed down from 154 km/h. Data from the black box was necessary since there were no eyewitness and no skid marks.
154 km/h = 95.7 MPH.
In Ontario anyway, anything more than 40 km/h over the speed limit is a criminal conviction.
Who would buy a car without seeing the inside? duh...
I would, and I have. Well, in my case, it was a pickup truck I bought a few years ago. I looked under the hood, found that it was a Slant-6 driving a Chrysler A-833 four-speed manual OD gearbox, saw that the build tag showed it had a 3.23 limited slip differential, and I bought it without hearing the engine run let alone taking it for a test drive.
(Oil was clean but not fresh, so the engine was at least reasonably healthy. Slant-6 and A-833 are arguably the most indestructible engine and transmission ever built, and I had spare parts for both, so I wasn't worried.)
It's a CAR, not a living room on wheels. As long as there's a seat, a seatbelt, an instrument cluster and a steering wheel, I'm happy.
Putting carpets in cars is silly and stupid.
As it turned out, the old 1983 Ram was well-suited to me. Rubber floor mat, plastic door liners - I could clean it with a garden hose. Factory AM/FM radio so I could listen to Howard Stern on my way to work. Dry cleaning hook to hang up my suits and blazers when I was driving home. And, as a bonus, the air conditioning worked. I loved that truck.
Furthermore, I don't see why every single vehicle should not be manufactured with this feature. After all, a car is a lethal weapon just like a gun and guns have serial numbers.
I think most of them are now. The collected data is used to improve airbag designs. Since airbags are dangerous (though, admittedly less dangerous than hitting your steering column and dashboard when you're brought to an abrupt halt from 131km/h in Montreal traffic), manufacturers have a tremendous liability if airbags are killing people in accidents. I know for sure that GM, DaimlerChrysler and most of the Japanese companies are using this.
131km/h is 81.4 MPH. Speaking as one who has lived in Montreal and driven on Montreal's old freeways (built before there was a real understanding of freeway design), this is too fast for the freeways of the area, let alone the city streets. Much of downtown Montreal has narrow winding streets with loads of pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Doing 81.4 MPH in those conditions is criminal irresponsibility, and an individual capable of doing something like that clearly has such a gross lack of understanding of cars and their capabilities that they probably thought 2 Fast 2 Furious was a good movie.
Never been to Montreal? Would you drive 80MPH through the streets of Lower Manhattan? Downtown Chicago?
Christ, parts of downtown Montreal have cobblestoned streets. Wet cobblestones are insanely slippery, and you still can stand at an intersection and watch some idiot who thinks his MacPherson-strut equipped front-wheel-drive Acura Integra with tinted windows can take him around any corner safely at twice - let alone four times - the posted speed limit.
This should have been a criminal conviction, especially with the supporting evidence from the black box.
Slashdot Mirror
BE very careful of static with plastic tupperware. YOu could very easily fry your gear.
For sure!
I use a similar no-no for non-CMOS electronic components. I have a huge stockpile of passive components - resistors, capacitors, etc - and things like tubes, bipolar transistors, etc. Over 20,000 vacuum tubes alone, according to my last inventory.
What I use is 4x8" generic ZipLock-ish baggies which I buy at the local head shop. The guy must think I'm a mega-dealer, because every few weeks I go in wearing a shirt and tie and buy 100 (or more) 4x8" baggies for $6.
I drop a piece of cardboard with a label into each baggie, then I stuff it with components. Then I put the baggie into a 4" wide cardboard parts tray (Bankers Box # 7353). The trays are then stored in cheap metal shelving units with 9" space between shelves. I have 6 shelves for vacuum tubes alone.
Unlike doing this with other methods (small drawers), I can simply insert a weird resistor value between standard values. I can drop a bag of #6-32x0.75" screws between the #6-32x0.5" and #6-32x1" screws. If I fill a baggie with 1k 1/4W resistors, I just add another baggie. Suddenly find a 12AX7A? Stick it in a new bag behind the 10 or so full of 12AX7s. I can take a group out, throw them into my toolbox and take them with me, not worrying that I'm going to spill them. It's very handy.
For static sensitive stuff, I use 4x8" antistat baggies which I purchase from Newark or DigiKey.
I can't claim that I invented or discovered this method - I first saw it while I was working for Litton, and I loved it.
Doesn't work for big stuff like transformers, stepper motors, complete assemblies. For that, I still have to use TupperWare (or the disposable resealable containers.)
Having an inventory of parts is useless if you can't find what you need when you need it. But it's even worse if you *can* find it but it doesn't work. Remember to think about static.
Why do we need to have small, power-efficient supercomputers? Isn't the main goal of the supercomputer to be fast as hell? Granted, if this can be achieved while simultaneously minimizing power and size then by all means go for it. However, as stated by my parent, what sacrafices are being made?
The increase in speed is related to the reduction in size.
For a moment, let's pretend that electricity within a wire travels at the speed of light.
Now, let's pretend that we wish to carry pulses of electricity from one end of the computer to the other at a very high speed.
At some point, the distance the signal has to travel will become significant to the speed of the computer.
This is already happening in PCs. If you take a close look at the motherboard in your computer, chances are you'll see weird places where the traces just zig-zag back and forth (notice the angles on them, that's not by accident either, but I'm not going to try to explain a fourth-year university course in microwave and RF design here). These zig-zags add length to the traces so that they have the same length as other traces within the same bus, and all the signals on that bus arrive at the same time. Think of them as being "equal length headers", if you're into the throb of a big-block V8.
Length of interconnecting wires is non-trivial at this point. Stray capacitance and inductance caused by any conductor are non-trivial at this point. As a result, a terrific limiting factor to the speed of a computer is now its size.
Power consumption is also related. Modern ICs are made of millions of MOSFET transistors which behave as switches. These switches are not perfect: during the transition between a logic high and a logic low, the transistors spend time in the linear state where they are resistive. As a result, they waste energy as heat.
Stray capacitance and inductance - even within the junctions of the transistors themselves - slow their ability to switch instantaneously. As a result, they must be made as small as possible to reduce capacitance (C) and inductance (L).
This also explains why newer generations of a processor can run faster than their predecessors: smaller and smaller features on the IC mean less stray C and L, which means that the transistors can switch states faster, which means that they spend less time in the linear state and therefore heat up less. This means less energy wasted as heat.
--I think this guy should just be given a slap on the wrist and undergo some counseling; after all, using an ice pick on a spammer is just PRIMITIVE.
Yeah. I agree. If he'd said he wanted to use a rusty camshaft, now that would have been all about inflicting pain.
My favorite for brandishing is the camshaft from a Pontiac 2.5L I-4, the "Iron Duke" engine used in everything from Chevrolet Citations and Celebrities to Pontiac 6000 and Fieros. It's about the same length as a baseball bat, and has a really nice comfortable weight in your hands.
I'm sure it would make a really nice sound as it collapses a spammer's sinus cavities. We'll have to wait until legislation is drafted which recognizes spammers as being sub-human. But then PETA will probably get involved somehow...
That is, itself, rather spammish. But provides a convenient anchor for self-proclaimed karma whores like me.
What really disappoints me about this whole thing is that the dude only threatened to go postal on spammers.
If he had actually done it, I'd clip out the newspaper pictures of the dude and frame them. They'd sit on my little shrine amoungst the framed pictures of Newton, Edison, Einstein and Bohr.
Incidentally, almost every power producing reactor in the western hemisphere is water moderated.... As you say, water moderation means that if the coolant boils off the chain reaction will stop. CANDU is in no way unique in this aspect.
I thought it was? If I recall, CANDU is the only reactor design to combine water moderation and use U-238. Most other reactor designs use U-235, which it seems to me is fissile without moderation.
The problem is that the fuel will continue to generate a significant amount of heat even after the chain reaction is stopped, because of the radioactive decay of very short-lived fission products.True. But again, tests with CANDU reactors (in particular the now-decommissioned NRX research reactor at Chalk River) have shown that the temperature never reaches a point where there's a danger of fuel melting - or even of damage to the bundles.
On the other hand, PLWR like Three Mile Island absolutely need backup cooling.
are you serious?! That themal expansion will be enough to [... what would you call that:] unmoderate [?] the reaction?
That's what I read, too.
If true, it's ingenious, but still Not Ready For Primetime. There's still the possibility of catastrophic accidents which would pulverize the balls, and then you're stuck with the Great Ukrainian Marshmallow Roast all over again.
That just seems iffy. Anyways, that just means that the reaction will reach an equilibrium where the heat of the reaction is just enough to expand the spheres to keep the reaction going at that speed.You want a complete shutdown when you walk away, not an indefinite intermediate equilibrium.
Of course. It's better than a complete runaway, but it's still far from a good situation.
I'd live right next door to a CANDU reactor. But there's no way in hell I'd want to be anywhere near this thing.
The ones at Minneapolis International run Windows 95! Windows 95!!!! They're constantly crashing. I wonder which H-1B suggested that one.
Actually, many of them do, for a variety of reasons.
I used to work installing and managing a FIDS (Flight Information Display System) at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Several pictures of the FIDS systems I used to manage are in those BSoD picture pages that a couple of other posters have mentioned.
The company that wrote the FIDS had precisely one programmer. He was excellent, but the company was crap, constantly over-extending him and making ridiculous promises to airports and their stuff.
Working with FIDS systems requires a lot of reverse-engineering. Airports don't like to change their technology; they're even more conservative than banks. (Consider the potential real-world implications: two planes colliding in mid-air over a city.)
Consequently, things are old, and usually the people who wrote them didn't document very well, or the documentation can't be found, or the systems are completely proprietary. Then there's the almost weekly cycle of airport amalgamations, airline mergers, fuelling contractor changes, etc. The IT department has to run around patching existing stuff together to try to keep up.
There was one VAX system in the GTAA (Toronto airport administration) headquarters building which, according to legend, hadn't been touched in 6 years because no one knew if it would come back up on its own after a reboot.
You can imagine in this environment that people are loathe to give you a space on a hub to sniff records off an airside server. Cut off one pin and serial is a one-way street; it's pretty hard for an outside contractor's computer systems to screw things up.
The displays around the terminals tended to be ANSI color dumb terminals all driven off serial data. Very reliable, but very hard to upgrade. Data feeds for new FIDS systems typically have to come from several sources, all of different data formats, and be merged.
At Pearson, we had three data streams for three terminals. Two of them came from one source, down a serial line, simultaneously but with completely different data formats. A third was yet another completely different format, provided by an airline which would change the format of the data at a whim.
Our software to read this stuff had to be reading directly off the serial port with direct hardware access (needed to be able to make the weird handshaking requirements on some systems). The programmer who wrote it did so before Windows NT, and certainly before Linux hit it big, and didn't have time to port it.
The other big issue, of course, is the computers themselves. Arrivals, departures and gate monitors frequently receive the same data streams and therefore have to be independenly configured on what to display and what to ignore. Not to mention the internal stuff for fuelling and maintenance companies, baggage throwers, food services, cargo flights, etc. Almost all of these displays are driven by PCs which are usually stuffed into horrible places - ceilings, under desks, janitor closets. Half the runaround of maintaining these things is actually getting four security escorts (even if you have all the security clearances in the world!) to let you into some room somewhere where you THINK there might be a computer where you THINK the power supply fan might be failing because you keep on having vmm.vxd crashes.
You'll note that a vmm.vxd BSoD is usually caused by a hardware failure. In my not inconsequential experience with public display computers, usually caused by overheating because some idiot decided to store his large collection of empty Tim Horton's coffee cups in the little space behind the mysterious computer under his desk. Or because of the massive dustbunnies which accumulate in a suspended ceiling 25 feet above the International Departures concourse.
If you had the opportunity to do the whole thing over from scratch, of course, you'
I would love an alternative to buying the LCD picture frames on sale at Thinkgeek.com for more than the cost of a brand new LCD monitor of equal or larger size...
I agree. Though ThinkGeek has all sorts of other cool stuff.
But as part of the software loaded onto these things, maybe they should offer a distributed client of some sort? I'm sure it would work as a selling feature: "Your new frame will display pictures and work on finding a cure for cancer."
Of course, if these are all >= Pentiums, they have a HALT instruction to reduce power consumption at idle. But this might be a neat feature for people who don't pay for electricity.
the problem that most people have with nuclear power is tchernobyl(or similar catastrophy that would release radioactivity to a wide area).
I'm glad you mentioned Chernobyl...
'is packed with tennis ball-size graphite "pebbles," each containing thousands of tiny uranium dioxide particles'... Proponents insist that the reactor's design features make it 'meltdown-proof' and 'walk-away safe'."... because apparently these people haven't learned anything from it.
The most important lesson of Chernobyl is that graphite burns. So if you lose control of this thing, it will catch fire. And the fire will spread radioactive decay daughters all over the place.
I am a big proponent of nuclear power, but only of one design: CANDU (CANadian Deuterium-Uranium). It's inherently impossible for it to melt down. It uses U-238 (natural uranium, in the form of "ceramic" pellets of uranium dioxide) which is NOT capable of a chain reaction without a heavy water moderator. (Heavy water is just water where the hydrogens have neutrons. Non-radioactive, naturally occurring, and just slightly heavier than normal water.)
As a result, if you lose control of a CANDU reactor, the reactor will overheat. Pressure will build up in the heavy water system until something breaks. The moderator will escape as steam, and since the fuel is essentially non-water soluble, with only extraordinarily small trace amounts of radioactive materials. With no moderator, the chain reaction stops, and the reactor cools down. This process occurs as a result of the laws of physics; in other words, Chernobyl cannot happen at Pickering or Darlington even if all the control systems fail or someone goes to extraordinary lengths to circumvent them.
The other great lesson is not to let boobs run the reactor. All nuclear power programs have had problems with this in the past; a "walk away" approach simply encourages this.
They couldn't filter out on IP. Many companies and plenty of ISPs use NAT and/or proxying. This means that you can have a sometimes large cloud of users all coming in on one IP.
True. I hadn't stopped to think that the people who respond to spam are probably also the people who know nothing about computers and therefore use (primarily) their work connections.
If formfucker doesn't have a good time delay between signups then they could delete the records between time A and B. Finding times would would be obvious with a count(*) group by hour (or minute) type statement. Or maybe I give the spammers too much credit.
FormFucker should probably sleep a random interval between submissions.
The bigger problem which would make it easier to filter out would be IP address. Your spammer gets ten responses from the same IP address, all with different data, and they're clearly bogus. So the usefulness of FormFucker is limited to being once against each spammer from a given IP address.
Many times, I'm seeing the forms have an ID number of some sort which would be passed when the link is followed:
A HREF = http://www.spammer.com/form.pl?recipent@email.com
or
A HREF = http://www.spammer.com/form.pl?ID=666
Again, same problem. Different data from ten submissions with the same ID or e-mail address, and the spammer knows the data is garbage.
Same if the spammer crosses a randomly-generated e-mail address against his list and finds that it's not there. Garbage data, easily culled.
Furthermore, if you run FormFucker, the data would have to include your e-mail address or ID number so the spammer can't weed it out as illegitimate. What's he gonna do when he finds out that it's taken him half an hour to pursue your dead lead? He's got your e-mail address, and because you fought back against his assault on your mailbox, I'd bet money the bastard would pull a joe-job on your address.
FormFucker is a great idea, but I wouldn't use it on the spam that comes into my e-mail addresses.
Hey! The parent posted a very nice shell script!
Plus, the actual amount of radioactive material would be tremendously small (think ounces per hundreds of people). If the waste became a concern, a standard battery slot could be developed so that batteries with longer lives could be manufactured. Those 10+ year batteries could simply be moved from computer to computer over the years.
Depending on whether or not the material is fissionable, with enough such batteries (not large quantities at the wholesale level), I'm sure you could build a bomb.
And in any case, a dirty bomb.
I think, in this world climate, it's unlikely to ever happen. Never mind the reactions from all the ill-informed hippies who think nuclear power is inherently evil.
Even so, you'll never get all the batteries back at the end of their service lives. Some will get thrown out. Some dude will get pissed off when his girlfriend calls him to dump him and throw his nuclear-powered cell phone into a lake. A kid will take apart the old pager he found.
I love nuclear power. It's far from perfect or even the panacea that it was claimed to be in the 1950s. And while I think it's still the best overall solution for our energy demands, it's like hydrogen-powered cars: I would be very afraid to see it in the hands of consumers.
First let me say that I hope your rambling diatribe is not indicative of the writing abilities of the average Princeton employee. If it is, then Princeton has indeed fallen as a school.
Very, very nice. Very nice indeed.
Mr. Strauss,
You *are* kidding, right?
Many of those spams to which you compare open source software are now being sent using mass-mailing viruses. Funny thing about viruses is that they usually exploit security flaws - stupid things like buffer overruns - which are by and large eliminated by the peer review process in open source software. (Never mind the poor Windows security model which allows these viruses to do actual damage.)
The writers of open-source software, which you dismiss as being a bunch of children, include organizations like IBM and NASA's JPL. The rogue programmers at NASA must alone be accountable for half the world's virus problems.
I know that when I reboot my FreeBSD webservers (which happens only when the power goes out or I have to vacuum the inside of the computer), the list of credits in the dmesg as it starts up makes me seriously consider how intelligent the choice of open source was, in the face of the legendary reliability, security and standards-compliance of Microsoft IIS.
Not for one second would any reasonable person suggest that student labor is a suitable choice for managing proprietary university systems. But that wouldn't be open source anyway. Nor would there be enough open source interest in developing systems like WebCT (which I haven't personally found to work that well anyway, being all too familiar with administration of WebCT 3.2).
Open source solutions like Linux remain generally unsuitable for the desktop - the very things which make it excel in a server environment are the very things which hobble its mass acceptance and usefulness as a desktop operating system. But that will be fixed before too long.
Where open source currently excels - and has almost since the first newsgroup message where someone said, "You know, I think you could improve your program by..." - is in the implementation of the open standards-based systems which are the very infrastructure of the network.
Open source isn't free. Download a source tarball. Compile it. Use it. Enjoy it. And if you find a feature is broken or missing, your contribution will be to edit the source code and send it back so that other people can share the changes.
And so what if a 14-year-old kid with a cable modem reviews the source, finds a bug or missing feature, and contributes a patch? That patch is still subject to the same peer review process. And it's still public, so that it can be documented by others if not by him.
The most important thing I learned as a student in university is that higher education is not a barometer of intelligence, creativity or aptitude, but a barometer of diligence and funding. Over the years since, I've hired several gifted programmers with ability far eclipsing many of the university graduates I've employed. Mostly they were gifted programmers because that's what they loved to do... kind of like a 14-year-old kid who may have started into C++ when he was 10, has a natural mind for developing algorithms, and is capable of developing efficient software while freshly-minted science degrees are still writing bubble sorts.
Frankly, the ignorance displayed in your article is an embarrassment to you, your professional reputation, and your university.
[signed in real name]
Are there really that many
Sorry, man. Most of the spam I get is advertising *.biz URLs, or sites like www.biz-dot.net.
I've come to the conclusion that, with the apparently singular exception of your domain, if there's a "biz" anywhere in any URL the entire e-mail is crap and the sender should be beaten in the face with a nine iron.
The .biz TLD doesn't seem to be used by any legitimate sites. And I don't think I need to worry about mass-deleting e-mails from www.yahoo.biz or www.amazon.biz. Just from ebhelper2003.biz and other fly-by-night sites peddling crap to the stupid.
With the three of them behind bars, spam will pretty much cease to exist forever.
You know, I'm considering grepping my incoming e-mail for any messages which contain URLs with the term "biz" anywhere. Especially when .biz is the TLD. Discarding the message and teergrubing the originating server the moment they send an URL like that.
By my quick estimate, that would get rid of everything except the Nigerian spams... which are hopefully a thing of the past; I hope the sender - like all other spammers - gets colorectal cancer.
Anyone have any thoughts or experience with this?
I have never flown a plane...so, you're telling me, that if I were suddenly thrust into the field of aviation, say, then I would suddenly begin falling for penis enlargement scams and etc? Or are you speaking for yourself?
Steady on the yoke. It's not like a car, you can't rest your thumbs in the corners or you'll tend to dive. (Actually, don't do that in a car, either. If you have an accident, you're almost guaranteed a broken thumb.)
You fucking arrogant little shithead. Not everybody is as saavy with computers as you are. Some people are a bit overwhelmed being in front of a computer, and take for granted that the information presented to them is factual and authoritative. I'm sure there are lots of scams YOU would fall for if you were placed into another field without training. Say, an aircraft pilot. Or an auto mechanic.
Caveat emptor, my ignorant and - by the defensive tone - gullible friend. No matter what the media, caveat emptor.
If you were more astute, I'd point out the folly of your reference, given my nickname here. But I think it would be lost on you. So would the fact that I did own a Douglas A-26 Invader, even if it was only for a few weeks and it contained nearly 4,000lbs of pigeon crap.
I stand by my statements, and I've got a very nice nail gun to affix your helmet to your head. You know, so you don't misplace it while you're excitedly running down to the bank to help out a poor Nigerian man who is down on his luck.
With the three of them behind bars, spam will pretty much cease to exist forever.
As long as there are lusers stupid enough to fall for it, someone will take their place.
With every caught spammer - fraudulent or "not fraudulent", authorities should be compiling lists of their customers for at least public humiliation, if not prosecution for aiding the spammers.
I'd love to see FTC ads: "The following is a public service announcement. Joe Brinkerhoff of Lubbock, Texas [show unflattering picture] purchased baste-on Magical Penis Enlargement Potion on January 16, 2003. You can thank him for giving spammers a reason to fill your mailbox with crap. Just thought you'd like to know." Add the threat of public humiliation and the stupid will think twice. I'm sure the PSAs could even become a TV show in their own right.
If it were up to me, they'd also be neutered and forced to wear bright red helmets with strobe lights for the rest of their natural lives.
The carpets aren't for decoration, they help dampen engine and outside noises.
Of course they do.
But what's wrong with engine noise? Again, it's a CAR, not a living room.
Forget the obvious impracticality of having carpets where you put muddy boots - especially in SUVs which claim to be off-road vehicles. Maybe if we didn't have carpets in cars, the increased noise would drown out cellphones, nullifying the hazards of drivers with telephones planted to their ears.
Improve the safety of your car: remove the carpet today!
On FDR & West Side Hwy I was doing speed of traffic to avoid being the "I'm-doing-the-speed-limit-so-I'm-not-the-cause-o
That's acceptable, since travelling at the prevailing speed is less likely to cause an accident than being the one guy who is doing the speed limit. Also, those are controlled access highways, if memory serves, so you don't have situations where people will be making left turns in front of you, or pedestrians, or cyclists, or...
But it's still not preferable.
On 5th (from 110th all the way to Washington Park) I was merely trying to catch all the lights green - which I did. (excepting 28th Street which was out of phase from the rest of the lights) Only scared one pedestrian who was reading a paper while walking against the light around the lower 60's.Not a good idea. Ever.
Having done it the once is not reason enough to do it again, or advise others to try it. Though from personal experience *most* Manhattan traffic will go as fast as they can, within their acceleration envelope, for as long as they can before having to stop again.I'd stay within 10 MPH of the speed limit on city streets. It's not that I care especially about the laws; I care about safety.
As a car guy, I've owned several cars which were capable of doing 100+ MPH within a quarter mile. I've had serious power-to-weight ratios. 340-4bbl with 12:1 compression ratio in a lightweight Plymouth Duster, 3.8L Buick V6 stuffed into a <2000lb Chevette, 400CID and 440CID (6.6L and 7.2L) big-block V8s in Dodge Ram pickup trucks. With power comes responsibility - it's like having a root account. You *can* do anything you want, but it only takes a couple of close calls - or the funerals of a couple of friends - to take it easy on the gas pedal.
Having said that, stoplight confrontations are, essentially, drag racing. I still like to stomp the Ram's gas pedal and smoke the rear tires off, blowing away the silly little Honda with tinted windows next to me. But when I get to the speed limit, I let off the gas.
On a long, straight, empty stretch of freeway where I'm only risking myself and maybe the occasional deer, I'll crack open the throttles a little more just for the fun of it. (There's nothing like hearing a big-block V8 at 4500RPM with the throttle wide-open. It's a religious experience.)
Worst this is that the 131 km/h was just before impact. The previous 2 seconds of data indicated that the moron lifted his foot off the gas and slowed down from 154 km/h. Data from the black box was necessary since there were no eyewitness and no skid marks.
154 km/h = 95.7 MPH.
In Ontario anyway, anything more than 40 km/h over the speed limit is a criminal conviction.
Kill him.
Who would buy a car without seeing the inside? duh...
I would, and I have. Well, in my case, it was a pickup truck I bought a few years ago. I looked under the hood, found that it was a Slant-6 driving a Chrysler A-833 four-speed manual OD gearbox, saw that the build tag showed it had a 3.23 limited slip differential, and I bought it without hearing the engine run let alone taking it for a test drive.
(Oil was clean but not fresh, so the engine was at least reasonably healthy. Slant-6 and A-833 are arguably the most indestructible engine and transmission ever built, and I had spare parts for both, so I wasn't worried.)
It's a CAR, not a living room on wheels. As long as there's a seat, a seatbelt, an instrument cluster and a steering wheel, I'm happy.
Putting carpets in cars is silly and stupid.
As it turned out, the old 1983 Ram was well-suited to me. Rubber floor mat, plastic door liners - I could clean it with a garden hose. Factory AM/FM radio so I could listen to Howard Stern on my way to work. Dry cleaning hook to hang up my suits and blazers when I was driving home. And, as a bonus, the air conditioning worked. I loved that truck.
Furthermore, I don't see why every single vehicle should not be manufactured with this feature. After all, a car is a lethal weapon just like a gun and guns have serial numbers.
I think most of them are now. The collected data is used to improve airbag designs. Since airbags are dangerous (though, admittedly less dangerous than hitting your steering column and dashboard when you're brought to an abrupt halt from 131km/h in Montreal traffic), manufacturers have a tremendous liability if airbags are killing people in accidents. I know for sure that GM, DaimlerChrysler and most of the Japanese companies are using this.
131km/h is 81.4 MPH. Speaking as one who has lived in Montreal and driven on Montreal's old freeways (built before there was a real understanding of freeway design), this is too fast for the freeways of the area, let alone the city streets. Much of downtown Montreal has narrow winding streets with loads of pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Doing 81.4 MPH in those conditions is criminal irresponsibility, and an individual capable of doing something like that clearly has such a gross lack of understanding of cars and their capabilities that they probably thought 2 Fast 2 Furious was a good movie.
Never been to Montreal? Would you drive 80MPH through the streets of Lower Manhattan? Downtown Chicago?
Christ, parts of downtown Montreal have cobblestoned streets. Wet cobblestones are insanely slippery, and you still can stand at an intersection and watch some idiot who thinks his MacPherson-strut equipped front-wheel-drive Acura Integra with tinted windows can take him around any corner safely at twice - let alone four times - the posted speed limit.
This should have been a criminal conviction, especially with the supporting evidence from the black box.