Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...
Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...
I don't know of any such toys for civil, aerospace or *gasp* nuclear engineers.
No, the ET-312 is *not* a piece of test equipment, though it really looks like it. Having tried it, lemme just say that it gives you a happy ending with absolutely no moving parts.
--rather have a modular vehicle, be able to upgrade, change configuration, power plant, etc, readily. Sedan to pickup to SUV to sally soccer mom minivan, and etc. Buy "a chassis" that you keep forever, have several easily swapped bodies and whatnot for different purposes, make the engines/drivetrains whatever easy to upgrade or change for a specific purpose, have it so the vehicles electronics-the "dash" be modular as well, plug and pray. You never have to junk the whole thing, nor buy an entire new one. We had a thread on this before, it's a nifty idea.
This *is* a modular vehicle. Assume the drivetrain is one module, the front of the body is another module, the rear of the body is another module, and the frame is yet another module.
Problem is, the things which make a good family sedan do not make a good pickup truck, just to start with.
People want gas mileage. To get gas mileage, car companies have slimmed the weight of a rear axle, removed the weight of the driveshaft, and put a compact engine sideways in the cramped engine bay (since we want to maximize passenger space and keep the car small for fuel efficiency and ease-of-parking in urban environments).
In a pickup truck, the user's needs are not to haul people, but to haul bales of hay or horse trailers... or the obligatory load of best friend's furniture for pizza and beer at the end of the month...
A bigger motor is required in order to be able to safely maneouver (ie. pull onto freeway with a yacht on the trailer and 6 kegs of beer in the back) and, even if it put out enough power, a smaller motor simply wouldn't last long under those loads. (Consider bearing loads on the crankshaft, never mind the ring loads from always having to floor it to get anywhere...). Also, to be able to support the 2,000lbs of crap in the back, a stronger structure is needed - a big steel frame. And somewhere you have to be able to bolt up the Class-4 hitch or 5th wheel trailer... these aren't generally required in a sedan and would add to the weight, meaning poorer performance and less gas mileage.
Vans and pickup trucks are often very similar structurally. The Aerostar and Ranger, for example, use almost identical frames; as do the S10 and Astro. The Durango/Grand Cherokee is just a Dakota frame with a tall station wagon body plopped on.
Before the Japanese taught American manufacturers how to cut corners and slim out the steel, American cars used to be almost all full-framed, as opposed to a unitbody tin can. At that time, rolling chassis were built, and then the body assembly was bolted to it. The car was as modular as you can get - want a Buick V6 in your Chevrolet Caprice Classic? Call the dealer, and he'll order it from the factory. Want an Oldsmobile Rocket 455 V8 in your Pontiac Laurentian? Can be done. Chrysler and Ford got into the action in similar ways to GM. Even though the car was modular, you seldom see someone taking the body off the frame of their Caprice Classic to bolt on an Oldsmobile body with leather seats.
DeLorean tried this, too. All the body panels bolted on, and were to be replaced in the case of an accident. And the Pontiac Fiero. And the Checker could have been upgraded/modernized - solid steel frames, bulletproof drivetrain which would have been easily swapped when it eventually wore out, and all the body panels were bolted on to be easy to repair after an accident, unlike today's crap.
Besides, can you imagine the nightmare? Designing a wiring harness for every provision of every feature that might be demanded? (Oops, have to upgrade my wiring harness, this engine option requires a pre-heated oxygen sensor downstream of the catalytic converter...)
Of course, you *can* build it if you want it badly enough. I've built a Buick V6 powered Chevette. I've seen a Cadillac 500 in another Chevette. I've helped wire a Fiero to accept a Cadillac Northstar V8. I wired a dual-engine Dodge Caravan C/V (windowless cargo Caravan) that had its original worn out 2.6L Mitsubishi driving the fro
Wrong. Try watching the Italian Job - indoor car chases over a decade before Blues Brothers came out. Yes, there is cinema outside of hollywood.
I'll check it out, thank you. Even if, like most European vehicles, Minis aren't really cars... seeing as how most decent motorcycles have as many cylinders driving the correct wheel and employ more steel in their construction.
Of course you should ensure that you reach an actual human by contacting them via their logs!!!
Well, there's the odd chance that they'll see 10,000 hits to the afflicted page in their site stats.
Be sure to include the email in question, including all the headers, and everything down to HELO, etc., so they know which email you're referring to.
No way! They'd know that the e-mail address was valid! I don't want that.
And of course append a nice polite note explaining to them how they were in error, so that they could be sure not to repeat their mistake. Cram as much of that into the log entry as you can. If you think you can only get a limited amount of text into one url, break the returned emain and note into portions put into successive log entries. Then when you're sure they have the whole thing, also send it in one single block of text. It will be more convenient for them to read if it gets through that way. On the other hand, if such a humongous url breaks something, they're more likely to read the logs and discover that they have a problem with spam from their system.
Indeed! If I were to write a script to take the source e-mail, line by line, and feed it back to their webserver, then it would certainly get the point across. You know, sending HTML to a webserver through an URL kinda feels like sticking a microphone right in front of a big stack of Apogee Concert Audio bins.
On the off chance that any of the people referred to by email address in the spam has any authority to do anything other than sell you their widget, you should also send the returned spam and nice note to all the email addresses in the spam. Be sure to also include root, admin, administrator, postmaster, abuse, info, and whatever you can think of as addresses to send to at their domain.
Indeed! In fact, I could also send it from an e-mail address whose username includes the instructions not to spam the e-mail address... Oh wait a minute, I already do that, and that address just gets more and more spam. I think enough of the webmasters are the spammers themselves, or forward the complaint to the spammer. That's better validation than those "Remove Me!" ruses.
If you whip up a script to do all that automatically to every piece of mail that gets filtered into your spam bucket, you might want to keep a list of those addresses, so you can filter out the bounces you're sure to get because any organization unprofessional enough to have spammers probably isn't dealing properly with all the responses they're getting.
I was thinking that I could attach an MP3 of Neil Young's Long May You Run to each one of them, in celebration of the infallible reliability of the IIS servers that they so often seem to employ.
I don't think that you could be considered to be spamming them, since you already have an established relationship with them, due to the fact that they contacted you first. And you really need to ensure that your message gets through to them, so serious measures are appropriate.
Yes indeed. This is part of why I like hitting the log files. I'm hoping that their hosting companies will at least note it, and this saves me the trouble of looking up the hosting company and sending them an e-mail. It's far more direct. Cut out the Network Solutions middleman.
As far as legality, it's probably a lot more legal than launching them out of a catapult, and a lot less work, too.
Greater work offers greater satisfaction, of course.
Actually, they probably *are* circumcised. Missing significant functionality and being convinced they've gotten something better sounds more like a Microsoft user.
I'll have to disagree with you there. Having been circumcised myself when I was 22, my biggest regret is that I didn't have it done sooner. You know how, during sex, there's a distinct IN stroke and a distinct OUT stroke? If you're uncut, the skin rolls right back over the head during the OUT stroke, and you don't feel a damned thing. Never mind how all the nerves
I've often thought that it would be nice to come up with something which submitted plausibible but fake information to the forms on spammers' websites. This would be done slowly so as not to DoS the server, but the steady trickle of nonsense replies would hopefully mean that the spammer couldn't tell the real ones from the fakes.
Well, they're really only going to expect the same things. Name, address, apartment number, daytime telephone, etc. Maybe a script could be written which looks for those prompts (including abbreviations and misspelling) and automatically fill them in with random info. (I'm sure someone can come up with a list of non-emergency telephone numbers of police departments around the USA, for example.) I don't know about the legality of generating a random number in the right format and submitting that for credit card info, somehow it feels to me like it might legally be some kind of fraud, even if you're only doing it to waste their time.
However, I wonder if the spammers will see the increase in traffic (even if the letters are all strangely returned) as a sign that spamming works. Keep in mind, these aren't intelligent people.
How do people feel about scripts to fill website logs with crap? Here's mine, quick and dirty, written in about 30 seconds because I was pissed off:
#!/bin/bash
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 10000 ]; do
lynx -dump http://www.resumeagencies.com/recruiterspage.asp?Y OU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_I_WIL L_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
sleep 1
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note the fact that I'm calling what I hope is a dynamic page, so with luck, I'm wasting their server's processor time. The script is otherwise, as you can see, completely unrefined.
Legality, anyone? Other problems (despite the obvious fact that I have to waste my bandwidth to fuck with spammers)? Obviously, it's a DoS attack of sorts, but then again, so is an unsolicited e-mail. If they want to challenge me legally on that point, then I will do the same to them. My website very clearly points to the policies which apply to all e-mails sent to my domain.
How do people feel about scripts to fill website logs with crap? Here's mine, quick and dirty, written in about 30 seconds because I was pissed off:
#!/bin/bash
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 10000 ]; do
lynx -dump http://www.resumeagencies.com/recruiterspage.asp?Y OU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_I_WIL L_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
sleep 1
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note the fact that I'm calling what I hope is a dynamic page, so with luck, I'm wasting their server's processor time. The script is otherwise, as you can see, completely unrefined.
Legality, anyone? Other problems (despite the obvious fact that I have to waste my bandwidth to fuck with spammers)? Obviously, it's a DoS attack of sorts, but then again, so is an unsolicited e-mail. If they want to challenge me legally on that point, then I will do the same to them. My website very clearly points to the policies which apply to all e-mails sent to my domain.
How 'bout the movie that invented the indoor car chase (yes... indoor car chase), and still reigns champion of Hollywood automotive carnage? (And these aren't shitty little imported cars, either, these are real American cars with man-sized 7.2L V8 engines doing over 120 miles per hour through the streets of Chicago.)
I cried the first time I saw it, but I love it.
"Well, thank you very much, pal. The day I get out of prison, my own brother picks me up in a police car."
"Shit!" "What?" "Rollers." "Rollers?" "Yeah." [interspersed flawlessly on the beat with Sam and Dave singing Soothe Me]
"They've probably got SCMODS... State, County, Municipal Offender Data System."
"You want out of this parking lot? Okay..."
"Baby clothes? This place has got *everything*!"
"I hate Illinois Nazis." [while stuck in a traffic jam caused by the Illinois Nazi Party.]
[at a country and western bar] "What kind of music do you normally have here?" "Oh, we've got both kinds... country AND western."
"It a hundred and six miles to Chicago. We've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."
Never mind the cameos by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, James Brown... The movie is pure genius.
I've never met anyone under 24 who's seen it, until I forced them to. Every single one of them has loved it. I'd expect the same of most of the Slashdot crowd.
Aretha Franklin's character, waitress: "We got two honkies out there, dressed like Hassidic diamond merchants. They look like they from the CIA or something..."
Her Hubby, cook: "What do they want to eat?"
"The big one wants dry white toast."
"Elwood!"
"The little one wants four fried chickens and a Coke."
Before I write my own and reinvent the wheel, does anyone know of any scripts which will create ISO image files of an MP3 collection?
Here's what I want to do. On my home LAN (as opposed to work, where we've already got a good backup strategy), I've got a large (20Gb) MP3 collection. I back up everything else with a little shell script, and that's good enough.
But the MP3 collection is hard to back up, and I've only ever done it twice because of the work involved. The technique thus far has been to simply dump 'em in sequential blocks by filename until I cannot add any more files before I exceed the CD's capacity. This is inefficient, of course, because if the next file is 5 megabytes and I've only got 4 megabytes left, then I go on to the next CD-R and preserve the order (so that I can still keep track of what files I've put in).
What I'd like to do is have a script which automatically sorts them so that I have efficient use of the CDs and tars each file individually to preserve the long filenames. (Why not tar all the files in the CD image? Damage to the CD might make that whole disc unreadable.) For the same reason, I'm not interested in disc spanning.
Of course, such a script would be useful anywhere that a large quantity of relatively big files have to be backed up to CD-R... or, even larger files have to be backed up to DVD.
Anyone know of anything like this, or am I rolling up my sleeves and kludging something together?
You'd think they'd realize not to put sites with pictures on slashdot.:)
Yeah, but how about those pictures of the Vectrex TV set?
That's a cool idea.
You can find Vectrex schematics in about 100 places on the 'Net, so I could even build my own Vectrex motherboard... (that way, I wouldn't have to take mine apart!)
I think that I have worries about the use of the color CRT, however.
Color tube means three beams of electrons to focus and accelerate instead of only one, which means a higher second anode voltage. Higher second anode voltage means more X-Ray production. Color TV sets and monitors are full of circuitry to keep this voltage very carefully regulated; lots of components in the power supply, horizontal deflection and cathode drives are very carefully specified for this reason - in fact, lots of TV schematics put a big border around those areas of the schematic, with "SAFETY CRITICAL - X-RAY" warnings all over them to make sure that technicians don't try to sub in a 47 ohm resistor when the schematic calls for a 42 ohm resistor, etc.
This Vectrex TV must have had some huge mods made to the deflection systems, and, as a direct consequence, the flyback supply which produces the high voltage for the second anode.
I hope he was careful...
Otherwise, it's a pretty simple hack. Build a Vectrex (rather than gutting an original). Find a large black and white monitor - Electrohome used to make 25" closed circuit and broadcast monitors - or an old large Sun monochrome display. Disconnect the deflection yoke, yank out the monitor's chassis, and put in the Vectrex. A larger tube will require more deflection current, so you'll need to beef up the output stage, and make any adjustments to the output stages to match the impedance of the monitor's yoke. CRT filaments can usually be lit from a 6VAC power supply - just a transformer from the power line. And, as for the high voltage, I'd throw a couple of 2N3055s onto a flyback (just a small solid state Tesla coil), rectify the output, and toss it at the CRT's high voltage ultor. Though the Vectrex flyback might even do it reasonably well... Adjust the voltage on the CRT's grids for best focus.
why not something about the tech that's being used this time around? That would be "News for Nerds."
Alright. Want to know something about the tech? Most of it is classified.
I used to work for Litton, designing radar video systems, before Northrop-Grumman bought us out. (Litton - builder of all Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and Aegis guided missile destroyers. NG - builder of stealth bomber and stealth fighter.)
Think of how radar works. A microwave radio signal is fired in a quick burst from a magnetron (just like in your microwave oven, but higher power and frequency). The signal is transmitted outward, bounces off the target, is received, heterodyned (mixed with a signal of similar frequency), and then the beat is amplified and fed to a display or other electronics (targeting computers, etc.).
If your signal isn't reflected, you don't have a target on your display. So what do stealth bombers and fighters do? Diffuse the signal, or reflect it everywhere except the direction from which it came.
It's just like a sand bar, which doesn't show up on marine radar - it absorbs the energy and/or reflects it away from the source.
Quoting from article: Like the review, I can't figure out what the target market for this is, but it's still a cool device.
Quoting from last comment: But the replacement bulbs for LCD projectors are expensive, especially considering that these bulbs don't have a particularly long lifetime.
Yeah. Heh. Even so, I don't care for large displays anyway.
Do I really need to see tuneless singers on American Idol blown up to the height of my living room wall?
Won't the videophones used on CNN still look every bit as grainy?
I want HDTV for the image fidelity, not so much for the practical size which can come with resolution. I can still enjoy and appreciate 1080i on my 17" monitor.
Sometimes, of course, you do want image size. I'm not knocking it, nor am I knocking the people who like big displays. Hell, in a former career, I was a Sony-certified video projector technician for the VPH-10xx and VPH-12xx CRT projectors. They're a blast, but not for my daily needs.
Of course, if I felt the need to accentuate my...girth... as a testament to my virility, I could do it with a large TV set.
Instead, however, I spend my disposable cash on my collection of vehicles. It's rather expensive driving a 27-foot-long 1976 Dodge Ram with a 440 CID (7.2L) V8 engine with today's gas prices. Yessir.
No need to try to demonstrate my manhood with a big TV. Nope, I'm perfectly happy with one of these little boxes connected to my comfy little ViewSonic 17" monitor.
Just a second, I feel an incredibly powerful need to go outside and listen to that lovely engine idle for a few minutes... Ahhhh.
I once saw a 2-door Cadillac in the showroom with front seats from a 4-door.
Strictly a pedestrian hack; anyone with a wrench could do that one.
It takes a seriously disturbed mind to come up with this one, and yet I've seen it done. (Even got to help build it, did some of the wiring.)
So, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine had this absolutely perfect four door 1985 Dodge Aries. Nearly mint condition, low mileage. It was almost a shame that he was using it as a winter beater. He was turning left one day and a guy ran a red light to plow into the side of him. Bang! No more passenger side. He drove it like that until spring.
However, he had a parts car kicking around the driveway, a 1987 Plymouth Reliant which had been written off when it got sideswiped on the driver's side. Otherwise, it too was in pretty good shape, but it was a two door car.
Most people would content themselves with picking up another K-Car - they're great little beaters, cheap, easy to maintain, and pretty reliable. But no...
So, in the summer time and driving his summer car (a gorgeous '71 Chevelle), he embarked on a neat project.
You see, a two door K-Car and a four door K-Car have exactly the same length. He's also half Irish, so he's too cheap to buy parts when he doesn't need to. And he's half Polish, so he makes do with whatever he has on hand. So out came the Sawzall and the MIG welder.
With some careful measuring and even more careful jigging, he was able to weld the passenger's side of the two door Plymouth Reliant onto the four-door Dodge Aries. With a coat of paint and a little bit of Bondo to hide the seam on the roof skin, he had a three-door Dodge Aries. Unless you take a close look at the weld marks un the underside of the floor, you'd think Chrysler actually built it like that. He even went to a couple of wrecking yards until he found all the interior trim pieces to make the interior of the two door car match the four door car.
Try taking that to the DMV to get it registered... they had fun with it. (Actually, the majority of it is still a four door 1985 Dodge Aries, so it's still titled as that.)
He didn't drive the car the next winter, because he wanted to save it from rust damage. Instead, he started taking it to car shows. The beauty of it, of course, is that from any one vantage point, it's either a two or four door K-Car - not something you'd expect to see at a car show. When they notice it, people seem to get a good laugh out of the car.
Watch out for the silver '85 Aries driving around eastern Toronto (Danforth) on nice summer days.
You worked at McDonalds for 4 years in high school? Was McDonalds hiring 14 year olds back then or were you on the 6-year high-school plan?
Heh. A little bit of both, actually. I'm the sort of guy who squeaked through high school, somehow got through university, etc. without being any sort of academic - I'm more of a practical person.
Here in Canada, if you had parental consent, then you could start working at McDonalds when you were 14.
And this was before any 18-year-old who knew how to install Windows could open a little consulting business, so I stuck around there for a few years. (After my first promotion, they made it worthwhile financially, and I'd made a lot of friends so the time passed quickly.)
why would the Jews survive and nobody else? That seems racist to me, espicially when you list them next to degrading uniforms and rust buckets.
You're on crack.
The Jewish people have survived (and, I dare say, prospered) despite virtually everyone trying to kill them over the past 6,000 years. They kick ass! (And they're great in bed.)
McDonalds uniforms *don't* degrade. I worked at a McDonalds for 4 years way back when I was in high school. I tried, for 3.5 years, to get a new uniform. I spilled ketchup on it, and then rubbed it in. The washing machine got it out. I tried soaking in in "grill acid" (essentially oven cleaner on steroids, used to clean the grills). The smoke which rose from the uniform was only the food on it being dissolved. I changed the oil in my Duster and wiped the gunk off the engine and the hot headers with a McDonalds uniform. Tossed it in my 1954 Maytag, and it was Tide fresh all over again. The labels claim they're polyester - but they survived chemicals which would melt polyester. Can't kill the damned things.
As for Dodge Darts being rustbuckets - they rusted less than almost any other car of their day (Corvettes and Bricklins are the only exceptions which come to mind). Notice how many of them you still see on the road? Quite a few, for a cheap economy car which was discontinued over 26 years ago. Not to mention that, but they also had Slant-6 engines, which are world-famous for being the toughest gasoline engine ever built. Usually, the Slant-6 was driving a TorqueFlite 904 or TF-727 automatic transmission, which are sufficiently overbuilt that many drag racers will use them behind Chrysler big-block V8s, including the legendary twist-your-driveshaft-into-a-pretzel Hemi. *AND* they got over 25 MPG, which is a feat for what is, by today's standards, a full-size car with a large engine, no fuel injection, and no overdrive gearing.
Not coincidentally, I love the Jews, I love Dodge Darts, I love the TI PEB, and my old green McDonalds uniform still hangs at the back of my closet because I can't bear to part with the damned thing.
Notice a pattern here? I like things which last, despite adversity. I extend that to people and cultures.
If that makes me a racist in your view, well, it's a badge I shall wear with pride.
Laptop's are the perfect solution for in car use. Their power supplies are already designed for DC in, they have a battery to smooth out any sags, they are small so they are easier to find mounting points for. If you don't need a working LCD you can find ones with a fairly powerfull cpu for not a lot of money on eBay.
This is a good point, and worthy of consideration. However, the remaining issue is one of regulation.
When you take the power off the car's electrical system, step 1: Capacitors. Step 2. Inductor. Step 3. Capacitors. Step 4. Regulator.
Make sure that the capacitive stages include a large (~30,000uF) capacitor in parallel with some smaller ones (0.1uF). The net effect isn't just 30,000.1uF; the 0.1uF will have less inductance to bypassing RF noise to ground. (This is why, for example, an old XT motherboard will have 0.1uF in parallel with the power supply leads to each chip, rather than just 0.1uFxN uF filter caps, where N is the number of chips.)
With the notebook, your power requirements will probably be less, and at a lower voltage than the 12V (13.8V actual) voltage of the vehicle's supply. Linear regulators might be able to do the job. Design the regulator to survive >20V, since you don't want back EMF coming from inductive loads (wiper motors especially) or even a failed alternator to lunch the computer or regulator.
Even a modest computer supply requiring 200W is a non-trivial load on an automotive electrical system. That's ~15A, more when you consider that the computer power supply is probably rated for an output power of 200W, and it's not 100% efficient. Most rear-window defrosters are fused at 30A, which means that your desktop PC's supply capacity is half that of the second biggest single continuous load in the car's electrical systems. (Biggest is headlights.)
A notebook is designed from the ground up to be energy efficient, and so even if your regulator ends up being a little home-brew linear setup, it's still probably drawing less current than the alternative.
One time I accidentally dropped a floppy from about 2 inches above the desk, and yet it still worked! (although I did have to completely reformat, losing the data already on it)
You just reminded me of something that happened to a friend in the late 1980s.
We were die-hard members of one of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A user's groups. He had his PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box) at a meeting, and was carrying it on a cart up a set of stairs. He was at the top of the stairs when it feel off the cart.
So, the PEB went end for end down the terazzo stairs. Bang, bang, bang. Little chips of terazzo breaking off the corner of each step, and a few small dents in the PEB.
He picked it up and shook it. Nothing sounded loose inside, so he hooked it up, and it still worked. Until he tried to save to a diskette.
The old full-height Shugart 5.25" double-sided single-density diskette drive now had a new feature. He could format a diskette, flip it over, and format it again. One of the heads was now halfway between tracks, so the net effect was that he had a four-sided diskette. 360k to a 5.25" diskette, while the rest of us were only getting 180k.
my friend somehow broke his computer by forcibly inserting some ram the wrong way round... got VERY VERY hot, and since he turned it on and then went to get food no on noticed til there was a bad smell... CPU was dead, motherboard was dead, ram was dead, and harddrive had corrupted partitioin tables (But the harddrives do still work)
Heh... The morals of the story...
Never force stuff into place. If you have to force something, you're doing it wrong. (Unless you're working on the suspension of a car, everything there is a pain in the ass.)
If you've just been working on something, always stay with it when you power it back up, at least to see the POST and that all hardware is recognized by the BIOS. Give it a few minutes after that, infant mortality sometimes rears its ugly head with new hardware that pops a capacitor or worse - turning it off right away will minimize the damage.
As a direct...algebraic simplification... of the above two rules, don't let idiots have screwdrivers.
The most drastic case I've ever come across was a motherboard that I installed without grounding. Turned it on, nothing happened for a few seconds, then "POP!" Smoked the thing. The amazing part is that I took it out, put it back in properly grounded, and it's still running! (That was about four years ago, I think)
I'd expect that you had a capacitor fail. I don't know what that would have had to do with forgetting to "ground the motherboard".
The black leads in your AT/ATX power supply connector are the power supply grounds. The RF grounds are provided when you screw the motherboard down into the case - the little pads around the screw-holes are connected to the motherboard's ground plane and serve to take care of that requirement (although, as most of us know, a motherboard will run outside of a case - it's not recommended for RFI reasons).
If it was a new motherboard, probably it was defective. There are generally lots of capacitors on motherboards, to provide RF bypassing and power supply filtration. If an electrolytic capacitor (aluminum or tantalum) is installed backwards - or has too low a voltage rating - then it will fail. Aluminum (ordinary) electrolytics tend to fail leaky - which means that the capacitor will dissipate energy and heat up, sometimes exploding, but often just remaining there. If they pop, they often remain shorted, and cause your power supply to shut down, or damage other parts of the circuit.
On the other hand, tantalum electrolytic capacitors (generally small yellow-orange rectangular surface mount) will tend to fail shorted. They eat up a lot of current, generate a lot of heat, and pop. Once they've actually exploded, they tend to be open circuited, so they're effectively no longer there.
If this was something like a bypass or a filter capacitor, your motherboard almost certainly will no longer work as well as it was designed (ie. RF emissions, susceptibility to RF noise or power supply ripple, etc.) but if it still works well enough for you, that's good.
All the same, I'd be taking a look at what failed and replacing it. You need a very steady hand and a good iron with a clean tip, but you can replace the defective capacitor.
As for the likelihood of a motherboard leaving the factory with a badly placed or wrongly-rated capacitor, well, sh*t happens. In the late 1980s, Toyota shipped over 10,000 Corollas with missing passenger side front speakers. That's a little easier to spot than a shipment of mislabelled capacitors, or accidentally putting a spool of caps into the pick and place machine the wrong way around.
What I'd like is for a lawyer to answer me about the ramifications of doing this.
If you put up a page on your website, offering to do a full "automated security analysis" of a remote computer, simply by "sending an e-mail to the following e-mail address".
Parse the headers, find the originating IP address, ping it, and then as part of the security analysis, run scripts which attack every single known Windows vulnerability. Afterwards, ping it, and display the results on the webpage.
Of course, you indicate in *human readable form* on that page that no human being will read e-mail going to that address, and that sending an e-mail to that address constitutes an agreement to an automated security test of your computer.
Spammers will harvest these addresses, and will pollute their address lists with addresses which will cause "random" crashes and so disrupt mass-mailings. Determining which e-mail addresses are causing the problem will be difficult for them, I would imagine, since they'll probably send a couple more e-mails in the time it takes for the script on the server to execute.
Evidently, getting permission from one's ISP (and mine is great *and* they hate spammers) and legal counsel is a prerequisite.
Of course, this is simply a security test.
Set-top HDTV Receiver which outputs VGA?
on
HDTV via GNU Radio
·
· Score: 1
Sounds too useful to exist.
Here's something I'd like to find, but I haven't been shopping around yet, and I don't know whether it's available or not. I'm also in Canada, and we've been a little slower to adopt HDTV up here, so I can't walk into Future Shop and browse with the same number of products available.
I really have little use for large TV sets.
On the other hand, VGA monitors capable of doing 2,000 horizontal pixels must already be available somewhere - not that I've been shopping for one of those, either. Either way, I still expect it would be cheaper than a 16:9 HDTV monitor.
Anyone know of any set-top boxes which receive HDTV and output letterboxed VGA video, either in the same resolution or down-converted to a popular VGA resolution?
Slashdot Mirror
That would have been right around 2 years before my birth...
How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?
Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...
That would have been right around 2 years before my birth...
How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?
Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...
That would have been right around 2 years before my birth...
How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?
Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices...
Maybe you should go visit here
Or... continuing my theory that all engineers are somehow perverted, I submit the following:
For mechanical engineers: http://www.fuckingmachines.com/
For electrical engineers: http://www.erostek.com/html/et-312.html
I don't know of any such toys for civil, aerospace or *gasp* nuclear engineers.
No, the ET-312 is *not* a piece of test equipment, though it really looks like it. Having tried it, lemme just say that it gives you a happy ending with absolutely no moving parts.
--rather have a modular vehicle, be able to upgrade, change configuration, power plant, etc, readily. Sedan to pickup to SUV to sally soccer mom minivan, and etc. Buy "a chassis" that you keep forever, have several easily swapped bodies and whatnot for different purposes, make the engines/drivetrains whatever easy to upgrade or change for a specific purpose, have it so the vehicles electronics-the "dash" be modular as well, plug and pray. You never have to junk the whole thing, nor buy an entire new one. We had a thread on this before, it's a nifty idea.
This *is* a modular vehicle. Assume the drivetrain is one module, the front of the body is another module, the rear of the body is another module, and the frame is yet another module.
Problem is, the things which make a good family sedan do not make a good pickup truck, just to start with.
People want gas mileage. To get gas mileage, car companies have slimmed the weight of a rear axle, removed the weight of the driveshaft, and put a compact engine sideways in the cramped engine bay (since we want to maximize passenger space and keep the car small for fuel efficiency and ease-of-parking in urban environments).
In a pickup truck, the user's needs are not to haul people, but to haul bales of hay or horse trailers... or the obligatory load of best friend's furniture for pizza and beer at the end of the month...
A bigger motor is required in order to be able to safely maneouver (ie. pull onto freeway with a yacht on the trailer and 6 kegs of beer in the back) and, even if it put out enough power, a smaller motor simply wouldn't last long under those loads. (Consider bearing loads on the crankshaft, never mind the ring loads from always having to floor it to get anywhere...). Also, to be able to support the 2,000lbs of crap in the back, a stronger structure is needed - a big steel frame. And somewhere you have to be able to bolt up the Class-4 hitch or 5th wheel trailer... these aren't generally required in a sedan and would add to the weight, meaning poorer performance and less gas mileage.
Vans and pickup trucks are often very similar structurally. The Aerostar and Ranger, for example, use almost identical frames; as do the S10 and Astro. The Durango/Grand Cherokee is just a Dakota frame with a tall station wagon body plopped on.
Before the Japanese taught American manufacturers how to cut corners and slim out the steel, American cars used to be almost all full-framed, as opposed to a unitbody tin can. At that time, rolling chassis were built, and then the body assembly was bolted to it. The car was as modular as you can get - want a Buick V6 in your Chevrolet Caprice Classic? Call the dealer, and he'll order it from the factory. Want an Oldsmobile Rocket 455 V8 in your Pontiac Laurentian? Can be done. Chrysler and Ford got into the action in similar ways to GM. Even though the car was modular, you seldom see someone taking the body off the frame of their Caprice Classic to bolt on an Oldsmobile body with leather seats.
DeLorean tried this, too. All the body panels bolted on, and were to be replaced in the case of an accident. And the Pontiac Fiero. And the Checker could have been upgraded/modernized - solid steel frames, bulletproof drivetrain which would have been easily swapped when it eventually wore out, and all the body panels were bolted on to be easy to repair after an accident, unlike today's crap.
Besides, can you imagine the nightmare? Designing a wiring harness for every provision of every feature that might be demanded? (Oops, have to upgrade my wiring harness, this engine option requires a pre-heated oxygen sensor downstream of the catalytic converter...)
Of course, you *can* build it if you want it badly enough. I've built a Buick V6 powered Chevette. I've seen a Cadillac 500 in another Chevette. I've helped wire a Fiero to accept a Cadillac Northstar V8. I wired a dual-engine Dodge Caravan C/V (windowless cargo Caravan) that had its original worn out 2.6L Mitsubishi driving the fro
Wrong. Try watching the Italian Job - indoor car chases over a decade before Blues Brothers came out. Yes, there is cinema outside of hollywood.
I'll check it out, thank you. Even if, like most European vehicles, Minis aren't really cars... seeing as how most decent motorcycles have as many cylinders driving the correct wheel and employ more steel in their construction.
Of course you should ensure that you reach an actual human by contacting them via their logs!!!
Well, there's the odd chance that they'll see 10,000 hits to the afflicted page in their site stats.
Be sure to include the email in question, including all the headers, and everything down to HELO, etc., so they know which email you're referring to.
No way! They'd know that the e-mail address was valid! I don't want that.
And of course append a nice polite note explaining to them how they were in error, so that they could be sure not to repeat their mistake. Cram as much of that into the log entry as you can. If you think you can only get a limited amount of text into one url, break the returned emain and note into portions put into successive log entries. Then when you're sure they have the whole thing, also send it in one single block of text. It will be more convenient for them to read if it gets through that way. On the other hand, if such a humongous url breaks something, they're more likely to read the logs and discover that they have a problem with spam from their system.
Indeed! If I were to write a script to take the source e-mail, line by line, and feed it back to their webserver, then it would certainly get the point across. You know, sending HTML to a webserver through an URL kinda feels like sticking a microphone right in front of a big stack of Apogee Concert Audio bins.
On the off chance that any of the people referred to by email address in the spam has any authority to do anything other than sell you their widget, you should also send the returned spam and nice note to all the email addresses in the spam. Be sure to also include root, admin, administrator, postmaster, abuse, info, and whatever you can think of as addresses to send to at their domain.
Indeed! In fact, I could also send it from an e-mail address whose username includes the instructions not to spam the e-mail address... Oh wait a minute, I already do that, and that address just gets more and more spam. I think enough of the webmasters are the spammers themselves, or forward the complaint to the spammer. That's better validation than those "Remove Me!" ruses.
If you whip up a script to do all that automatically to every piece of mail that gets filtered into your spam bucket, you might want to keep a list of those addresses, so you can filter out the bounces you're sure to get because any organization unprofessional enough to have spammers probably isn't dealing properly with all the responses they're getting.
I was thinking that I could attach an MP3 of Neil Young's Long May You Run to each one of them, in celebration of the infallible reliability of the IIS servers that they so often seem to employ.
I don't think that you could be considered to be spamming them, since you already have an established relationship with them, due to the fact that they contacted you first. And you really need to ensure that your message gets through to them, so serious measures are appropriate.
Yes indeed. This is part of why I like hitting the log files. I'm hoping that their hosting companies will at least note it, and this saves me the trouble of looking up the hosting company and sending them an e-mail. It's far more direct. Cut out the Network Solutions middleman.
As far as legality, it's probably a lot more legal than launching them out of a catapult, and a lot less work, too.
Greater work offers greater satisfaction, of course.
Actually, they probably *are* circumcised. Missing significant functionality and being convinced they've gotten something better sounds more like a Microsoft user.
I'll have to disagree with you there. Having been circumcised myself when I was 22, my biggest regret is that I didn't have it done sooner. You know how, during sex, there's a distinct IN stroke and a distinct OUT stroke? If you're uncut, the skin rolls right back over the head during the OUT stroke, and you don't feel a damned thing. Never mind how all the nerves
I've often thought that it would be nice to come up with something which submitted plausibible but fake information to the forms on spammers' websites. This would be done slowly so as not to DoS the server, but the steady trickle of nonsense replies would hopefully mean that the spammer couldn't tell the real ones from the fakes.
Well, they're really only going to expect the same things. Name, address, apartment number, daytime telephone, etc. Maybe a script could be written which looks for those prompts (including abbreviations and misspelling) and automatically fill them in with random info. (I'm sure someone can come up with a list of non-emergency telephone numbers of police departments around the USA, for example.) I don't know about the legality of generating a random number in the right format and submitting that for credit card info, somehow it feels to me like it might legally be some kind of fraud, even if you're only doing it to waste their time.
However, I wonder if the spammers will see the increase in traffic (even if the letters are all strangely returned) as a sign that spamming works. Keep in mind, these aren't intelligent people.
How do people feel about scripts to fill website logs with crap? Here's mine, quick and dirty, written in about 30 seconds because I was pissed off:
#!/bin/bashCOUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 10000 ]; do
lynx -dump http://www.resumeagencies.com/recruiterspage.asp?
sleep 1
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note the fact that I'm calling what I hope is a dynamic page, so with luck, I'm wasting their server's processor time. The script is otherwise, as you can see, completely unrefined.
Legality, anyone? Other problems (despite the obvious fact that I have to waste my bandwidth to fuck with spammers)? Obviously, it's a DoS attack of sorts, but then again, so is an unsolicited e-mail. If they want to challenge me legally on that point, then I will do the same to them. My website very clearly points to the policies which apply to all e-mails sent to my domain.
How do people feel about scripts to fill website logs with crap? Here's mine, quick and dirty, written in about 30 seconds because I was pissed off:
#!/bin/bashCOUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 10000 ]; do
lynx -dump http://www.resumeagencies.com/recruiterspage.asp?
sleep 1
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note the fact that I'm calling what I hope is a dynamic page, so with luck, I'm wasting their server's processor time. The script is otherwise, as you can see, completely unrefined.
Legality, anyone? Other problems (despite the obvious fact that I have to waste my bandwidth to fuck with spammers)? Obviously, it's a DoS attack of sorts, but then again, so is an unsolicited e-mail. If they want to challenge me legally on that point, then I will do the same to them. My website very clearly points to the policies which apply to all e-mails sent to my domain.
How 'bout the movie that invented the indoor car chase (yes... indoor car chase), and still reigns champion of Hollywood automotive carnage? (And these aren't shitty little imported cars, either, these are real American cars with man-sized 7.2L V8 engines doing over 120 miles per hour through the streets of Chicago.)
I cried the first time I saw it, but I love it.
"Well, thank you very much, pal. The day I get out of prison, my own brother picks me up in a police car."
"Shit!" "What?" "Rollers." "Rollers?" "Yeah." [interspersed flawlessly on the beat with Sam and Dave singing Soothe Me]
"They've probably got SCMODS... State, County, Municipal Offender Data System."
"You want out of this parking lot? Okay..."
"Baby clothes? This place has got *everything*!"
"I hate Illinois Nazis." [while stuck in a traffic jam caused by the Illinois Nazi Party.]
[at a country and western bar] "What kind of music do you normally have here?" "Oh, we've got both kinds... country AND western."
"It a hundred and six miles to Chicago. We've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."
Never mind the cameos by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, James Brown... The movie is pure genius.
I've never met anyone under 24 who's seen it, until I forced them to. Every single one of them has loved it. I'd expect the same of most of the Slashdot crowd.
Aretha Franklin's character, waitress: "We got two honkies out there, dressed like Hassidic diamond merchants. They look like they from the CIA or something..."
Her Hubby, cook: "What do they want to eat?"
"The big one wants dry white toast."
"Elwood!"
"The little one wants four fried chickens and a Coke."
"Jake! Shit, the Blues Brothers!"
This is the movie that demanded an FAA UNairworthiness certificate for a Ford Pinto station wagon.
The Blues Brothers, 1980. Buy, rent, borrow or download this movie.
Before I write my own and reinvent the wheel, does anyone know of any scripts which will create ISO image files of an MP3 collection?
Here's what I want to do. On my home LAN (as opposed to work, where we've already got a good backup strategy), I've got a large (20Gb) MP3 collection. I back up everything else with a little shell script, and that's good enough.
But the MP3 collection is hard to back up, and I've only ever done it twice because of the work involved. The technique thus far has been to simply dump 'em in sequential blocks by filename until I cannot add any more files before I exceed the CD's capacity. This is inefficient, of course, because if the next file is 5 megabytes and I've only got 4 megabytes left, then I go on to the next CD-R and preserve the order (so that I can still keep track of what files I've put in).
What I'd like to do is have a script which automatically sorts them so that I have efficient use of the CDs and tars each file individually to preserve the long filenames. (Why not tar all the files in the CD image? Damage to the CD might make that whole disc unreadable.) For the same reason, I'm not interested in disc spanning.
Of course, such a script would be useful anywhere that a large quantity of relatively big files have to be backed up to CD-R... or, even larger files have to be backed up to DVD.
Anyone know of anything like this, or am I rolling up my sleeves and kludging something together?
You'd think they'd realize not to put sites with pictures on slashdot.
Yeah, but how about those pictures of the Vectrex TV set?
That's a cool idea.
You can find Vectrex schematics in about 100 places on the 'Net, so I could even build my own Vectrex motherboard... (that way, I wouldn't have to take mine apart!)
I think that I have worries about the use of the color CRT, however.
Color tube means three beams of electrons to focus and accelerate instead of only one, which means a higher second anode voltage. Higher second anode voltage means more X-Ray production. Color TV sets and monitors are full of circuitry to keep this voltage very carefully regulated; lots of components in the power supply, horizontal deflection and cathode drives are very carefully specified for this reason - in fact, lots of TV schematics put a big border around those areas of the schematic, with "SAFETY CRITICAL - X-RAY" warnings all over them to make sure that technicians don't try to sub in a 47 ohm resistor when the schematic calls for a 42 ohm resistor, etc.
This Vectrex TV must have had some huge mods made to the deflection systems, and, as a direct consequence, the flyback supply which produces the high voltage for the second anode.
I hope he was careful...
Otherwise, it's a pretty simple hack. Build a Vectrex (rather than gutting an original). Find a large black and white monitor - Electrohome used to make 25" closed circuit and broadcast monitors - or an old large Sun monochrome display. Disconnect the deflection yoke, yank out the monitor's chassis, and put in the Vectrex. A larger tube will require more deflection current, so you'll need to beef up the output stage, and make any adjustments to the output stages to match the impedance of the monitor's yoke. CRT filaments can usually be lit from a 6VAC power supply - just a transformer from the power line. And, as for the high voltage, I'd throw a couple of 2N3055s onto a flyback (just a small solid state Tesla coil), rectify the output, and toss it at the CRT's high voltage ultor. Though the Vectrex flyback might even do it reasonably well... Adjust the voltage on the CRT's grids for best focus.
why not something about the tech that's being used this time around? That would be "News for Nerds."
Alright. Want to know something about the tech? Most of it is classified.
I used to work for Litton, designing radar video systems, before Northrop-Grumman bought us out. (Litton - builder of all Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and Aegis guided missile destroyers. NG - builder of stealth bomber and stealth fighter.)
Think of how radar works. A microwave radio signal is fired in a quick burst from a magnetron (just like in your microwave oven, but higher power and frequency). The signal is transmitted outward, bounces off the target, is received, heterodyned (mixed with a signal of similar frequency), and then the beat is amplified and fed to a display or other electronics (targeting computers, etc.).
If your signal isn't reflected, you don't have a target on your display. So what do stealth bombers and fighters do? Diffuse the signal, or reflect it everywhere except the direction from which it came.
It's just like a sand bar, which doesn't show up on marine radar - it absorbs the energy and/or reflects it away from the source.
And that's how radar stealth works.
Quoting from article: Like the review, I can't figure out what the target market for this is, but it's still a cool device.
Quoting from last comment: But the replacement bulbs for LCD projectors are expensive, especially considering that these bulbs don't have a particularly long lifetime.
Yeah. Heh. Even so, I don't care for large displays anyway.
Do I really need to see tuneless singers on American Idol blown up to the height of my living room wall?
Won't the videophones used on CNN still look every bit as grainy?
I want HDTV for the image fidelity, not so much for the practical size which can come with resolution. I can still enjoy and appreciate 1080i on my 17" monitor.
Sometimes, of course, you do want image size. I'm not knocking it, nor am I knocking the people who like big displays. Hell, in a former career, I was a Sony-certified video projector technician for the VPH-10xx and VPH-12xx CRT projectors. They're a blast, but not for my daily needs.
Of course, if I felt the need to accentuate my ...girth... as a testament to my virility, I could do it with a large TV set.
Instead, however, I spend my disposable cash on my collection of vehicles. It's rather expensive driving a 27-foot-long 1976 Dodge Ram with a 440 CID (7.2L) V8 engine with today's gas prices. Yessir.
No need to try to demonstrate my manhood with a big TV. Nope, I'm perfectly happy with one of these little boxes connected to my comfy little ViewSonic 17" monitor.
Just a second, I feel an incredibly powerful need to go outside and listen to that lovely engine idle for a few minutes... Ahhhh.
Speaking of Evolution, I really wish that Ximian would speed up theirs.
It takes it 8 minutes to exit on my PIII-500. I refuse to believe that I should need to upgrade an e-mail drone beyond that.
If there were truth in advertising, Ximian would have called it Continental Drift.
I once saw a 2-door Cadillac in the showroom with front seats from a 4-door.
Strictly a pedestrian hack; anyone with a wrench could do that one.
It takes a seriously disturbed mind to come up with this one, and yet I've seen it done. (Even got to help build it, did some of the wiring.)
So, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine had this absolutely perfect four door 1985 Dodge Aries. Nearly mint condition, low mileage. It was almost a shame that he was using it as a winter beater. He was turning left one day and a guy ran a red light to plow into the side of him. Bang! No more passenger side. He drove it like that until spring.
However, he had a parts car kicking around the driveway, a 1987 Plymouth Reliant which had been written off when it got sideswiped on the driver's side. Otherwise, it too was in pretty good shape, but it was a two door car.
Most people would content themselves with picking up another K-Car - they're great little beaters, cheap, easy to maintain, and pretty reliable. But no...
So, in the summer time and driving his summer car (a gorgeous '71 Chevelle), he embarked on a neat project.
You see, a two door K-Car and a four door K-Car have exactly the same length. He's also half Irish, so he's too cheap to buy parts when he doesn't need to. And he's half Polish, so he makes do with whatever he has on hand. So out came the Sawzall and the MIG welder.
With some careful measuring and even more careful jigging, he was able to weld the passenger's side of the two door Plymouth Reliant onto the four-door Dodge Aries. With a coat of paint and a little bit of Bondo to hide the seam on the roof skin, he had a three-door Dodge Aries. Unless you take a close look at the weld marks un the underside of the floor, you'd think Chrysler actually built it like that. He even went to a couple of wrecking yards until he found all the interior trim pieces to make the interior of the two door car match the four door car.
Try taking that to the DMV to get it registered... they had fun with it. (Actually, the majority of it is still a four door 1985 Dodge Aries, so it's still titled as that.)
He didn't drive the car the next winter, because he wanted to save it from rust damage. Instead, he started taking it to car shows. The beauty of it, of course, is that from any one vantage point, it's either a two or four door K-Car - not something you'd expect to see at a car show. When they notice it, people seem to get a good laugh out of the car.
Watch out for the silver '85 Aries driving around eastern Toronto (Danforth) on nice summer days.
You worked at McDonalds for 4 years in high school? Was McDonalds hiring 14 year olds back then or were you on the 6-year high-school plan?
Heh. A little bit of both, actually. I'm the sort of guy who squeaked through high school, somehow got through university, etc. without being any sort of academic - I'm more of a practical person.
Here in Canada, if you had parental consent, then you could start working at McDonalds when you were 14.
And this was before any 18-year-old who knew how to install Windows could open a little consulting business, so I stuck around there for a few years. (After my first promotion, they made it worthwhile financially, and I'd made a lot of friends so the time passed quickly.)
why would the Jews survive and nobody else? That seems racist to me, espicially when you list them next to degrading uniforms and rust buckets.
You're on crack.
The Jewish people have survived (and, I dare say, prospered) despite virtually everyone trying to kill them over the past 6,000 years. They kick ass! (And they're great in bed.)
McDonalds uniforms *don't* degrade. I worked at a McDonalds for 4 years way back when I was in high school. I tried, for 3.5 years, to get a new uniform. I spilled ketchup on it, and then rubbed it in. The washing machine got it out. I tried soaking in in "grill acid" (essentially oven cleaner on steroids, used to clean the grills). The smoke which rose from the uniform was only the food on it being dissolved. I changed the oil in my Duster and wiped the gunk off the engine and the hot headers with a McDonalds uniform. Tossed it in my 1954 Maytag, and it was Tide fresh all over again. The labels claim they're polyester - but they survived chemicals which would melt polyester. Can't kill the damned things.
As for Dodge Darts being rustbuckets - they rusted less than almost any other car of their day (Corvettes and Bricklins are the only exceptions which come to mind). Notice how many of them you still see on the road? Quite a few, for a cheap economy car which was discontinued over 26 years ago. Not to mention that, but they also had Slant-6 engines, which are world-famous for being the toughest gasoline engine ever built. Usually, the Slant-6 was driving a TorqueFlite 904 or TF-727 automatic transmission, which are sufficiently overbuilt that many drag racers will use them behind Chrysler big-block V8s, including the legendary twist-your-driveshaft-into-a-pretzel Hemi. *AND* they got over 25 MPG, which is a feat for what is, by today's standards, a full-size car with a large engine, no fuel injection, and no overdrive gearing.
Not coincidentally, I love the Jews, I love Dodge Darts, I love the TI PEB, and my old green McDonalds uniform still hangs at the back of my closet because I can't bear to part with the damned thing.
Notice a pattern here? I like things which last, despite adversity. I extend that to people and cultures.
If that makes me a racist in your view, well, it's a badge I shall wear with pride.
Laptop's are the perfect solution for in car use. Their power supplies are already designed for DC in, they have a battery to smooth out any sags, they are small so they are easier to find mounting points for. If you don't need a working LCD you can find ones with a fairly powerfull cpu for not a lot of money on eBay.
This is a good point, and worthy of consideration. However, the remaining issue is one of regulation.
When you take the power off the car's electrical system, step 1: Capacitors. Step 2. Inductor. Step 3. Capacitors. Step 4. Regulator.
Make sure that the capacitive stages include a large (~30,000uF) capacitor in parallel with some smaller ones (0.1uF). The net effect isn't just 30,000.1uF; the 0.1uF will have less inductance to bypassing RF noise to ground. (This is why, for example, an old XT motherboard will have 0.1uF in parallel with the power supply leads to each chip, rather than just 0.1uFxN uF filter caps, where N is the number of chips.)
With the notebook, your power requirements will probably be less, and at a lower voltage than the 12V (13.8V actual) voltage of the vehicle's supply. Linear regulators might be able to do the job. Design the regulator to survive >20V, since you don't want back EMF coming from inductive loads (wiper motors especially) or even a failed alternator to lunch the computer or regulator.
Even a modest computer supply requiring 200W is a non-trivial load on an automotive electrical system. That's ~15A, more when you consider that the computer power supply is probably rated for an output power of 200W, and it's not 100% efficient. Most rear-window defrosters are fused at 30A, which means that your desktop PC's supply capacity is half that of the second biggest single continuous load in the car's electrical systems. (Biggest is headlights.)
A notebook is designed from the ground up to be energy efficient, and so even if your regulator ends up being a little home-brew linear setup, it's still probably drawing less current than the alternative.
One time I accidentally dropped a floppy from about 2 inches above the desk, and yet it still worked! (although I did have to completely reformat, losing the data already on it)
You just reminded me of something that happened to a friend in the late 1980s.
We were die-hard members of one of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A user's groups. He had his PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box) at a meeting, and was carrying it on a cart up a set of stairs. He was at the top of the stairs when it feel off the cart.
Before I continue, a word on the TI-99/4A. If there's a nuclear holocaust, I have every faith that the only survivors will be the Jews, Dodge Darts, McDonalds uniforms, and the TI PEB. You see, Texas Instruments built them out of stamped steel, with each card housed in a cast aluminum case. They were overbuilt for military use, let alone as a "home computer".
So, the PEB went end for end down the terazzo stairs. Bang, bang, bang. Little chips of terazzo breaking off the corner of each step, and a few small dents in the PEB.
He picked it up and shook it. Nothing sounded loose inside, so he hooked it up, and it still worked. Until he tried to save to a diskette.
The old full-height Shugart 5.25" double-sided single-density diskette drive now had a new feature. He could format a diskette, flip it over, and format it again. One of the heads was now halfway between tracks, so the net effect was that he had a four-sided diskette. 360k to a 5.25" diskette, while the rest of us were only getting 180k.
my friend somehow broke his computer by forcibly inserting some ram the wrong way round... got VERY VERY hot, and since he turned it on and then went to get food no on noticed til there was a bad smell... CPU was dead, motherboard was dead, ram was dead, and harddrive had corrupted partitioin tables (But the harddrives do still work)
Heh... The morals of the story...
The most drastic case I've ever come across was a motherboard that I installed without grounding. Turned it on, nothing happened for a few seconds, then "POP!" Smoked the thing. The amazing part is that I took it out, put it back in properly grounded, and it's still running! (That was about four years ago, I think)
I'd expect that you had a capacitor fail. I don't know what that would have had to do with forgetting to "ground the motherboard".
The black leads in your AT/ATX power supply connector are the power supply grounds. The RF grounds are provided when you screw the motherboard down into the case - the little pads around the screw-holes are connected to the motherboard's ground plane and serve to take care of that requirement (although, as most of us know, a motherboard will run outside of a case - it's not recommended for RFI reasons).
If it was a new motherboard, probably it was defective. There are generally lots of capacitors on motherboards, to provide RF bypassing and power supply filtration. If an electrolytic capacitor (aluminum or tantalum) is installed backwards - or has too low a voltage rating - then it will fail. Aluminum (ordinary) electrolytics tend to fail leaky - which means that the capacitor will dissipate energy and heat up, sometimes exploding, but often just remaining there. If they pop, they often remain shorted, and cause your power supply to shut down, or damage other parts of the circuit.
On the other hand, tantalum electrolytic capacitors (generally small yellow-orange rectangular surface mount) will tend to fail shorted. They eat up a lot of current, generate a lot of heat, and pop. Once they've actually exploded, they tend to be open circuited, so they're effectively no longer there.
If this was something like a bypass or a filter capacitor, your motherboard almost certainly will no longer work as well as it was designed (ie. RF emissions, susceptibility to RF noise or power supply ripple, etc.) but if it still works well enough for you, that's good.
All the same, I'd be taking a look at what failed and replacing it. You need a very steady hand and a good iron with a clean tip, but you can replace the defective capacitor.
As for the likelihood of a motherboard leaving the factory with a badly placed or wrongly-rated capacitor, well, sh*t happens. In the late 1980s, Toyota shipped over 10,000 Corollas with missing passenger side front speakers. That's a little easier to spot than a shipment of mislabelled capacitors, or accidentally putting a spool of caps into the pick and place machine the wrong way around.
What I'd like is for a lawyer to answer me about the ramifications of doing this.
If you put up a page on your website, offering to do a full "automated security analysis" of a remote computer, simply by "sending an e-mail to the following e-mail address".
Parse the headers, find the originating IP address, ping it, and then as part of the security analysis, run scripts which attack every single known Windows vulnerability. Afterwards, ping it, and display the results on the webpage.
Of course, you indicate in *human readable form* on that page that no human being will read e-mail going to that address, and that sending an e-mail to that address constitutes an agreement to an automated security test of your computer.
Spammers will harvest these addresses, and will pollute their address lists with addresses which will cause "random" crashes and so disrupt mass-mailings. Determining which e-mail addresses are causing the problem will be difficult for them, I would imagine, since they'll probably send a couple more e-mails in the time it takes for the script on the server to execute.
Evidently, getting permission from one's ISP (and mine is great *and* they hate spammers) and legal counsel is a prerequisite.
Of course, this is simply a security test.
Sounds too useful to exist.
Here's something I'd like to find, but I haven't been shopping around yet, and I don't know whether it's available or not. I'm also in Canada, and we've been a little slower to adopt HDTV up here, so I can't walk into Future Shop and browse with the same number of products available.
I really have little use for large TV sets.
On the other hand, VGA monitors capable of doing 2,000 horizontal pixels must already be available somewhere - not that I've been shopping for one of those, either. Either way, I still expect it would be cheaper than a 16:9 HDTV monitor.
Anyone know of any set-top boxes which receive HDTV and output letterboxed VGA video, either in the same resolution or down-converted to a popular VGA resolution?