Will someone please explain to me what it is about Floridians especially that attracts them to shady business models?
I don't get it. But I do know that clearly half of my spam comes from Florida. (40% of it is from the other 49 states, especially southern states; the other 10% is from gross third-world nations.)
Geez, all I thought there was down there was blue-haired little old ladies from Binghamton who weren't strong enough to start the snowblower anymore.
I've got a nice pair of wire cutters. If someone tells me where the fiber is routed, I'll happily take 'em out at their borders.
Original quote in bold; content adjusted by BigBlockMopar in plain text.
...We'd be glad to have you as long as you pay fifty percent of your income to the government
There are lots of high tech jobs open because Canadians are constantly moving south for better paying, lower taxed opportunity in a land of real freedom
particularly in telecommunications which is important because in January you can't go outside without freezing your testicles off, so you need a good telephone - in fact, the government even subsidizes Northern Telecom to the tune of $100,000,000+ a year
we have a decent health care system as long as you don't get sick, because all the MRI machines are in Buffalo, NY
few homeless, since the cardboard boxes all over Toronto are assessed property taxes
over half the fresh water in the world but it's in glaciers 2 miles thick, above the arctic circle, where intelligent people don't go voluntarily (too damned cold and desolate, I've been there).
damned good immigrant and local food you can have poutine, beaver tails and Chinese snake soup in the same Toronto restaurant. Yummy.
culture and festivals especially Caribana, which has had at least one murder a year for the past 5 years
and are ranked best country to live in for the seventh straight year in a row by the U.N. whose representatives obviously don't consider it a little divisive that you can take the Canadian citizenship test in 27 different languages.
Cape Breton Island has the best fiddle players in the Americas
Wow. That just reminds me how proud I am to be Canadian. Oh, boy. What about Rita McNeil's tea-room in Nova Scotia?
Canadian doctors are probably leaving for the U.S. I'll give you that. But you haven't proved that this affects the Canadian health care system Net loss in doctors every year...health care depends on doctors...you figure it out.
Not to mention that the Canadian government provides thousands of dollars to the education of each and every one of those med students who eventually graduates and flies the coop.
I can't say that I blame them, either. If I were interested in a career as a physician, you can bet your ass that I'd get my schooling in Canada and my career in the United States.
In Canada, we're all in this together, and we succeed or fail together.
That's called "communism". And while it's the prevailing Canadian attitude, I'll continue to work my ass off to get out of this country.
And while skilled and talented people leave Canada for greener pastures in the United States, Canada's place in the world will continue to decay and decline as did Russia's, and East Germany's, and Poland's, and Czechoslovakia's and...
BTW, speaking as a 26-year-old Canadian, once I'm gone, I'm gone. I'm not going to upset my life and risk everything to move back to a country that has such an inertia toward a Marxist ideal that has been proven impractical if not impossible in country after country.
And one poor person dying on the streets is far too many.
I'd call that Darwin's theory at work. In developed counties, the poor are usually that because they're stupid or they consistently make bad decisions (same thing), they're lazy or they're addicted. If you want to get out of poverty badly enough, you can. Oprah Winfrey and Ross Perot are great American examples of this. Anthony Hopkins grew up in abject poverty in a coal-mining town in Wales (United Kingdom). And Jim Carrey grew up in a shack in Scarborough (Toronto, Canada). All of these people proved that poverty can be beaten. Those who don't beat it apparently don't care to. Screw 'em; if they don't want to help themselves, why should I have to?
Canada is so bent on trying to help everyone that I should be able to file a paper somewhere in Ottawa and get a government grant to pay for the costs of the immigration lawyer who will get me into the USA. (In all seriousness, I'm going to call my legal counsel and ask him to look into that for me. Once he's done laughing, if there's a way to do it, I assure you that he will.)
Shed no tears for the Canadian in me on the day that I stand before the judge and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
The following is all absolutely true, especially about the quality of Canadian medical care. The information was relayed concisely and responsibly by an individual who took the time to speak his piece carefully.
I happen to live in Canada, and I happen to agree with him, which is why I question the motivation behind this post having been moderated to "flamebait". It clearly isn't flamebait, though the moderator who did it disagreed with what was said.
When I get moderator access, I don't moderate down stuff I disagree with. I only moderate up or down the posting based on the *quality* of the post, not whether or not I agree with it.
Censoring ideas that don't agree with those of the prevailing forces are sure signs of socialist and communist thinking.
Because it's not how human beings operate. If people would stop being selfish a**holes we wouldn't need capitalism. At least capitalism rewards innovation[sic] and hard work. Socialism breeds laziness, it is a proven fact. Until we grow up, capitalism is the best way for us ALL to make something good out of our lives. I would rather die than be cornered into a way of life by the government.
And about Canada's healthcare system: Have you checked out the value of the Canadian dollar yet? Sheesh, it sucks. 15% or more in sales tax?? And they have very poor healthcare because people who want to be doctors want to make money, so the good doctors leave CDA for the US, leaving the hacks to take care of the homeland.
Hell, you pay taxes so that everyone can drive on good roads and go to school, right?
What's wrong with extending that to health care, supporting the needlessly unemployed etc.
Sure.
Even better, let's divide the wealth of the country equally among all of its citizens. That sounds like a great idea, too, doesn't it? Everybody enjoys the fruits of the country's successes.
It's great on paper.
Problem is, it doesn't take into account a pair of fundamental flaws with human nature. People are lazy, and people will take advantage of the system when they can.
The system is called communism. And when you know that you're going to get your 50 rubles a week depending on whether you actually go to work or not, what's the point in going to work?
Similarily, what's the point in saving up in case you find yourself unemployed or (gasp!) fired for never showing up at work on time, if you know the government will take care of you?
The best never see any rewards for their efforts, and consequently won't try as hard. The worst never see any punishment for their uselessness, and therefore never have an incentive to work harder. The net effect is that the country's gross domestic product drops, its international value decays, and the society will fall into recession and poverty.
Look at where Russia is. Look at the mess of the former Soviet countries. Look at the quality of life of the average Chinese person.
Why is this such a difficult concept for people who espouse socialism to understand?
Canada is a socialist country; socialism and communism are kissing cousins. And since Canada embarked on its path to socialism, its economy hasn't grown at the same rate as our big brother to the south. It hasn't prospered. It's full of trade unions jacking up labor rates so that City of Toronto parking attendants make $21/hr, which is more than I make with my substantial computer skills.
I hate living in Canada. Until things change here, Canada will continue to go downhill.
I'm a 26 year old Canadian, and on the wall in my bedroom is an American flag. It's a long story, but it was given to me by the US Ambassador to Canada when Clinton visited Ottawa (Canada's capital) in 1994, and I worked on the visit. But the flag is there, hanging on my wall, reminding me where I want to be, and what it is that I'm working for.
I'm working for freedom from the oppression of high taxes, the stifling regime of a government that rewards those who don't plan ahead.
I work my ass off, not for financial reward and the comfort they will buy me (because in Canada, it's nearly futile, and the rich are generally looked down on). I work my ass off so that I can move to the United States, become and American citizen, and carry the responsibility and rewards of being an American.
Like many skilled young Canadians today, that's my driving goal.
I'm tired of living in a socialist country (Canada), and while I'm not too enthused by either the Democrats or the Republicans, Ralph Nader is not the answer that the USA wants or needs.
I'm a social liberal, but a fiscal conservative. What does that mean? It means that I believe abortions should be legal and obtainable, the government shouldn't have to pay for them. Nor should the HMOs. (Really, 9 times out of 10, an unwanted pregancy could have been avoided through responsible use of birth control.) I believe in freedom of speech, gay and lesbian marriage, racial equality without affirmative action, and labor costs being driven by free market capitalism without the artificial inflation and meddling that unions do.
If I were an American citizen, I'd have no idea who to vote for. On one hand, the Republicans make fiscal sense. On the other hand, they're also fundamentally evil, protected by an impermeable shroud of religious self-righteousness. On one hand, the Democrats believe in the same things I do, but on the other hand, they're also big proponents of labor unions and punishing environmental laws that will screw all businesses and individuals.
Nasty.
Yeah? Well at least us Canadians don't leave our poor out on the street to die because we're too cheap to give them medical attention. Private insurance systems are all fine and dandy for those who can afford them, but that's not everybody.
Ahh, but this statement really irks me, speaking as a Canadian. I'll tell you a story that underscores all the flaws with socialized medicine.
It was the day that Princess Diana died. I remember this, because it was on all the TV sets in the hospital waiting room.
I was feeling really shitty, and was able to diagnose my ailment. I had strepped throat, and needed an antibiotic prescription.
Of course, to save OHIP (Ontario's provincial "HMO"), I tried first to go to a walk-in clinic. Of course, it was a Sunday evening, so they were all closed. Feeling bad that I was going to go to a hospital emergency room (it costs the government a lot), I had to do it anyway.
At 9:PM, I arrived, and told the triage nurse that I had strepped throat and that I needed a prescription. I was told to sit down, that a doctor would be with me soon. "Soon", of course, implies a geological time frame, with things there happening about as fast as continental drift.
So, I sat in the waiting room, one of three people there; a little kid with a sprained finger (and his mother, but she didn't count), a guy with a small gash to his face, and me.
At ten o'clock, a homeless guy shuffled in, spoke with the nurse, and then, of course, sat down beside me. There were about fifty seats free, but he had to sit beside me. I love derelicts. They always harass me. I hope they all freeze to death.
The derelict proceeded to try to make small talk with me, and I really wasn't interested in having anything to do with him. He stank. He was gross. And I did find out that he was in there because he had tried to shoot up his heroin with a bent needle. The needle had broken off in his arm. That had been three days ago.
After an unbearable hour of moving from seat to seat and having this guy follow me and keep talking to me, he was called in. Ten o'clock.
I was called in at midnight, into the same examining room as the derelict had been in. His stench was still there. The doctor made me open my mouth, took a look, told me it looked like I had strepped throat (which I had told the triage nurse) and wrote me a prescription for Keflex 150mg (I'd suggested Keflex 200mg). Five minutes in the examining room, preceeded by a three hour wait with unsavory characters.
This, I'd suggest to you, is a good example of why socialized medicine doesn't work. I'd like to think that I'm worth more to Canadian society than a homeless person who shoots up smack with damaged syringes. But apparently, I'm not. I'd like to think that, in a weakened state, I wouldn't have to be harassed by the homeless people this country (and in particular, the City of Toronto) panders to.
I'd like to think that because I work hard and have useful skills, I'd be treated better than those who don't. If working hard doesn't offer me any benefits, why bother doing so?
I don't feel it's right that medical coverage isn't provided as a basic right to all Americans, especially the working poor. But I do feel that as part of my reward for being a contributing member of society, I should also have some sort of priority - better hospitals, better service, freedom from harassment in the waiting rooms.
The Canadian health care system is one extreme; the American health care system is the other. What is needed is a happy medium.
Not only will you have to retrain thousands of users, but you'll also have to replace all of your applications software and stuff.
Since companies often don't like big expenditures (and the cost of a Windows or Office site license is usually the smallest part of the bill), they're not going to want to do it all at once.
Here's a suggestion to start getting the ball rolling, and it basically details what I'm doing at the company that I work for. Remember, one step at a time, as opportunity permits:
New webserver running Linux, not Windows 2K. This is a good chance to show the boss what Linux is all about.
New mail server running Linux.
New SAMBA fileserver, using a RAID setup, without incurring the massive licensing costs of setting up a Novell box. (Our current Novell box crashes daily; no one seems to know why.)
Lighter-duty users (who basically just use their computers for running a terminal and reading their e-mail) will be offered the choice of running Linux. As these pioneering users get used to Linux, I fully expect water-cooler conversation to turn to the fact that they haven't seen a BSOD in months.
More demanding users will get tired of the existing Windows 95A installations on their machines. As these machines crash out and need hard disk formats and reinstalls, the option of Linux and Corel Office will be presented.
The plan has not yet been established for how to deal with the very demanding users, like our General Manager and our Controller, both of whom are running Office 97 for a lot of the accounting. Since they make very intensive use of spreadsheets and need backwards compatibility with Windows, they may need to remain with Windows, either until the perfection of WINE or of Corel Office.
This becomes a one step at a time method. The overheads of supporting two operating systems in our office won't be all that great. I'm in a small branch office, and I fully expect that there will be less problems overseeing the Linux boxes than I currently have in administering the Windows 95A machines.
The part that really frustrates me about this whole process is that our General Manager likes to get involved with everything. He's the sort of guy who thinks nothing of walking across our carpeted office with a bare stick of RAM in his hand, giving me the added challenge of worrying about weird hardware crashes.
Recently, we got new computers for both him and the controller. The controller trusts me implicitly, and is very knowledgeable about computers. On his new machine, while we're unable for a couple of reasons to run NT 4.0, I was able to format the hard disk drive and do a clean install of Windows 95B, which is, IMHO, the best Windows version.
The General Manager wanted none of that. He didn't want to have to reinstall all his applications. So, he made me give him the computer with no operating system on it. He then used an old, pre-FAT32, version of Partition Magic to copy his existing drive over to the new computer. His machine now runs Windows 95 Upgrade (also no FAT32), which was installed over Windows 3.1 on a 486, and has been mirrored onto bigger and bigger hard disks with every hardware upgrade since then. His 8 gigabyte hard disk is now set up as 8 different 500 meg partitions, for a total of 4 gigabytes.
He complains constantly that his computer is buggy, and thinks nothing of tinkering with it for a day to try to get it stable. Of course, the amusing part is that he could have formatted his hard disk and reinstalled it cleanly in half the time. Of course, he's always short of hard disk space. And his Windows directory is cluttered with DLLs and stuff from applications that were uninstalled several hard disk drives ago.
Anyone got any suggestions on helping this guy see the light? He's my biggest challenge.
Also, something I picked up on is that ethernet shouldn't be run from one building (they might be on a different supply that's out of phase relative to the other building's supply) to another over an electrical medium as there will be a potential difference.
Actually, it's got nothing to do with the phase of the AC power.
In a perfect world, all transformers would provide perfect AC isolation between incoming AC power and the output of your computer's power supply. (In fact, this is tested at the factory, that's what the "HI POT" quality controls you sometimes see are for - "HIgh POTential" isolation testing.)
Since the computers should therefore be isolated from the AC line, phase and issues like that are irrelevant. Ethernet, like everything else on your computer, is a pulse train that has been modulated onto the DC voltages that come out of your power supply.
The big issue that you really can't trust, especially between buildings, is that they're grounded the same way. Potential differences can result there, and either blow out the varistors on your ethernet cards and hubs, or can result in nasty shocks.
Instead, you should use fibre between buildings.
Absolutely. Ethernet's limitation is merely caused by limitations in the consistency of the electrical power grid; it's not actually a failing of ethernet itself.
ipchains -P input DENY to be contiunued... long live IP address surveys.
This is a good point. If they do a scan at an IP address and none of the priviledged ports are responding (accepting connections or indicating that they're closed), the best you can do is assume that there's no computer there. Right?
Hey guys and gals, I thought I should share my thoughts after reading Mr. Moody's column on Linux. Go take another look at his column; when you do, take a look around the site, you can send feedback.
Don't know who at ABC, if anyone, will read it, or what the reaction will be. But voice your opinions! Be concise, clean, amusing, factual and well-formatted, otherwise the editor won't even bother reading it.
Without further ado, here's what I sent to ABC:
Mr. Moody clearly owns Microsoft shares. Or he enjoys products that perform only with mediocrity. I wonder if Mr. Moody drives a Hyundai and praises its virtues similarily to those of Windows.
I'm new to Linux, but I'm not new to UNIX or to computers. In fact, I signed up for my first Internet access in 1988, at the tender age of 14. Back then, it wasn't called the Internet, it was called ARPANET. I've seen a lot of changes, since I've been online longer than Yahoo.
Now, while I don't think I'm ready to praise the virtues of Linux as a desktop environment - I still run Windows 95B OSR2 for that - but I'm pleased to say that I've formatted my server's hard drive and have replaced Windows NT 4.0 with RedHat Linux 6.2.
Sure, the learning curve has been steep. Sure, I've had frustrations. And sure, the operating system completely lacks the polish and refinement of Windows NT. This is primarily why I don't feel it's ready for mass desktop deployment. But, on the other hand, in a server-duty machine, it really shines.
Linux is an operating system by computer geeks and for computer geeks. It is therefore full of technical tools and features that would cost thousands of dollars to buy from Microsoft. It's far more configurable than Windows. It's a UNIX derivative, meaning it's closely related to the most core architecture of the Internet. Being a UNIX family member, it's also a multi-user operating system, with all the related user sercurity features and sophistication that are inherent to a multi-user platform. Compare that to Windows, which is merely a multi-tasking operating system.
And, I'm sorry, but by nature of the fact that it's an open-source operating system, every bug gets detailed, documented and fixed. While a Microsoft user might have to manage a complex set of variables in order to find a given "undocumented feature" of Windows, a fresh pair of eyes looking over a chunk of source code can in minutes reveal errors that might never be spotted in Windows.
None of today's software can or will ever be perfect. Implementation of libraries, millions of lines of source code, dozens of different platforms and operating system variables all can contribute to creating weird behavior. If there are 10,000,000 lines of code and they're 99.995% right, there will still be 50,000 bugs.
Better to have those bugs discovered in advance of exploits and/or lost data. Better to have those bugs addressed by thousands of developers working together in a collaborative manner, bringing together the best of talents in a relaxed setting. Better to be able to have the source code and not rely on Microsoft's small (in comparison) team of developers.
I'm sorry that Mr. Moody feels the way that he does. I'm sorry he couldn't research his article more objectively. And I'm sorry that ABC's editorial staff apparently don't live up to the image of impartial professionalism that I had expected.
I would have expected to see an article like that coming from the people at MSNBC, who brought us mainstream tabloid journalism like Dateline NBC; not from the fine news agency that brings me Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel every night.
Remember, Sony Records is a division of Sony Corporation. Universal Music is a division of Seagrams Distillery. etc.
If you want to completely make the boycott effective, buy a Panasonic DVD player, not a Sony. Buy Gilbey's rum, not Seagram's gin.
Better still, don't bother buying any RIAA CDs anymore. Roll your own. Send royalty checks to the agents of the artists; the agents probably don't like the RIAA either. They can't stop us.
The information technology revolution is happening, and the redcoats will be beaten.
Your stereo is broken, like most consumer electronics equipment. Shielding and filtering costs money, which most manufacturers prefer to keep for themselves. You should be complaining to the company that made your stereo.
Or, better still, throw out the Japanese-made mass-produced plastic crap, and replace it all with professional or old school steel-chassis American-made stereo equipment.
Carver, McIntosh, ElectroVoice, Klipsche all immediately come to mind...
I lived for a year near a big CB operator - his CB picked up in my stereo and came out my speakers.
Hmmm... Okay, CB works in the 27MHz band, which is for public use. While in some jurisdictions you're supposed to have a license for CB, most of the time it's not really policed.
CB is limited to (off the top of my head) 4W TX power for narrow-band FM modulation, 12W TX power for sideband operation. Lots of people (especially truckers, who, sterotypes aside, do like to use them) hop up CB radios, allowing for a longer range.
One way to hop it up is to stay with a 4W/12W TX setup, but to use an antenna that provides more gain. 3dB antenna gain will work in both receive and transmit, and will allow an effective radiated transmitter power of 8W/24W. 6dB antenna gain will be double that again. But, it's perfectly legal, since no more than 4W/12W of energy is being radiated, it's just being "amplified" the same way a gramophone horn works with audio.
The other trick, illegal for sure in both the USA and Canada, is to run a linear amplifier on the CB's output stage. 4W in, 40W out. It's not uncommon to see linear amplifier stages home-built than put out over 1kW of power in the 27MHz band. When it's on a moving vehicle, it becomes pretty hard to triangulate the position of the offending transmitter.
If your stereo was picking up noise in the tuner, it's probably because it's a poor quality tuner (not very selective), you have a poor antenna (tuned more for 27MHz than for broadcast FM) or everything is just misaligned.
If, however, it's coming in through your stereo when you're listening to a CD or something, you're far better off ensuring that all the parts of the stereo are properly grounded through some good, thick copper wire. Make sure that every connector on the thing is clean, since a little dirt or corrosion can make a detector similar to those blued razor blade detectors in foxhole radios built by troops at war (back in WWI and WWII).
I called about this, and got passed around and around, ultimately told that I had to _write_ a certain address in Washington DC and request a certain form....
I'd suggest that if you had a radio license yourself and gave them your call sign, they'd have been far more interested, because by the time you have a radiotelephone license, you're usually pretty good at ferretting out a problem.
The FCC probably didn't try too hard because of the same reasons Microsoft charges $xxx/minute for technical support: too many people call asking fairly basic questions, and they eat up a lot of labor.
I just turned my stereo up louder, it did the trick.
If the CB radio in the background got drowned out more by the music playing, then the problem was clearly on your end, even if the guy was running a 5kW linear amplifier into a 12dB ERP antenna. The problem was clearly occurring *after* your volume control, and therefore in the audio output stages of your stereo system.
Cheap stereo.
The fact of the matter is that a good stereo should run fine right in the shadow of a TV station or even an AM radio station's 50kW transmitter. You can bet your ass that the local AM radio station, in order to get any sort of coverage and longevity out of his expensive equipment, is running that transmitter at its most efficient and into a well planned and well tuned antenna system. FCC be damned, the station's general manager is going to freak out if he's always paying for new output tubes in the transmitter.
So, buy a good stereo. This is the sort of performance difference that you can get by not buying your stereo at Wal-Mart.
My own stereo system shies away from the cheap-assed unshielded plastic crap of today. Parts of it I built myself. No RFI issues, even though I live within a clear line of sight of both the CN Tower (which was orginally built as a transmitter tower, but also happens to be the world's tallest building, Sears and Petronas towers be damned) and a large cellular/microwave relay tower that bristles with 120MHz range dipoles.
It consists of:
Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers, circa 1971.
Speaker cables, 12 gauge HPN heater cord with 1/4" connectors. (Note that this is not overpriced consumer-grade gold-plated crap like Monster Cables; mine are just solid engineering.)
Sound A-5000 solid-state stereo amplifier, circa 1975, point to point wiring, steel chassis. (Output stages replaced with lower noise, more modern transistors.)
Preamplifier - homebuilt, mounted into steel chassis of A-5000. Uses two 12AT7 twin-triode vacuum tubes, all parts surface-mounted on a home-etched circuit board with a ground plane. Tube filaments are powered by rectified and filtered 6V power, to reduce cathode hum. The entire preamplifier section is housed in an old steel cigar box that just happened to fit, and makes a great shield for the tubes. Why tubes? Yeah, you can do the same thing better with good MOSFETs, but when your B+ is 12V, 1.2V of induced noise is 10% of your signal. With tubes, when your B+ is 120V, the same 1.2V of induced noise is only 1% of your signal.
NAD 3340 CD Player.
RCA patch cables are not used to connect the CD player to the amplifier. The NAD has balanced outputs, and the amplifier has balanced inputs, so I use XLR patch.
No tuner. I use my Sony clock-radio to listen to Howard Stern in the mornings.
Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 ISA - output stages were LM741, replaced them with low-noise version. Now, if only I could somehow get the D/A converter *out* of the computer...
Audio output from the SoundBlaster is, unfortunately, unbalanced. (Besides, there are lots more things that would induce noise into a sound card, not just unbalanced patch.) Good quality (not the gold-plated Radio Shack blister-packed crap) RCA to RCA patch cable to the amplifier.
You don't need to be that extreme to get good sound, though I will admit that MP3s have never sounded so good.
Cool, I could put this in my primitive Triumph and put in all sorts of neat-o diagnostic equipment. I could type in commands like "tune -l/dev/carburettor" or run top to see how the vital stats of the engine, temprature and other things are doing.
Nah. Better off just to port a fuel injection system from something more modern onto your vintage car.
I've got a 1974 Plymouth Valiant Brougham with a Slant-6. I've got most of the EFI system from a 1995 Jeep Cherokee with a 4.0L engine, and I'm well along the path towards getting it running.
The only part that I anticipate real trouble with, is actually recalibrating how the computer reads the mass airflow sensor, since at a given engine speed and throttle position, the slightly smaller Slant-6 won't inhale quite as much air...:)
For troubleshooting, just use a diagnostic cable (available from the dealer) and a notebook computer.
Why build it, when it's already done for you?
No, wait, I'm just asking for something else to break down on my car.
Heheheheh... You are, after all, talking about British cars. Probably no matter how badly you kludge any additions together, they'll probably still be more robust and reliable than Lucas Electrics.
Here's a thought, if you're handy, your car troubles you, and originality isn't an issue: Rewire it. It's not that tough.
Figure out how to mount a 1980 or so GM alternator onto your engine. They're great, and the American/Canadian GM alternators have built in regulators. Literally, run the positive lead to the battery, and it works. Run another lead to a lightbulb on the dashboard and you'll know when it doesn't work.
GM also had the best distributors at about that time, and I know that there are mounting kits out there that will let you use the GM HEI system on almost all American engines, as well as many imports (VW Beetle, Volvo, etc). Drop the distributor into the engine, connect the spark plug leads, run a wire from the B pin on the bottom of the distributor cap to the positive terminal on the battery, and it will work. (Add an ignition switch in there somewhere for practicality.)
I'd reserve that little 486 for running the large LED sign that you could build right into the trunklid, across the back of your car, telling people to get off your tail when they get too close. I wonder how it would feel to drill holes for a 16 x 160 LED matrix into my trunk...
On another note, I think all you really need to do is run a wire to all of the motherboard mounting posts, and the outside of all drives and such, and that should be good enough. Getting a copy of the ATX specs might or might not be cheap.....
Sure! That'll work. Until the unmarked white van starts parking in front of your house. A few days later, a couple of nice chaps with government papers and nice trenchcoats will get out, enter your house, and remove the very nice broadband 200W or so radio transmitter than you have.
All a computer does is turn on and off 5V (and 3.3V, and 2.8V) circuits very quickly. All of these circuits are full of stray inductance and stray capacitance (making high speed computers harder to make); the stray inductance and capacitance form wonderful resonant circuits that can spew every weird harmonic of every weird system pulsetrain to every electronic device for miles.
Not good.
Put your computer into a grounded metal case. Don't run your motherboard on a table. Close the computer when you're not adding or removing hardware. And that way, you won't be spewing RF noise.
To build a clear case, you have to make a faraday cage around the computer. The easiest way is to do it using a steel case, but since you want it to be clear, I suggest that you look into lining it with grounded aluminum window screen. Notice that when you look at other clear-cased computer stuff like iMacs, the motherboard is obscured by all the sheetmetal RF shields.
Grounding a clear computer, from an AC power safety and electrostatics standpoint is a piece of cake. But to ground it to the point where it would pass an FCC class-B RF certification is going to be a nightmare.
Electric utilities frown upon drawing unequal currents from the two legs of your power, and charge a surcharge when that happens, similar to if you have a strongly reactive load
In a domestic situation, isn't the "frowing" more a feature of the way the consumption meter works?
Not that I am more enlightened but what I think happened was that this power supply was somehow short-circuited and current was being drained through grounding. I've seen this happen before.
Yeah... In this situation, the symptom is more likely localized heating of stuff you're not expected to be getting warm, rather than a symptom at the electric bill...
<grin> If the VGA connector to your monitor is getting hot, you've either overclocked your video card way too far, or you've got a grounding issue.
But, seriously, make sure that your entire computer is plugged into the same outlet (circuit). That means computer, monitor, printer, sound system, etc. All of those things are connected by computer cables that have big grounds on them. If you're in an old house or one that's improperly wired, the ground on one end of a serial cable may be at a different potential than that of the other end!
Twisted pair ethernet is designed to handle a potential difference, seeing as how in its designed implementation, it often runs from one end of an office to another, etc. But I'd trust coax ethernet less: I've been zapped a time or two, touching the BNC connector and the chassis of a computer at the same time.
Remember, if any two grounded devices are on different circuits and the building (or extension cords, or power bars, or UPSs) are wired wrong, touching both of them at the same time could be fatal.
If you have any measure of electronics skills and a good crop of kids in the classroom (which they probably are, if they're bored), try building something neat with them.
When I was in high school, one of the things I built was a small computer.
Nothing fancy, all you need is an empty piece of Veroboard or some other prototyping bits (even Radio Shack has it), a Z80 processor, some RAM chips, and an EPROM programmer.
The part of the class that is good with their hands can assemble the computer and get the hardware done. (A few chips, none with more than 40 pins, it will take them a few classes, but not too long.) The rest of the class can punch in an assembly language program that you can provide on paper (find it on the 'net, or write something quickly), assemble it, then burn it to an EPROM.
From there, you can plop the EPROM into the hardware department's product, turn it on, and either have it work, or not. <grin>
And then there's other stuff...
When I was in high school, I built a small robot arm. It was controlled by my old TI-99/4A, which used to write information to the parallel port. I used the 4 MSB (most significant bits) of the parallel port's 8 bit byte to select a given motor on the arm, and the 4 LSB (least significant bits) selected the operation: Hold, forward one step, backwards one step.
Of course, used in this manner, I could have controlled a lot more motors, but my technology at that time was primitive!
Feedback to the computer on arm position was done by using the keyboard. When the arm reached one limit or another, a switch was triggered, and that switch was in parallel with a key on the keyboard.
All the programming was in TI-BASIC, loaded into the machine from a cassette. I could make the arm do certain movement by "printing" a character to the parallel port. When the arm reached a limit of motion, the TI-BASIC "CALL KEY" instruction, which would test for key presses, detected it. A loop of printing instructions and then checking the values returned by CALL KEY gave it full feedback and allowed the robot arm to pick up objects without crushing tem, move them precisely, put them down, and even return to pick them up from the same place as it put them down.
Of course, there was no practical use to this setup, but it was cheap and easy to build: a few surplus stepper motors from old printers, a power supply, a homebuilt stepper motor controller. The arm itself was a drawer rail (allowing for in and out movement on one axis) with a piece of picture hanging wire on the shaft of a motor to turn the rail in and out. The gripper was made with Mechano and operated on another stepper motor. And there were pivots for the gripper, the base of the arm and the angle of the arm, all built with junk and stepper motors.
It was fun, and it was thoroughly useless. But it was something that my friends liked to play with when they were at my place, so I think a classroom might enjoy it. I wrote routines for it that would put pepper onto dinner, or ketchup onto a hot dog, even put a battery into a radio. Of course, all those things have to be in exactly the positions where the robot thinks they are, before it can manipulate them.
Of course, today, you could use an XT as a controller; you wouldn't need to worry about waiting for cassette-based programs to load.
- We're right across the river from Windsor. - We've got these three kick ass casinos, for those hoping to make REAL money. - Over four times the stray bullets! - Over five times the illegal drugs! - Police? They don't give a shit! - No nasty, invasive body-cavity searches at the border for all the long-hair US hacks. - Camping at techno's place! 100T LAN and 110 to all the tents, 220 available upon request.
- Get to test your SUV under real off-road conditions - Detroit's streets!
- Have your Pentium-100 notebook computer stolen at gunpoint by an unemployed auto worker, get insurance company to buy you a new one.
- Only a quick jaunt down I-94 to Ann Arbor, home of fine academia and even finer dating circuit.
- Linux conference in Detroit would allow an opportunity to get Linux into automotive manufacturing computers, and strategically position the OS to take over the world through creative writing of the kernel in fuel injection computers.
Nah, seriously, I love Detroit. But it's not the place for a Linux conference.
This is going to seem off-topic, but the general tone of the posts thus far has been that Ottawa is a great Linux town. I'm sure it is. But when I moved out of Ottawa in 1996, I hadn't even heard of Linux.
Consider carefully before you move to Ottawa, if you get an offer from an Ottawa-based high-tech firm.
Speaking as an Ottawa refugee who now lives in Toronto, the thing that amazes me is that anyone voluntarily exposes him or herself to the climate.
Sure, the quiet solitude of Bank Street at 2:AM on a Saturday night is a lot nicer than the hustle and bustle of Yonge Street at 4 in the morning, but when it's -50c (well below 0F) on a January morning and your Toyota's engine ain't gonna turn over (let alone start), you'll see what I mean.
I spent my first 22 years in Ottawa and Montreal, both of which are insanely cold. I speak from experience; a Toronto/Detroit/Chicago winter is warm in comparison (the Great Lakes moderate the temperature).
I can fondly remember the winter of 1993. It was my first year living on my own, and I had a nice house in Bells Corners and a job downtown. Bus service is non-existant (OC Transpo really sucks), so if your car doesn't start, you're car-pooling, because those few taxis that did start are all full of people in the same situation. One morning, I woke up and looked out the window, which was solidly iced over from the inside (condensation had frozen to the glass). It was brilliantly sunny out - a sign that everyone who has lived in the subarctic knows to interpret as a message from God or Mother Nature or whoever, saying, it's way too fscking cold to go outside.
As I got dressed, the phone started ringing, and it was a few of my co-workers and neighbors calling me to ask if my car had started.
I went outside to my trusty little winter beater, a 1980 Chevette. Speaking from experience, only three car engines will start reliably in weather than cold, and only if they're very well maintained: a Chevette 1.6L I-4, a Lada (Russian) 2.0L I-4 or a Chrysler Slant-6. Forget your new Acura, even if it's been plugged in, you can't guarantee it'll run. Fuel injection systems have computers to run them, and if you look at the temperature ratings of electronic components, often they won't work when it's that cold.
Not only do they not have EFI (a good thing in this case), most of those older cars are rear-wheel-drive, so that when there's a foot of fresh snow on the ground, you at least know what the car is going to do when you hit the gas. (Fishtail, versus the pseudo-random behavior of a front-wheel-drive car with poor traction.)
It was with trepidation that I threw on my two jackets and stepped outside. Upon inhaling the first breath of that fabulously clear air, the mucous in my nose flash-froze, and I trudged to my car on snow that sounded like styrofoam underfoot. I opened the door, and the light inside the car lit dimly; a bad sign under any other circumstances, but a great sign of life in this case. The car wasn't plugged into a block heater, because my old Chevette had come from a warmer place (northern Massachusetts) where such things aren't needed. Besides, if you know what you're doing and take good care of your carbureted engine, you won't need it.
I sat in the worn vinyl seat and heard the trademark sounds of cracking that vinyl makes when subjected to insanely cold temperatures. Fumbling my key into the ignition (I was shivering), I turned the car on, and cranked it over. Slowly, gently, the engine spun over, and then caught on two cylinders. Pop-wheeze-pop-wheeze. After a few seconds, cylinders three and four joined in: pop-wheeze-wheeze-pop-wheeze-pop-pop-wheeze-pop-po p-pop-pop. After a few more seconds, the engine settled into a normal idle as the combustion chambers started to warm up, and the oil flowing through the motor started to thin out.
I revved her a few times. Since the old Chevette was a stickshift, I had held the clutch to start her up (you don't want the starter motor to be trying to turn a transmission full of lubricant that is as thick as tar when it's tough enough to start the engine!). The dashboard lights and the interior light were bright by this point, so I figured I was okay as I let my foot slowly off the clutch. The engine bogged down, and I thought it was going to stall, so I held the gas up and gently let off the clutch. Within a few moments, the transmission was spinning freely, and the oil inside it was starting to warm up.
I let her idle in neutral for ten minutes, watching the temperature gauge like a hawk (even with 70% antifreeze, at that temperatures, the engine coolant is like Jell-o in the radiator, and oftentimes the engine can't get the coolant flowing through the radiator, so, ironically enough, you overheat. Tempting as it may be, never exceed 70% antifreeze, you need the 30% water or the engine won't cool at all.). The needle came up fine, so I stuck her into reverse to see if I could get out of the driveway.
When I had parked the car the night before, it had been warmer outside, and the tires had been warm from driving. Since then, the tires had frozen into the snow on the driveway. With a popping noise from all four wheels, the car shuddered free from the ice, and rolled out of the driveway.
I was an hour late getting to work that day, but my boss didn't care. His brand new Chevy Blazer didn't start; he was one of the 6 people stuffed into my faithful old Chevette for the long and cold drive to the office.
Think carefully about how rugged you and your car are, before you even remotely consider living in Ottawa. Linux community be damned.
I'm glad Robert Malda went to Hope College and learned the finer aspects of math. Hope College is filled with Christian Nazis that value religion over science. Let's all thank Robert Malda for going to Hope College and learning that math really doesn't count!
I get the sense that the Mighty Commander Taco is otherwise a very intelligent individual. So, I'm sure there was a good reason for the lapse in judgement in the choice of his alma mater.
As with most lapses in judgement, perhaps there was a woman involved?
As Ferdinand Porsche found out during the development of the original Beetle, it only requires 20 horsepower to get a car moving 60 mph (a car with the rolling resistance and aerodynamic profile of the Beetle, which originally shipped with a 36hp engine).
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Will someone please explain to me what it is about Floridians especially that attracts them to shady business models?
I don't get it. But I do know that clearly half of my spam comes from Florida. (40% of it is from the other 49 states, especially southern states; the other 10% is from gross third-world nations.)
Geez, all I thought there was down there was blue-haired little old ladies from Binghamton who weren't strong enough to start the snowblower anymore.
I've got a nice pair of wire cutters. If someone tells me where the fiber is routed, I'll happily take 'em out at their borders.
Windows wasn't built in a day.
And, just like the city usually cited in your analogy, I'm sure all the water fountains at Microsoft are plumbed with lead pipes.
It's only a matter of time.
<grin>
Original quote in bold; content adjusted by BigBlockMopar in plain text.
There are lots of high tech jobs open because Canadians are constantly moving south for better paying, lower taxed opportunity in a land of real freedom
particularly in telecommunications which is important because in January you can't go outside without freezing your testicles off, so you need a good telephone - in fact, the government even subsidizes Northern Telecom to the tune of $100,000,000+ a year
we have a decent health care system as long as you don't get sick, because all the MRI machines are in Buffalo, NY
few homeless, since the cardboard boxes all over Toronto are assessed property taxes
over half the fresh water in the world but it's in glaciers 2 miles thick, above the arctic circle, where intelligent people don't go voluntarily (too damned cold and desolate, I've been there).
damned good immigrant and local food you can have poutine, beaver tails and Chinese snake soup in the same Toronto restaurant. Yummy.
culture and festivals especially Caribana, which has had at least one murder a year for the past 5 years
and are ranked best country to live in for the seventh straight year in a row by the U.N. whose representatives obviously don't consider it a little divisive that you can take the Canadian citizenship test in 27 different languages.
Cape Breton Island has the best fiddle players in the Americas
Wow. That just reminds me how proud I am to be Canadian. Oh, boy. What about Rita McNeil's tea-room in Nova Scotia?
Net loss in doctors every year...health care depends on doctors...you figure it out.
Not to mention that the Canadian government provides thousands of dollars to the education of each and every one of those med students who eventually graduates and flies the coop.
I can't say that I blame them, either. If I were interested in a career as a physician, you can bet your ass that I'd get my schooling in Canada and my career in the United States.
That's called "communism". And while it's the prevailing Canadian attitude, I'll continue to work my ass off to get out of this country.
And while skilled and talented people leave Canada for greener pastures in the United States, Canada's place in the world will continue to decay and decline as did Russia's, and East Germany's, and Poland's, and Czechoslovakia's and...
BTW, speaking as a 26-year-old Canadian, once I'm gone, I'm gone. I'm not going to upset my life and risk everything to move back to a country that has such an inertia toward a Marxist ideal that has been proven impractical if not impossible in country after country.
And one poor person dying on the streets is far too many.I'd call that Darwin's theory at work. In developed counties, the poor are usually that because they're stupid or they consistently make bad decisions (same thing), they're lazy or they're addicted. If you want to get out of poverty badly enough, you can. Oprah Winfrey and Ross Perot are great American examples of this. Anthony Hopkins grew up in abject poverty in a coal-mining town in Wales (United Kingdom). And Jim Carrey grew up in a shack in Scarborough (Toronto, Canada). All of these people proved that poverty can be beaten. Those who don't beat it apparently don't care to. Screw 'em; if they don't want to help themselves, why should I have to?
Canada is so bent on trying to help everyone that I should be able to file a paper somewhere in Ottawa and get a government grant to pay for the costs of the immigration lawyer who will get me into the USA. (In all seriousness, I'm going to call my legal counsel and ask him to look into that for me. Once he's done laughing, if there's a way to do it, I assure you that he will.)
Shed no tears for the Canadian in me on the day that I stand before the judge and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
I agree. Just because a few people were stupid and took corners too fast for a rear-engine car, that's no reason to kill the car.
However, that stupid 90-degree fanbelt arrangement was pretty bad. I've never seen a fanbelt in one of those last longer than 2,500 miles.
<grin>
The following is all absolutely true, especially about the quality of Canadian medical care. The information was relayed concisely and responsibly by an individual who took the time to speak his piece carefully.
I happen to live in Canada, and I happen to agree with him, which is why I question the motivation behind this post having been moderated to "flamebait". It clearly isn't flamebait, though the moderator who did it disagreed with what was said.
When I get moderator access, I don't moderate down stuff I disagree with. I only moderate up or down the posting based on the *quality* of the post, not whether or not I agree with it.
Censoring ideas that don't agree with those of the prevailing forces are sure signs of socialist and communist thinking.
Because it's not how human beings operate. If people would stop being selfish a**holes we wouldn't need capitalism. At least capitalism rewards innovation[sic] and hard work. Socialism breeds laziness, it is a proven fact. Until we grow up, capitalism is the best way for us ALL to make something good out of our lives. I would rather die than be cornered into a way of life by the government.And about Canada's healthcare system: Have you checked out the value of the Canadian dollar yet? Sheesh, it sucks. 15% or more in sales tax?? And they have very poor healthcare because people who want to be doctors want to make money, so the good doctors leave CDA for the US, leaving the hacks to take care of the homeland.
What's wrong with extending that to health care, supporting the needlessly unemployed etc.
Sure.
Even better, let's divide the wealth of the country equally among all of its citizens. That sounds like a great idea, too, doesn't it? Everybody enjoys the fruits of the country's successes.
It's great on paper.
Problem is, it doesn't take into account a pair of fundamental flaws with human nature. People are lazy, and people will take advantage of the system when they can.
The system is called communism. And when you know that you're going to get your 50 rubles a week depending on whether you actually go to work or not, what's the point in going to work?
Similarily, what's the point in saving up in case you find yourself unemployed or (gasp!) fired for never showing up at work on time, if you know the government will take care of you?
The best never see any rewards for their efforts, and consequently won't try as hard. The worst never see any punishment for their uselessness, and therefore never have an incentive to work harder. The net effect is that the country's gross domestic product drops, its international value decays, and the society will fall into recession and poverty.
Look at where Russia is. Look at the mess of the former Soviet countries. Look at the quality of life of the average Chinese person.
Why is this such a difficult concept for people who espouse socialism to understand?
Canada is a socialist country; socialism and communism are kissing cousins. And since Canada embarked on its path to socialism, its economy hasn't grown at the same rate as our big brother to the south. It hasn't prospered. It's full of trade unions jacking up labor rates so that City of Toronto parking attendants make $21/hr, which is more than I make with my substantial computer skills.
I hate living in Canada. Until things change here, Canada will continue to go downhill.
I'm a 26 year old Canadian, and on the wall in my bedroom is an American flag. It's a long story, but it was given to me by the US Ambassador to Canada when Clinton visited Ottawa (Canada's capital) in 1994, and I worked on the visit. But the flag is there, hanging on my wall, reminding me where I want to be, and what it is that I'm working for.
I'm working for freedom from the oppression of high taxes, the stifling regime of a government that rewards those who don't plan ahead.
I work my ass off, not for financial reward and the comfort they will buy me (because in Canada, it's nearly futile, and the rich are generally looked down on). I work my ass off so that I can move to the United States, become and American citizen, and carry the responsibility and rewards of being an American.
Like many skilled young Canadians today, that's my driving goal.
I'm tired of living in a socialist country (Canada), and while I'm not too enthused by either the Democrats or the Republicans, Ralph Nader is not the answer that the USA wants or needs.
I'm a social liberal, but a fiscal conservative. What does that mean? It means that I believe abortions should be legal and obtainable, the government shouldn't have to pay for them. Nor should the HMOs. (Really, 9 times out of 10, an unwanted pregancy could have been avoided through responsible use of birth control.) I believe in freedom of speech, gay and lesbian marriage, racial equality without affirmative action, and labor costs being driven by free market capitalism without the artificial inflation and meddling that unions do.
If I were an American citizen, I'd have no idea who to vote for. On one hand, the Republicans make fiscal sense. On the other hand, they're also fundamentally evil, protected by an impermeable shroud of religious self-righteousness. On one hand, the Democrats believe in the same things I do, but on the other hand, they're also big proponents of labor unions and punishing environmental laws that will screw all businesses and individuals.
Nasty.
Yeah? Well at least us Canadians don't leave our poor out on the street to die because we're too cheap to give them medical attention. Private insurance systems are all fine and dandy for those who can afford them, but that's not everybody.Ahh, but this statement really irks me, speaking as a Canadian. I'll tell you a story that underscores all the flaws with socialized medicine.
It was the day that Princess Diana died. I remember this, because it was on all the TV sets in the hospital waiting room.
I was feeling really shitty, and was able to diagnose my ailment. I had strepped throat, and needed an antibiotic prescription.
Of course, to save OHIP (Ontario's provincial "HMO"), I tried first to go to a walk-in clinic. Of course, it was a Sunday evening, so they were all closed. Feeling bad that I was going to go to a hospital emergency room (it costs the government a lot), I had to do it anyway.
At 9:PM, I arrived, and told the triage nurse that I had strepped throat and that I needed a prescription. I was told to sit down, that a doctor would be with me soon. "Soon", of course, implies a geological time frame, with things there happening about as fast as continental drift.
So, I sat in the waiting room, one of three people there; a little kid with a sprained finger (and his mother, but she didn't count), a guy with a small gash to his face, and me.
At ten o'clock, a homeless guy shuffled in, spoke with the nurse, and then, of course, sat down beside me. There were about fifty seats free, but he had to sit beside me. I love derelicts. They always harass me. I hope they all freeze to death.
The derelict proceeded to try to make small talk with me, and I really wasn't interested in having anything to do with him. He stank. He was gross. And I did find out that he was in there because he had tried to shoot up his heroin with a bent needle. The needle had broken off in his arm. That had been three days ago.
After an unbearable hour of moving from seat to seat and having this guy follow me and keep talking to me, he was called in. Ten o'clock.
I was called in at midnight, into the same examining room as the derelict had been in. His stench was still there. The doctor made me open my mouth, took a look, told me it looked like I had strepped throat (which I had told the triage nurse) and wrote me a prescription for Keflex 150mg (I'd suggested Keflex 200mg). Five minutes in the examining room, preceeded by a three hour wait with unsavory characters.
This, I'd suggest to you, is a good example of why socialized medicine doesn't work. I'd like to think that I'm worth more to Canadian society than a homeless person who shoots up smack with damaged syringes. But apparently, I'm not. I'd like to think that, in a weakened state, I wouldn't have to be harassed by the homeless people this country (and in particular, the City of Toronto) panders to.
I'd like to think that because I work hard and have useful skills, I'd be treated better than those who don't. If working hard doesn't offer me any benefits, why bother doing so?
I don't feel it's right that medical coverage isn't provided as a basic right to all Americans, especially the working poor. But I do feel that as part of my reward for being a contributing member of society, I should also have some sort of priority - better hospitals, better service, freedom from harassment in the waiting rooms.
The Canadian health care system is one extreme; the American health care system is the other. What is needed is a happy medium.
This is *not* going to happen easily.
Not only will you have to retrain thousands of users, but you'll also have to replace all of your applications software and stuff.
Since companies often don't like big expenditures (and the cost of a Windows or Office site license is usually the smallest part of the bill), they're not going to want to do it all at once.
Here's a suggestion to start getting the ball rolling, and it basically details what I'm doing at the company that I work for. Remember, one step at a time, as opportunity permits:
New webserver running Linux, not Windows 2K. This is a good chance to show the boss what Linux is all about.
New mail server running Linux.
New SAMBA fileserver, using a RAID setup, without incurring the massive licensing costs of setting up a Novell box. (Our current Novell box crashes daily; no one seems to know why.)
Lighter-duty users (who basically just use their computers for running a terminal and reading their e-mail) will be offered the choice of running Linux. As these pioneering users get used to Linux, I fully expect water-cooler conversation to turn to the fact that they haven't seen a BSOD in months.
More demanding users will get tired of the existing Windows 95A installations on their machines. As these machines crash out and need hard disk formats and reinstalls, the option of Linux and Corel Office will be presented.
The plan has not yet been established for how to deal with the very demanding users, like our General Manager and our Controller, both of whom are running Office 97 for a lot of the accounting. Since they make very intensive use of spreadsheets and need backwards compatibility with Windows, they may need to remain with Windows, either until the perfection of WINE or of Corel Office.
This becomes a one step at a time method. The overheads of supporting two operating systems in our office won't be all that great. I'm in a small branch office, and I fully expect that there will be less problems overseeing the Linux boxes than I currently have in administering the Windows 95A machines.
The part that really frustrates me about this whole process is that our General Manager likes to get involved with everything. He's the sort of guy who thinks nothing of walking across our carpeted office with a bare stick of RAM in his hand, giving me the added challenge of worrying about weird hardware crashes.
Recently, we got new computers for both him and the controller. The controller trusts me implicitly, and is very knowledgeable about computers. On his new machine, while we're unable for a couple of reasons to run NT 4.0, I was able to format the hard disk drive and do a clean install of Windows 95B, which is, IMHO, the best Windows version.
The General Manager wanted none of that. He didn't want to have to reinstall all his applications. So, he made me give him the computer with no operating system on it. He then used an old, pre-FAT32, version of Partition Magic to copy his existing drive over to the new computer. His machine now runs Windows 95 Upgrade (also no FAT32), which was installed over Windows 3.1 on a 486, and has been mirrored onto bigger and bigger hard disks with every hardware upgrade since then. His 8 gigabyte hard disk is now set up as 8 different 500 meg partitions, for a total of 4 gigabytes.
He complains constantly that his computer is buggy, and thinks nothing of tinkering with it for a day to try to get it stable. Of course, the amusing part is that he could have formatted his hard disk and reinstalled it cleanly in half the time. Of course, he's always short of hard disk space. And his Windows directory is cluttered with DLLs and stuff from applications that were uninstalled several hard disk drives ago.
Anyone got any suggestions on helping this guy see the light? He's my biggest challenge.
Actually, it's got nothing to do with the phase of the AC power.
In a perfect world, all transformers would provide perfect AC isolation between incoming AC power and the output of your computer's power supply. (In fact, this is tested at the factory, that's what the "HI POT" quality controls you sometimes see are for - "HIgh POTential" isolation testing.)
Since the computers should therefore be isolated from the AC line, phase and issues like that are irrelevant. Ethernet, like everything else on your computer, is a pulse train that has been modulated onto the DC voltages that come out of your power supply.
The big issue that you really can't trust, especially between buildings, is that they're grounded the same way. Potential differences can result there, and either blow out the varistors on your ethernet cards and hubs, or can result in nasty shocks.
Instead, you should use fibre between buildings.Absolutely. Ethernet's limitation is merely caused by limitations in the consistency of the electrical power grid; it's not actually a failing of ethernet itself.
This is a good point. If they do a scan at an IP address and none of the priviledged ports are responding (accepting connections or indicating that they're closed), the best you can do is assume that there's no computer there. Right?
How will this have skewed the results?
Hey guys and gals, I thought I should share my thoughts after reading Mr. Moody's column on Linux. Go take another look at his column; when you do, take a look around the site, you can send feedback.
Don't know who at ABC, if anyone, will read it, or what the reaction will be. But voice your opinions! Be concise, clean, amusing, factual and well-formatted, otherwise the editor won't even bother reading it.
Without further ado, here's what I sent to ABC:
Mr. Moody clearly owns Microsoft shares. Or he enjoys products that perform only with mediocrity. I wonder if Mr. Moody drives a Hyundai and praises its virtues similarily to those of Windows.
I'm new to Linux, but I'm not new to UNIX or to computers. In fact, I signed up for my first Internet access in 1988, at the tender age of 14. Back then, it wasn't called the Internet, it was called ARPANET. I've seen a lot of changes, since I've been online longer than Yahoo.
Now, while I don't think I'm ready to praise the virtues of Linux as a desktop environment - I still run Windows 95B OSR2 for that - but I'm pleased to say that I've formatted my server's hard drive and have replaced Windows NT 4.0 with RedHat Linux 6.2.
Sure, the learning curve has been steep. Sure, I've had frustrations. And sure, the operating system completely lacks the polish and refinement of Windows NT. This is primarily why I don't feel it's ready for mass desktop deployment. But, on the other hand, in a server-duty machine, it really shines.
Linux is an operating system by computer geeks and for computer geeks. It is therefore full of technical tools and features that would cost thousands of dollars to buy from Microsoft. It's far more configurable than Windows. It's a UNIX derivative, meaning it's closely related to the most core architecture of the Internet. Being a UNIX family member, it's also a multi-user operating system, with all the related user sercurity features and sophistication that are inherent to a multi-user platform. Compare that to Windows, which is merely a multi-tasking operating system.
And, I'm sorry, but by nature of the fact that it's an open-source operating system, every bug gets detailed, documented and fixed. While a Microsoft user might have to manage a complex set of variables in order to find a given "undocumented feature" of Windows, a fresh pair of eyes looking over a chunk of source code can in minutes reveal errors that might never be spotted in Windows.
None of today's software can or will ever be perfect. Implementation of libraries, millions of lines of source code, dozens of different platforms and operating system variables all can contribute to creating weird behavior. If there are 10,000,000 lines of code and they're 99.995% right, there will still be 50,000 bugs.
Better to have those bugs discovered in advance of exploits and/or lost data. Better to have those bugs addressed by thousands of developers working together in a collaborative manner, bringing together the best of talents in a relaxed setting. Better to be able to have the source code and not rely on Microsoft's small (in comparison) team of developers.
I'm sorry that Mr. Moody feels the way that he does. I'm sorry he couldn't research his article more objectively. And I'm sorry that ABC's editorial staff apparently don't live up to the image of impartial professionalism that I had expected.
I would have expected to see an article like that coming from the people at MSNBC, who brought us mainstream tabloid journalism like Dateline NBC; not from the fine news agency that brings me Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel every night.
Remember, Sony Records is a division of Sony Corporation. Universal Music is a division of Seagrams Distillery. etc.
If you want to completely make the boycott effective, buy a Panasonic DVD player, not a Sony. Buy Gilbey's rum, not Seagram's gin.
Better still, don't bother buying any RIAA CDs anymore. Roll your own. Send royalty checks to the agents of the artists; the agents probably don't like the RIAA either. They can't stop us.
The information technology revolution is happening, and the redcoats will be beaten.
Or, better still, throw out the Japanese-made mass-produced plastic crap, and replace it all with professional or old school steel-chassis American-made stereo equipment.
Carver, McIntosh, ElectroVoice, Klipsche all immediately come to mind...
Hmmm... Okay, CB works in the 27MHz band, which is for public use. While in some jurisdictions you're supposed to have a license for CB, most of the time it's not really policed.
CB is limited to (off the top of my head) 4W TX power for narrow-band FM modulation, 12W TX power for sideband operation. Lots of people (especially truckers, who, sterotypes aside, do like to use them) hop up CB radios, allowing for a longer range.
One way to hop it up is to stay with a 4W/12W TX setup, but to use an antenna that provides more gain. 3dB antenna gain will work in both receive and transmit, and will allow an effective radiated transmitter power of 8W/24W. 6dB antenna gain will be double that again. But, it's perfectly legal, since no more than 4W/12W of energy is being radiated, it's just being "amplified" the same way a gramophone horn works with audio.
The other trick, illegal for sure in both the USA and Canada, is to run a linear amplifier on the CB's output stage. 4W in, 40W out. It's not uncommon to see linear amplifier stages home-built than put out over 1kW of power in the 27MHz band. When it's on a moving vehicle, it becomes pretty hard to triangulate the position of the offending transmitter.
If your stereo was picking up noise in the tuner, it's probably because it's a poor quality tuner (not very selective), you have a poor antenna (tuned more for 27MHz than for broadcast FM) or everything is just misaligned.
If, however, it's coming in through your stereo when you're listening to a CD or something, you're far better off ensuring that all the parts of the stereo are properly grounded through some good, thick copper wire. Make sure that every connector on the thing is clean, since a little dirt or corrosion can make a detector similar to those blued razor blade detectors in foxhole radios built by troops at war (back in WWI and WWII).
I called about this, and got passed around and around, ultimately told that I had to _write_ a certain address in Washington DC and request a certain form....I'd suggest that if you had a radio license yourself and gave them your call sign, they'd have been far more interested, because by the time you have a radiotelephone license, you're usually pretty good at ferretting out a problem.
The FCC probably didn't try too hard because of the same reasons Microsoft charges $xxx/minute for technical support: too many people call asking fairly basic questions, and they eat up a lot of labor.
I just turned my stereo up louder, it did the trick.If the CB radio in the background got drowned out more by the music playing, then the problem was clearly on your end, even if the guy was running a 5kW linear amplifier into a 12dB ERP antenna. The problem was clearly occurring *after* your volume control, and therefore in the audio output stages of your stereo system.
Cheap stereo.
The fact of the matter is that a good stereo should run fine right in the shadow of a TV station or even an AM radio station's 50kW transmitter. You can bet your ass that the local AM radio station, in order to get any sort of coverage and longevity out of his expensive equipment, is running that transmitter at its most efficient and into a well planned and well tuned antenna system. FCC be damned, the station's general manager is going to freak out if he's always paying for new output tubes in the transmitter.
So, buy a good stereo. This is the sort of performance difference that you can get by not buying your stereo at Wal-Mart.
My own stereo system shies away from the cheap-assed unshielded plastic crap of today. Parts of it I built myself. No RFI issues, even though I live within a clear line of sight of both the CN Tower (which was orginally built as a transmitter tower, but also happens to be the world's tallest building, Sears and Petronas towers be damned) and a large cellular/microwave relay tower that bristles with 120MHz range dipoles.
It consists of:
Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers, circa 1971.
Speaker cables, 12 gauge HPN heater cord with 1/4" connectors. (Note that this is not overpriced consumer-grade gold-plated crap like Monster Cables; mine are just solid engineering.)
Sound A-5000 solid-state stereo amplifier, circa 1975, point to point wiring, steel chassis. (Output stages replaced with lower noise, more modern transistors.)
Preamplifier - homebuilt, mounted into steel chassis of A-5000. Uses two 12AT7 twin-triode vacuum tubes, all parts surface-mounted on a home-etched circuit board with a ground plane. Tube filaments are powered by rectified and filtered 6V power, to reduce cathode hum. The entire preamplifier section is housed in an old steel cigar box that just happened to fit, and makes a great shield for the tubes. Why tubes? Yeah, you can do the same thing better with good MOSFETs, but when your B+ is 12V, 1.2V of induced noise is 10% of your signal. With tubes, when your B+ is 120V, the same 1.2V of induced noise is only 1% of your signal.
NAD 3340 CD Player.
RCA patch cables are not used to connect the CD player to the amplifier. The NAD has balanced outputs, and the amplifier has balanced inputs, so I use XLR patch.
No tuner. I use my Sony clock-radio to listen to Howard Stern in the mornings.
Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 ISA - output stages were LM741, replaced them with low-noise version. Now, if only I could somehow get the D/A converter *out* of the computer...
Audio output from the SoundBlaster is, unfortunately, unbalanced. (Besides, there are lots more things that would induce noise into a sound card, not just unbalanced patch.) Good quality (not the gold-plated Radio Shack blister-packed crap) RCA to RCA patch cable to the amplifier.
You don't need to be that extreme to get good sound, though I will admit that MP3s have never sounded so good.
<grin>
Nah. Better off just to port a fuel injection system from something more modern onto your vintage car.
I've got a 1974 Plymouth Valiant Brougham with a Slant-6. I've got most of the EFI system from a 1995 Jeep Cherokee with a 4.0L engine, and I'm well along the path towards getting it running.
The only part that I anticipate real trouble with, is actually recalibrating how the computer reads the mass airflow sensor, since at a given engine speed and throttle position, the slightly smaller Slant-6 won't inhale quite as much air... :)
For troubleshooting, just use a diagnostic cable (available from the dealer) and a notebook computer.
Why build it, when it's already done for you?
No, wait, I'm just asking for something else to break down on my car.Heheheheh... You are, after all, talking about British cars. Probably no matter how badly you kludge any additions together, they'll probably still be more robust and reliable than Lucas Electrics.
Here's a thought, if you're handy, your car troubles you, and originality isn't an issue: Rewire it. It's not that tough.
Figure out how to mount a 1980 or so GM alternator onto your engine. They're great, and the American/Canadian GM alternators have built in regulators. Literally, run the positive lead to the battery, and it works. Run another lead to a lightbulb on the dashboard and you'll know when it doesn't work.
GM also had the best distributors at about that time, and I know that there are mounting kits out there that will let you use the GM HEI system on almost all American engines, as well as many imports (VW Beetle, Volvo, etc). Drop the distributor into the engine, connect the spark plug leads, run a wire from the B pin on the bottom of the distributor cap to the positive terminal on the battery, and it will work. (Add an ignition switch in there somewhere for practicality.)
I'd reserve that little 486 for running the large LED sign that you could build right into the trunklid, across the back of your car, telling people to get off your tail when they get too close. I wonder how it would feel to drill holes for a 16 x 160 LED matrix into my trunk...
<grin>
Sure! That'll work. Until the unmarked white van starts parking in front of your house. A few days later, a couple of nice chaps with government papers and nice trenchcoats will get out, enter your house, and remove the very nice broadband 200W or so radio transmitter than you have.
All a computer does is turn on and off 5V (and 3.3V, and 2.8V) circuits very quickly. All of these circuits are full of stray inductance and stray capacitance (making high speed computers harder to make); the stray inductance and capacitance form wonderful resonant circuits that can spew every weird harmonic of every weird system pulsetrain to every electronic device for miles.
Not good.
Put your computer into a grounded metal case. Don't run your motherboard on a table. Close the computer when you're not adding or removing hardware. And that way, you won't be spewing RF noise.
To build a clear case, you have to make a faraday cage around the computer. The easiest way is to do it using a steel case, but since you want it to be clear, I suggest that you look into lining it with grounded aluminum window screen. Notice that when you look at other clear-cased computer stuff like iMacs, the motherboard is obscured by all the sheetmetal RF shields.
Grounding a clear computer, from an AC power safety and electrostatics standpoint is a piece of cake. But to ground it to the point where it would pass an FCC class-B RF certification is going to be a nightmare.
In a domestic situation, isn't the "frowing" more a feature of the way the consumption meter works?
Yeah... In this situation, the symptom is more likely localized heating of stuff you're not expected to be getting warm, rather than a symptom at the electric bill...
<grin> If the VGA connector to your monitor is getting hot, you've either overclocked your video card way too far, or you've got a grounding issue.
But, seriously, make sure that your entire computer is plugged into the same outlet (circuit). That means computer, monitor, printer, sound system, etc. All of those things are connected by computer cables that have big grounds on them. If you're in an old house or one that's improperly wired, the ground on one end of a serial cable may be at a different potential than that of the other end!
Twisted pair ethernet is designed to handle a potential difference, seeing as how in its designed implementation, it often runs from one end of an office to another, etc. But I'd trust coax ethernet less: I've been zapped a time or two, touching the BNC connector and the chassis of a computer at the same time.
Remember, if any two grounded devices are on different circuits and the building (or extension cords, or power bars, or UPSs) are wired wrong, touching both of them at the same time could be fatal.
If you have any measure of electronics skills and a good crop of kids in the classroom (which they probably are, if they're bored), try building something neat with them.
When I was in high school, one of the things I built was a small computer.
Nothing fancy, all you need is an empty piece of Veroboard or some other prototyping bits (even Radio Shack has it), a Z80 processor, some RAM chips, and an EPROM programmer.
The part of the class that is good with their hands can assemble the computer and get the hardware done. (A few chips, none with more than 40 pins, it will take them a few classes, but not too long.) The rest of the class can punch in an assembly language program that you can provide on paper (find it on the 'net, or write something quickly), assemble it, then burn it to an EPROM.
From there, you can plop the EPROM into the hardware department's product, turn it on, and either have it work, or not. <grin>
And then there's other stuff...
When I was in high school, I built a small robot arm. It was controlled by my old TI-99/4A, which used to write information to the parallel port. I used the 4 MSB (most significant bits) of the parallel port's 8 bit byte to select a given motor on the arm, and the 4 LSB (least significant bits) selected the operation: Hold, forward one step, backwards one step.
Of course, used in this manner, I could have controlled a lot more motors, but my technology at that time was primitive!
Feedback to the computer on arm position was done by using the keyboard. When the arm reached one limit or another, a switch was triggered, and that switch was in parallel with a key on the keyboard.
All the programming was in TI-BASIC, loaded into the machine from a cassette. I could make the arm do certain movement by "printing" a character to the parallel port. When the arm reached a limit of motion, the TI-BASIC "CALL KEY" instruction, which would test for key presses, detected it. A loop of printing instructions and then checking the values returned by CALL KEY gave it full feedback and allowed the robot arm to pick up objects without crushing tem, move them precisely, put them down, and even return to pick them up from the same place as it put them down.
Of course, there was no practical use to this setup, but it was cheap and easy to build: a few surplus stepper motors from old printers, a power supply, a homebuilt stepper motor controller. The arm itself was a drawer rail (allowing for in and out movement on one axis) with a piece of picture hanging wire on the shaft of a motor to turn the rail in and out. The gripper was made with Mechano and operated on another stepper motor. And there were pivots for the gripper, the base of the arm and the angle of the arm, all built with junk and stepper motors.
It was fun, and it was thoroughly useless. But it was something that my friends liked to play with when they were at my place, so I think a classroom might enjoy it. I wrote routines for it that would put pepper onto dinner, or ketchup onto a hot dog, even put a battery into a radio. Of course, all those things have to be in exactly the positions where the robot thinks they are, before it can manipulate them.
Of course, today, you could use an XT as a controller; you wouldn't need to worry about waiting for cassette-based programs to load.
Benefits of Detroit over Windsor:
- We're right across the river from Windsor.
- We've got these three kick ass casinos, for those hoping to make REAL money.
- Over four times the stray bullets!
- Over five times the illegal drugs!
- Police? They don't give a shit!
- No nasty, invasive body-cavity searches at the border for all the long-hair US hacks.
- Camping at techno's place! 100T LAN and 110 to all the tents, 220 available upon request.
- Get to test your SUV under real off-road conditions - Detroit's streets!
- Have your Pentium-100 notebook computer stolen at gunpoint by an unemployed auto worker, get insurance company to buy you a new one.
- Only a quick jaunt down I-94 to Ann Arbor, home of fine academia and even finer dating circuit.
- Linux conference in Detroit would allow an opportunity to get Linux into automotive manufacturing computers, and strategically position the OS to take over the world through creative writing of the kernel in fuel injection computers.
Nah, seriously, I love Detroit. But it's not the place for a Linux conference.
This is going to seem off-topic, but the general tone of the posts thus far has been that Ottawa is a great Linux town. I'm sure it is. But when I moved out of Ottawa in 1996, I hadn't even heard of Linux.
Consider carefully before you move to Ottawa, if you get an offer from an Ottawa-based high-tech firm.
Speaking as an Ottawa refugee who now lives in Toronto, the thing that amazes me is that anyone voluntarily exposes him or herself to the climate.
Sure, the quiet solitude of Bank Street at 2:AM on a Saturday night is a lot nicer than the hustle and bustle of Yonge Street at 4 in the morning, but when it's -50c (well below 0F) on a January morning and your Toyota's engine ain't gonna turn over (let alone start), you'll see what I mean.
I spent my first 22 years in Ottawa and Montreal, both of which are insanely cold. I speak from experience; a Toronto/Detroit/Chicago winter is warm in comparison (the Great Lakes moderate the temperature).
I can fondly remember the winter of 1993. It was my first year living on my own, and I had a nice house in Bells Corners and a job downtown. Bus service is non-existant (OC Transpo really sucks), so if your car doesn't start, you're car-pooling, because those few taxis that did start are all full of people in the same situation. One morning, I woke up and looked out the window, which was solidly iced over from the inside (condensation had frozen to the glass). It was brilliantly sunny out - a sign that everyone who has lived in the subarctic knows to interpret as a message from God or Mother Nature or whoever, saying, it's way too fscking cold to go outside.
As I got dressed, the phone started ringing, and it was a few of my co-workers and neighbors calling me to ask if my car had started.
I went outside to my trusty little winter beater, a 1980 Chevette. Speaking from experience, only three car engines will start reliably in weather than cold, and only if they're very well maintained: a Chevette 1.6L I-4, a Lada (Russian) 2.0L I-4 or a Chrysler Slant-6. Forget your new Acura, even if it's been plugged in, you can't guarantee it'll run. Fuel injection systems have computers to run them, and if you look at the temperature ratings of electronic components, often they won't work when it's that cold.
Not only do they not have EFI (a good thing in this case), most of those older cars are rear-wheel-drive, so that when there's a foot of fresh snow on the ground, you at least know what the car is going to do when you hit the gas. (Fishtail, versus the pseudo-random behavior of a front-wheel-drive car with poor traction.)
It was with trepidation that I threw on my two jackets and stepped outside. Upon inhaling the first breath of that fabulously clear air, the mucous in my nose flash-froze, and I trudged to my car on snow that sounded like styrofoam underfoot. I opened the door, and the light inside the car lit dimly; a bad sign under any other circumstances, but a great sign of life in this case. The car wasn't plugged into a block heater, because my old Chevette had come from a warmer place (northern Massachusetts) where such things aren't needed. Besides, if you know what you're doing and take good care of your carbureted engine, you won't need it.
I sat in the worn vinyl seat and heard the trademark sounds of cracking that vinyl makes when subjected to insanely cold temperatures. Fumbling my key into the ignition (I was shivering), I turned the car on, and cranked it over. Slowly, gently, the engine spun over, and then caught on two cylinders. Pop-wheeze-pop-wheeze. After a few seconds, cylinders three and four joined in: pop-wheeze-wheeze-pop-wheeze-pop-pop-wheeze-pop-po p-pop-pop. After a few more seconds, the engine settled into a normal idle as the combustion chambers started to warm up, and the oil flowing through the motor started to thin out.
I revved her a few times. Since the old Chevette was a stickshift, I had held the clutch to start her up (you don't want the starter motor to be trying to turn a transmission full of lubricant that is as thick as tar when it's tough enough to start the engine!). The dashboard lights and the interior light were bright by this point, so I figured I was okay as I let my foot slowly off the clutch. The engine bogged down, and I thought it was going to stall, so I held the gas up and gently let off the clutch. Within a few moments, the transmission was spinning freely, and the oil inside it was starting to warm up.
I let her idle in neutral for ten minutes, watching the temperature gauge like a hawk (even with 70% antifreeze, at that temperatures, the engine coolant is like Jell-o in the radiator, and oftentimes the engine can't get the coolant flowing through the radiator, so, ironically enough, you overheat. Tempting as it may be, never exceed 70% antifreeze, you need the 30% water or the engine won't cool at all.). The needle came up fine, so I stuck her into reverse to see if I could get out of the driveway.
When I had parked the car the night before, it had been warmer outside, and the tires had been warm from driving. Since then, the tires had frozen into the snow on the driveway. With a popping noise from all four wheels, the car shuddered free from the ice, and rolled out of the driveway.
I was an hour late getting to work that day, but my boss didn't care. His brand new Chevy Blazer didn't start; he was one of the 6 people stuffed into my faithful old Chevette for the long and cold drive to the office.
Think carefully about how rugged you and your car are, before you even remotely consider living in Ottawa. Linux community be damned.
I get the sense that the Mighty Commander Taco is otherwise a very intelligent individual. So, I'm sure there was a good reason for the lapse in judgement in the choice of his alma mater.
As with most lapses in judgement, perhaps there was a woman involved?
As Ferdinand Porsche found out during the development of the original Beetle, it only requires 20 horsepower to get a car moving 60 mph (a car with the rolling resistance and aerodynamic profile of the Beetle, which originally shipped with a 36hp engine).
Why bother, when you can build an electric car that gets 4 miles per gallon?
Think about it. Then click the damned link.
<grin>