I made a wallet-sized PDP-11 (see photo) using these tools.
I put the simh PDP-11 emulator and unix_v7_rl.dsk along with the following script onto a CF card formatted as a DOS FAT partition.
set cpu 18b set rl0 RL02 att rl0 unix_v7_rl.dsk boot rl0 #boot #rl(0,0)rl2unix
You have to type those last two lines manually to the PDP-11's boot prompt.
I'm ready to roll with a PDP-11 in my wallet (or, if you include the $9.95 CF-USB (Linux driver) card, in my Penguin Mints container, which matches the black and yellow 48MB Lexar card I got on sale at Fry's for $19.95).
Total cost for a PDP-11 running Unix: $29.90, mints not included.
BTW, the default V7 "root" password is "root" (I ran John the Ripper and it took 0.00002 seconds).
Paper User Interfaces for Paper Documents
I've been working on a product for a few years that uses paper as a user interface, kind of a follow-on to the graphical user interface. I used to joke with friends that I was working on an 8.5x11 inch 400 dpi gray-scale display that costs 2.5 cents.
Document Tokens -- making paper a first class citizen on the network
You scan your documents, and they get stored in a document repository on the network (using WebDAV over HTTP or some other protocol), and it prints out a piece of paper that refers to the electronic document on the network, kind of a like a paper document or a paper URL. I named it a "Document Token". You drop it in your copier, for example, press the big green button, and it automatically recognizes it, retrieves the original, and prints it back. Or if you asked it to e-mail the scanned document instead, it will e-mail the document as an attachment or just a hyperlink.
Cover Sheets as Forms
Another thing you can do is print out a cover sheet with checkboxes on it and some document meta-data built in, so you can drop the cover sheet for your "Legal Contracts" on top of the latest contract you got, check the box for the account you're dealing with, and press the start button. It will scan, store based on the directions embedded in the paper, and associate the document meta-data with the paper.
Situated Meta-Data Capture
One of the most expensive things about scanning is associating the meta-data with the document after scanning. When you have the paper in hand, you know what the document is and where it came from. The file folder or desktop location is right there in front of you, and the physical presence of the document triggers certain kinds of memory as well. In ethnographic terms, the document is what Lucy Suchman calls situated When you try to add meta-data to a document after scanning, you (or worse, someone hired to look at it for you) is staring at a set of bits on a computer screen, completely divorced from its context, and it's expensive to discover where it came from and what it means. If you can associate this information with the paper document when it's in the paper domain, by marking it down on a paper user interface, then you save lots of time and money.
W3C Standardization
For the web to become a truly ubiquitous computing interface, it must move beyond the desktop. We're working with the W3C to standardize an XML representation of forms such that the same form purpose can be expressed in different media -- desktop, pda, mobile phone, and even paper. Take a look at the XFormslast-call specification.
Could this extra European CD be where there perl module RPMs that were present in the 7.1 DMA developer disk are? Or does RedHat just not make them anymore? It's sure a lot more convenient to be able to install perl modules with the same dependency tracking as in the rest of the system...
I built my own remote controlled analog meter using an AC voltmeter from Radio Shack, and an X10 dimmer from X10.com (no link needed -- I'm' sure you already have a window open there anyway).
You can control it remotely from a command-line program and use it to display your web server load, ebay price, whatever. (Hey, it could be a Web Service or maybe even a Gnome widget!)
See pictures and instructions at http://graflex.org/klotz/meter
I've been using Jeff's rioserve for a month or so and have sent him some updates. You might want to check back for these (and probably other people's) updates.
Configuration is now in config.pl, not spread into multiple files.
The home page now lets you list bu title, artist, album, or genre, not just by title
There is now an 'edit' page which is what you get taken to by default when you click on a song.
4. You can edit any of the fields and it updates both the database and the MP3 file itself, if you have write permission and mp3info executable installed (I used mp3info-0.8.4-2)
Instructions now include specific step-by-step directions for Apache, NFS, DHCP, and SSDP configuration.
Literally "otaku" is "[your] house". It's a personal pronoun meaning "you," but quite formal, cold, and distant (see note). People who use "otaku" to mean "you" outside its normal usage pattern (essentially certain types of sales situations) are socially challenged individuals who have difficulty connecting with others. Since this social trait frequently coincides with an intense interest in something other than people (like anime or trainspotting), it's a hallmark of nerdiness, and so "otaku" has come to be the name for such people.
Note: This shift in meaning from noun (house) to pronoun (you) to noun (nerd) is not unusual in Japanese pronouns. There are about 80 well-known ways of saying "I", about a dozen in common use, and countless more in literary/historical use.
Let's consider a case in point: young boys refer t themselves as "boku," which originally meant something like "manservent." Since people often refer themselves and others by their roles, "boku" would indeed once have been a word for onesself, in certain circumstances. At some point in the past hundred years or so, it shifted from roughly "squire" to to a general word for the squire-like self, i.e., a young bou. Interestingly enough, the word "boku" can also mean "you," when used by someone else to address a boy; for example, his mother may call him that. (In English, we have the opposite -- parents call themselves what the children call them.)
Another example is "kimi," which originally something like "prince" (I think), but is now a warm and close "you" for certain social standings, perhaps like the French "tu" but with more restrictions on social use, age of participants, etc.
A related word for you is "kisama." But don't use it! Even though the "sama" suffix is an honorifi (a step more monorific than the well-known "san") using the resulting "kisama" to an individual is an invitation to a fistfight.
Japanese is a fascinating language, and has had hundreds of years to evolve nuances of meaning and usage in pronouns, nouns, and verbs expression relationships between people.
The article summarizes their position on technology:
As is typical of the Amish, when a new technology comes along, the Amish examine its effect on the church and community. The technology should not be an intrusion into the home, but rather serve the social purposes and goals of the group. In a sense, the Amish "re-organize" the technology.
Actually, no. I worked at the MIT AI lab during this period, and was in charge of EMACS on the PDP-10 series (for ITS and TOPS-20) after RMS moved on to start the GNU project.
TECO was developed for the PDP series. The PDP-6 and 10 were the systems that ran ITS. EMACS was a package of TECO macros; there were others, RMACS and TMACS for example. RMS and others maintained EMACS, and it became the lead, and eventually it took on a life of its own.
After RMS stopped working on PDP-10 software and was fully engaged on the GNU project, I was in charge of PDP-10 EMACS. There were a variety of other EMACS clones on Unix, small and large, but they all had various extensibility problems (i.e., had to be recompiled) or licensing problems (i.e., you had to buy them). RMS started with one or the other of them and fixed both the licensing and extensibility problems, and everybody knows it all from that point.
RMS did not write TECO, and EMACS was not first on Unix.
The ITS operating system (the world's second timesharing system, and the system for which RMS and others first developed EMACS) had a concept of state checkpoints in OS calls, called PCLSRing.
Alan Bawden wrote a paper on it, and it's quite a good read. His web site has a compressed.gz version, but I found an HTML version of the HTML PCLSR Paper and I quote from its abstract here:
Under any timesharing operating system there will be occasions when a process must access the state of another process. A process may need to start, stop, debug, load, dump, create, or destroy another process. There is also one occasion when a process must access its own state: an interrupt handler needs access to the state of the running process prior to the arrival of the interrupt, so that the process may continue after the interrupt has been dealt with.
"PCLSRing" is a mechanism the ITS operating system uses to enforce a kind of modularity when a process must access the state of another process. The modularity principle is very simple: no process ever catches another process (including itself) in the act of executing a system call. System calls thus behave as if they were directly implemented in hardware. A process can no more catch another process in the middle of deleting a file than it can catch another process in the middle of a multiply instruction.
There was also a way to put the system into a PCLSR test mode that exercised all these control points within the system calls, to help debug them. See
SYSDOC TEST documentation extracted from the now decomissioned AI PDP-10 that originally served it up as ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/alan/its/sysdoc.tgz (yes, ITS was on the Arpanet and the Internet and ran TCP/IP as well).
I live on a dead-end court too. Two of my neighbors have open 802.11 networks. If I didn't need a static IP address I'd consider dropping my DSL and using theirs; with connection bonding I'd get faster downloads than either of them;-)
A DSL line in most places in the US is about $40/mo. An 802.11b hub with NAT under $200 fixed cost. A cafe or restaurant needs almost no help to do this -- just buy the line, pay the $40/mo, and reboot the access point if something goes awry.
At $40/mo total cost, they don't need to bill their customers for this.
If they don't charge their customers, then why does there need to be billing for this? And if there's no billing, there's no need for accounts.
And if there's no need for billing or accounts, there's no need for infrastructure.
Ergo, Boingo is a parasitic organization trying to figure out a way to charge for a problem it is creating.
When I was growing up my parents had a Spartacus Backwards Clock, a popular item from the 1950's, I guess. Unfortunately for me, though, I am now completely broken about clockwise and counter-clockwise. I have gotten to where I can now figure it out, but it is definitely a cognitive task, not an immediate perception as it is with normal people.
A friend reports a similar confusion with orange and purple, but it was purposefully engendered by her many cooperating (all older) siblings...
The standard pegasus.o claims to support 1 Mb/s pegasus-based Home PNA. This is the same driver used for the 10/100 Pegasus chipset used by SMC and other brands of USB Ethernet adapters, a lifesaver for the I-Opener, etc.
The driver author's home page is http://www.dce.bg/~petkan/ if you want up-to-the-minute information; otherwise, just look in your kernel source for pegasus.
By the way, Home PNA was the brainchild of Bob Frankston, one of the inventors of spreadsheets (VisiCalc).
I agree -- 64C sounds too high. Here is a good article on the subject from Via Hardware.
I recommend the following three steps to cool it down:
Run H.ODA's WPCREDIT/WCPRSET and set the ACPI HALT cooling on, if your processor is running at under 1.33 GHz or if you're not running Win2K. This will keep your idle temperature down. See the end of the VIA Hardware article for the admonition about CPU speed and Win2K stability.
Use Arctic Silver II thermal paste. I bought some at Fry's and it's pretty cheap. It brought the temperature down 2-3C under load.
Try the NoiseControl Silverado fan, if it fits in your face. North Americans no longer have to buy it from Germany, as Plycon sells it in the US now.
I have a 1.2GHz Athlon which I run at about 1.35GHz by upping the FSB. My IWill KK266 board claims that it idles at 26C, and it gets up around 41C during heavy use, and 49C in a tight loop.
I have a shutoff at 50C, which it last reached when Outlook went into a tight loop overnight. I ran a program called MBM to check on it, and it recommended a program called Shutdown Now to shut down and power off in case of alarm. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that Shutdown Now was nagware, and my system was up all night at 50C, sending me pages every 5 minutes. When I got to work in the morning, there was a pop-up dialog saying to please send in $15 to them before it would shut off my computer. Talk about lame! It would have been fine to nag a boot time, not not at shutdown time! I'm just glad the program didn't fry my CPU. Anyway, I replaced it with the NT Resource Kit program called shutdown.exe that took a little bit of mousing around to get into MBM's configuration, but no way was I going to give money to the guy who almost fried my computer.
I am shocked, shocked to discover that a fundamental computer architecture explored in the 1950's, rejected as unworkable, and forgotten is in fact unworkable.
The feeling that this induces has no word in English, but in Japanese it's called yappari.
Bandwidth is cheap. Installs are expensive. If you're doing the installation yourself for you and your neighbors, and you're willing to pay the provider more per month for TOS that gives you more bandwidth and the right to use it among multiple computers, then you are actually helping the DSL industry by helping it solve its last-mile problem. The ISP can always adjust their bandwidth prices for supply and demand.
If you're hurting anyone, it's the phone company who would bumble the installation anyway until you give up on the competitive ISP and just sign up with them anyway.
...this device here is the Turtle Beach Audiotron. What this device is, and this is a Windows CE based device, that lives in your audio stereo component.
hfnetchk is a command-line utility. HotFix Reporter is a freeware program that parses its output and produces an HTML page with brief descriptions, links to the MS site for download, etc.
Instructions:
Download and install Hotfix Reporter. It seems not to create a program group by default, so you have to type one in.
Get the Microsoft HotFix checker program from the URL that it tells you to go to.
Install the Microsoft cmd-tool in the same directory as the Hotfix Reporter. Note that it appears to be a self-extracting archive, so it installs itself where you run it.
Run the HotFix reporter from the Start button.
Some of the fixes have no installed-p test, so they show up every time.
Make a separate note of the uninstallation instructions, as they are hard (impossible) to find afterwards, and if you get unusual behaviors (as I did), you may regret not being able to uninstall the various fixes to test.
It cools my 1.2Ghz Athlon running at 1.35GHz just fine, and I can't hear it at all over the Antec case fans (which are quiet as well).
Price is an issue though -- it was $88 shipped to the US from Germany, but it arrived quickly.
It's 80mmx56mm, but it's 133mm tall because it uses twin squirrel-cage fans, so it's certainly not going to fit in a rack-mount, but it fits in a tower just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I made a wallet-sized PDP-11 (see photo) using these tools.
I put the simh PDP-11 emulator and unix_v7_rl.dsk along with the following script onto a CF card formatted as a DOS FAT partition.
You have to type those last two lines manually to the PDP-11's boot prompt.
I'm ready to roll with a PDP-11 in my wallet (or, if you include the $9.95 CF-USB (Linux driver) card, in my Penguin Mints container, which matches the black and yellow 48MB Lexar card I got on sale at Fry's for $19.95).
Total cost for a PDP-11 running Unix: $29.90, mints not included.
BTW, the default V7 "root" password is "root" (I ran John the Ripper and it took 0.00002 seconds).
Paper User Interfaces for Paper Documents
I've been working on a product for a few years that uses paper as a user interface , kind of a follow-on to the graphical user interface. I used to joke with friends that I was working on an 8.5x11 inch 400 dpi gray-scale display that costs 2.5 cents.
Document Tokens -- making paper a first class citizen on the network
You scan your documents, and they get stored in a document repository on the network (using WebDAV over HTTP or some other protocol), and it prints out a piece of paper that refers to the electronic document on the network, kind of a like a paper document or a paper URL. I named it a "Document Token". You drop it in your copier, for example, press the big green button, and it automatically recognizes it, retrieves the original, and prints it back. Or if you asked it to e-mail the scanned document instead, it will e-mail the document as an attachment or just a hyperlink.
Cover Sheets as Forms
Another thing you can do is print out a cover sheet with checkboxes on it and some document meta-data built in, so you can drop the cover sheet for your "Legal Contracts" on top of the latest contract you got, check the box for the account you're dealing with, and press the start button. It will scan, store based on the directions embedded in the paper, and associate the document meta-data with the paper.
Situated Meta-Data Capture
One of the most expensive things about scanning is associating the meta-data with the document after scanning. When you have the paper in hand, you know what the document is and where it came from. The file folder or desktop location is right there in front of you, and the physical presence of the document triggers certain kinds of memory as well. In ethnographic terms, the document is what Lucy Suchman calls situated When you try to add meta-data to a document after scanning, you (or worse, someone hired to look at it for you) is staring at a set of bits on a computer screen, completely divorced from its context, and it's expensive to discover where it came from and what it means. If you can associate this information with the paper document when it's in the paper domain, by marking it down on a paper user interface, then you save lots of time and money.
W3C Standardization
For the web to become a truly ubiquitous computing interface, it must move beyond the desktop. We're working with the W3C to standardize an XML representation of forms such that the same form purpose can be expressed in different media -- desktop, pda, mobile phone, and even paper. Take a look at the XForms last-call specification.
Product
The product is called FlowPort
There are some proposals in thee XML and Web Services arena for dealing with some of the problems tha yEnc is skirting.
One, called DIME, is a MIME-like system that handles binary content, chunks, etc.
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/dime.html
Could this extra European CD be where there perl module RPMs that were present in the 7.1 DMA developer disk are? Or does RedHat just not make them anymore? It's sure a lot more convenient to be able to install perl modules with the same dependency tracking as in the rest of the system...
I built my own remote controlled analog meter using an AC voltmeter from Radio Shack, and an X10 dimmer from X10.com (no link needed -- I'm' sure you already have a window open there anyway).
You can control it remotely from a command-line program and use it to display your web server load, ebay price, whatever. (Hey, it could be a Web Service or maybe even a Gnome widget!)
See pictures and instructions at http://graflex.org/klotz/meter
http://www.casedge.com/html/nlx_slim_desktop_mx213 n.html
Literally "otaku" is "[your] house". It's a personal pronoun meaning "you," but quite formal, cold, and distant (see note). People who use "otaku" to mean "you" outside its normal usage pattern (essentially certain types of sales situations) are socially challenged individuals who have difficulty connecting with others. Since this social trait frequently coincides with an intense interest in something other than people (like anime or trainspotting), it's a hallmark of nerdiness, and so "otaku" has come to be the name for such people.
Note: This shift in meaning from noun (house) to pronoun (you) to noun (nerd) is not unusual in Japanese pronouns. There are about 80 well-known ways of saying "I", about a dozen in common use, and countless more in literary/historical use.
Let's consider a case in point: young boys refer t themselves as "boku," which originally meant something like "manservent." Since people often refer themselves and others by their roles, "boku" would indeed once have been a word for onesself, in certain circumstances. At some point in the past hundred years or so, it shifted from roughly "squire" to to a general word for the squire-like self, i.e., a young bou. Interestingly enough, the word "boku" can also mean "you," when used by someone else to address a boy; for example, his mother may call him that. (In English, we have the opposite -- parents call themselves what the children call them.)
Another example is "kimi," which originally something like "prince" (I think), but is now a warm and close "you" for certain social standings, perhaps like the French "tu" but with more restrictions on social use, age of participants, etc.
A related word for you is "kisama." But don't use it! Even though the "sama" suffix is an honorifi (a step more monorific than the well-known "san") using the resulting "kisama" to an individual is an invitation to a fistfight.
Japanese is a fascinating language, and has had hundreds of years to evolve nuances of meaning and usage in pronouns, nouns, and verbs expression relationships between people.
As a friend asked me recently, I wonder how many applications could cope with someone named "//SYSIN DD *"
The Toshiba 1.8-inch 10GB drives are 5mm thick, and available in 10mm 20GB. The 5GB drive in the iPod is the earlier generation of them, I think.
According to Amish News, the Amish do not shy away from technology, and in fact even use cell phones
The article summarizes their position on technology:
Actually, no. I worked at the MIT AI lab during this period, and was in charge of EMACS on the PDP-10 series (for ITS and TOPS-20) after RMS moved on to start the GNU project.
TECO was developed for the PDP series. The PDP-6 and 10 were the systems that ran ITS. EMACS was a package of TECO macros; there were others, RMACS and TMACS for example. RMS and others maintained EMACS, and it became the lead, and eventually it took on a life of its own.
After RMS stopped working on PDP-10 software and was fully engaged on the GNU project, I was in charge of PDP-10 EMACS. There were a variety of other EMACS clones on Unix, small and large, but they all had various extensibility problems (i.e., had to be recompiled) or licensing problems (i.e., you had to buy them). RMS started with one or the other of them and fixed both the licensing and extensibility problems, and everybody knows it all from that point.
RMS did not write TECO, and EMACS was not first on Unix.
If you don't want remote logging, try a PCMCIA hard disk. Softwareandstuff.com has 170MB drives for $25 -- I bought two.
Alan Bawden wrote a paper on it, and it's quite a good read. His web site has a compressed .gz version, but I found an HTML version of the HTML PCLSR Paper and I quote from its abstract here:
There was also a way to put the system into a PCLSR test mode that exercised all these control points within the system calls, to help debug them. See SYSDOC TEST documentation extracted from the now decomissioned AI PDP-10 that originally served it up as ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/alan/its/sysdoc.tgz (yes, ITS was on the Arpanet and the Internet and ran TCP/IP as well).
I live on a dead-end court too. Two of my neighbors have open 802.11 networks. If I didn't need a static IP address I'd consider dropping my DSL and using theirs; with connection bonding I'd get faster downloads than either of them ;-)
A DSL line in most places in the US is about $40/mo. An 802.11b hub with NAT under $200 fixed cost. A cafe or restaurant needs almost no help to do this -- just buy the line, pay the $40/mo, and reboot the access point if something goes awry.
At $40/mo total cost, they don't need to bill their customers for this.
If they don't charge their customers, then why does there need to be billing for this? And if there's no billing, there's no need for accounts.
And if there's no need for billing or accounts, there's no need for infrastructure.
Ergo, Boingo is a parasitic organization trying to figure out a way to charge for a problem it is creating.
When I was growing up my parents had a Spartacus Backwards Clock, a popular item from the 1950's, I guess. Unfortunately for me, though, I am now completely broken about clockwise and counter-clockwise. I have gotten to where I can now figure it out, but it is definitely a cognitive task, not an immediate perception as it is with normal people.
A friend reports a similar confusion with orange and purple, but it was purposefully engendered by her many cooperating (all older) siblings...
Here in Palo Alto I saw 10, all but two in pairs, seconds apart, in 10 minutes. All I could see were bright ones, mostly with green trails.
The standard pegasus.o claims to support 1 Mb/s pegasus-based Home PNA. This is the same driver used for the 10/100 Pegasus chipset used by SMC and other brands of USB Ethernet adapters, a lifesaver for the I-Opener, etc.
The driver author's home page is http://www.dce.bg/~petkan/ if you want up-to-the-minute information; otherwise, just look in your kernel source for pegasus.
By the way, Home PNA was the brainchild of Bob Frankston, one of the inventors of spreadsheets (VisiCalc).
I agree -- 64C sounds too high. Here is a good article on the subject from Via Hardware.
I recommend the following three steps to cool it down:
I have a 1.2GHz Athlon which I run at about 1.35GHz by upping the FSB. My IWill KK266 board claims that it idles at 26C, and it gets up around 41C during heavy use, and 49C in a tight loop.
I have a shutoff at 50C, which it last reached when Outlook went into a tight loop overnight. I ran a program called MBM to check on it, and it recommended a program called Shutdown Now to shut down and power off in case of alarm. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that Shutdown Now was nagware, and my system was up all night at 50C, sending me pages every 5 minutes. When I got to work in the morning, there was a pop-up dialog saying to please send in $15 to them before it would shut off my computer. Talk about lame! It would have been fine to nag a boot time, not not at shutdown time! I'm just glad the program didn't fry my CPU. Anyway, I replaced it with the NT Resource Kit program called shutdown.exe that took a little bit of mousing around to get into MBM's configuration, but no way was I going to give money to the guy who almost fried my computer.
I am shocked, shocked to discover that a fundamental computer architecture explored in the 1950's, rejected as unworkable, and forgotten is in fact unworkable.
The feeling that this induces has no word in English, but in Japanese it's called yappari.
Bandwidth is cheap. Installs are expensive. If you're doing the installation yourself for you and your neighbors, and you're willing to pay the provider more per month for TOS that gives you more bandwidth and the right to use it among multiple computers, then you are actually helping the DSL industry by helping it solve its last-mile problem. The ISP can always adjust their bandwidth prices for supply and demand.
If you're hurting anyone, it's the phone company who would bumble the installation anyway until you give up on the competitive ISP and just sign up with them anyway.
Instructions:
I use a Noisecontrol Silverado. It's really quiet and was the winner in a Tom's Hardware roundup, and the quietest at 38db.
It cools my 1.2Ghz Athlon running at 1.35GHz just fine, and I can't hear it at all over the Antec case fans (which are quiet as well).
Price is an issue though -- it was $88 shipped to the US from Germany, but it arrived quickly.
It's 80mmx56mm, but it's 133mm tall because it uses twin squirrel-cage fans, so it's certainly not going to fit in a rack-mount, but it fits in a tower just fine.