I'm not sure about the events leading up to the failure of the BD-10 project, only that Jim Bede sold the manufacturing rights to a company that cratered, either financially or literally. GIven that I can't find any record of a BD-10 flying in the last 5 years, the smoking hole theory may be true. Bummer.
I'm still jonesin' something fierce for a chance to start my Long EZ. First must come my recreational, then my private approvals. I'm not jumping in with both feet blind...I want checkrides and all that stuff;-)
I'm not looking forward to paying for ground school classes after I spent 15 years flying right seat with my dad in a Warrior though. The joys of replicated training.
As for avoiding jetwash, it's common practice for controllers to space light planes far enough behind the b-jets around here to avoid it, as well as providing verbal warnings and alternate vectors for ascent to try and keep the 172s out of the vortecies of a G-IV, so I think fears about Cubs getting knocked around behind a jet EZ or something may be overstated, at least near me (ORD, AUZ, JMH, O6C, etc).
My $0.02, worth precisely what everyone paid for them.
While most of those have homebuilt roots, none share the roots or the accessability that the EZ platform has, nor have any had as many flight hours logged in public, as far as I know (even the EZ-rocket). The coolest thing about the EZ-Rocket and Cozy Jet are that they are within the (relative) grasp of the guy who built the airframe himself and still stinks of resin.
The Javelin/ATJ and the Viperjet both borrow heavily from the T38/F5 (and similar) design class of small jets that have been in use for decades, and the homebuilts have only flown recently (June and August IIRC, with a pittance of hours on the clock). I don't even want to guess at their cost, especially given the ATJ's obvious military market aspirations. The Aerocomp, while it looks great, strikes me as a b-jet designed to get around the type certification process. Never mind that it costs easily 3/4 of a million (750,000) USD dollars to build to flyable shape in anything but stripped condition.
The Maverick looks like it's a long way from a generally available 49% kit, especially after one of the three prototypes killed Maverick's chief test pilot a few years back. The quoted price of around $1.5M USD for a ready-to-fly plane doesn't sit well with me either, despite the fact that Bob Hoover bought one.
Both of these are far outside what most people I know would consider accessable, and as much as I would love to see one of them at the local airstrip, I don't think they'll sell more than a few kits a year.
The appeal of the EZ-Rocket is the (currently apparent) accessability of the technology. By establishing a spec race design, the powerplants and airframes will be available, known, researched quantities. That in turn will enable things like affordable retrofits to existing EZ airframes (not soon, but eventually), and trickle down, tho not immediately, to the most realistic bracket of composite builders and flyers. Someone with good sourcing and an existing tool crib who is willing to invest the time can have a flying EZ up in the air for less than US$150k (I've done the math, all I'm waiting for is the space and the time), tho without the glass cockpit and leather that some seem to value so highly. A basic jet support package, installed during construction wouldn't add terribly to the cost of the airframe. Used but safe jets are available more readily than most think, and while I think it'll be a while before GE T-58s are found on the back of more than a handful of canard aircraft at Oshkosh, it's closer now than it was. Hell, EZ Jet does conversions today for under $100,000US.
What I'm trying to get at is that even if there is a departure from the admittedly very efficient yet short flying Rutan jet design (2ish minutes max burn at the EZ Vne of 195kts), it will open the door for more experimentation in the lower cost segments, mush like the Mazda, Subaru and Nissan powerplant experiemnts have. The BD-5J proves there is a market for small homebuilt jets that are affordable, and though Jim Bede actually built and flew the first of the BD-10s (to great fanvfare and anticiplation), the Canadian company he sold it to cratered before they ever delivered a kit.
Making the EZ platform jet-bearing will enable a lot of knowledge sharing in the industry and among the brightest and most fearless of the builders. I don't know about anyone else here, but I made a copy of the plans a few years ago when I first heard about the Cozy jet and the EZ-Rocket. I've been toying with the idea ever since. My front canard sits on the wall, waiting in grand anticipation for a jet ready platform to carry it, and I'm eagerly waiting for one to carry me.
This is pretty sweet. The jet powered Long-EZ has been around a while, and was flown at one of the X-Prize events by Dick Rutan. There's also a jet powered Cozy, which I won't like to because it's hosted on a very small server, that looks a lot slicker but doesn't perform as well as the XCOR EZ. I saw the EZ-rocket at Oshkosh in '02, and it went like a bat outta hell.
The day of high performance jet homebuilts is upon us!
OK, maybe not, but I can dream, right? Ever since I saw the Microjet for the firs time, I've been waiting for this. Now it's closer than ever.
Looks great, and by great, I mean it looks like nothing changed. The best kind of upgrade (short of the ones that introduce new features) is the one that goes unnoticed, but fixes things that were broken.
I apparently stopped by last night in the middle of something happening, as I got a very broken page a few times, with columns all out of whack, etc. I was excited though, because I knew The Change was happening.
When are people going to lean that the only truly secure computer is the one that's free of any connection to anything, wired or otherwise, powered off, encased in concrete, and then shot into the sun? Anything that people build will have some kind of vulnerability. The trick is mitigating them so that damamge is minimal.
Come on...this isn't rocket surgery. Use some common sense.
I've never, ever seen the hotel staff erase the cards. I have however, had hotel staff give me a card that had just been given back to them by a guest checking out. 2 passes thru the magstripe writer and it was mine, not the previous guests. All one would have to do is swipe a few cards out of the totally unsecured and easily accessable SHOEBOX on the counter. If I knew which chains did the CC#/name/address I'm sure I could abscond with enough data to cause real trouble for people. It's amazingly easy.
Thankfully, my credit card companies are extremely vigilant with my card activity. I have them well trained, and they've caught things that were nefarious within minutes of them happening. Big ups to Universal/Citi.They've saved my ass a few times.
AC nails the details I left out. The sulphur deposition by your favorite Pink Pearl, especially on Be-Cu and Sn-Ni alloys, is not limited to the time of contact. The microscopic particles left behind continue to etch the plating until it's gone, leaving bare copper ready to oxidize and corrode. Bad news. Pure gold is relatively inert, but the PCB industry doesn't use pure gold. They use an alloy, closer to 14k-18k, to make sure the gold isn't so soft it comes off after a few insertion cycles, so it's vulnerable to a few kinds of oxidation and the above mentioned bi-metallic corrosion. For instance, never use a beryllium compound up against a nickel compound. Over time, they will not only oxidize each other something fierce, but will also mutally destroy the other's plating. I very rarely see Be-Cu plating on any of the comsumer-electronics-bound products that come across my desk. That coating is usually reserved for places where it is only used with gold or Be- fingered contacts (and is rarely seen in the industrial space in which I now play).
Don't get me started on the changes being driven by the lead-free initiatives. They're driving some of the metallurgists nearby a little bit crazy. Lead is a very nice material to help join all the platings, coatings, and layers of metal together. It's unfortunate it's so bad for our little blue marble.
Regarding the nice PVC erasers, by all means use them, but be careful what you set them down on. The chlorides involved will melt some kinds of plastic, and leave lasting marks. Ask me how I know.
This is less than stellar. First off, if you actually see copper on RAM, AGP, PCI or any other edge card connector something is seriously f'd up.
Edge cards are plated with tin/(lead)/nickel, or (90% of the time) gold. Gold is used because it doens't really oxidize, and if for some reason it does develop a microscopic layer of oxide, it's conductive and friendly.
Any gook on the edge connector is the result of something else touching it. Kimwipes and alcohol would relaly be the best way to remedy this problem. If the item in question (like a known good vid card or DIMM or whatever) is removed and inserted a lot, the gold will wear. It's awesome for conductivity, but it's still soft. Treat it with care. If it's inserted and removed from a contact that doens't use gold plated fingers, you'll not only get wear, but you'll get oxide buildup from that other metal. This also applies to non-gold edge connectors into gold fingered sockets.
Gold goes with gold, and nothing else, if you have any option at all.
Clean with alcohol (97%) and some kind of chemical safe lab wipe (like Kimwipes). Use dry abrasives like erasers as a LAST RESORT. Your parts will thank you by giving you long and happy lives.
</EE hat>
And yes, I do remember the days of fixing flaky Apple//e's by dropping them 12" onto the table to reseat the cards and bump the oxidized fingers a mil or two. I also still shudder in horror every time I remember it.
Actually, Sony used an optical connector very much like that for the TOSLINK output on some of the high end Discman models a while back. They made a special optical adapter cable which had a white plastic 1/8" TRS on it and the optical window at the end. I still own mine, tho the discman is long gone.
It's not out of the realm of reality that someone else would do it, but with the rest of the BS on the site, as well as the baaaaaad MS Paint image hack, I tend to disbelieve it, just like OSNews.
Close, but you have your harmonics backwards. The human ear finds even order distortion (harmonics) to be euphonic (pleasing) while off order is quite discordant. Clipping is, of course, especially bad, since it's the beginnings of a squarewave, which is the sum of an infinite number of odd harmonics.
Tubes and some FET topologies produce mostly even-order distortion. Poorly designed digital stuff and overdriven transistors (clipping) generate odd-order gak.
'Digital amps' (class D, T or I in this case) use a PWM signal that gets passed through a set of low pass filters to remove the majority of the harmonics. Unfortunately, the use of PWM instead of brute force analog does indeed have a measurable effect on the sound, especially when an amplifier is compromised somehow (by design or implementation) or run near the limit of it's performance envelope. There are some very good switching amps on the market, but to my ears (as a recording engineer, musician, and electrical engineer) there are still advantages to giant linear power supplies and dozens of transistors.
Warm to me generally equates to more abundant lower mids (400Hz-ish, +/- a few hundred), while bright is, as you said, an overabundance of HF content.
It may be an artifact of having selective availability (dithering, aka SA) turned on. Since it's off now, a bit of digging says the max is ~30kft and ~700mph. Still not out of line for a pulsejet powered cruise missile.
He didn't look into the fact that civillian GPS recievers crop the data stream if the speed gets over abour ~300mph or the altiture exceeds a preset amount (15kft?).
After his pulsejet is lit and going for a minute, he'll ahve a damn hard time driving it without any guidance information other than dead reckoning...
Gee, he wasn't even talking about an iMac. He was talking about an iBook. See, it's a laptop, and a very usable one at that. Veeeeery different from them CRT based thingies (I hate 'em too). If you need PCI slots and serial ports buy a generic x86 mobo and fight with IRQs. If you want a UNIX system that just works, and has actual desktop usability, drop a grand and buy an iBook.
The company that employs me by day has been doing this for several years now for employee training. Things that can be easily moved to computer based learning systems with e-tests etc have been put on VCDs.
> Caller ID cell phone. Excellent idea. I used one whent he first came out on campus and it was incredibly helpful.
> Get out of Jail Free Card. Serious, call and I > come and get you no questions asked kind of > thing. Giving them the card from a Monopoly > game would be nice touch if it had a promise > behind it. That depends on the distance to the picker-upper, but also tremendously useful until she gets a car.
> Phone Mic for recording conversations. Unless she says she's recording them, this is definately illegal. A tone that repeats every 30 seconds is also permissable.
> Snort for the college network. Every college I know of has line items in their code of conduct that prohibit not only promiscuous tools like strobe, but packet sniffers as well. Unless she's working in a CS lab on TCP/IP security this one is a nono.
> For god sakes a wireless switch to be the lov > of everyone in your dorm. Depends on the dorm...mine was made fo concrete and steel, and I couldn't get wifi anywhere but in my room.
> Paintball gun, so much fun just right at your > fingertips. Most places this will be a violation of the university firearms policy. Don't ask how I know. I'd advise against it strongly.
> Noise reduction headphones. Especially if the neighbors ahve a loud stereo or a loud SO.
> Eye Drops. Especially useful when the campus police tear gas the student body.
> Espresso Machine. Check the housing regs. A lot of schools are banning things that have heating elements like hot plates, waffle makers and (gasp!) coffee pots. An espresso machine falls under the same umbrella. Most RAs won't care to much as long as you share, but it's definately a check first kind of item.
> Eclipse Light. Very handy, especially if her room has lighting that's as abysmal as mine did.
> Butane Torch. See residence hall regs. This one is iffy. I wasnt' even allowed to have a soldering iron in my hall. Not that it stopped me at all...
> Web Cam, for almost anything. Great way to make pizza money. Wait...was that out loud? Crap.
> Condoms. Seconded.
> Duct Tape(not to be confused with condoms). Preferrably the good stuff from 3M that doesn't crap out when wet or leave a sticky gooey residue like the Duck Tape stuff.
> MP3 player. A decent stereo is a better choice here, unless there's an inordinately long (>10 minute) walk to class.
> Sony Playstation2/xbox/gamecube. See my comment for the webcam.
> Blinder. As in blinders or as in blender?
> Shot Glass. Most dorms are dry...make sure it stays empty when the RA is around.
> Mixer. Good for making virgin daquris...
> A really nice tool kit. Absolutely indispensable.
In addition I'd add a pile of blank CDs, a big ass box of , a roll of quarters for said laundry, a few boxes of powerbars, and a roll of stamps.
I'm not sure where the submitter is from, but including a lock pick kit is quite illegal most places unless you're a locksmith. Of course, that's been said already, so just pretend I'm not being redundant.
Isn't this just a glorified facelift for the various/var/log parts? Seriously. I less/var/log/secure every day or two for that exact reason. If you want it pretty pipe it to a perl script to HTMLify it and read it inside your favorite browser.
IMHO, the best compromise solution is audio streaming (teacher -> student) with a discussion board/photo album. The way it works is that the teacher lectures along to the photo album. The discussion baord is used for the studnets to post questions and offer solutions to examples.
The only drawback is that the use of a discussion board requires students with a bit of restraint and sometimes that's more of an issue that people think (even with adults).
It's not hard to imagine. Here at school we're connected by an OC12 and triple DS3s, in addition to a smattering of slow stuff (T1, DSL, serial, frame drops, etc). It doesnt help me much tho, because the geniuses here on campus have decided to route all of the student (resnet) connections over a single one of those DS3s (traffic for 12,000 ppl), then deny there's a slowdown. They don't maintain their DNSs properly, and the campus mailhost is on the ORBS list as an open relay.
Yes, bandwidth is a drug. I miss it horribly when I go home to a cable modem.
Actually, it should be a Big Thanks to prof. Gene Spafford (Spaf) and his staff for maintaining ther integrity of out humble little CS school. He's a rather well known security guru who's forgotten more than a geek like me will ever learn about locking down boxen. I'm glad he and his staff had the integrity to turn down what's looking more and more like this:
Uncle Sam: "Is carnivore a program to generate fake credit card numbers?"
University "Nope, it's not."
Uncle Sam: "Thanks for making sure this wasn't an illegal program. Have a nice day."
Art, if you see this, drop me a line. Haven't heard from you since Terry graduated.
Spaff (and I've met him once or twice. Brilliant, but kinda prickley) is saying that by definition a trusted system bneeds to be developed using very well defined goals and requirements. Lats time I checked, other than some rather broad sweeping statements (many eyes = fewer bugs) there were no hard-and-fast plans for the goals of the various free unicies.
Don't attack him for what you think he meant..it's well known in the security community. that trusted systems are built to very strict standards.
That almost looks like it was booting on a test mule Powermac 9600 (with a P4 proc). Yellowdog linux offers the champion server for Macs, and there's that funny line about Macintosh NVram mapping or something. Also, the FD controller is the same one used on late model 9600s. Hmmm....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about the events leading up to the failure of the BD-10 project, only that Jim Bede sold the manufacturing rights to a company that cratered, either financially or literally. GIven that I can't find any record of a BD-10 flying in the last 5 years, the smoking hole theory may be true. Bummer.
;-)
I'm still jonesin' something fierce for a chance to start my Long EZ. First must come my recreational, then my private approvals. I'm not jumping in with both feet blind...I want checkrides and all that stuff
I'm not looking forward to paying for ground school classes after I spent 15 years flying right seat with my dad in a Warrior though. The joys of replicated training.
As for avoiding jetwash, it's common practice for controllers to space light planes far enough behind the b-jets around here to avoid it, as well as providing verbal warnings and alternate vectors for ascent to try and keep the 172s out of the vortecies of a G-IV, so I think fears about Cubs getting knocked around behind a jet EZ or something may be overstated, at least near me (ORD, AUZ, JMH, O6C, etc).
My $0.02, worth precisely what everyone paid for them.
-dave
While most of those have homebuilt roots, none share the roots or the accessability that the EZ platform has, nor have any had as many flight hours logged in public, as far as I know (even the EZ-rocket). The coolest thing about the EZ-Rocket and Cozy Jet are that they are within the (relative) grasp of the guy who built the airframe himself and still stinks of resin.
The Javelin/ATJ and the Viperjet both borrow heavily from the T38/F5 (and similar) design class of small jets that have been in use for decades, and the homebuilts have only flown recently (June and August IIRC, with a pittance of hours on the clock). I don't even want to guess at their cost, especially given the ATJ's obvious military market aspirations.
The Aerocomp, while it looks great, strikes me as a b-jet designed to get around the type certification process. Never mind that it costs easily 3/4 of a million (750,000) USD dollars to build to flyable shape in anything but stripped condition.
The Maverick looks like it's a long way from a generally available 49% kit, especially after one of the three prototypes killed Maverick's chief test pilot a few years back. The quoted price of around $1.5M USD for a ready-to-fly plane doesn't sit well with me either, despite the fact that Bob Hoover bought one.
Both of these are far outside what most people I know would consider accessable, and as much as I would love to see one of them at the local airstrip, I don't think they'll sell more than a few kits a year.
The appeal of the EZ-Rocket is the (currently apparent) accessability of the technology. By establishing a spec race design, the powerplants and airframes will be available, known, researched quantities. That in turn will enable things like affordable retrofits to existing EZ airframes (not soon, but eventually), and trickle down, tho not immediately, to the most realistic bracket of composite builders and flyers. Someone with good sourcing and an existing tool crib who is willing to invest the time can have a flying EZ up in the air for less than US$150k (I've done the math, all I'm waiting for is the space and the time), tho without the glass cockpit and leather that some seem to value so highly. A basic jet support package, installed during construction wouldn't add terribly to the cost of the airframe. Used but safe jets are available more readily than most think, and while I think it'll be a while before GE T-58s are found on the back of more than a handful of canard aircraft at Oshkosh, it's closer now than it was. Hell, EZ Jet does conversions today for under $100,000US.
What I'm trying to get at is that even if there is a departure from the admittedly very efficient yet short flying Rutan jet design (2ish minutes max burn at the EZ Vne of 195kts), it will open the door for more experimentation in the lower cost segments, mush like the Mazda, Subaru and Nissan powerplant experiemnts have. The BD-5J proves there is a market for small homebuilt jets that are affordable, and though Jim Bede actually built and flew the first of the BD-10s (to great fanvfare and anticiplation), the Canadian company he sold it to cratered before they ever delivered a kit.
Making the EZ platform jet-bearing will enable a lot of knowledge sharing in the industry and among the brightest and most fearless of the builders. I don't know about anyone else here, but I made a copy of the plans a few years ago when I first heard about the Cozy jet and the EZ-Rocket. I've been toying with the idea ever since. My front canard sits on the wall, waiting in grand anticipation for a jet ready platform to carry it, and I'm eagerly waiting for one to carry me.
-dave
This is pretty sweet. The jet powered Long-EZ has been around a while, and was flown at one of the X-Prize events by Dick Rutan. There's also a jet powered Cozy, which I won't like to because it's hosted on a very small server, that looks a lot slicker but doesn't perform as well as the XCOR EZ. I saw the EZ-rocket at Oshkosh in '02, and it went like a bat outta hell.
The day of high performance jet homebuilts is upon us!
OK, maybe not, but I can dream, right? Ever since I saw the Microjet for the firs time, I've been waiting for this. Now it's closer than ever.
-dave
Looks great, and by great, I mean it looks like nothing changed. The best kind of upgrade (short of the ones that introduce new features) is the one that goes unnoticed, but fixes things that were broken.
I apparently stopped by last night in the middle of something happening, as I got a very broken page a few times, with columns all out of whack, etc. I was excited though, because I knew The Change was happening.
Thanks to all involved.
Now, about those colors...
When are people going to lean that the only truly secure computer is the one that's free of any connection to anything, wired or otherwise, powered off, encased in concrete, and then shot into the sun? Anything that people build will have some kind of vulnerability. The trick is mitigating them so that damamge is minimal.
Come on...this isn't rocket surgery. Use some common sense.
I've never, ever seen the hotel staff erase the cards. I have however, had hotel staff give me a card that had just been given back to them by a guest checking out. 2 passes thru the magstripe writer and it was mine, not the previous guests. All one would have to do is swipe a few cards out of the totally unsecured and easily accessable SHOEBOX on the counter. If I knew which chains did the CC#/name/address I'm sure I could abscond with enough data to cause real trouble for people. It's amazingly easy.
Thankfully, my credit card companies are extremely vigilant with my card activity. I have them well trained, and they've caught things that were nefarious within minutes of them happening. Big ups to Universal/Citi.They've saved my ass a few times.
AC nails the details I left out. The sulphur deposition by your favorite Pink Pearl, especially on Be-Cu and Sn-Ni alloys, is not limited to the time of contact. The microscopic particles left behind continue to etch the plating until it's gone, leaving bare copper ready to oxidize and corrode. Bad news. Pure gold is relatively inert, but the PCB industry doesn't use pure gold. They use an alloy, closer to 14k-18k, to make sure the gold isn't so soft it comes off after a few insertion cycles, so it's vulnerable to a few kinds of oxidation and the above mentioned bi-metallic corrosion. For instance, never use a beryllium compound up against a nickel compound. Over time, they will not only oxidize each other something fierce, but will also mutally destroy the other's plating. I very rarely see Be-Cu plating on any of the comsumer-electronics-bound products that come across my desk. That coating is usually reserved for places where it is only used with gold or Be- fingered contacts (and is rarely seen in the industrial space in which I now play).
Don't get me started on the changes being driven by the lead-free initiatives. They're driving some of the metallurgists nearby a little bit crazy. Lead is a very nice material to help join all the platings, coatings, and layers of metal together. It's unfortunate it's so bad for our little blue marble.
Regarding the nice PVC erasers, by all means use them, but be careful what you set them down on. The chlorides involved will melt some kinds of plastic, and leave lasting marks. Ask me how I know.
-dave
This is less than stellar. First off, if you actually see copper on RAM, AGP, PCI or any other edge card connector something is seriously f'd up.
Edge cards are plated with tin/(lead)/nickel, or (90% of the time) gold. Gold is used because it doens't really oxidize, and if for some reason it does develop a microscopic layer of oxide, it's conductive and friendly.
Any gook on the edge connector is the result of something else touching it. Kimwipes and alcohol would relaly be the best way to remedy this problem. If the item in question (like a known good vid card or DIMM or whatever) is removed and inserted a lot, the gold will wear. It's awesome for conductivity, but it's still soft. Treat it with care. If it's inserted and removed from a contact that doens't use gold plated fingers, you'll not only get wear, but you'll get oxide buildup from that other metal. This also applies to non-gold edge connectors into gold fingered sockets.
Gold goes with gold, and nothing else, if you have any option at all.
Clean with alcohol (97%) and some kind of chemical safe lab wipe (like Kimwipes). Use dry abrasives like erasers as a LAST RESORT. Your parts will thank you by giving you long and happy lives.
</EE hat>
And yes, I do remember the days of fixing flaky Apple
Be nice to your electronics.
-dave
Actually, Sony used an optical connector very much like that for the TOSLINK output on some of the high end Discman models a while back. They made a special optical adapter cable which had a white plastic 1/8" TRS on it and the optical window at the end. I still own mine, tho the discman is long gone.
It's not out of the realm of reality that someone else would do it, but with the rest of the BS on the site, as well as the baaaaaad MS Paint image hack, I tend to disbelieve it, just like OSNews.
Close, but you have your harmonics backwards. The human ear finds even order distortion (harmonics) to be euphonic (pleasing) while off order is quite discordant. Clipping is, of course, especially bad, since it's the beginnings of a squarewave, which is the sum of an infinite number of odd harmonics.
Tubes and some FET topologies produce mostly even-order distortion. Poorly designed digital stuff and overdriven transistors (clipping) generate odd-order gak.
'Digital amps' (class D, T or I in this case) use a PWM signal that gets passed through a set of low pass filters to remove the majority of the harmonics. Unfortunately, the use of PWM instead of brute force analog does indeed have a measurable effect on the sound, especially when an amplifier is compromised somehow (by design or implementation) or run near the limit of it's performance envelope. There are some very good switching amps on the market, but to my ears (as a recording engineer, musician, and electrical engineer) there are still advantages to giant linear power supplies and dozens of transistors.
Warm to me generally equates to more abundant lower mids (400Hz-ish, +/- a few hundred), while bright is, as you said, an overabundance of HF content.
Your mileage will most certainly vary.
-dave
Like most research, it's only true under specific circumstances. I'm 6'4" and unemployed.
*sigh*
It may be an artifact of having selective availability (dithering, aka SA) turned on. Since it's off now, a bit of digging says the max is ~30kft and ~700mph. Still not out of line for a pulsejet powered cruise missile.
He didn't look into the fact that civillian GPS recievers crop the data stream if the speed gets over abour ~300mph or the altiture exceeds a preset amount (15kft?).
After his pulsejet is lit and going for a minute, he'll ahve a damn hard time driving it without any guidance information other than dead reckoning...
Gee, he wasn't even talking about an iMac. He was talking about an iBook. See, it's a laptop, and a very usable one at that. Veeeeery different from them CRT based thingies (I hate 'em too). If you need PCI slots and serial ports buy a generic x86 mobo and fight with IRQs. If you want a UNIX system that just works, and has actual desktop usability, drop a grand and buy an iBook.
-dave
the trailer is now HERE
I'll try to post a USA mirror in a little while.
-dave
The company that employs me by day has been doing this for several years now for employee training. Things that can be easily moved to computer based learning systems with e-tests etc have been put on VCDs.
It works very well if it's done right.
-dave
RMS bashing a liscence that isn't GNU/Linux.
yawn
I don't think he's totally wrong, but I'm suprised that the fact that he's against it was newsworthy.
I'll leave the discussion of the politics to the regulars. Meanwhile I'll go back to my OSX box and get some real work done.
-dave
> Caller ID cell phone.
Excellent idea. I used one whent he first came out on campus and it was incredibly helpful.
> Get out of Jail Free Card. Serious, call and I
> come and get you no questions asked kind of
> thing. Giving them the card from a Monopoly
> game would be nice touch if it had a promise
> behind it.
That depends on the distance to the picker-upper, but also tremendously useful until she gets a car.
> Phone Mic for recording conversations.
Unless she says she's recording them, this is definately illegal. A tone that repeats every 30 seconds is also permissable.
> Snort for the college network.
Every college I know of has line items in their code of conduct that prohibit not only promiscuous tools like strobe, but packet sniffers as well. Unless she's working in a CS lab on TCP/IP security this one is a nono.
> For god sakes a wireless switch to be the lov
> of everyone in your dorm.
Depends on the dorm...mine was made fo concrete and steel, and I couldn't get wifi anywhere but in my room.
> Paintball gun, so much fun just right at your
> fingertips.
Most places this will be a violation of the university firearms policy. Don't ask how I know. I'd advise against it strongly.
> Noise reduction headphones.
Especially if the neighbors ahve a loud stereo or a loud SO.
> Eye Drops.
Especially useful when the campus police tear gas the student body.
> Espresso Machine.
Check the housing regs. A lot of schools are banning things that have heating elements like hot plates, waffle makers and (gasp!) coffee pots. An espresso machine falls under the same umbrella. Most RAs won't care to much as long as you share, but it's definately a check first kind of item.
> Eclipse Light.
Very handy, especially if her room has lighting that's as abysmal as mine did.
> Butane Torch.
See residence hall regs. This one is iffy. I wasnt' even allowed to have a soldering iron in my hall. Not that it stopped me at all...
> Web Cam, for almost anything.
Great way to make pizza money. Wait...was that out loud? Crap.
> Condoms.
Seconded.
> Duct Tape(not to be confused with condoms).
Preferrably the good stuff from 3M that doesn't crap out when wet or leave a sticky gooey residue like the Duck Tape stuff.
> MP3 player.
A decent stereo is a better choice here, unless there's an inordinately long (>10 minute) walk to class.
> Sony Playstation2/xbox/gamecube.
See my comment for the webcam.
> Blinder.
As in blinders or as in blender?
> Shot Glass.
Most dorms are dry...make sure it stays empty when the RA is around.
> Mixer.
Good for making virgin daquris...
> A really nice tool kit.
Absolutely indispensable.
In addition I'd add a pile of blank CDs, a big ass box of , a roll of quarters for said laundry, a few boxes of powerbars, and a roll of stamps.
I'm not sure where the submitter is from, but including a lock pick kit is quite illegal most places unless you're a locksmith. Of course, that's been said already, so just pretend I'm not being redundant.
-dave
If you bothered to take a good look, you'd notice that the absence of IE is made up for by the presence of icons for Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
Sheesh...
-dave
Isn't this just a glorified facelift for the various /var/log parts? Seriously. I less /var/log/secure every day or two for that exact reason. If you want it pretty pipe it to a perl script to HTMLify it and read it inside your favorite browser.
-dave
IMHO, the best compromise solution is audio streaming (teacher -> student) with a discussion board/photo album. The way it works is that the teacher lectures along to the photo album. The discussion baord is used for the studnets to post questions and offer solutions to examples.
The only drawback is that the use of a discussion board requires students with a bit of restraint and sometimes that's more of an issue that people think (even with adults).
My $0.02, having done just what I described
-dave
It's not hard to imagine. Here at school we're connected by an OC12 and triple DS3s, in addition to a smattering of slow stuff (T1, DSL, serial, frame drops, etc). It doesnt help me much tho, because the geniuses here on campus have decided to route all of the student (resnet) connections over a single one of those DS3s (traffic for 12,000 ppl), then deny there's a slowdown. They don't maintain their DNSs properly, and the campus mailhost is on the ORBS list as an open relay.
Yes, bandwidth is a drug. I miss it horribly when I go home to a cable modem.
I want my, I want my, I want my gig-base-T...
-dave
Actually, it should be a Big Thanks to prof. Gene Spafford (Spaf) and his staff for maintaining ther integrity of out humble little CS school. He's a rather well known security guru who's forgotten more than a geek like me will ever learn about locking down boxen. I'm glad he and his staff had the integrity to turn down what's looking more and more like this:
Uncle Sam: "Is carnivore a program to generate fake credit card numbers?"
University "Nope, it's not."
Uncle Sam: "Thanks for making sure this wasn't an illegal program. Have a nice day."
Art, if you see this, drop me a line. Haven't heard from you since Terry graduated.
-dave
Spaff (and I've met him once or twice. Brilliant, but kinda prickley) is saying that by definition a trusted system bneeds to be developed using very well defined goals and requirements. Lats time I checked, other than some rather broad sweeping statements (many eyes = fewer bugs) there were no hard-and-fast plans for the goals of the various free unicies.
Don't attack him for what you think he meant..it's well known in the security community. that trusted systems are built to very strict standards.
So get some standards and quit bitching.
-dave
That almost looks like it was booting on a test mule Powermac 9600 (with a P4 proc). Yellowdog linux offers the champion server for Macs, and there's that funny line about Macintosh NVram mapping or something. Also, the FD controller is the same one used on late model 9600s. Hmmm....
-dave