Hey, do you know that Dallas semiconductor now has a bona-fide MP3 decoder chip out? Just feed the binary data into it, and audio comes out. Really neat.
You forget the massive amount of money Ford already has invested in UNIX. What kind of system do you think most automakers use for CAD work? Most of them use UNIX. Ford probably has more money invested in UNIX than it does in windows. UNIX still owns the really high-end, Windows has never been able to kick UNIX out of that market.
The issue isn't that there's a lack of documentation. It's a lack of people who know how to think. You see, there is a LOT of EXCELLENT documentation for Linux. But most people's problem is that they don't think the right way to understand it. Once you know how to *think*, then everything becomes plainly obvious and all the documentation makes total sense. I see it all the time. People will say, "Linux has no good documentation". Then, in the next breath, they will say: "and man doesn't count." Or the HOWTOs don't count. Or info doesn't count. Well, jimminy cricket, if those don't count then I guess we don't have any docs. What _DOES_ count? Hum? The simple fact is that it's all there, you just don't understand it.
I see it all the time. People who say the problem is there's no documentation, when in fact the real problem is them. They just don't understand the documentation that's there. I want you look at the manpage for tar. Looks totally senseless doesn't it? Well, for someone who has learned how to THINK properly, it's totally obvious and incredibly useful. It's strange how often 90% of the way there is learning how to think. That's the way it is with programming and mathematics, and many other things. It doesn't make any sense, until suddenly, your mind will figure out how it has to think. Then, when you go back it makes absolute sense. The only problem, of course, is you can't articulate what the difference is between the way you WHERE thinking and the way you ARE thinking. As a result, no one can really tell you how to do it. You just have to work at understanding it.
This brings me to another misconception people have. They treat Linux like Windows. You see, Windows exists to be a servant, to conform. To make things easy on you. However, Linux is different. You need to be patient, and EARN the priviledge of using Linux. It is a priviledge, it has to be. Anyone can do it, but they need to realise they aren't the ones in charge. It's a matter of being humble. In the Linux world, you have a grand tradition to live up to. It comes with the territory. None of us are any better than men like Ken Thompson and Richard Stallman, and like them we must earn the priviledge to use Linux. It takes time and patience. If you're not willing to give that much into it, and give Linux and UNIX the respect they deserve, you should go elsewhere.
But remember, if you're willing to respect the system, help is readily available and eventually, once you've stopped using those GUI tools as a crutch, it will all make sense.
I have to wonder if you have any idea what you're talking about. Edison General Electric at it's peak in 1890 was worth more than $3 billion(if you compensate for inflation, that works out to approx. $300 billion in today's money), and his personal fortune was well into the hundreds of millions.
A bad businessman couldn't do that. Edison General Electric went on to form the core of GE, along with several other, smaller companies.
Why is it that every time a company comes up with a good sideline product, they spin it off into it's own company? I mean, how are you supposed to build a company that way?
Every time Edison came up with a new invention, he didn't spin it off into it's own company. Everything remained the product of Edison General Electric, or one of it's divisions. Same thing goes for IBM. Ford hasn't spun each model into it's own company.
How are you supposed to build a large business if you keep giving away all your best products?
You should feel dumb. This is your TRADE. You should know at least a little about it's history. If you don't recognize names like Ken Thompson and Charles Babbage, you are in a sorry state indeed.
Do you want to know how it helps? It helps you to appreciate where it came from, the work involved in creating these machines and the passion others have had for them. It would help you to understand where YOU fit in the grand scheme of things, and it'll help you to have a little pride in your work. It's all about respect. It's about respecting the genius that made your trade possible, respecting the machine they have built and respecting yourself enough to do the best job you can. As a man who works with computers, you have to live up to the promise of your forebears. No one expects you to be another Babbage or Thompson, but you have a duty to yourself to understand the commitment they had and reflect at least some of it.
You may think of yourself as just someone who fixes computers, but you aren't. You are a steward of the legacy of those that came before, all of us are. All of us have a duty to maintain the tradition and memory of these men. Without there contributions and endless hours of work and passion for the machine, we wouldn't even have computers.
So, pick up a book. Read. The history of our trade is a glorious thing, full of great men and brilliant engineering. Only through it's study can we hope to go as far as they did.
Monitors are really sturdy beasts. The glass gets up to 1" thick, and they are pumped down to a heavy vacuum.
Guess what that means? If you don't break the tube properly, KABOOM! It implodes, sending glass shrapnel everywhere. They have to be broken very carefully at the neck to keep them from imploding.
He's an audiophile, what do you expect? Anyone who knows anything about sound never calls themselves audiophiles:)
Re:Imperial vs. Metric: SERIOUSLY OFFTOPIC!
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Ah, a metric boy. I've eaten you guys for lunch.
One thing, what kind of goof thinks there are 2cm in one inch? It's 2.54. Now, as for benefits of imperial: One inch is the average length of your thumb, tip to first knuckle. A span(3") is the width of your hand, your foot is approximately one foot.
Imperial measurements make you learn fractions. When I was taking a course in machining, there where a lot of guys there for whom the only math they learned in their entire lives was the math they had to learn in that class. Thanks to imperial, they learned fractions. They never would have learned that with metric - in fact, they didn't. You see, they had been taught metric in school. In Canada, NOBODY in the machinist trade uses metric. It's entirely imperial.
Don't talk like it's our fault. The ad companies started this by going to paying by the click. They've started a war with their customers, and all the customers can do is fight back until the war is won.
It's more the process of invention. It seems that when an invention's time has come, it is inevitable. Consider the perfection of the light bulb, telephones, flight, etc. I many of these cases there where a LOT of people working on it at the same time, and in some cases, succeeded literally within minutes of each other.
Anywhere you need motive power, a lawnmower engine is just what you need. First, I word to the wise.
You're not going to find plans for the interesting stuff. Most of these machines are REALLY simple, and really require very little in the way of design to make one that works. Plans are for the uncreative. If you're stuck, go to howthingswork.com and look it up. From there, apply the rule of Farmer's engineering: If one inch in diameter is good, two inches is better. Build it good and heavy.
I also wonder, since when is it illegal for an adult to build and operate a go-kart for himself? ATVs are basically souped-up go-karts, you know. Remember, used bicycles usually sell for $20 and are a great source of drive and steering components. One thing I should also mention, a previous poster mentioned using an alternator to build a generator. One problem: Alternators need a DC voltage present to produce a field inside them. If you just run the alternator with a load and no other source of power attached, it won't work.
Next, you have make sure the engines run. I'm going to assume they're Briggs and Stratton vertical shaft engines. You need a mount for safety reasons. Get a piece of plywood, a jigsaw, drill, and some bolts(I think something 3/8" will fit in a B&S base). First you need to make a hole in the plywood that's about three inches in diameter. Drill and jigsaw it out. Now, center the engine over the hole and drill holes for the mounting bolts using the holes in the engine base as a guide for the drill. Bolt the engine to the plywood, and screw the plywood down good and tight to the work bench, or secure it through some other suitable means. Put some gas in the gas tank and take the air filter off. There's a 1" opening underneath. You need to manually choke the engine to make sure the gas is sucked into the carburetor. Hold you hand over the opening while you crank the engine. It should now start, once it has take your hand off the air intake and let it run for a little while before you kill it. If they all run, great, you can get on to building something.
If not, smell the hand that was over the air intake. Does it smell like gasoline? If not, it's likely that the gas line coming into the carb is plugged and you'll need to clean it. Some turpentine should clear out any deposits. If your hand does smell like gasoline, take the spark plug out of the engine. Smell the end of it. Does it smell like gasoline? If not, you need to remove the carburetor and clean it. If so, you need to examine the spark plug. Is the end encrusted with crud? Are the electrodes dirty? If so, clean them up with a wire brush and some emery cloth. Now you're ready to check for spark. Keep the spark plug wire connected to the plug, and hold the plug's metal base against the body of the engine while cranking. You should see a spark. Make sure that you have good electrical contact with the base. If you haven't got any spark, it's best to go buy a good book on small engine repair as you will probably have to remove the flywheel to fix the problem.
Okay, now that you have the engines all running. You can build something. Bicycles, motorcycles and old photocopiers are great sources of drive components. Motorcycles use good and stout drive chains and sprockets, if your local scrappie gets motorcycles, they are deffinitely worth scavenging.
Right now, the only thing that limits the possibilities is creativity. You know, when I was helping to teach a machine shop class I used to tell people something that would really stun them. If you can work machine tools, weld and have a good knowledge of electronics, you can build just about anything you can imagine.
Those five words can be remarkably effective. I'm not entirely sure why you'd need remote communication at all. Just plan everything ahead of time, if things get a little timeshifted, heh, it's not like this is a precision military strike. This is a bombing, thuggery plain and simple. It's like using a club, it really doesn't take that much cleverness and split-second planning to run up behind someone and club them.
Here's an interesting example. What if Terrorist X decides to start clubbing people in the US as a terrorism measure. He arranges things before-hand with everyone to be involved. The clubbers head for America, never again to speak with each other. Simple plan, each clubber, upon arriving in America, secures a place to stay and a suitable club - probably a baseball bat. Hide the club in a baggy jacket, and wait for the right moment. Does Terrorist X care who gets clubbed? No. Does he care when they get clubbed? No.
The attack on the WTC was a horrible, immoral, evil thing to do. But it was very distinctly a clubbing. What kind of brains and skill does it really take to figure out that flying a jet into a building will do an awful lot of damage? I figure they got together, checked the flight schedules for some probable looking flights, and then did it. I honestly don't think the internet played even the foggiest role in the planning or execution of this effort. Many of the terrorists had been in the US for some time(five or six years by my recollection), meaning they most likely wheren't sent there to do THIS job. They probably had perfectly normal lives. The best they did was 75% success rate with the planes, bombs are a lot more reliable than that.
Honestly, it doesn't have the earmarkings of an attack that was well thought through. Quite frankly, it went overboard. The whole thing is totally out of hand now, with numerous very frightening military powers ready to vapourize whoever was responsible for this. It's not even like they have to FIND the terrorist, they just have to get the right general region. Heh, depending on how far they want to take it, the right hemisphere. Whoever is responsible for this attack did a stupid, stupid thing.
It is only good for limited remote communications. A pirate numbers station on shortwave would probably be a better technique for longterm use, and is used.
Every so often you pick them up on the shortwave bands, usually in Spanish. Just a voice, reading numbers.
Now, for more local communications, I don't think you'd need anything as elaborate, especially if the local government is sympathetic to your efforts.
If I where to send an e-mail that something like this:
Hi George, how's the family? We're doing great over here, Lisa just gave birth to a baby boy, 6 lbs. We're planning on visiting New York September 12th, and hope we can see before heading home. Will you be in the area? Maybe we can get together for lunch.
Would you know that the sender was REALLY telling the reader to set off a fire bomb(baby boy), approx. 6lbs in weight charge, September 12th at ? Or how about a numbers station?
They quote numbers indicating page and word number in a certain book. m Like fourth word on the third page. The receiver then looks it up and reconstructs the message. This, my friend, is steganography. I honestly don't see how a computer could pick this stuff out.
It just seems to me that that weight would be spread out over the entire structure on numerous floors. The weight of the 747 would be focused on one or two floors. I think it was enough to put the building structure right at the brink - the roof falling down on top was just enough to bring the rest down.
What about the added weight? A Boeing 747 has a max. takeoff weight of 400 tons. Now, lets be generous and say it was at half that. You have 400,000 pounds being applied to a severely weekened structure.
I didn't see the jet come out the other side, so it must have stayed in the building. Wouldn't that contribute significantly to the collapse as well?
Why? The DivX Codec is GOOD. It takes a movie, which in old-fashioned MPEG format would take over 300 megs and compresses it down to 50 Megs. It's MP3 to WAV files.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I want to point out.
40 pounds is approx. $80 US.
It's over $100 canadian.
I have this strange irrational fear of being accosted by aliens asking for directions at night.
Hey, do you know that Dallas semiconductor now has a bona-fide MP3 decoder chip out? Just feed the binary data into it, and audio comes out. Really neat.
You forget the massive amount of money Ford already has invested in UNIX. What kind of system do you think most automakers use for CAD work? Most of them use UNIX. Ford probably has more money invested in UNIX than it does in windows. UNIX still owns the really high-end, Windows has never been able to kick UNIX out of that market.
The issue isn't that there's a lack of documentation. It's a lack of people who know how to think. You see, there is a LOT of EXCELLENT documentation for Linux. But most people's problem is that they don't think the right way to understand it. Once you know how to *think*, then everything becomes plainly obvious and all the documentation makes total sense. I see it all the time. People will say, "Linux has no good documentation". Then, in the next breath, they will say: "and man doesn't count." Or the HOWTOs don't count. Or info doesn't count. Well, jimminy cricket, if those don't count then I guess we don't have any docs. What _DOES_ count? Hum? The simple fact is that it's all there, you just don't understand it.
I see it all the time. People who say the problem is there's no documentation, when in fact the real problem is them. They just don't understand the documentation that's there. I want you look at the manpage for tar. Looks totally senseless doesn't it? Well, for someone who has learned how to THINK properly, it's totally obvious and incredibly useful. It's strange how often 90% of the way there is learning how to think. That's the way it is with programming and mathematics, and many other things. It doesn't make any sense, until suddenly, your mind will figure out how it has to think. Then, when you go back it makes absolute sense. The only problem, of course, is you can't articulate what the difference is between the way you WHERE thinking and the way you ARE thinking. As a result, no one can really tell you how to do it. You just have to work at understanding it.
This brings me to another misconception people have. They treat Linux like Windows. You see, Windows exists to be a servant, to conform. To make things easy on you. However, Linux is different. You need to be patient, and EARN the priviledge of using Linux. It is a priviledge, it has to be. Anyone can do it, but they need to realise they aren't the ones in charge. It's a matter of being humble. In the Linux world, you have a grand tradition to live up to. It comes with the territory. None of us are any better than men like Ken Thompson and Richard Stallman, and like them we must earn the priviledge to use Linux. It takes time and patience. If you're not willing to give that much into it, and give Linux and UNIX the respect they deserve, you should go elsewhere.
But remember, if you're willing to respect the system, help is readily available and eventually, once you've stopped using those GUI tools as a crutch, it will all make sense.
It's not that you need to know who Leibniz and Newton where to understand calculus, but you do to respect calculus.
If you are ignorant of the men who created it, you will never be able to respect the creation.
I have to wonder if you have any idea what you're talking about. Edison General Electric at it's peak in 1890 was worth more than $3 billion(if you compensate for inflation, that works out to approx. $300 billion in today's money), and his personal fortune was well into the hundreds of millions.
A bad businessman couldn't do that. Edison General Electric went on to form the core of GE, along with several other, smaller companies.
Why is it that every time a company comes up with a good sideline product, they spin it off into it's own company? I mean, how are you supposed to build a company that way?
Every time Edison came up with a new invention, he didn't spin it off into it's own company. Everything remained the product of Edison General Electric, or one of it's divisions. Same thing goes for IBM. Ford hasn't spun each model into it's own company.
How are you supposed to build a large business if you keep giving away all your best products?
You should feel dumb. This is your TRADE. You should know at least a little about it's history. If you don't recognize names like Ken Thompson and Charles Babbage, you are in a sorry state indeed.
Do you want to know how it helps? It helps you to appreciate where it came from, the work involved in creating these machines and the passion others have had for them. It would help you to understand where YOU fit in the grand scheme of things, and it'll help you to have a little pride in your work. It's all about respect. It's about respecting the genius that made your trade possible, respecting the machine they have built and respecting yourself enough to do the best job you can. As a man who works with computers, you have to live up to the promise of your forebears. No one expects you to be another Babbage or Thompson, but you have a duty to yourself to understand the commitment they had and reflect at least some of it.
You may think of yourself as just someone who fixes computers, but you aren't. You are a steward of the legacy of those that came before, all of us are. All of us have a duty to maintain the tradition and memory of these men. Without there contributions and endless hours of work and passion for the machine, we wouldn't even have computers.
So, pick up a book. Read. The history of our trade is a glorious thing, full of great men and brilliant engineering. Only through it's study can we hope to go as far as they did.
Monitors are really sturdy beasts. The glass gets up to 1" thick, and they are pumped down to a heavy vacuum.
Guess what that means? If you don't break the tube properly, KABOOM! It implodes, sending glass shrapnel everywhere. They have to be broken very carefully at the neck to keep them from imploding.
He's an audiophile, what do you expect? Anyone who knows anything about sound never calls themselves audiophiles:)
Ah, a metric boy. I've eaten you guys for lunch.
One thing, what kind of goof thinks there are 2cm in one inch? It's 2.54. Now, as for benefits of imperial: One inch is the average length of your thumb, tip to first knuckle. A span(3") is the width of your hand, your foot is approximately one foot.
Imperial measurements make you learn fractions. When I was taking a course in machining, there where a lot of guys there for whom the only math they learned in their entire lives was the math they had to learn in that class. Thanks to imperial, they learned fractions. They never would have learned that with metric - in fact, they didn't. You see, they had been taught metric in school. In Canada, NOBODY in the machinist trade uses metric. It's entirely imperial.
It's an imperial world.
Yahoo actually started life as an acronym: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Don't talk like it's our fault. The ad companies started this by going to paying by the click. They've started a war with their customers, and all the customers can do is fight back until the war is won.
I honestly don't know how many people use ad-blocking software, but at reading this article I have no installed it. It's a war, and they'll lose.
It's more the process of invention. It seems that when an invention's time has come, it is inevitable. Consider the perfection of the light bulb, telephones, flight, etc. I many of these cases there where a LOT of people working on it at the same time, and in some cases, succeeded literally within minutes of each other.
Anywhere you need motive power, a lawnmower engine is just what you need. First, I word to the wise.
You're not going to find plans for the interesting stuff. Most of these machines are REALLY simple, and really require very little in the way of design to make one that works. Plans are for the uncreative. If you're stuck, go to howthingswork.com and look it up. From there, apply the rule of Farmer's engineering: If one inch in diameter is good, two inches is better. Build it good and heavy.
I also wonder, since when is it illegal for an adult to build and operate a go-kart for himself? ATVs are basically souped-up go-karts, you know. Remember, used bicycles usually sell for $20 and are a great source of drive and steering components. One thing I should also mention, a previous poster mentioned using an alternator to build a generator. One problem: Alternators need a DC voltage present to produce a field inside them. If you just run the alternator with a load and no other source of power attached, it won't work.
Next, you have make sure the engines run. I'm going to assume they're Briggs and Stratton vertical shaft engines. You need a mount for safety reasons. Get a piece of plywood, a jigsaw, drill, and some bolts(I think something 3/8" will fit in a B&S base). First you need to make a hole in the plywood that's about three inches in diameter. Drill and jigsaw it out. Now, center the engine over the hole and drill holes for the mounting bolts using the holes in the engine base as a guide for the drill. Bolt the engine to the plywood, and screw the plywood down good and tight to the work bench, or secure it through some other suitable means. Put some gas in the gas tank and take the air filter off. There's a 1" opening underneath. You need to manually choke the engine to make sure the gas is sucked into the carburetor. Hold you hand over the opening while you crank the engine. It should now start, once it has take your hand off the air intake and let it run for a little while before you kill it. If they all run, great, you can get on to building something.
If not, smell the hand that was over the air intake. Does it smell like gasoline? If not, it's likely that the gas line coming into the carb is plugged and you'll need to clean it. Some turpentine should clear out any deposits. If your hand does smell like gasoline, take the spark plug out of the engine. Smell the end of it. Does it smell like gasoline? If not, you need to remove the carburetor and clean it. If so, you need to examine the spark plug. Is the end encrusted with crud? Are the electrodes dirty? If so, clean them up with a wire brush and some emery cloth. Now you're ready to check for spark. Keep the spark plug wire connected to the plug, and hold the plug's metal base against the body of the engine while cranking. You should see a spark. Make sure that you have good electrical contact with the base. If you haven't got any spark, it's best to go buy a good book on small engine repair as you will probably have to remove the flywheel to fix the problem.
Okay, now that you have the engines all running. You can build something. Bicycles, motorcycles and old photocopiers are great sources of drive components. Motorcycles use good and stout drive chains and sprockets, if your local scrappie gets motorcycles, they are deffinitely worth scavenging.
Right now, the only thing that limits the possibilities is creativity. You know, when I was helping to teach a machine shop class I used to tell people something that would really stun them. If you can work machine tools, weld and have a good knowledge of electronics, you can build just about anything you can imagine.
Those five words can be remarkably effective. I'm not entirely sure why you'd need remote communication at all. Just plan everything ahead of time, if things get a little timeshifted, heh, it's not like this is a precision military strike. This is a bombing, thuggery plain and simple. It's like using a club, it really doesn't take that much cleverness and split-second planning to run up behind someone and club them.
Here's an interesting example. What if Terrorist X decides to start clubbing people in the US as a terrorism measure. He arranges things before-hand with everyone to be involved. The clubbers head for America, never again to speak with each other. Simple plan, each clubber, upon arriving in America, secures a place to stay and a suitable club - probably a baseball bat. Hide the club in a baggy jacket, and wait for the right moment. Does Terrorist X care who gets clubbed? No. Does he care when they get clubbed? No.
The attack on the WTC was a horrible, immoral, evil thing to do. But it was very distinctly a clubbing. What kind of brains and skill does it really take to figure out that flying a jet into a building will do an awful lot of damage? I figure they got together, checked the flight schedules for some probable looking flights, and then did it. I honestly don't think the internet played even the foggiest role in the planning or execution of this effort. Many of the terrorists had been in the US for some time(five or six years by my recollection), meaning they most likely wheren't sent there to do THIS job. They probably had perfectly normal lives. The best they did was 75% success rate with the planes, bombs are a lot more reliable than that.
Honestly, it doesn't have the earmarkings of an attack that was well thought through. Quite frankly, it went overboard. The whole thing is totally out of hand now, with numerous very frightening military powers ready to vapourize whoever was responsible for this. It's not even like they have to FIND the terrorist, they just have to get the right general region. Heh, depending on how far they want to take it, the right hemisphere. Whoever is responsible for this attack did a stupid, stupid thing.
They're postfixes, not prefixes.
It is only good for limited remote communications. A pirate numbers station on shortwave would probably be a better technique for longterm use, and is used.
Every so often you pick them up on the shortwave bands, usually in Spanish. Just a voice, reading numbers.
Now, for more local communications, I don't think you'd need anything as elaborate, especially if the local government is sympathetic to your efforts.
If I where to send an e-mail that something like this:
Hi George, how's the family? We're doing great over here, Lisa just gave birth to a baby boy, 6 lbs. We're planning on visiting New York September 12th, and hope we can see before heading home. Will you be in the area? Maybe we can get together for lunch.
Would you know that the sender was REALLY telling the reader to set off a fire bomb(baby boy), approx. 6lbs in weight charge, September 12th at ? Or how about a numbers station?
They quote numbers indicating page and word number in a certain book. m Like fourth word on the third page. The receiver then looks it up and reconstructs the message. This, my friend, is steganography. I honestly don't see how a computer could pick this stuff out.
It just seems to me that that weight would be spread out over the entire structure on numerous floors. The weight of the 747 would be focused on one or two floors. I think it was enough to put the building structure right at the brink - the roof falling down on top was just enough to bring the rest down.
What about the added weight? A Boeing 747 has a max. takeoff weight of 400 tons. Now, lets be generous and say it was at half that. You have 400,000 pounds being applied to a severely weekened structure.
I didn't see the jet come out the other side, so it must have stayed in the building. Wouldn't that contribute significantly to the collapse as well?
The wonders of classical biological warfare!
Why? The DivX Codec is GOOD. It takes a movie, which in old-fashioned MPEG format would take over 300 megs and compresses it down to 50 Megs. It's MP3 to WAV files.