I went to fill up 2 days ago and they were giving away BioDiesel (5 gals) at the station that I went to in San Francisco (I think it was an Olympia). Wow.. if it wasn't so expensive ($3.25/gal).. and if my car took diesel... Apparently all the Airport shuttle buses already run on this stuff, and more public trans in san francisco is supposed to switch over soon.
It's simple, and it works... it doesn't nag, and everything goes in a human readable text file(it checks for a date on the start of a line and goes from there), you can even run it off cron to email you you're schedule for the day everyday. I don't know if the linux version has as many features as the BSD version, I know the Solaris one sucks...
I also use abook (an ncurses addressbook program) for my addresses, it exports to mutt,pine,elm,csv, and is pretty easy to navigate.
Everything is console based and pretty easy to keep track of.
It's getting to be pretty standard, UDMA, which is fancy for faster Direct Memory Access. You would need the hardware for it... most new machines have UDMA/66 built in, some older ones have UDMA/33, and the newest of the new have UDMA/100, these are the speeds that the controller will (theoretically) transfer data at. You'll also need Hard drives that support the protocols... it should also be noted that things are backward compatible... you can run a UDMA/100 capable drive on a 66 controller, but it will run at 66. and you can run a udma/66 drive on a 100 controller but it will run at 66 (will always run at the slower speed, doh!).
If you have an older machine... There are add-on PCI IDE controller cards that support UDMA 66 or 100, they are pretty reasonable at under $50 (100) and some cheaper 66 versions can be had for under $25.
I have setup a FreeBSD fileserver with 4 60GB maxtor udma/100 drives and a promise udma/100 controller running vinum(freebsd version of lvm) with a raid 5, pretty easy to do, but not the fastest thing in the world.
Windows: I don't believe DMA is enabled by default on windows(both for Hard drives & CD/DVD), but there is a setting in the device manager of the control panel.
Linux: hdparm, man hdparm.
Mac: I believe the G4's have UDMA/66 built in.
Also note that the cable is different... you can't use the old IDE cable to run in UDMA mode. most controllers come with (80 pin?) cables. And jumper settings on the drives alone don't determine master/slave, The cable will determine this also.. they will be labeled master & slave as well as be color coded(on good cables).
I don't think it can be done without special firmware, or something in the BIOS. VMware is doing exactly what laptops are doing, VMware writes to a file in the host, and newer laptops write to a special partition. It sucks.. but possibly the only thing you can do is to put laptop brains on your desktop/server board... which may or may not be that easy to do, it certainly may be easier to convince one of the smaller board manufacturers to do this.
move it all out of the area. move yourself out of the area, do your work in the hallway or outside if necessary. I'd call OSHA too... At the very least ask for a helmet.. I'm sure the guy with the jackhammer has one.
Barrett evoked Moore and his famous law at a news conference Wednesday to unveil a new chip-making machine developed by a research consortium founded by Intel and other chip makers. The machine will enable chip makers to create even smaller circuits on a single semiconductor wafer, possibly extending Moore's Law until around 2015.
Sad how they just use him to promote the "next new thing." I wonder though, how much longer does Moore's law really apply, I'm kind of leaning toward a date sometime before 2015... maybe the 18 months the "law" is currently on will be adjusted again to 24 months or longer...
I hope they didn't reboot it, kept it running while ripping off the drywall around it. Would have been a total shame if they had to reboot it for dumb things like y2k upgrades.
Although it probably doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack enabled, does this thing qualify to be added to the Uptimes.net list?
Oh yeah... I wasn't happy at all when my neighbor got his x10 stuff.. we had a lot of fun playing jokes on each other--turning each other's stuff on and off.
I wouldn't put any X10 stuff on my production systems, I have NOC monkeys that can push reset buttons for me.. That stuff is purely for fun... and they are fun to play with, may not be secure, but neither is my telephone or television, someone can walk by my house and broadcast propaganda on my TV(if I didn't have cable.;).
If I wanted a serious, secure, remote power control system, I'd go out and buy one, I wouldn't trust anything I built myself.
APC makes a good one, SNMP able and ready. I've used this on remote test stations and they work well. Expensive though.
I've got the X10 firecracker module (got from free, just pay shipping from freshmeat.net offer like 2years ago now I think) and there's tons of stuff you can hook on to it.. including something new that I haven't tried myself.. They call it the Powerhouse, replacement outlets that are rated at 15 amps each.
I've been happy with my firecracker and there's tons of software for it, open source and not. It's serial controlled, and wireless. no soldering, semi-expensive, but good nerd value.
These 'boys' (that's what they are, mostly) aren't getting any sex. 15-17 year olds that look around and see everyone having sex, and they themselves are extremely sexually frustrated. So much so that they can't carry on a polite conversation with the opposite sex. They probably don't even have any female friends.
I don't think that stopping the bullying is gonna help, there needs to be another step the 'cool' girls at school need to pay more attention to these guys. Never mind the nerds that have much more potential(golddiggers!), these guys need more help and affection. Forget the jocks! focus on those that look like they might be trouble...
To all the high school sluts in the world.. be heroes.. save some lives.. do what you need to do.
Look at the work MAME users have done with their systems, most of the stuff in The Build your own arcade controls page are keyboard hacks of some kind, from taking apart an old keyboard and changing things around, to buying a programmable keyboard encoder, such as the I-PAC and the Hagstrom electronics products. It's really easy and most of the work has already been done for you, you just need to reprogram(with their utility software, and hook up switches.
One of the biggest mistakes of my life(and a huge waste of time) was declaring a major at the start of my college career(if you can call it that, went long enough). What you love to do now, might not be what you'll love later.. keep you mind open to everything that college will offer you.
Don't declare a major until you have to, take all the required freshman classes (english, etc.) first and then go around, meet people, talk to them about their majors, take some intro classes here and there, and you'll find your niche.. I wasted a lot of time, I went in an architecture major, moved to MIS, then CS, then ended up a German major with a minor in sociology. Because it's what I had the most fun doing at the time. I've found myself in grad school now getting a MSCS. Although the years I spent in undergrad switching from major to major were lots of fun, it got expensive after a while and I stopped having fun at the end.
Be absolutely sure before you pick your major, college is supposed to be for learning and opening your mind to other things, but it's also there for fun. If you have any desire to go to grad school, that's when you should specialize. Most companies won't really care if you are CS or CEng, as long as you are what they need, either way, you'll be around computers(which you currently want to be), unless of course there is something specific you want to get into, embedded systems, application programming, Operating system design, missle guidance systems. But at 17/18, I didn't know what I wanted for dinner, much less what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
In college, you'll learn a lot about what you are, what you will become and about others. I think that the life experience of college was what I took to be most important coming out of it(besides meeting my wife there).
Sadly, the budget for the project only allowed for it to be operation until tomorrow... I think that was one of the main reasons they wanted to land(crash) the thing on Eros. They wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. They're doing a great job. Why not keep trying to get new images while they still can(have dish time and money). Will someone donate another $200mil to launch another mission like this? unlikely.. they were lucky to get the grant for this mission. Money rules the world...
Sony doesn't want you to use CD-R's to record music, they want you to use MD. I think they feel that CD-R's are not for the Consumer electronics market.
It's really simple, I built a pedal set with a pair of linear potentiometers(X2, Y2), a few springs, and some sweat.. I later added a couple of big switches that corresponded to switches 3 & 4 of the joystick. This was a some years back, but now that there are more and more USB joysticks and such, the gameport should be freed up for use with simple stuff like this, you can get some pots and switches and make your own controller, I've used to gameport hooked up to a thermometer.
This is real simple stuff beginners can get started on.
looks like the OSU httpd server they are using on their VMS/VAX machine is not holding up to slashdotting.. big iron is getting old.. I remember running batches on the VMS/VAX machines at the U of A. used to think they were cool.
Having grown up in Silicon Valley... it's really sad to see the changes that have gone thru the area in the last 10 or so years.. People have become more and more obsessed with money. I've never seen such a concentration of luxury cars, sports cars, where 10 years ago, maybe 1 in 10 cars you'd see on the road was a BMW or mercedes, nowadays they are more prevalent(not counting SUV's). Money and status have become the driving force here in Silicon Valley. What's weird also the reputation that we have outside the valley, when most of these people that give Silicon Valley a bad name (as far as greed and such) are not really from here, this is just where they made their money.
And this obsession with money has driven the cost of living way up in the area, so much so, that even the cream of the crop, coming out of the great schools in the area can't afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
(Anyone know of a nice 3 bedroom+2bath in Santa Clara county for under $360k?)
When the stuff I need to do tend to grow.. I like to..
1. Write tasks down.
2. Remember where you wrote it (a whiteboard by your desk or something)
3. Look at what you wrote down.
4. Prioritize.
5. Do task.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 frequently until the tasks are pretty managable. #2 & #3 are pretty damn important.. I've seen people write stuff down on their palmpilots and not look at it for a month.. heck I've done that.
Prioritization is equally important, do what you can, and what *needs* to get done in the time you have, don't try to do everything all at once--you'll burn out.
The big difference is that a NAS is basically a fileserver, and a SAN is a network of disks. A SAN needs to be attached via a traditional disk attachment(scsi or fibrechannel), while a NAS is ethernet based(be it 10/100/1000/etc).
The advantage of a NAS is definitely cost. it's cheaper and way easier to install and maintain.
The advantage of a SAN is that it is a network of "disks" or nodes, and data is replicated between those nodes, you can have a nodes all in one space, or in separate datacenters, london, ny, la, etc. The SAN takes care of making the data available to the servers attached to it, no matter where the location is, but the server -must- be attached to the SAN in some way to access the data or to share the data.
A cheaper alternative to netapps are the new IDE NAS's maxtor, quantum, have made these with IDE disks, based on linux, RAID5 in most cases going up to 480GB in a 1U or 2U case. pretty cheap and quick storage considering it's plug and use.
The advantages for the netapps is that they have a very cool filesystem/operating system with snapshop capabilities.. this means that it literally takes a snapshot of the disk at a given time, say every midnight, and keeps the snapshot accessible from anywhere in the filesystem in.snapshot, this provides for easier backups (no file locking problem) and easy file retrieval if things change.
NetApps are NAS (network attached storage) not SAN (Storage attached network) different things, a NAS has all the data stored in one node, whereas a SAN has the data shared between multiple nodes. SAN provides redundancy in that data is duplicated within the nodes and if one node goes down, the data is still accessible.
However, I think NetApps are GREAT, and should work well in the setting in question, provided that lag from the other side of the ocean isn't going to be an issue. NetApps are Alpha boxes, with tons of disks on them, they can be clustered for redundancy and are fast and reliable. I've gotten 12,000 ops/sec from them.
But since the situation involves 2 continents, I believe that a true SAN should be the solution. maybe outsourcing to a company like StorageNetworks might be an option.
interesting to see that the bill is sponsored by 3 republicans and 1 democrat, the republicans have this image of being owned by big business(music industry)...
Have you looked into the Sprint wireless solution, seems to be quick self-install option.. it's wireless and fast from what I've heard. I know several people in Tucson using it already, and it's supposed to be available in maricopa county. http://www.sprintbroadband.com
This isn't like the DSS dish thing where you still have to dialup for upstream traffic... apparently it's a roof mounted flat dish wireless tranciever. Might be worth a look... could this be the future?
Can't wait for this to come to california.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to fill up 2 days ago and they were giving away BioDiesel (5 gals) at the station that I went to in San Francisco (I think it was an Olympia). Wow.. if it wasn't so expensive ($3.25/gal).. and if my car took diesel... Apparently all the Airport shuttle buses already run on this stuff, and more public trans in san francisco is supposed to switch over soon.
I don't know about the stability/memory leakage though.. I use ipsec for my vpn with windows/linux/freebsd/etc.
On my FreeBSD box.. I use /usr/bin/calendar
It's simple, and it works... it doesn't nag, and everything goes in a human readable text file(it checks for a date on the start of a line and goes from there), you can even run it off cron to email you you're schedule for the day everyday. I don't know if the linux version has as many features as the BSD version, I know the Solaris one sucks...
I also use abook (an ncurses addressbook program) for my addresses, it exports to mutt,pine,elm,csv, and is pretty easy to navigate.
Everything is console based and pretty easy to keep track of.
There is a linux server available.. but I've been resorting to using mame32(windows) to use it.. there is no support for Xmame, but there is an sdk...
It's getting to be pretty standard, UDMA, which is fancy for faster Direct Memory Access. You would need the hardware for it... most new machines have UDMA/66 built in, some older ones have UDMA/33, and the newest of the new have UDMA/100, these are the speeds that the controller will (theoretically) transfer data at. You'll also need Hard drives that support the protocols... it should also be noted that things are backward compatible... you can run a UDMA/100 capable drive on a 66 controller, but it will run at 66. and you can run a udma/66 drive on a 100 controller but it will run at 66 (will always run at the slower speed, doh!).
;)
If you have an older machine... There are add-on PCI IDE controller cards that support UDMA 66 or 100, they are pretty reasonable at under $50 (100) and some cheaper 66 versions can be had for under $25.
I have setup a FreeBSD fileserver with 4 60GB maxtor udma/100 drives and a promise udma/100 controller running vinum(freebsd version of lvm) with a raid 5, pretty easy to do, but not the fastest thing in the world.
Windows: I don't believe DMA is enabled by default on windows(both for Hard drives & CD/DVD), but there is a setting in the device manager of the control panel.
Linux: hdparm, man hdparm.
Mac: I believe the G4's have UDMA/66 built in.
Also note that the cable is different... you can't use the old IDE cable to run in UDMA mode. most controllers come with (80 pin?) cables. And jumper settings on the drives alone don't determine master/slave, The cable will determine this also.. they will be labeled master & slave as well as be color coded(on good cables).
That's about all I know.
I don't think it can be done without special firmware, or something in the BIOS. VMware is doing exactly what laptops are doing, VMware writes to a file in the host, and newer laptops write to a special partition. It sucks.. but possibly the only thing you can do is to put laptop brains on your desktop/server board... which may or may not be that easy to do, it certainly may be easier to convince one of the smaller board manufacturers to do this.
move it all out of the area. move yourself out of the area, do your work in the hallway or outside if necessary. I'd call OSHA too... At the very least ask for a helmet.. I'm sure the guy with the jackhammer has one.
Sad how they just use him to promote the "next new thing." I wonder though, how much longer does Moore's law really apply, I'm kind of leaning toward a date sometime before 2015... maybe the 18 months the "law" is currently on will be adjusted again to 24 months or longer...
Kris.
Although it probably doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack enabled, does this thing qualify to be added to the Uptimes.net list?
Just musing.
No FreeBSD support on IBM :-(. I love thinkpads though.
I wouldn't put any X10 stuff on my production systems, I have NOC monkeys that can push reset buttons for me.. That stuff is purely for fun... and they are fun to play with, may not be secure, but neither is my telephone or television, someone can walk by my house and broadcast propaganda on my TV(if I didn't have cable.;).
If I wanted a serious, secure, remote power control system, I'd go out and buy one, I wouldn't trust anything I built myself.
APC makes a good one, SNMP able and ready. I've used this on remote test stations and they work well. Expensive though.
I've been happy with my firecracker and there's tons of software for it, open source and not. It's serial controlled, and wireless. no soldering, semi-expensive, but good nerd value.
These 'boys' (that's what they are, mostly) aren't getting any sex. 15-17 year olds that look around and see everyone having sex, and they themselves are extremely sexually frustrated. So much so that they can't carry on a polite conversation with the opposite sex. They probably don't even have any female friends.
I don't think that stopping the bullying is gonna help, there needs to be another step the 'cool' girls at school need to pay more attention to these guys. Never mind the nerds that have much more potential(golddiggers!), these guys need more help and affection. Forget the jocks! focus on those that look like they might be trouble...
To all the high school sluts in the world.. be heroes.. save some lives.. do what you need to do.
;-)
Look at the work MAME users have done with their systems, most of the stuff in The Build your own arcade controls page are keyboard hacks of some kind, from taking apart an old keyboard and changing things around, to buying a programmable keyboard encoder, such as the I-PAC and the Hagstrom electronics products. It's really easy and most of the work has already been done for you, you just need to reprogram(with their utility software, and hook up switches.
Don't declare a major until you have to, take all the required freshman classes (english, etc.) first and then go around, meet people, talk to them about their majors, take some intro classes here and there, and you'll find your niche.. I wasted a lot of time, I went in an architecture major, moved to MIS, then CS, then ended up a German major with a minor in sociology. Because it's what I had the most fun doing at the time. I've found myself in grad school now getting a MSCS. Although the years I spent in undergrad switching from major to major were lots of fun, it got expensive after a while and I stopped having fun at the end.
Be absolutely sure before you pick your major, college is supposed to be for learning and opening your mind to other things, but it's also there for fun. If you have any desire to go to grad school, that's when you should specialize. Most companies won't really care if you are CS or CEng, as long as you are what they need, either way, you'll be around computers(which you currently want to be), unless of course there is something specific you want to get into, embedded systems, application programming, Operating system design, missle guidance systems. But at 17/18, I didn't know what I wanted for dinner, much less what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
In college, you'll learn a lot about what you are, what you will become and about others. I think that the life experience of college was what I took to be most important coming out of it(besides meeting my wife there).
Sadly, the budget for the project only allowed for it to be operation until tomorrow... I think that was one of the main reasons they wanted to land(crash) the thing on Eros. They wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. They're doing a great job. Why not keep trying to get new images while they still can(have dish time and money). Will someone donate another $200mil to launch another mission like this? unlikely.. they were lucky to get the grant for this mission. Money rules the world...
Sony doesn't want you to use CD-R's to record music, they want you to use MD. I think they feel that CD-R's are not for the Consumer electronics market.
It's really simple, I built a pedal set with a pair of linear potentiometers(X2, Y2), a few springs, and some sweat.. I later added a couple of big switches that corresponded to switches 3 & 4 of the joystick. This was a some years back, but now that there are more and more USB joysticks and such, the gameport should be freed up for use with simple stuff like this, you can get some pots and switches and make your own controller, I've used to gameport hooked up to a thermometer.
This is real simple stuff beginners can get started on.
Good start for technical info on joystick ports.
Kris.
looks like the OSU httpd server they are using on their VMS/VAX machine is not holding up to slashdotting.. big iron is getting old.. I remember running batches on the VMS/VAX machines at the U of A. used to think they were cool.
Having grown up in Silicon Valley... it's really sad to see the changes that have gone thru the area in the last 10 or so years.. People have become more and more obsessed with money. I've never seen such a concentration of luxury cars, sports cars, where 10 years ago, maybe 1 in 10 cars you'd see on the road was a BMW or mercedes, nowadays they are more prevalent(not counting SUV's). Money and status have become the driving force here in Silicon Valley. What's weird also the reputation that we have outside the valley, when most of these people that give Silicon Valley a bad name (as far as greed and such) are not really from here, this is just where they made their money.
And this obsession with money has driven the cost of living way up in the area, so much so, that even the cream of the crop, coming out of the great schools in the area can't afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
(Anyone know of a nice 3 bedroom+2bath in Santa Clara county for under $360k?)
When the stuff I need to do tend to grow.. I like to..
1. Write tasks down.
2. Remember where you wrote it (a whiteboard by your desk or something)
3. Look at what you wrote down.
4. Prioritize.
5. Do task.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 frequently until the tasks are pretty managable. #2 & #3 are pretty damn important.. I've seen people write stuff down on their palmpilots and not look at it for a month.. heck I've done that.
Prioritization is equally important, do what you can, and what *needs* to get done in the time you have, don't try to do everything all at once--you'll burn out.
OK.. I guess I wasn't clear enough...
.snapshot, this provides for easier backups (no file locking problem) and easy file retrieval if things change.
The big difference is that a NAS is basically a fileserver, and a SAN is a network of disks. A SAN needs to be attached via a traditional disk attachment(scsi or fibrechannel), while a NAS is ethernet based(be it 10/100/1000/etc).
The advantage of a NAS is definitely cost. it's cheaper and way easier to install and maintain.
The advantage of a SAN is that it is a network of "disks" or nodes, and data is replicated between those nodes, you can have a nodes all in one space, or in separate datacenters, london, ny, la, etc. The SAN takes care of making the data available to the servers attached to it, no matter where the location is, but the server -must- be attached to the SAN in some way to access the data or to share the data.
A cheaper alternative to netapps are the new IDE NAS's maxtor, quantum, have made these with IDE disks, based on linux, RAID5 in most cases going up to 480GB in a 1U or 2U case. pretty cheap and quick storage considering it's plug and use.
The advantages for the netapps is that they have a very cool filesystem/operating system with snapshop capabilities.. this means that it literally takes a snapshot of the disk at a given time, say every midnight, and keeps the snapshot accessible from anywhere in the filesystem in
However, I think NetApps are GREAT, and should work well in the setting in question, provided that lag from the other side of the ocean isn't going to be an issue. NetApps are Alpha boxes, with tons of disks on them, they can be clustered for redundancy and are fast and reliable. I've gotten 12,000 ops/sec from them.
But since the situation involves 2 continents, I believe that a true SAN should be the solution. maybe outsourcing to a company like StorageNetworks might be an option.
interesting to see that the bill is sponsored by 3 republicans and 1 democrat, the republicans have this image of being owned by big business(music industry)...
Have you looked into the Sprint wireless solution, seems to be quick self-install option.. it's wireless and fast from what I've heard. I know several people in Tucson using it already, and it's supposed to be available in maricopa county. http://www.sprintbroadband.com This isn't like the DSS dish thing where you still have to dialup for upstream traffic... apparently it's a roof mounted flat dish wireless tranciever. Might be worth a look... could this be the future? Can't wait for this to come to california.