I'm pretty light on irrational phobias. I'm not afraid of heights (part of my job involves tower climbing), or speed (I'm a bit bummed that my car is limited by engine speed to 117MPH since its conversion from an automatic to a 5-speed manual), or arachnids in general (scorpions are cool, though centipedes not so much). I have a pet rat. I once went swimming in a pond, and ended up covered in tiny leeches (kind of a bother, but really no big deal). I'm deathly allergic to bees and wasps, but being among them doesn't really faze me. Snakes are awesome little critters. Most bugs are cool, except perhaps for the tomato worm (I think because of their large, constantly-chewing teeth), but even then there's a species of small stingerless parasitic wasp which both kills them and requires their existence, thus restoring the tomato worm to cool status.
So on, so forth.
Spiders? Meh. Crazy, twitchy, mindless jumpy things, they are. I tend to leave them alone outside and go on my way, or relocate them if they're bothering me in an area where I need to be working (in the garden, under the car, whatever). But even outside, I prefer bats for flying insect control and toads for the crawlers (which also do a fine job at reducing the spider population).
I even keep the car windows rolled up all summer unless I'm actively driving, to keep the little foragers from getting in and killing me with my reaction to them.
I'm familiar with the concept that "spiders are great, since they eat things worse than they are," but really: For me, there's not anything worse that I've yet encountered.
Well, yeah - there's a few different biometric readers which claim not to be fooled by dead or artificial flesh.
I'm just aghast at the claim to be able to somehow automatically detect duress. To restate my original analogy: So, you're having a bad day. Duress detector (if it even exists) on anti-RIAA biomatric decryption device gets activated, and poof - no more music archive.
I ignored that point because I don't make the same assumptions you do.
I assume that it's a computer, and that it just runs programs consisting of executable data. I assume that these programs use data consisting of information. I assume that all data, whether executable or not, is implicitly not trustworthy. And I assume that any program (particularly the malicious sort) can change data, whether executable or not. I further assume that, therefore, data can be a program -- at least some of the time.
Therefore, I assume that metadata (being just data, after all) might consist only of lies and deceit. It doesn't take much imagination to see the problem.
I hacked my original Xbox using a savegame file for 007, which (upon loading from the in-game menu) immediately booted Linux and proceeded to reflash the BIOS so that the whole machine would be a more complacent environment.
I don't trust data to not be executable. I don't trust metadata any more than I trust a file extension.
Heh. Yeah. Let's use the shotgun approach - after all, it's the most scholarly and learned method of problem solving. Why not add another for mid-spring, just in case? (Have you priced this stuff?)
No. That would be the first step in causing people to figure out how to forge metadata. Such that instead of someone maliciously and confusingly naming something ".doc.exe," it will promote malicious and confusing misuse of metadata.
It, therefore, accomplishes little or nothing positive, and it makes working with a command line much harder.
Ok, 695297. Live in your little world with only a dozen different data files, all described by some trusted (why is it trusted???) metadata.
Anything in much greater quantity than that, if described by metadata, ends up with the same fucking mess we have right now with the assumptions made about file extensions: If you can't trust a file's extension, then you can't trust its metadata either (whether this metadata be based on magic, or based on extended attributes, umask, or whatever).
Further, with extensions instead of some slowshit GUI-centric metadata not-fixing-any-problems-here-mmmk nonsense, scripting is still easy (or, more to my original point, mostly unnecessary.)
That's WTF I'm talking about: The greater context, about the evils of file extensions (see that cute little titlebar at the top of this browser window? That context.). The context in which your suggestion ("file") is meritless.
"file," very simply, just doesn't fucking fix the problem. Your suggestion about "file," in this context of security, neither promotes safer computing nor reduces complexity. Instead, it just makes things harder. Which seems pretty fucking useless.
In this context.
(Next time, at least read the article summary. k? thx.)
Hey, Anonymous Aussie - go fuck yourself. I'm never, ever visiting there, for all of the reasons you listed.
My wife does want to move someplace warmer than Ohio, though, but it ain't gonna happen. I want to move north, where the bugs are smaller, and the spiders die off every year.
Even here, we get big (about 4") shiny, hairless jet black spiders in our house (never have seen one outside), with legs that are neither quite as meaty nor as curled-up as those of a tarantula. They move fast, and seem aggressive toward whatever moves (no matter how big), and don't appear inclined to jump. They have, so far, defied my attempts at identification.
It's not a wolf spider - I'd know, since I've slain my fair share of those here, as well. The shape of the body is totally different. And they don't seem to have as many eyes. *shudder*
Any further south than this, and things just go even further downhill.
I wasn't always afraid of spiders, until one day when I was a kid, and I saw this big pink spider in the garden. It was the biggest spider I'd ever seen, with big tubular legs. It looked almost like a crab, but it wasn't. When it saw me coming, it scurried off, noisily rustling some old leaves as it went. (Who, at age 6, would've thought that a fleeing spider makes noise as its weight crushes the surface it walks on? Honestly? Who?)
That was bad enough. About a year later I saw it (or maybe one just like it) in the living room, running across the floor in front of the TV. Dear mom eventually found it and killed it in a flurry of footfalls (the first couple of which only seemed to piss it off).
And, yeah - that was about it. I'm now very annoyed by little spiders (which must die), and utterly terrified of large spiders (which must also die, preferably if my screams are sufficient to get someone else to do it. If the screams don't work, fire generally does).
Learned phobia? Irrational? You bet. I'm still never going to go to Australia.
In the war against bugs, I prefer a swarm of well-trained and hungry indoor housecats and an assortment of poisons and traps, to any of these huge and twisted looking spiders - any fucking day.
Wake me up after you've either failed similarly, or found something that I've done incompetently. K?
Your inane suffrage from the typical alpha-geek doctrine which prescribes that the first thing to do when told of the failure of others is best countered with the assertion that operator is at least incompetent is, at best, a positively useless behavioral pattern.
You didn't get the whole story, anyway - I was pissing and moaning on Slashdot, not trying to write a fucking novel.
Here's the sequence of events:
1. Customer hires Company A to install several Gigalink spans. Company A is certified to do so. Links all work at gigabit speeds with low latency and no significant packet loss. Everything works fine for several months. 2. It gets cold out. 3. 2 of 3 links stop working most of the time, especially at night, unless it's warm out. 4. Company A turns out to be clueless and unhelpful, despite their paper "competence." 5. Customer asks Company B, who they've used for radio work for tens of years, including other WWAN projects, if they can help. 6. Company B (that's us, by the way) says "Sure, we'll give it a shot. No promises." 7. Try. Realigning appears to succeed. 8. Fail. Cold out again. 9. Try again when it is cold out, like -5F. Replace non-penetrating roof mount on bouncy snow-covered roof at one end of link with 3" sch. 80 pipe securely fastened to solid brick wall of elevator house on roof. Appear to succeed. 10. Fail. After a couple of heat cycles, things don't work anymore. Just like before. 11. Try. Let's line this thing up right, once and for all. Inspect radio's hardware for signs that thermal expansion might be somehow altering the alignment in a meaningful way, and grasp at all other available straws. Inspect other buildings for possible interference sources. Concoct and shoot down different scenarios including ice formation from flue gas condensation to power issues when furnace is running extensively. Find nothing. 12. Fail. 13. Customer calls manufacturer. Manufacturer suggests Company C to align things better. 14. Company C tries. Spends all day. Moves the pipe mount up as high as possible on wall. Manages insignificantly improved peak numbers vs. what we were getting. 15. Company C goes back to Chicago. 16. Company C fails. As soon as it gets cold out, link stops working. 17. Customer calls manufacturer. Manufacturer says "OK, send a pair of them to us and we'll test it here." 18. We install a temporary 5.8GHz link (at substantially lower speed) for Customer to use in the interim. 19. Customer sends a pair of Gigalink units back to Manufacturer. 20. Manufacturer calls customer. Says units work fine in their lab without any particular difficulty and are performing to specification. 21. ??? (nothing's budged since then, 5.8GHz link is still working fine, remaining 2 installed Gigalink spans also working fine now that the weather is nice and warm) 22. I conclude that 60GHz-ish stuff doesn't fucking work. It may be counter to a world of differing opinion, but this one is mine.
So, Oh Wise and Competent One, please tell me where I've gone wrong, other than the fact that I accepted the job to begin with. I beg this of you. Show me the error of my ways, oh great and powerful -- oops, I meant "competent" -- Oz!
Thanks! (And I promise not to look behind the curtain.)
The system I'm familiar with (Cardax back end, Sagem Morpho biometrics) understands duress, and can be programmed to do about anything in response to it (ranging from nothing to "dump the poison gas," if that's your thing).
However: It's not magic. One simply programs one finger to be "normal access," and another finger to be "duress." In typical application, this means that the index finger is simply going to open the door, while the middle finger will signal duress.
Anything else seems so totally not foolproof that it'd be laughable. Imagine you're on the way to work, and your wife calls you on your cell phone, unhappy about something you've done (or perhaps just in continuation of last night's hallway sex). Eventually, you're at work and off the phone, but still troubled by the events just moments before. Your pulse is rapid, your BP is high. You're probably perspiring more than usual. You plant your finger/hand/whatever onto the reader, and instead of the normal beep-chirp-thunk of the door unlocking, guards show up and ask you what the problem is.
Yeah. Because concocting a Bash script to wrap around file to separate all of the mp3 files out of a directory full of randomness and into their own directory is so much easier than "mv *.mp3../mp3".
Everyone knows that.
Further, it seems that it should be common knowledge by now that it's always faster to inspect every file for magic, than to just have equivalent information built into the filename itself -- especially over a network.
And it should be plain, but it's positively impossible to ever confuse (deliberately or otherwise) the magic that file looks for.
Between my wife and myself, we have three cars: One good, reliable daily driver (a 1995 BMW). Another is an antique second-gen Firebird which only sees use on some weekends and when the BMW is down waiting for parts (which isn't often, but we still need a backup). There is also a work truck (2002 GMC Safari cargo van) which carries me and my tools to jobsites.
The BMW is comfortable and reasonably efficient. The Firebird is uncomfortable, inefficient, loud, fun, and has little need for maintenance because it's almost never driven. The Safari is inefficient, cumbersome in the snow, and only has two seats, which is inadequate for my family of four -- and besides, it's always stuffed with tools, wire, and equipment. They're all paid for, and none of them were very expensive.
I can't see doing it any other way -- despite the fact that my wife doesn't drive (and doesn't even have a license to do so if she chose to).
So, yeah: Three cars, one driver. Your mileage may vary, especially if there's public transportation available. There isn't any in my city, and the closest place that does have even a bus line is 30 miles away and connected only by highway.
(I also have a couple of bicycles for myself, and I'm not averse to riding one of them. But their utility is lacking once the snow flies, and it's difficult to move children, tools, or materials with them.)
Aw, hell. This is 2009. You can use the extra time on a train for a lot of things, including Slashdot, and thus have even more free time for your family.
How much of your attention is with your family right now as you read this at home?
The people who installed it originally, apparently, also knew what they were doing. The folks who followed up my failed efforts, who came from two states away at the behest of Proxim, I'd guess they probably knew what they were doing too.
We all failed. Therefore, by your logic, we're all just well-qualified morons.
Glad your link works well for you. But please don't assume that your good experience is universal, because it simply is not.
It was an integrated unit: radio, feedhorn, antenna, and enough fancy-welded aluminum hardware to mount to a pipe, with power, fiber, and Cat 5 on industrial weatherproof connectors on the bottom. The pipe itself was hot-dipped 3" schedule 80 steel, secured to an old-school 3-bricks-thick wall with some very heavy steel hardware from Andrew, and was probably the most overbuilt thing in the entire building.
10 degrees would've meant the whole world to these things -- think the difference between "ticking along nicely" and "what signal?". It really was the pickiest fucking thing I've ever laid my hands on. The pattern exhibited by these units had a number of strong sidelobes, all rather near eachother, and with nulls like the Grand Canyon in between.
I want to believe that the parallel plane thing is nonsense, too, but I just can't. I began the project with similar theories to what you describe, and was totally confounded by the time I'd given up on it.
Oh, no. It's far worse than that: It hardly works at all.
At work, we recently tried, and failed, to properly align a 58GHz wireless gigabit link. Looked like a good installation; clear Fresnel zone, no obviously destructive reflective surfaces, good mounting at one end (we substantially improved the mount at the other). The hardware looked good (made by Gigalink, now Proxim). Very short range - literally, across the street, which (since the radios were made for short haul) was right near the middle of the specifications on the radios. Simple antenna; looked like it was just a feedhorn covered by a radome.
As far as I can tell, it's nearly impossible to properly align these things. The wavelength is so bloody short that a misalignment of less than 1MM seems to fuck up the whole works. And it's not sufficient to just have the antennas pointed toward eachother; they have to be aligned on exactly parallel planes.
So anyway, we'd align it. And then it'd get cold out. And then it wouldn't work. Presumably, the buildings and steel mounts change shape sufficiently with the difference in temperature to just ruin everything.
Several more service calls later, and we'd given up on it.
I'm not exactly unskilled at these sorts of things. Back in the day, I used to install Primestar. I got good enough at alignment that I could set a pole in concrete, good and plumb. I'd pre-set the elevation and and the polarity of the LNB. After having a glance at my compass, I'd just put the dish on the pole and tighten it down, and then go on inside the house without ever checking the satellite meter. Chances were good that by the time I got inside, the receiver was all sync'd up and ready to go, with good RSSI values...and with no adjustment needed.
This 58GHz shit, at least as implemented by Gigalink, though: What a fucking abomination. If what WiGig proposes is anything similar in terms of pain, I can easily wait the rest of my life without it and never, ever miss it.
I have kids. And you're right: They sure can be broken during normal activity.
The kids, that is. Kids break all the time. Meanwhile, who gives a fuck if a light bulb breaks? Are you all so poor at supervising your own children that you haven't the wits to tell Little Johnny to stop eating the broken light bulb?
FFS. Keep the kids away so you can clean up the mess (more just because it is sharp and pointy, than because it is so toxic and evil that it will make your kids go blind and give birth to xenomorphs), put another CFL in the lamp, and move on.
The question, as I see it, is rather general: "Is a high-end brand of car worth more money than a low end brand of car?"
And to answer that: Yes.
I drive a 1995 BMW 325i. Someone, somewhere, bought this car for $47,000 -- enough money, at that time, for them to have bought one of a number of different Saabs, Volvos, Cadillacs, Lincolns, maybe even a Corvette instead.
I've had the car about four years. I gave $6,500 for it with about 120k miles on it (it's up around 170k now). It has, so far, been the cheapest and most reliable vehicle I've ever driven, including purchase price and maintenance.
My previous car was a 1995 Chevy Beretta, bought new for about $16,000. Various parts of that car would fall apart of you looked at them funny -- a rear spindle failed once, causing one of the rear wheels to suddenly and completely remove itself from the car. The ABS didn't work for a long time, due to a manufacturing fault which allowed the sensor wires to short against the rear axle. The cam-lock bits which held the doors open fell off, and landed at the bottom of each door. The hanger strap for the muffler rusted completely through. The head gasket failed at 130k. It liked to eat alternators, and water pumps. It once dumped the fluid contents of the power steering system on my feet one very cold night as I merely attempted to maneuver out of a driveway.
On the BMW, it's different. It doesn't eat water pumps or alternators. It has never required any internal engine service. Most importantly, it has never tried to kill me or coated my feet in -5F power steering fluid. Various parts wear out at a predictable pace (ball joints and suspension bits, brakes, tires - it got its third battery recently), but otherwise the car has been very maintenance-free for me. The GM 4L30E automatic transmission it came with did die a few months ago, but even with the expense of swapping that out for a manual, it's still been cheaper than buying a new (lesser) car, and still works out far cheaper than maintaining that old Beretta.
Hell: The BMW doesn't even rust. The Beretta was suffering serious paint failure, with everything above the primer coat flaking off, when I got rid of it. The seats in the Beretta had gone all sloppy, and the cloth was wearing out -- the BMW leather still looks and feels damn near new.
And in terms of parts expense: It's not really much different. A new BMW alternator is expensive, but then so is a new Delco alternator. A new BMW water pump is expensive, but then so is a new GM water pump. There aren't as many third-party vendors selling cheap BMW parts as there are cheap domestic parts, but when the OEM articles seem to last forever -- why bother digging around for cut-rate products?
Now, then: I am a pretty small sampleset. But in my experience and opinion: Yes, a better-designed car should be worth more, because the parts are better and they last longer. If I had the means, and a choice between a nice $50,000 BMW, or a nice $28,000 Ford (or a $5,000 BMW and a $2,800 Ford), I'd pick the BMW.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, sure.
I'm pretty light on irrational phobias. I'm not afraid of heights (part of my job involves tower climbing), or speed (I'm a bit bummed that my car is limited by engine speed to 117MPH since its conversion from an automatic to a 5-speed manual), or arachnids in general (scorpions are cool, though centipedes not so much). I have a pet rat. I once went swimming in a pond, and ended up covered in tiny leeches (kind of a bother, but really no big deal). I'm deathly allergic to bees and wasps, but being among them doesn't really faze me. Snakes are awesome little critters. Most bugs are cool, except perhaps for the tomato worm (I think because of their large, constantly-chewing teeth), but even then there's a species of small stingerless parasitic wasp which both kills them and requires their existence, thus restoring the tomato worm to cool status.
So on, so forth.
Spiders? Meh. Crazy, twitchy, mindless jumpy things, they are. I tend to leave them alone outside and go on my way, or relocate them if they're bothering me in an area where I need to be working (in the garden, under the car, whatever). But even outside, I prefer bats for flying insect control and toads for the crawlers (which also do a fine job at reducing the spider population).
I even keep the car windows rolled up all summer unless I'm actively driving, to keep the little foragers from getting in and killing me with my reaction to them.
I'm familiar with the concept that "spiders are great, since they eat things worse than they are," but really: For me, there's not anything worse that I've yet encountered.
YMMV.
Well, yeah - there's a few different biometric readers which claim not to be fooled by dead or artificial flesh.
I'm just aghast at the claim to be able to somehow automatically detect duress. To restate my original analogy: So, you're having a bad day. Duress detector (if it even exists) on anti-RIAA biomatric decryption device gets activated, and poof - no more music archive.
Again: Count me out. :)
I ignored that point because I don't make the same assumptions you do.
I assume that it's a computer, and that it just runs programs consisting of executable data. I assume that these programs use data consisting of information. I assume that all data, whether executable or not, is implicitly not trustworthy. And I assume that any program (particularly the malicious sort) can change data, whether executable or not. I further assume that, therefore, data can be a program -- at least some of the time.
Therefore, I assume that metadata (being just data, after all) might consist only of lies and deceit. It doesn't take much imagination to see the problem.
I hacked my original Xbox using a savegame file for 007, which (upon loading from the in-game menu) immediately booted Linux and proceeded to reflash the BIOS so that the whole machine would be a more complacent environment.
I don't trust data to not be executable. I don't trust metadata any more than I trust a file extension.
Hey, kid: Stay in school. It sounds like you need it.
Heh. Yeah. Let's use the shotgun approach - after all, it's the most scholarly and learned method of problem solving. Why not add another for mid-spring, just in case? (Have you priced this stuff?)
http://www.orinocowireless.com/downloads/products/gigalink/DS_0708_GIGALINK_US.pdf
-30C to 60C operating. IIRC, that's not quite up spec for a Mars mission, but it should be adequate for any place on Earth's surface.
It just doesn't fucking work.
The other thing I get out of this is that you do NOT know what you are doing or you would have figured this out already.
How? Through osmosis? Paper certificates? Which part of Proxim certification includes the bit about that says "our product DOESN'T FUCKING WORK"?
No. That would be the first step in causing people to figure out how to forge metadata. Such that instead of someone maliciously and confusingly naming something ".doc.exe," it will promote malicious and confusing misuse of metadata.
It, therefore, accomplishes little or nothing positive, and it makes working with a command line much harder.
Ok, 695297. Live in your little world with only a dozen different data files, all described by some trusted (why is it trusted???) metadata.
Anything in much greater quantity than that, if described by metadata, ends up with the same fucking mess we have right now with the assumptions made about file extensions: If you can't trust a file's extension, then you can't trust its metadata either (whether this metadata be based on magic, or based on extended attributes, umask, or whatever).
Further, with extensions instead of some slowshit GUI-centric metadata not-fixing-any-problems-here-mmmk nonsense, scripting is still easy (or, more to my original point, mostly unnecessary.)
That's WTF I'm talking about: The greater context, about the evils of file extensions (see that cute little titlebar at the top of this browser window? That context.). The context in which your suggestion ("file") is meritless.
"file," very simply, just doesn't fucking fix the problem. Your suggestion about "file," in this context of security, neither promotes safer computing nor reduces complexity. Instead, it just makes things harder. Which seems pretty fucking useless.
In this context.
(Next time, at least read the article summary. k? thx.)
Hey, Anonymous Aussie - go fuck yourself. I'm never, ever visiting there, for all of the reasons you listed.
My wife does want to move someplace warmer than Ohio, though, but it ain't gonna happen. I want to move north, where the bugs are smaller, and the spiders die off every year.
Even here, we get big (about 4") shiny, hairless jet black spiders in our house (never have seen one outside), with legs that are neither quite as meaty nor as curled-up as those of a tarantula. They move fast, and seem aggressive toward whatever moves (no matter how big), and don't appear inclined to jump. They have, so far, defied my attempts at identification.
It's not a wolf spider - I'd know, since I've slain my fair share of those here, as well. The shape of the body is totally different. And they don't seem to have as many eyes. *shudder*
Any further south than this, and things just go even further downhill.
I wasn't always afraid of spiders, until one day when I was a kid, and I saw this big pink spider in the garden. It was the biggest spider I'd ever seen, with big tubular legs. It looked almost like a crab, but it wasn't. When it saw me coming, it scurried off, noisily rustling some old leaves as it went. (Who, at age 6, would've thought that a fleeing spider makes noise as its weight crushes the surface it walks on? Honestly? Who?)
That was bad enough. About a year later I saw it (or maybe one just like it) in the living room, running across the floor in front of the TV. Dear mom eventually found it and killed it in a flurry of footfalls (the first couple of which only seemed to piss it off).
And, yeah - that was about it. I'm now very annoyed by little spiders (which must die), and utterly terrified of large spiders (which must also die, preferably if my screams are sufficient to get someone else to do it. If the screams don't work, fire generally does).
Learned phobia? Irrational? You bet. I'm still never going to go to Australia.
In the war against bugs, I prefer a swarm of well-trained and hungry indoor housecats and an assortment of poisons and traps, to any of these huge and twisted looking spiders - any fucking day.
Uh-huh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
Wake me up after you've either failed similarly, or found something that I've done incompetently. K?
Your inane suffrage from the typical alpha-geek doctrine which prescribes that the first thing to do when told of the failure of others is best countered with the assertion that operator is at least incompetent is, at best, a positively useless behavioral pattern.
You didn't get the whole story, anyway - I was pissing and moaning on Slashdot, not trying to write a fucking novel.
Here's the sequence of events:
1. Customer hires Company A to install several Gigalink spans. Company A is certified to do so. Links all work at gigabit speeds with low latency and no significant packet loss. Everything works fine for several months.
2. It gets cold out.
3. 2 of 3 links stop working most of the time, especially at night, unless it's warm out.
4. Company A turns out to be clueless and unhelpful, despite their paper "competence."
5. Customer asks Company B, who they've used for radio work for tens of years, including other WWAN projects, if they can help.
6. Company B (that's us, by the way) says "Sure, we'll give it a shot. No promises."
7. Try. Realigning appears to succeed.
8. Fail. Cold out again.
9. Try again when it is cold out, like -5F. Replace non-penetrating roof mount on bouncy snow-covered roof at one end of link with 3" sch. 80 pipe securely fastened to solid brick wall of elevator house on roof. Appear to succeed.
10. Fail. After a couple of heat cycles, things don't work anymore. Just like before.
11. Try. Let's line this thing up right, once and for all. Inspect radio's hardware for signs that thermal expansion might be somehow altering the alignment in a meaningful way, and grasp at all other available straws. Inspect other buildings for possible interference sources. Concoct and shoot down different scenarios including ice formation from flue gas condensation to power issues when furnace is running extensively. Find nothing.
12. Fail.
13. Customer calls manufacturer. Manufacturer suggests Company C to align things better.
14. Company C tries. Spends all day. Moves the pipe mount up as high as possible on wall. Manages insignificantly improved peak numbers vs. what we were getting.
15. Company C goes back to Chicago.
16. Company C fails. As soon as it gets cold out, link stops working.
17. Customer calls manufacturer. Manufacturer says "OK, send a pair of them to us and we'll test it here."
18. We install a temporary 5.8GHz link (at substantially lower speed) for Customer to use in the interim.
19. Customer sends a pair of Gigalink units back to Manufacturer.
20. Manufacturer calls customer. Says units work fine in their lab without any particular difficulty and are performing to specification.
21. ??? (nothing's budged since then, 5.8GHz link is still working fine, remaining 2 installed Gigalink spans also working fine now that the weather is nice and warm)
22. I conclude that 60GHz-ish stuff doesn't fucking work. It may be counter to a world of differing opinion, but this one is mine.
So, Oh Wise and Competent One, please tell me where I've gone wrong, other than the fact that I accepted the job to begin with. I beg this of you. Show me the error of my ways, oh great and powerful -- oops, I meant "competent" -- Oz!
Thanks! (And I promise not to look behind the curtain.)
Sounds interesting.
The system I'm familiar with (Cardax back end, Sagem Morpho biometrics) understands duress, and can be programmed to do about anything in response to it (ranging from nothing to "dump the poison gas," if that's your thing).
However: It's not magic. One simply programs one finger to be "normal access," and another finger to be "duress." In typical application, this means that the index finger is simply going to open the door, while the middle finger will signal duress.
Anything else seems so totally not foolproof that it'd be laughable. Imagine you're on the way to work, and your wife calls you on your cell phone, unhappy about something you've done (or perhaps just in continuation of last night's hallway sex). Eventually, you're at work and off the phone, but still troubled by the events just moments before. Your pulse is rapid, your BP is high. You're probably perspiring more than usual. You plant your finger/hand/whatever onto the reader, and instead of the normal beep-chirp-thunk of the door unlocking, guards show up and ask you what the problem is.
Count me out.
Yeah. Because concocting a Bash script to wrap around file to separate all of the mp3 files out of a directory full of randomness and into their own directory is so much easier than "mv *.mp3 ../mp3".
Everyone knows that.
Further, it seems that it should be common knowledge by now that it's always faster to inspect every file for magic, than to just have equivalent information built into the filename itself -- especially over a network.
And it should be plain, but it's positively impossible to ever confuse (deliberately or otherwise) the magic that file looks for.
[/sarcasm]
Between my wife and myself, we have three cars: One good, reliable daily driver (a 1995 BMW). Another is an antique second-gen Firebird which only sees use on some weekends and when the BMW is down waiting for parts (which isn't often, but we still need a backup). There is also a work truck (2002 GMC Safari cargo van) which carries me and my tools to jobsites.
The BMW is comfortable and reasonably efficient. The Firebird is uncomfortable, inefficient, loud, fun, and has little need for maintenance because it's almost never driven. The Safari is inefficient, cumbersome in the snow, and only has two seats, which is inadequate for my family of four -- and besides, it's always stuffed with tools, wire, and equipment. They're all paid for, and none of them were very expensive.
I can't see doing it any other way -- despite the fact that my wife doesn't drive (and doesn't even have a license to do so if she chose to).
So, yeah: Three cars, one driver. Your mileage may vary, especially if there's public transportation available. There isn't any in my city, and the closest place that does have even a bus line is 30 miles away and connected only by highway.
(I also have a couple of bicycles for myself, and I'm not averse to riding one of them. But their utility is lacking once the snow flies, and it's difficult to move children, tools, or materials with them.)
Aw, hell. This is 2009. You can use the extra time on a train for a lot of things, including Slashdot, and thus have even more free time for your family.
How much of your attention is with your family right now as you read this at home?
science.slashdot.org isn't a place where people might commonly expect to find pictures.
I do know what I'm doing.
The people who installed it originally, apparently, also knew what they were doing. The folks who followed up my failed efforts, who came from two states away at the behest of Proxim, I'd guess they probably knew what they were doing too.
We all failed. Therefore, by your logic, we're all just well-qualified morons.
Glad your link works well for you. But please don't assume that your good experience is universal, because it simply is not.
It was an integrated unit: radio, feedhorn, antenna, and enough fancy-welded aluminum hardware to mount to a pipe, with power, fiber, and Cat 5 on industrial weatherproof connectors on the bottom. The pipe itself was hot-dipped 3" schedule 80 steel, secured to an old-school 3-bricks-thick wall with some very heavy steel hardware from Andrew, and was probably the most overbuilt thing in the entire building.
10 degrees would've meant the whole world to these things -- think the difference between "ticking along nicely" and "what signal?". It really was the pickiest fucking thing I've ever laid my hands on. The pattern exhibited by these units had a number of strong sidelobes, all rather near eachother, and with nulls like the Grand Canyon in between.
I want to believe that the parallel plane thing is nonsense, too, but I just can't. I began the project with similar theories to what you describe, and was totally confounded by the time I'd given up on it.
Oh, no. It's far worse than that: It hardly works at all.
At work, we recently tried, and failed, to properly align a 58GHz wireless gigabit link. Looked like a good installation; clear Fresnel zone, no obviously destructive reflective surfaces, good mounting at one end (we substantially improved the mount at the other). The hardware looked good (made by Gigalink, now Proxim). Very short range - literally, across the street, which (since the radios were made for short haul) was right near the middle of the specifications on the radios. Simple antenna; looked like it was just a feedhorn covered by a radome.
As far as I can tell, it's nearly impossible to properly align these things. The wavelength is so bloody short that a misalignment of less than 1MM seems to fuck up the whole works. And it's not sufficient to just have the antennas pointed toward eachother; they have to be aligned on exactly parallel planes.
So anyway, we'd align it. And then it'd get cold out. And then it wouldn't work. Presumably, the buildings and steel mounts change shape sufficiently with the difference in temperature to just ruin everything.
Several more service calls later, and we'd given up on it.
I'm not exactly unskilled at these sorts of things. Back in the day, I used to install Primestar. I got good enough at alignment that I could set a pole in concrete, good and plumb. I'd pre-set the elevation and and the polarity of the LNB. After having a glance at my compass, I'd just put the dish on the pole and tighten it down, and then go on inside the house without ever checking the satellite meter. Chances were good that by the time I got inside, the receiver was all sync'd up and ready to go, with good RSSI values...and with no adjustment needed.
This 58GHz shit, at least as implemented by Gigalink, though: What a fucking abomination. If what WiGig proposes is anything similar in terms of pain, I can easily wait the rest of my life without it and never, ever miss it.
Fine then, let's try this:
In Soviet Russia, Wikipedia rewrites you!
I, for one, welcome our revisionist-history overlords!
I, for one, want to live next to a crack house, or at least a house where I can buy crack. Or powder. Or smack. Or meth. Or mescaline.
I'd also like a strip club next door.
And I think that I, personally, would love to have an oriental massage parlor right across the street. Preferably, right next to a casino.
I also would rather like it if an all-night liquor store would open up within stumbling distance of my stoop.
While I'm at it, I guess I'd not even mind so much if there were a prison (or maybe just a nuclear reactor) just beyond the back yard.
Who are you to infringe on my right have these things?
s/meaningless feel good tripe/green tripe/
There, fixed that for you.
(Hope this helps.)
I have kids. And you're right: They sure can be broken during normal activity.
The kids, that is. Kids break all the time. Meanwhile, who gives a fuck if a light bulb breaks? Are you all so poor at supervising your own children that you haven't the wits to tell Little Johnny to stop eating the broken light bulb?
FFS. Keep the kids away so you can clean up the mess (more just because it is sharp and pointy, than because it is so toxic and evil that it will make your kids go blind and give birth to xenomorphs), put another CFL in the lamp, and move on.
Gads.
The question, as I see it, is rather general: "Is a high-end brand of car worth more money than a low end brand of car?"
And to answer that: Yes.
I drive a 1995 BMW 325i. Someone, somewhere, bought this car for $47,000 -- enough money, at that time, for them to have bought one of a number of different Saabs, Volvos, Cadillacs, Lincolns, maybe even a Corvette instead.
I've had the car about four years. I gave $6,500 for it with about 120k miles on it (it's up around 170k now). It has, so far, been the cheapest and most reliable vehicle I've ever driven, including purchase price and maintenance.
My previous car was a 1995 Chevy Beretta, bought new for about $16,000. Various parts of that car would fall apart of you looked at them funny -- a rear spindle failed once, causing one of the rear wheels to suddenly and completely remove itself from the car. The ABS didn't work for a long time, due to a manufacturing fault which allowed the sensor wires to short against the rear axle. The cam-lock bits which held the doors open fell off, and landed at the bottom of each door. The hanger strap for the muffler rusted completely through. The head gasket failed at 130k. It liked to eat alternators, and water pumps. It once dumped the fluid contents of the power steering system on my feet one very cold night as I merely attempted to maneuver out of a driveway.
On the BMW, it's different. It doesn't eat water pumps or alternators. It has never required any internal engine service. Most importantly, it has never tried to kill me or coated my feet in -5F power steering fluid. Various parts wear out at a predictable pace (ball joints and suspension bits, brakes, tires - it got its third battery recently), but otherwise the car has been very maintenance-free for me. The GM 4L30E automatic transmission it came with did die a few months ago, but even with the expense of swapping that out for a manual, it's still been cheaper than buying a new (lesser) car, and still works out far cheaper than maintaining that old Beretta.
Hell: The BMW doesn't even rust. The Beretta was suffering serious paint failure, with everything above the primer coat flaking off, when I got rid of it. The seats in the Beretta had gone all sloppy, and the cloth was wearing out -- the BMW leather still looks and feels damn near new.
And in terms of parts expense: It's not really much different. A new BMW alternator is expensive, but then so is a new Delco alternator. A new BMW water pump is expensive, but then so is a new GM water pump. There aren't as many third-party vendors selling cheap BMW parts as there are cheap domestic parts, but when the OEM articles seem to last forever -- why bother digging around for cut-rate products?
Now, then: I am a pretty small sampleset. But in my experience and opinion: Yes, a better-designed car should be worth more, because the parts are better and they last longer. If I had the means, and a choice between a nice $50,000 BMW, or a nice $28,000 Ford (or a $5,000 BMW and a $2,800 Ford), I'd pick the BMW.
Your mileage may very.
I thought weed was quasi-legal in at least the city of Amsterdam.
Would the locals care to elaborate on the incongruity of thought that I am currently experiencing?