>So the pulses spread out as they travel, and eventually you have to put in a repeater that extracts the digital data and outputs it as nicely shaped pulses again.
Old tech. They used to do hybrid stuff like this, several optical amp stages and then a regen stage but not any more. There is no electrical stage in a modern undersea cable. They use non-zero dispersion compensating fibre in certain stretches of the system. Typically 4 repeater hops of std fibre then one of the nzd fibre which has the _opposite_ effect and corrects it all. End effect is that at landfall the signals have minimal dispersion.
You don't get 'average' telco companies in the undersea cable business. Submarine systems are the hardest game in this business and there are only about half a dozen companies that do this. Each transoceanic cable is something like a 10 figure contract.
And no, they don't use std OTDR, but the idea is the same. At each repeater (remember they are all optical nowadays) there is a tap from the 'eastward' fibre that sends a signal back along the 'westward' fibre of the pair. (And vice-versa) This lets the cable operators know exactly where any break/bend or power drop occurred, in real time.
In fact the terrestrial companies (like Terraworx) are starting to use this technology on land because they go coast-to-coast all optically and some of those repeater huts are hard to reach in winter. Hence a remote diagnosis tool is necessary.
Yes there are isolators in the system but at each EDFA repeater there is a small internal tap that takes a signal from the eastward fibre and sends it back to base along the westward fibre.
This lets the cable operators diagnose cable fault positions very accurately.
At my place of work we have Outlook and most people use the view other's calendar facility to see when other people are free for meetings. We then have to get up and walk to reception to find out what rooms are free when and revise the meeting schedules accordingly.
We would love to be able to call up the meeting room in Outlook, essentially invite the location to the meeting as well as the people. However IT flat out won't let us do that because it works on NT accounts and email addresses. You can't give a room an NT account.
So the facility I request is to be able to add meeting rooms to the server and include size information etc so we can call people to meetings and the software looks up when we are all free and suggests a room that is big enough to hold us all. Heck, why not give some kind of booking priority to managers so they can kick others out of pre-booked rooms; they'd love that.
People have posted this before and will post it again. There is a direct reference to the correct way to state this on the lego website and you lot continue to get it wrong.
Seems fair enough. I once saw a web page that displayed "two and a half" (in symbols) on a windows PC but "two times pi" (again, in symbols) when viewed on a Mac running Netscape.
Similar thing here.
It was the test flight of the 707 and it wasn't a barrel roll _as_such_. More flying around a helix, ie the axis of the rotation was not cocentric with the airframe. Anyway, the story goes that all aircraft can do this with no additional stress to the airframe and the test pilot knew this and just did it. Afterwards the boss told hom in no uncertain terms to never do anything like that again.
There's a film of this happening. Don't know if it's been webifyed yet.
I investigated loads of different drawing programs before settling on xfig for the diagrams in my PhD thesis. I began with xfig and thought 'euurgh, how do I use this, I'm used to corel draw and its completely different'. Then I tried corel draw under wine, it worked in all areas except I couldn't save. Bummer. I tried staroffice's drawing program but it was just slow and I objected to running a whole office suite when I just wanted to draw diagrams and use them with LaTeX. In the end I settled on xfig and forced myself to learn it. And I'm very glad I did. Fast, simple and precise. I won't change to anything else now.
Under win9* you can get a blue screen by ejecting the disk when the machine wants to use it. Linux just ignores the eject button until the drive is unmounted. In fact, with LS-120 drives the eject command works just as it does with CDs. You have to be root though to do this (unlike CDs).
I remember reading that big HDDs were starting to be sold where the _real_ capacity was quite a bit larger than the stated capacity and the drive automatically looked for sectors about to go bad and started using the 'spare' parts of the drive. Hence giving a more reliable drive than you might otherwise get. If this is the case then you might be writing your obscuring data over the parts of the platters that the HDD is using _now_ but not what it was using when you first got it and started using it to store your por^H^H^H sensitive data.
Some company put out players that could apparently do similar high frequency tricks with CDs. I only got a partial sucess on my 'consumer electronics trivia' skill roll just now so I'm not sure of the name but it could be the 'legato link' feature on Pioneer (or maybe Yamaha) decks.
>The previous important development in optical transmission networks was the optical amplifier. By doped sections of fiber with a high voltage placed across each section, they were able to create an amplifier. The light waves coming into the doped section of fiber would be amplified.
Only slightly wrong. You don't use a voltage across the fibre section, you shine lots of light down it, 980nm or 1480nm. This excites the erbium ions in the doped fibre and provides gain at 1550nm (the telecomms wavelength).
It has been suggested recently (sorry, no URLs) that the UK government is to introduce a policy to allow low income families inexpensive computers in order to get more British people 'on the net'. Now as I understood it this would be a rental deal involving refurbished computers, ie second hand.
Are you in a position to recomend that these computers get shipped with linux? The advantages of this I see are:
1. Linux is free. As in no money, making it cheaper for these low income families.
2. Linux is free. As in Nelson Mandela, meaning the source code is available. There were a lot of people in the early to mid eighties who started programming their spectrums and c64s etc in their bedrooms and went on to careers in the industry. With linux shipping with full source it once again promotes individuals to get down to programming. This can only do good for a nation's skill-base in a modern hi-tech world society.
3. Linux runs on less powerful machines very nicely. So lower spec and therefore cheaper machines can be used. And for the techies there is nothing like being machine limited to make you write more efficient code.
4. The powers that be can put together their own flavour of a distribution to give technophobes just what they want and no more. A word processor, email client and web browser is all that many people want, they don't even want to have to install it for themselves. This is certainly possible with several of the desktop environments available.
It might have been written as onesingleword, or it had a hyphen, I can't remember exactly. But it was a win98/NT machine most of the time, that's when it wasn't running Be or FreeBSD or whatever my flatmate put on it.
At uni the machines in my office were all named after Scotch whisky brands. Quite good for a Scottish university. Scales reasonably well.
A recent discussion on this topic with friends suggested obscure mathematicians/physicists. Try logging in to Euler, Descarte or Green. This will scale very well.
But my favourite, the one we had in my old flat, was to name the machines after sex positions. Missionary, Doggie, 69, Not_tonight (a very common one!) and of course the best idea was for the server to be called Nympho (not strictly a position but related, so forgive me) because it was always turned on!
Many comments have pointed out holes in the arguments. I won't repeat those but I will give the one thing I remember that my lecturer said to me when I first learned unix.
'unix is a sharp tool, you get all the power and precision of a scalpel as well as the capability to cut yourself and bleed'
To this I will just add that this is case of different tools for different people to do differnet tasks. Some tools were never designed to take an edge and some are useless if blunted. What the author described is a lot like saying give them Be. You can do all the web, email, letters to Grandma and quake that most users want (and from what I've seen a whole lot more that most users don't need but developers will love). If I was starting to write my PhD thesis now, I may well be choosing Be rather than linux as my platform.
OK hated is the wrong word for me but RH isn't getting any more of my money. Why? RH6 is too expensive. I paid 30 pound for RH4.1 and again for 5.0 and liked what I got. But 80 pounds in the local shops for the RH6.0 is just stupid when boxed SuSE is about 30 if you go to the right places. Yes I can download it (though not for much longer, leave uni soon) and yes I could get a 3rd party CD but the only ways I can contribute to Linux at the moment is to pay money to fund developers working for RH or to advocate it in my own quiet way and get other people using it. I'd like to buy 'RH core' but as far as I can tell it's mail order only and postage is pricey.
But, gripes aside, I like their distro and know enough of it's innards to make it work the way _I_ want soon after an install.
So my choices are: Adopt a new distro and learn a new bunch of tricks, or pay a minimal sum that won't get back to a business that pays the wages of Linux developers.
Rick signing off, from a tweaked, configured, and much loved RH5.2 box.
The 5% thing is rubbish. If it were true only 1 in 20 people who suffered a stroke would have any long term disabilities as a consequence.
Re:Hard drives are NOT sealed: Void stickers
on
CPU Cooling Insanity
·
· Score: 2
Check your hard drive for one of those 'Warranty Void if removed' stickers. Press it with your finger _gently_. It depresses. There's a hole there normally sealed from dust etc by the sticker. I've seen this on several (older) hard drives, although I can't comment on the very newest ones from the manufacturers. This explains the altitude thing mentioned above.
I would also be worried about the prospect of any coolant fluid destroying the integrety of the glue holding the sticker down. But I'm ignorant in this area of chemistry so I don't know if mineral oil would be a problem here.
The main slashdot page is showing 0 of 0 comments for this story for me. I wouldn't normally post a message like this because someone else always beats me to it but I've not seen anyone else comment on this phenomenon. Is this a know problem affecting others or just me? The previous story has only 7 comments according to the front page as well.
Slashdot Mirror
>So the pulses spread out as they travel, and eventually you have to put in a repeater that extracts the digital data and outputs it as nicely shaped pulses again.
Old tech. They used to do hybrid stuff like this, several optical amp stages and then a regen stage but not any more. There is no electrical stage in a modern undersea cable. They use non-zero dispersion compensating fibre in certain stretches of the system. Typically 4 repeater hops of std fibre then one of the nzd fibre which has the _opposite_ effect and corrects it all. End effect is that at landfall the signals have minimal dispersion.
You don't get 'average' telco companies in the undersea cable business. Submarine systems are the hardest game in this business and there are only about half a dozen companies that do this. Each transoceanic cable is something like a 10 figure contract.
And no, they don't use std OTDR, but the idea is the same. At each repeater (remember they are all optical nowadays) there is a tap from the 'eastward' fibre that sends a signal back along the 'westward' fibre of the pair. (And vice-versa) This lets the cable operators know exactly where any break/bend or power drop occurred, in real time.
In fact the terrestrial companies (like Terraworx) are starting to use this technology on land because they go coast-to-coast all optically and some of those repeater huts are hard to reach in winter. Hence a remote diagnosis tool is necessary.
Wrong!
Yes there are isolators in the system but at each EDFA repeater there is a small internal tap that takes a signal from the eastward fibre and sends it back to base along the westward fibre.
This lets the cable operators diagnose cable fault positions very accurately.
At my place of work we have Outlook and most people use the view other's calendar facility to see when other people are free for meetings. We then have to get up and walk to reception to find out what rooms are free when and revise the meeting schedules accordingly.
We would love to be able to call up the meeting room in Outlook, essentially invite the location to the meeting as well as the people. However IT flat out won't let us do that because it works on NT accounts and email addresses. You can't give a room an NT account.
So the facility I request is to be able to add meeting rooms to the server and include size information etc so we can call people to meetings and the software looks up when we are all free and suggests a room that is big enough to hold us all. Heck, why not give some kind of booking priority to managers so they can kick others out of pre-booked rooms; they'd love that.
People have posted this before and will post it again. There is a direct reference to the correct way to state this on the lego website and you lot continue to get it wrong.
Seems fair enough. I once saw a web page that displayed "two and a half" (in symbols) on a windows PC but "two times pi" (again, in symbols) when viewed on a Mac running Netscape.
Similar thing here.
It was the test flight of the 707 and it wasn't a barrel roll _as_such_. More flying around a helix, ie the axis of the rotation was not cocentric with the airframe. Anyway, the story goes that all aircraft can do this with no additional stress to the airframe and the test pilot knew this and just did it. Afterwards the boss told hom in no uncertain terms to never do anything like that again.
There's a film of this happening. Don't know if it's been webifyed yet.
Hear hear
I investigated loads of different drawing programs before settling on xfig for the diagrams in my PhD thesis. I began with xfig and thought 'euurgh, how do I use this, I'm used to corel draw and its completely different'. Then I tried corel draw under wine, it worked in all areas except I couldn't save. Bummer. I tried staroffice's drawing program but it was just slow and I objected to running a whole office suite when I just wanted to draw diagrams and use them with LaTeX. In the end I settled on xfig and forced myself to learn it. And I'm very glad I did. Fast, simple and precise. I won't change to anything else now.
Under win9* you can get a blue screen by ejecting the disk when the machine wants to use it. Linux just ignores the eject button until the drive is unmounted. In fact, with LS-120 drives the eject command works just as it does with CDs. You have to be root though to do this (unlike CDs).
I remember reading that big HDDs were starting to be sold where the _real_ capacity was quite a bit larger than the stated capacity and the drive automatically looked for sectors about to go bad and started using the 'spare' parts of the drive. Hence giving a more reliable drive than you might otherwise get. If this is the case then you might be writing your obscuring data over the parts of the platters that the HDD is using _now_ but not what it was using when you first got it and started using it to store your por^H^H^H sensitive data.
Anyone know any more about this?
Some company put out players that could apparently do similar high frequency tricks with CDs. I only got a partial sucess on my 'consumer electronics trivia' skill roll just now so I'm not sure of the name but it could be the 'legato link' feature on Pioneer (or maybe Yamaha) decks.
>The previous important development in optical transmission networks was the optical amplifier. By doped sections of fiber with a high voltage placed across each section, they were able to create an amplifier. The light waves coming into the doped section of fiber would be amplified.
Only slightly wrong. You don't use a voltage across the fibre section, you shine lots of light down it, 980nm or 1480nm. This excites the erbium ions in the doped fibre and provides gain at 1550nm (the telecomms wavelength).
I'm glad to see the correct date format used in the /. story header for this one.
It has been suggested recently (sorry, no URLs) that the UK government is to introduce a policy to allow low income families inexpensive computers in order to get more British people 'on the net'. Now as I understood it this would be a rental deal involving refurbished computers, ie second hand.
Are you in a position to recomend that these computers get shipped with linux? The advantages of this I see are:
1. Linux is free. As in no money, making it cheaper for these low income families.
2. Linux is free. As in Nelson Mandela, meaning the source code is available. There were a lot of people in the early to mid eighties who started programming their spectrums and c64s etc in their bedrooms and went on to careers in the industry. With linux shipping with full source it once again promotes individuals to get down to programming. This can only do good for a nation's skill-base in a modern hi-tech world society.
3. Linux runs on less powerful machines very nicely. So lower spec and therefore cheaper machines can be used. And for the techies there is nothing like being machine limited to make you write more efficient code.
4. The powers that be can put together their own flavour of a distribution to give technophobes just what they want and no more. A word processor, email client and web browser is all that many people want, they don't even want to have to install it for themselves. This is certainly possible with several of the desktop environments available.
Richard Forster
It might have been written as onesingleword, or it had a hyphen, I can't remember exactly.
But it was a win98/NT machine most of the time, that's when it wasn't running Be or FreeBSD or whatever my flatmate put on it.
At uni the machines in my office were all named after Scotch whisky brands. Quite good for a Scottish university. Scales reasonably well.
A recent discussion on this topic with friends suggested obscure mathematicians/physicists. Try logging in to Euler, Descarte or Green. This will scale very well.
But my favourite, the one we had in my old flat, was to name the machines after sex positions. Missionary, Doggie, 69, Not_tonight (a very common one!) and of course the best idea was for the server to be called Nympho (not strictly a position but related, so forgive me) because it was always turned on!
Stay Alert
Trust No-one
Keep Your Laser Handy
Citizen: Are you Happy?
Garth: "Say.....That's a UNIX manual"
The best thing about Microsoft products is that they come with a 'best before' date.
Many comments have pointed out holes in the arguments. I won't repeat those but I will give the one thing I remember that my lecturer said to me when I first learned unix.
'unix is a sharp tool, you get all the power and precision of a scalpel as well as the capability to cut yourself and bleed'
To this I will just add that this is case of different tools for different people to do differnet tasks. Some tools were never designed to take an edge and some are useless if blunted.
What the author described is a lot like saying give them Be. You can do all the web, email, letters to Grandma and quake that most users want (and from what I've seen a whole lot more that most users don't need but developers will love).
If I was starting to write my PhD thesis now, I may well be choosing Be rather than linux as my platform.
OK hated is the wrong word for me but RH isn't getting any more of my money. Why? RH6 is too expensive. I paid 30 pound for RH4.1 and again for 5.0 and liked what I got. But 80 pounds in the local shops for the RH6.0 is just stupid when boxed SuSE is about 30 if you go to the right places. Yes I can download it (though not for much longer, leave uni soon) and yes I could get a 3rd party CD but the only ways I can contribute to Linux at the moment is to pay money to fund developers working for RH or to advocate it in my own quiet way and get other people using it. I'd like to buy 'RH core' but as far as I can tell it's mail order only and postage is pricey.
But, gripes aside, I like their distro and know enough of it's innards to make it work the way _I_ want soon after an install.
So my choices are: Adopt a new distro and learn a new bunch of tricks, or pay a minimal sum that won't get back to a business that pays the wages of Linux developers.
Rick signing off, from a tweaked, configured, and much loved RH5.2 box.
The 5% thing is rubbish. If it were true only 1 in 20 people who suffered a stroke would have any long term disabilities as a consequence.
Check your hard drive for one of those 'Warranty Void if removed' stickers. Press it with your finger _gently_. It depresses. There's a hole there normally sealed from dust etc by the sticker. I've seen this on several (older) hard drives, although I can't comment on the very newest ones from the manufacturers.
This explains the altitude thing mentioned above.
I would also be worried about the prospect of any coolant fluid destroying the integrety of the glue holding the sticker down. But I'm ignorant in this area of chemistry so I don't know if mineral oil would be a problem here.
Well I confess I didn't count them, but it seems to be right.
Richard Forster
The main slashdot page is showing 0 of 0 comments for this story for me. I wouldn't normally post a message like this because someone else always beats me to it but I've not seen anyone else comment on this phenomenon. Is this a know problem affecting others or just me? The previous story has only 7 comments according to the front page as well.
Richard Forster