I do. Some groups are mostly noise, but others are still pretty good.
As for the spam problem, maybe you can suggest to your ISP that they install Cleanfeed or similar. (Yes, that's the same site as the anti-yEnc page, which BTW I agree with.)
One advantage of the new clock is that it ticks much faster. Today?s international time and frequency standards, such as NIST-F1, measure an atomic resonance of about 9 billion cycles per second. By contrast, the new NIST device monitors an optical frequency more than 100,000 times higher or about 1 quadrillion (US) cycles per second.
A 9 GHz oscillation can be hooked up directly to electronic circuits, counters, PLLs, etc. My first question when I read this article was, how the heck do you synchronize anything else to a "frequency" that's in the optical / ultraviolet range? I found some more information on this page and this one, so I guess that's how this new clock works.
Probably the best part of the tour for me was the liquid hydrogen. Even better was touching it. Yes I did, yes I still have all my digits.
Are you sure it was hydrogen? Liquid nitrogen would be much more common (and safer, and cheaper). I agree it's a fun demo to dip your hand in it though, especially after they show a flower or something shattering after it's been immersed for a few seconds.
Remember a few years back, an inventor released an alkaline battery recharger to the market that would recharge ANY alkaline battery hundreds of times.
Well, that's what the infomercials claimed...
Now we have crippled alkaline chargers with "special" batteries that only work on unique chargers (no cross brand compatibility, it's mechanically engineered to be incompatible).
This "mechanical incompatibility" is easily cured with a drill, a wad of aluminum foil, or just by putting an AA cell into the "C/D" position (at least on the Renewal chargers I've used). Also "Pure Energy" brand cells work without modification in a Renewal charger. AFAIK the only mechanical incompatibility is Rechargeable/Standard, not between brands of rechargeable.
To a first-order approximation, "regular" and "rechargeable" alkalines are the same (and can both be charged by the same charger electronics). However, I believe the battery industry's claims that the rechargeable units have slightly different mechanical and electrical characteristics designed to improve performance (energy capacity, cycle life, not leaking caustic chemicals, etc). YMMV on this point, of course.
Electric vehicles are the step in right direction.
Close. Hybrid Electric vehicles (Toyota Prius / Honda Insight) are the step in the right direction. They're close enough to conventional cars that users don't have to make any major lifestyle adjustments (like plugging in their cars every night), but they produce immediate pollution benefits and also get a lot of essential technology like efficient batteries, electric motors, and control circuitry out into the marketplace.
Maybe some day the internal combustion engines in these hybrid vehicles will be replaced with hydrogen fuel cells, or maybe we'll keep the internal combustion engines but run them on ethanol / bio-diesel[1]. Either way, a hybrid "fuel"/electric vehicle is probably going to be a better choice than the all-electric one.
[1] There are differences between phasing out fossil fuel energy production, and phasing out hydrocarbon energy production.
Yeah yeah, Tesla conspiracy free energy Siberia explosion blah blah
Look at all of the public paranoia about *stray* fields from power-transmission lines causing cancer, claims of brain tumors from cel phones, and tell me how long you think Tesla's beamed-power schemes would survive in today's world even if there weren't a massive power company conspiracy to suppress them.
Then you have to look at efficiency, interference with other radio communication, shielding of sensitive electronic devices, and on and on.
Tesla had a lot of great ideas, but that doesn't mean that every one of them was good.
If I recall correctly, batteries are basically chemical capacitors. (Two surfaces of different electric potential separated by a resistor)
Batteries and capacitors are quite different. Batteries use electrochemical reactions that produce a near-constant potential (voltage) across the terminals, until the reactants are used up.
Capacitors work by polarizing a dielectric material [a physical change, not a chemical one] between two closely-spaced plates. The terminal voltage is proportional to the amount of charge (time integral of current) the capacitor is holding.
Modern capacitors are approaching the energy capacity of batteries. A 50F 2.3V capacitor holds 132 J of energy, which is equivalent to 120 Amp-seconds (or 33 mA-hours) at 1.1 Volts. This capacitor costs CDN$17.88, compared to $2.17 for a 250 mAh AAA NiCd cell. (prices are from Digikey in quantities of 1000)
So the capacitor's about 8x the cost for 1/8 the capacity of the NiCd.
We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?
One big limitation is that we only make our memory chips one layer thick (vs. multi-layer capacitors), and that these capacitors are optimized for storing information, not energy. The more energy stored per cell, the more heat is wasted every time that cell switches state.
So how do you get ionising radiation without nuclear decay? Please tell us.
X-ray tubes (few kV of DC accelerate electrons into a metal target, producing ionizing X-ray photons).
Cyclortrons and liner accelerators - alternating radio-frequency fields accelerate charged particles to high energy levels. Shoot the primary beam into a production target and you can make all kinds of other stuff (neutrons, muons, pions, etc).
Mercury-vapor short-wave UV lamps also qualify.
It would be a major breakthrough in nuclear physics...
As other psoters have mentioned, Uranium does not have medical uses.
However, Plutonium-238 was (is?) used as a power source in some pacemakers. It's not the bomb isotope, so I guess this detector will be able to tell the difference.
Every 5 years or so, take all the old discs and copy the data files onto new media. If it's a photo album, this would make a good family activity for the holidays.
If the encoding format (e.g. JPEG) is obsolete by that time, then keep the original files but also convert each one as best you can to the current storage format. It would also help to keep a 'changelog' diary describing each conversion, and to include source code for the various conversion utilities that you used. Make sure you also keep off-site backups so that you don't lose everything to fire or theft.
Gold-plated iridium tablets?! OK, clearly you're just clueless and way out of your depth. Get back someday when you know what the big words mean.
What exactly is the problem with the original poster's statement? Iridium seems to be a valid candidate for a long-lived data storage substrate. Were you suggesting that the gold-plating would be redundant because iridium already has excellent corrosion resistance? Or something else?
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
Well, then you design some standard way to represent scientific symbols and equations with ASCII phrases. Given the wide use of TeX among scientists and mathemeticians, I would say this is a solved problem.
However, I agree with your point about foreign languages.
It did make the unit smaller, but I kept on loosing the power supply. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to find a suitable PS for that box
s/loosing/losing/
I ran my Netwinder from a 13.8V 3A supply designed to power automotive accessories (available at Radio Shack or other electronics stores). I also had a 12V gel-cell wired in parallel as a "UPS".
It was unreachable for me earlier this morning, but it's back now.
Feb 27 2002 - Slashdotted!!!! by ralphs
Well this is a good test of the old StrongARM netwinder... we're getting bombarded with http requests after a story got posted on Slashdot. Temporarily I've taken the FAQ offline because it generates way too much load...
I have played with one, and I wish I had one (even though it would replace my much more powerful 233MHz PII firewall,
I'm not sure about "much more powerful" - my Netwinder and my K6-233 desktop had comparable CPU power, based on keyrates in the distributed.net RC5 cracking client. The only place that the Netwinder really falls down is in floating-point math, which has to be emulated in software. So don't plan on making a Netwinder-based 3D render-farm.
(p.s. it does play MP3s quite nicely, with an appropriately-written player).
Small size and low power are very nice features. If only they'd been able to make it "low noise" and "low cost" as well...
It'd be better if they didn't force the OS though. Just use whatever is your favourite. ARM Debian, SuSe, *BSD, whatever. Sell the platform and make it easy to add an OS.
I'm not sure what you mean by "force the OS". The bootloader is designed to load a Linux kernel, but apart from that there's nothing restricting your choice of distribution.
Changing the OS does require a bit of effort because the Netwinder doesn't have any removable media drives, but once you've set it up to net-boot from another machine it's easy to wipe the drives and put on whatever you want.
However not all software will compile/run on the StrongARM platform; many packages have hidden bugs or x86-only assumptions that are exposed by the new architecture (e.g. structure padding, endian-ness, word alignment). You can't just take the stack of SuSE source RPMs and expect to build a fully-functional port. However this is more the fault of the software than of the hardware.
Details about the Debian Netwinder version are here.
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
You had an "office server". It shipped with a stripped-down distribution designed for end users. It wasn't *supposed* to have any hack value.
There was also a development model (same hardware, give or take some RAM and HD) that included all the necessary tools and utilities. The DM disk images were available for download from www.netwinder.org, so you could have easily upgraded your unit if you'd ever bothered to look. IIRC there was also a Debian version for the Netwinder.
When it came out, there was only the development model. Its first market was Linux hackers, and the core development team were very active (and helpful) on the newsgroups and mailing lists.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
No, the Netwinder is a very-cool-but-now-outdated Linux-friendly hardware platform that was hijacked by a group of clueless marketroids who thought that spending $BIGNUM on a cheesy domain name and a stack of glossy brochures was a better idea than actually continuing to develop the product.
That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines,[...]
So you're blaming the Netwinder for the trouble you had re-configuring an office full of mongrel Windows 95 boxes???
Re:Examine this behavior in your selves....
on
Pilot of My Soul
·
· Score: 1
What happens if the site you want doesn't work? Rather than not worrying about it, you reload a few times, don't you? Like the angry monkey wondering why the dispenser isn't giving him his juice, you suddenly get a shock by getting your dopamine level reduced.
Reminds me of an old quote about USENET:
"If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine."
-- Rob Stampfli
www.overture.com (formerly GoTo.com) is a search engine where advertisers pay for clickthroughs, and each search result shows you how much your click costs that advertiser (more $ == higher search ranking).
Search for "bulk email".
Click through the first 10 or so.
Multiply by the Slashdot Effect.
Smile.
(I am not associated with overture.com, nor is this an endorsement of their services. But anything that bleeds money from spammers is good IMHO).
Those who give an 'informative' moderation should first click the link to see whether or not it actually leads to an ISO of the software in question...
(this one doesn't, and the 'Red Flag Linux' link at the top of his page leads only to an Amazon.com 'honor system' donation page. I see no indication that the person receiving these donations has anything to do with the development or distribution of Red Flag Linux).
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody really use usenet anymore?
I do. Some groups are mostly noise, but others are still pretty good.
As for the spam problem, maybe you can suggest to your ISP that they install Cleanfeed or similar. (Yes, that's the same site as the anti-yEnc page, which BTW I agree with.)
Also see RFC2100, "The Naming of Hosts"
One advantage of the new clock is that it ticks much faster. Today?s international time and frequency standards, such as NIST-F1, measure an atomic resonance of about 9 billion cycles per second. By contrast, the new NIST device monitors an optical frequency more than 100,000 times higher or about 1 quadrillion (US) cycles per second.
A 9 GHz oscillation can be hooked up directly to electronic circuits, counters, PLLs, etc. My first question when I read this article was, how the heck do you synchronize anything else to a "frequency" that's in the optical / ultraviolet range? I found some more information on this page and this one, so I guess that's how this new clock works.
Probably the best part of the tour for me was the liquid hydrogen. Even better was touching it. Yes I did, yes I still have all my digits.
Are you sure it was hydrogen? Liquid nitrogen would be much more common (and safer, and cheaper). I agree it's a fun demo to dip your hand in it though, especially after they show a flower or something shattering after it's been immersed for a few seconds.
Remember a few years back, an inventor released an alkaline battery recharger to the market that would recharge ANY alkaline battery hundreds of times.
Well, that's what the infomercials claimed...
Now we have crippled alkaline chargers with "special" batteries that only work on unique chargers (no cross brand compatibility, it's mechanically engineered to be incompatible).
This "mechanical incompatibility" is easily cured with a drill, a wad of aluminum foil, or just by putting an AA cell into the "C/D" position (at least on the Renewal chargers I've used). Also "Pure Energy" brand cells work without modification in a Renewal charger. AFAIK the only mechanical incompatibility is Rechargeable/Standard, not between brands of rechargeable.
To a first-order approximation, "regular" and "rechargeable" alkalines are the same (and can both be charged by the same charger electronics). However, I believe the battery industry's claims that the rechargeable units have slightly different mechanical and electrical characteristics designed to improve performance (energy capacity, cycle life, not leaking caustic chemicals, etc). YMMV on this point, of course.
what about power density? how large is that 50 F capacitor? how about its mass?
Dunno about the mass. Dimensions are 18mm diameter by 40mm length. Look at part#P11066-ND near the middle of this page(pdf).
Electric vehicles are the step in right direction.
Close. Hybrid Electric vehicles (Toyota Prius / Honda Insight) are the step in the right direction. They're close enough to conventional cars that users don't have to make any major lifestyle adjustments (like plugging in their cars every night), but they produce immediate pollution benefits and also get a lot of essential technology like efficient batteries, electric motors, and control circuitry out into the marketplace.
Maybe some day the internal combustion engines in these hybrid vehicles will be replaced with hydrogen fuel cells, or maybe we'll keep the internal combustion engines but run them on ethanol / bio-diesel[1]. Either way, a hybrid "fuel"/electric vehicle is probably going to be a better choice than the all-electric one.
[1] There are differences between phasing out fossil fuel energy production, and phasing out hydrocarbon energy production.
Yeah yeah, Tesla conspiracy free energy Siberia explosion blah blah
Look at all of the public paranoia about *stray* fields from power-transmission lines causing cancer, claims of brain tumors from cel phones, and tell me how long you think Tesla's beamed-power schemes would survive in today's world even if there weren't a massive power company conspiracy to suppress them.
Then you have to look at efficiency, interference with other radio communication, shielding of sensitive electronic devices, and on and on.
Tesla had a lot of great ideas, but that doesn't mean that every one of them was good.
You could use rechargeable alkalines.
If I recall correctly, batteries are basically chemical capacitors. (Two surfaces of different electric potential separated by a resistor)
Batteries and capacitors are quite different. Batteries use electrochemical reactions that produce a near-constant potential (voltage) across the terminals, until the reactants are used up.
Capacitors work by polarizing a dielectric material [a physical change, not a chemical one] between two closely-spaced plates. The terminal voltage is proportional to the amount of charge (time integral of current) the capacitor is holding.
Modern capacitors are approaching the energy capacity of batteries. A 50F 2.3V capacitor holds 132 J of energy, which is equivalent to 120 Amp-seconds (or 33 mA-hours) at 1.1 Volts. This capacitor costs CDN$17.88, compared to $2.17 for a 250 mAh AAA NiCd cell. (prices are from Digikey in quantities of 1000)
So the capacitor's about 8x the cost for 1/8 the capacity of the NiCd.
We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?
One big limitation is that we only make our memory chips one layer thick (vs. multi-layer capacitors), and that these capacitors are optimized for storing information, not energy. The more energy stored per cell, the more heat is wasted every time that cell switches state.
So how do you get ionising radiation without nuclear decay? Please tell us.
X-ray tubes (few kV of DC accelerate electrons into a metal target, producing ionizing X-ray photons).
Cyclortrons and liner accelerators - alternating radio-frequency fields accelerate charged particles to high energy levels. Shoot the primary beam into a production target and you can make all kinds of other stuff (neutrons, muons, pions, etc).
Mercury-vapor short-wave UV lamps also qualify.
It would be a major breakthrough in nuclear physics...
It was, last century.
See this link
As other psoters have mentioned, Uranium does not have medical uses.
However, Plutonium-238 was (is?) used as a power source in some pacemakers. It's not the bomb isotope, so I guess this detector will be able to tell the difference.
Don't bet on ASCII to *always work*. For a long time EBCDIC was the standard, and it's slowly fading away now...
Hopefully conversion tools for ASCII->Whatever will always be easy to find, e.g. "dd if=file.old of=file.new conv=ascii" to convert EBCDIC to ASCII.
Every 5 years or so, take all the old discs and copy the data files onto new media. If it's a photo album, this would make a good family activity for the holidays.
If the encoding format (e.g. JPEG) is obsolete by that time, then keep the original files but also convert each one as best you can to the current storage format. It would also help to keep a 'changelog' diary describing each conversion, and to include source code for the various conversion utilities that you used. Make sure you also keep off-site backups so that you don't lose everything to fire or theft.
Gold-plated iridium tablets?! OK, clearly you're just clueless and way out of your depth. Get back someday when you know what the big words mean.
What exactly is the problem with the original poster's statement? Iridium seems to be a valid candidate for a long-lived data storage substrate. Were you suggesting that the gold-plating would be redundant because iridium already has excellent corrosion resistance? Or something else?
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
Well, then you design some standard way to represent scientific symbols and equations with ASCII phrases. Given the wide use of TeX among scientists and mathemeticians, I would say this is a solved problem.
However, I agree with your point about foreign languages.
It did make the unit smaller, but I kept on loosing the power supply. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to find a suitable PS for that box
s/loosing/losing/
I ran my Netwinder from a 13.8V 3A supply designed to power automotive accessories (available at Radio Shack or other electronics stores). I also had a 12V gel-cell wired in parallel as a "UPS".
Netwinder.org is still up after all this time
It was unreachable for me earlier this morning, but it's back now.
Feb 27 2002 - Slashdotted!!!! by ralphs
Well this is a good test of the old StrongARM netwinder... we're getting bombarded with http requests after a story got posted on Slashdot. Temporarily I've taken the FAQ offline because it generates way too much load...
1:18pm up 119 days, 20:18, 1 user, load average: 124.91, 102.34, 101.20
(the FAQ in question is a CGI-based FAQ-o-Matic).
From their 'site info' page:
NetWinder.org is hosted on a dual StrongARM rackmount NetWinder system, each with 128MB of RAM and a 10GB drive.
The uptime record for the server is 460 days. At that time we had to shut it down, in order to relocate the system from the former Rebel.com premises.
I have played with one, and I wish I had one (even though it would replace my much more powerful 233MHz PII firewall,
I'm not sure about "much more powerful" - my Netwinder and my K6-233 desktop had comparable CPU power, based on keyrates in the distributed.net RC5 cracking client. The only place that the Netwinder really falls down is in floating-point math, which has to be emulated in software. So don't plan on making a Netwinder-based 3D render-farm.
(p.s. it does play MP3s quite nicely, with an appropriately-written player).
Small size and low power are very nice features. If only they'd been able to make it "low noise" and "low cost" as well...
It'd be better if they didn't force the OS though. Just use whatever is your favourite. ARM Debian, SuSe, *BSD, whatever. Sell the platform and make it easy to add an OS.
I'm not sure what you mean by "force the OS". The bootloader is designed to load a Linux kernel, but apart from that there's nothing restricting your choice of distribution.
Changing the OS does require a bit of effort because the Netwinder doesn't have any removable media drives, but once you've set it up to net-boot from another machine it's easy to wipe the drives and put on whatever you want.
However not all software will compile/run on the StrongARM platform; many packages have hidden bugs or x86-only assumptions that are exposed by the new architecture (e.g. structure padding, endian-ness, word alignment). You can't just take the stack of SuSE source RPMs and expect to build a fully-functional port. However this is more the fault of the software than of the hardware.
Details about the Debian Netwinder version are here.
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
You had an "office server". It shipped with a stripped-down distribution designed for end users. It wasn't *supposed* to have any hack value.
There was also a development model (same hardware, give or take some RAM and HD) that included all the necessary tools and utilities. The DM disk images were available for download from www.netwinder.org, so you could have easily upgraded your unit if you'd ever bothered to look. IIRC there was also a Debian version for the Netwinder.
When it came out, there was only the development model. Its first market was Linux hackers, and the core development team were very active (and helpful) on the newsgroups and mailing lists.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
No, the Netwinder is a very-cool-but-now-outdated Linux-friendly hardware platform that was hijacked by a group of clueless marketroids who thought that spending $BIGNUM on a cheesy domain name and a stack of glossy brochures was a better idea than actually continuing to develop the product.
That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines,[...]
So you're blaming the Netwinder for the trouble you had re-configuring an office full of mongrel Windows 95 boxes???
What happens if the site you want doesn't work? Rather than not worrying about it, you reload a few times, don't you? Like the angry monkey wondering why the dispenser isn't giving him his juice, you suddenly get a shock by getting your dopamine level reduced.
Reminds me of an old quote about USENET:
"If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine."
-- Rob Stampfli
www.overture.com (formerly GoTo.com) is a search engine where advertisers pay for clickthroughs, and each search result shows you how much your click costs that advertiser (more $ == higher search ranking).
Search for "bulk email".
Click through the first 10 or so.
Multiply by the Slashdot Effect.
Smile.
(I am not associated with overture.com, nor is this an endorsement of their services. But anything that bleeds money from spammers is good IMHO).
Those who give an 'informative' moderation should first click the link to see whether or not it actually leads to an ISO of the software in question...
(this one doesn't, and the 'Red Flag Linux' link at the top of his page leads only to an Amazon.com 'honor system' donation page. I see no indication that the person receiving these donations has anything to do with the development or distribution of Red Flag Linux).