I actually went to CA to see the unveiling of their Rocket-Ez a couple of years ago, and we heard Jeff Greason speak on the visions for the company - the mission, to make a nontoxic, reusable (in the real sense) rocket motor. They are already selling small rocket engines for manoevering thrusters on spacecraft.
I wrote about it at the time on my website and took plenty of photos. It was quite impressive the number of firsts that Xcor were achieving.
A few hundred miles isn't short range compared to other weapons. An air to air missile has 50 miles range, cannons have perhaps 1 mile range. This thing fires at the speed of light for hundreds of miles. Get it aimed and the target doesn't have the opportunity to dodge out the way like they do with a missile.
OT, but I note you ran all this as root (or at least the # prompt indicates the logged in user has root privileges).
It is generally best practise to only do things as root that need to be done as root. Things like running 'host' don't - so as good security practise, you should have done this as a non-root user!
It could have been all solved if the US had adopted DAB digital radio like everywhere else in the world...but guess what, Clear Channel had it squashed precisely because it'd bring "too much competition". So the US is lumbered with the rather useless 'HD radio', or pay-per-month satellite radio.
You might be interested in this website: Light Straw. I particularly enjoyed the stories of the old manual international exchange where operators would put calls through by hand during the 1970s or thereabouts. Looking at all that kit, it's no wonder phone calls used to be so expensive.
I work with a former phone engineer who told me about a night in the exchange - the place was very quiet, and then at 8.00pm, all the switches started going, building into a massive crechendo of sound, the entire exchange turning into a deafening cacaphony of selectors...well, selecting. He said it was spooky. He shortly afterwards discovered the event that prompted all this activity was the dramatic end of an episode of a primetime TV soap.
One of the things that surprised me was all the tones were generated by essentially a big electric motor driven thing (I think Light Straw has some samples of the tones along with an engineer testing the thing). I'm just old enough to remember the last Strowger exchanges (our local exchange went digital in 1989 IIRC) and I sort of regret not badgering a BT engineer into letting me in the building and watch this thing go. Perhaps I'm just a bit too geeky, but I love electromechanical stuff.
Digital phone exchanges seem so...dead...by comparison.
The Grumman Cheetah is a neat plane, the Association of Manx Pilots have one which I've got a few hours in. Probably the best nosedragger single in my budget:-) I used to have a half share in an ancient Cessna 140 (see http://www.dylansmith.net) which I flew coast to coast across the US. It's a big place at 85 knots!
I love the old Strowger exchange systems. They make such nice noises:-)
There's one at the London Science Museum. I had great fun last year trying to make all the phones go at once, and then hang them all up as fast as possible, lovely Ctththhthththhwhwwwraaack! sounds as all the bidirectional selectors go home.
100 chf? Here, it's GBP1,000 (about US$1800) for being caught using a handheld phone whilst driving. Over in the UK it's only GBP30 (US$55) which is hardly a deterrent.
Obtain an old 1960s rotary dial telephone, as found in all British households (since at the time, the phone company was the GPO and were the only people to be allowed to connect phones, so the range was extremely limited. It did include the Ericofon though).
Inside the phone, insert the guts of a cheap GSM cell phone. Build some electronics to change the LD pulsing from the rotary dial into something suitable to cause the cellphone to dial. Maybe add an extra button as a 'Send' button for the cell phone. Have the loudspeaker of the phone which the ringtone normally plays through connected to a circuit that rings the phone bell.
Catch the train.
Receive phone call. "Rrrring rring". Pull out old phone from bag, place on table. Lift receiver.
Ah yes, the obligatory "I use the lunix b3cause it was on Hackers and I also need to s1am the windoze computers!" (I'm risking flamebait, I know, but I've been wanting to use "lunix" for a while now;))
The debate is almost pointless. If there's complex software, and that complex software has bugs, it is inevitable that exploits and exploit kits like the one in the story will be written.
Railing against them won't make them go away - maybe the author(s) of this particular tool will give up, but there are plenty of other authors who will inevitably write something similar anyway.
No - I've experimented with numerous block sizes. The best I've seen on the systems I've played with is around 11Mbyte/sec - around 8 seems more normal. Perhaps it's just the crappy systems we have;-)
Most cheap home systems are more likely to be crappy though.
Yes - this is true. What a lot of people forget is you also need the hard disk suited for the task. Most cheap hard disks don't have the sustained data rate to fill 100Mbit/sec.
Of course, if you've got a RAID array full of 15Krpm SCSI drives, then go for it:-)
Gigabit Ethernet actually uses the same frequency (100MHz) as 100Mbit ethernet. Cat5 and Cat5e is both rated for 100MHz. Actually, I wonder if you can get Cat5 but not Cat5e any more. When I wired my house, Cat5e was the minimum spec being sold.
The difference with Gig-E is that it uses all four pairs in the wire (100Mbit only uses 2 pairs) and it has a different linecode that allows more bits per baud.
Do a dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null, let it run for a while, then Ctrl-C. The data rate it shows will quickly disabuse you of the notion that an ATA HDD will operate *sustained* at 40-60MBps. They can certainly burst a high rate (thanks to the cache), but sustaining that rate is a whole different story.
Most ATA HDDs won't sustain a data rate capable of saturating a 100Mbit/s network, let alone a gigabit network.
It doesn't in Britain, but by law the Police are entitled to ask you for your encryption keys and passphrases, and if you refuse (or have forgotten!) you face criminal prosecution. This stupid piece of legislation of course effectively makes any automatically keyed encryption (let's say IPSEC or SSH) a way of prosecuting someone.
If the Police are trying to get you for *something* but can't get anything to stick, or a high-end civil servant is trying the same, what's to stop them demanding your encryption keys for your IPSEC or SSH session, and then prosecuting you because you can't hand those over - because you never knew what they were?
Fortunately, we don't have this stupid piece of legislation where I live, although I live in the British Isles (just not in the UK)
If you think of it, hiding messages in spam would make quite good steganography. Since pretty much most spam comes with a sizeable chunk of 'hashbusters' (random words on the bottom, random characters in the subject), you could hide your message quite easily in the hashbuster.
In regular email, just the fact a PGP encrypted message was sent by Alice to Bob would tip the authorities off that Alice and Bob were at least communicating; if they are both criminals for instance, just seeing the activity between Alice and Bob might be enough to alert the authorities to watch the pair a bit more closely because something's about to go down - even if they can't actually discover the message content.
However, if Alice and Bob are both spammers, and use the Windows worm du jour as their open spam relay, and each spam a few million email addresses, it's much harder to see that Alice and Bob are in fact conversing let alone find the actual message.
I was 18. Actually, I was already running a FidoNet BBS by then.
I also rooted the Unix box at work (an IBM 6150 RT running AIX 3.something) due to a really trivial root password (it wasn't a computer job, but in the idle moments, I started learning Unix on that machine. Mainly by trying to see what each command did. Whilst logged in as root! It was great fun when I discovered 'wall'. Good job I didn't experimentally try rm -rf *:-) Things got much safer when I discovered the 'man' command)
OK, when on the move, how many people who are doing word processing need more than the features of WordPerfect 5, the early versions of Excel for Windows and that kind of thing?
What we need is a really low electrical power CPU - optimized to take as little electricity as possible, but which is capable of running these kinds of applications acceptably quickly. It probably doesn't need to be more than 50MHz. Put this in a ultra-lightweight laptop style case, using solid state storage for disk (you can get USB memory sticks with 512MB which is more than sufficient for this class of computing) and have the battery go a day or two between charges.
My mobile phone is a case in point. Although it's not a word processor, I've got an organizer, email client, lightweight web browser, camera, SSH client, IRC client and pager all rolled into one, and it'll go ten days without a charge on standby, and can be used for 7 hours on one charge with a tiny battery. I can even make phone calls on it. Make essentially a notebook with mobile phone technology, and you've got an excellent portable internet terminal that you can write documents, make spreadsheets, compile small programs etc. on.
Re:If you've ever wondered why your PHB...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
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It's from the Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert has a boss with pointy hair. Hence the Pointy Haired Boss.
Writing good UI is often not just difficult (to get the human interface aspects right), but if you're used to having to crack hard 'business logic' end problems, writing user interfaces is extremely tedious.
This is probably part of the reason why UI is often bad in free software - few people want to do it because it's an incredibly boring job.
I've done both Windows (including some nitty gritty stuff, right down to replacement GINA dlls - the GINA is the bit that handles your login) and plenty of Unix programming (on various flavours, including AIX, Solaris and Linux).
For simple stuff, it's a wash.
However, for anything more than small programs, Windows really shows how needlessly overcomplex Win32 is, and how crufty it is.
For example, say you have a program you wrote for a Linux server that has to wait on a number of sockets, named pipes and serial ports, and process the data as soon as it comes in. In your program for Linux (or AIX for that matter), you use one call to select() to wait on the whole lot. You read and write them exactly the same way (with read() and write()). On Windows, you use select() to wait on sockets, PeekNamedPipe (IIRC, it's a while since I've done this) to check on the named pipe, and yet something else for the serial port. So your code gets needlessly complex because you are forced to have three pieces of code to do essentially the same job. More room for bugs.
Say, on Linux, you want to read the system log. It's a regular file, you open and read it in exactly the same way as any other file. You can use 'tail -f' to watch it, you can easily handle it in exactly the same way as you'd handle any other file on the system. On Windows, you have to use special API calls to read the event log.
If you want to configure something in Windows, you can't just read/write the configuration file - you have to use yet another specialized set of APIs to maipulate the registry.
If you write an application that handles barcode scanners for example, under Windows, you have to write different code if you're reading and RS-232 scanner compared to a scanner that shows up as a HID device. In a Unix-type OS, you just read/dev/uhid0 instead of/dev/tty00 and that's it.
This, I think, is why you tend to get poorer quality software on Windows - not because Windows programmers are necessarily any less competent, but because of the maddeningly overcomplex (and often inconsistent) Windows API. I think Microsoft realises that Win32 is a crock of shit - and this is why they are trying to move to.Net. Once enough stuff is ported to.Net, they can wave goodbye to the monstrosity they probably are regretting ever creating.
The only time I don't use a package is when there isn't one available, for example, if you want to run Exim on RedHat.
Typically, I prefer to use Debian. If you use the packages, apt-get update && apt-get upgrade will upgrade them all when bugs are found (particularly important with security on an Internet server). If you're doing everything from source, it's quite a bit of hassle manually compiling new versions of things that have vulnerabilities.
Generally, go with the packages (or at least a BSD-style ports system).
You could do this 'visual design' thing years ago with JSP - no, nothing to do with Java, but Jackson Structured Programming.
Jackson Structured Programming was basically a design method for data processing type programs - things that took an input, did something to it, and emitted output. Think of many programs you'd pipe data through in Unix, and you have the typical type of thing JSP was aimed at. Except JSP was usually used by COBOL programmers for data processing type tasks.
With JSP, you drew the structure of your input, and the desired output which represented all the sequence, selection and iteration in the data. You'd then take these two structures, and merge them. This merging proccess brought you a program structure - another tree-like diagram. You would then recurse through the tree, turning the program structure into code. The idea was that all the work was done in the design - get the input and output structures right, and you'd have no logical errors in your code. For the kind of things JSP was aimed at, it actually worked very well.
There were programs available for VAX/VMS which could turn the program structure into compilable COBOL - completely automating the programming step. This was being done well over a decade ago.
Microsoft will now come up with its own version of JSP, and claim it as a great "innovation" of course:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I actually went to CA to see the unveiling of their Rocket-Ez a couple of years ago, and we heard Jeff Greason speak on the visions for the company - the mission, to make a nontoxic, reusable (in the real sense) rocket motor. They are already selling small rocket engines for manoevering thrusters on spacecraft.
I wrote about it at the time on my website and took plenty of photos. It was quite impressive the number of firsts that Xcor were achieving.
A few hundred miles isn't short range compared to other weapons. An air to air missile has 50 miles range, cannons have perhaps 1 mile range. This thing fires at the speed of light for hundreds of miles. Get it aimed and the target doesn't have the opportunity to dodge out the way like they do with a missile.
Driving *America* down the drain? The Delorean was designed and manufactured in Northern Ireland!
OT, but I note you ran all this as root (or at least the # prompt indicates the logged in user has root privileges).
It is generally best practise to only do things as root that need to be done as root. Things like running 'host' don't - so as good security practise, you should have done this as a non-root user!
It could have been all solved if the US had adopted DAB digital radio like everywhere else in the world...but guess what, Clear Channel had it squashed precisely because it'd bring "too much competition". So the US is lumbered with the rather useless 'HD radio', or pay-per-month satellite radio.
You might be interested in this website: Light Straw. I particularly enjoyed the stories of the old manual international exchange where operators would put calls through by hand during the 1970s or thereabouts. Looking at all that kit, it's no wonder phone calls used to be so expensive.
:-) I used to have a half share in an ancient Cessna 140 (see http://www.dylansmith.net) which I flew coast to coast across the US. It's a big place at 85 knots!
I work with a former phone engineer who told me about a night in the exchange - the place was very quiet, and then at 8.00pm, all the switches started going, building into a massive crechendo of sound, the entire exchange turning into a deafening cacaphony of selectors...well, selecting. He said it was spooky. He shortly afterwards discovered the event that prompted all this activity was the dramatic end of an episode of a primetime TV soap.
One of the things that surprised me was all the tones were generated by essentially a big electric motor driven thing (I think Light Straw has some samples of the tones along with an engineer testing the thing). I'm just old enough to remember the last Strowger exchanges (our local exchange went digital in 1989 IIRC) and I sort of regret not badgering a BT engineer into letting me in the building and watch this thing go. Perhaps I'm just a bit too geeky, but I love electromechanical stuff.
Digital phone exchanges seem so...dead...by comparison.
The Grumman Cheetah is a neat plane, the Association of Manx Pilots have one which I've got a few hours in. Probably the best nosedragger single in my budget
I love the old Strowger exchange systems. They make such nice noises :-)
There's one at the London Science Museum. I had great fun last year trying to make all the phones go at once, and then hang them all up as fast as possible, lovely Ctththhthththhwhwwwraaack! sounds as all the bidirectional selectors go home.
BTW: What do you fly at HPN?
All I can say is:
Beware of geeks bearing GIFs.
100 chf? Here, it's GBP1,000 (about US$1800) for being caught using a handheld phone whilst driving. Over in the UK it's only GBP30 (US$55) which is hardly a deterrent.
Just once, I want to try this.
Obtain an old 1960s rotary dial telephone, as found in all British households (since at the time, the phone company was the GPO and were the only people to be allowed to connect phones, so the range was extremely limited. It did include the Ericofon though).
Inside the phone, insert the guts of a cheap GSM cell phone. Build some electronics to change the LD pulsing from the rotary dial into something suitable to cause the cellphone to dial. Maybe add an extra button as a 'Send' button for the cell phone. Have the loudspeaker of the phone which the ringtone normally plays through connected to a circuit that rings the phone bell.
Catch the train.
Receive phone call. "Rrrring rring". Pull out old phone from bag, place on table. Lift receiver.
"HI I'M ON THE TRAIN!"
Phone a friend with the rotary dial, too.
Observe looks of fellow passengers.
Lunix is actually an OS for the Commodore 64.
The debate is almost pointless. If there's complex software, and that complex software has bugs, it is inevitable that exploits and exploit kits like the one in the story will be written.
Railing against them won't make them go away - maybe the author(s) of this particular tool will give up, but there are plenty of other authors who will inevitably write something similar anyway.
No - I've experimented with numerous block sizes. The best I've seen on the systems I've played with is around 11Mbyte/sec - around 8 seems more normal. Perhaps it's just the crappy systems we have ;-)
Most cheap home systems are more likely to be crappy though.
Yes - this is true. What a lot of people forget is you also need the hard disk suited for the task. Most cheap hard disks don't have the sustained data rate to fill 100Mbit/sec.
:-)
Of course, if you've got a RAID array full of 15Krpm SCSI drives, then go for it
Gigabit Ethernet actually uses the same frequency (100MHz) as 100Mbit ethernet. Cat5 and Cat5e is both rated for 100MHz. Actually, I wonder if you can get Cat5 but not Cat5e any more. When I wired my house, Cat5e was the minimum spec being sold.
The difference with Gig-E is that it uses all four pairs in the wire (100Mbit only uses 2 pairs) and it has a different linecode that allows more bits per baud.
Do a dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null, let it run for a while, then Ctrl-C. The data rate it shows will quickly disabuse you of the notion that an ATA HDD will operate *sustained* at 40-60MBps. They can certainly burst a high rate (thanks to the cache), but sustaining that rate is a whole different story.
Most ATA HDDs won't sustain a data rate capable of saturating a 100Mbit/s network, let alone a gigabit network.
It doesn't in Britain, but by law the Police are entitled to ask you for your encryption keys and passphrases, and if you refuse (or have forgotten!) you face criminal prosecution. This stupid piece of legislation of course effectively makes any automatically keyed encryption (let's say IPSEC or SSH) a way of prosecuting someone.
If the Police are trying to get you for *something* but can't get anything to stick, or a high-end civil servant is trying the same, what's to stop them demanding your encryption keys for your IPSEC or SSH session, and then prosecuting you because you can't hand those over - because you never knew what they were?
Fortunately, we don't have this stupid piece of legislation where I live, although I live in the British Isles (just not in the UK)
If you think of it, hiding messages in spam would make quite good steganography. Since pretty much most spam comes with a sizeable chunk of 'hashbusters' (random words on the bottom, random characters in the subject), you could hide your message quite easily in the hashbuster.
In regular email, just the fact a PGP encrypted message was sent by Alice to Bob would tip the authorities off that Alice and Bob were at least communicating; if they are both criminals for instance, just seeing the activity between Alice and Bob might be enough to alert the authorities to watch the pair a bit more closely because something's about to go down - even if they can't actually discover the message content.
However, if Alice and Bob are both spammers, and use the Windows worm du jour as their open spam relay, and each spam a few million email addresses, it's much harder to see that Alice and Bob are in fact conversing let alone find the actual message.
I was 18. Actually, I was already running a FidoNet BBS by then.
:-) Things got much safer when I discovered the 'man' command)
I also rooted the Unix box at work (an IBM 6150 RT running AIX 3.something) due to a really trivial root password (it wasn't a computer job, but in the idle moments, I started learning Unix on that machine. Mainly by trying to see what each command did. Whilst logged in as root! It was great fun when I discovered 'wall'. Good job I didn't experimentally try rm -rf *
Ah, the days before the web.
OK, when on the move, how many people who are doing word processing need more than the features of WordPerfect 5, the early versions of Excel for Windows and that kind of thing?
What we need is a really low electrical power CPU - optimized to take as little electricity as possible, but which is capable of running these kinds of applications acceptably quickly. It probably doesn't need to be more than 50MHz. Put this in a ultra-lightweight laptop style case, using solid state storage for disk (you can get USB memory sticks with 512MB which is more than sufficient for this class of computing) and have the battery go a day or two between charges.
My mobile phone is a case in point. Although it's not a word processor, I've got an organizer, email client, lightweight web browser, camera, SSH client, IRC client and pager all rolled into one, and it'll go ten days without a charge on standby, and can be used for 7 hours on one charge with a tiny battery. I can even make phone calls on it. Make essentially a notebook with mobile phone technology, and you've got an excellent portable internet terminal that you can write documents, make spreadsheets, compile small programs etc. on.
It's from the Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert has a boss with pointy hair. Hence the Pointy Haired Boss.
Writing good UI is often not just difficult (to get the human interface aspects right), but if you're used to having to crack hard 'business logic' end problems, writing user interfaces is extremely tedious.
This is probably part of the reason why UI is often bad in free software - few people want to do it because it's an incredibly boring job.
I've done both Windows (including some nitty gritty stuff, right down to replacement GINA dlls - the GINA is the bit that handles your login) and plenty of Unix programming (on various flavours, including AIX, Solaris and Linux).
/dev/uhid0 instead of /dev/tty00 and that's it.
.Net. Once enough stuff is ported to .Net, they can wave goodbye to the monstrosity they probably are regretting ever creating.
For simple stuff, it's a wash.
However, for anything more than small programs, Windows really shows how needlessly overcomplex Win32 is, and how crufty it is.
For example, say you have a program you wrote for a Linux server that has to wait on a number of sockets, named pipes and serial ports, and process the data as soon as it comes in. In your program for Linux (or AIX for that matter), you use one call to select() to wait on the whole lot. You read and write them exactly the same way (with read() and write()). On Windows, you use select() to wait on sockets, PeekNamedPipe (IIRC, it's a while since I've done this) to check on the named pipe, and yet something else for the serial port. So your code gets needlessly complex because you are forced to have three pieces of code to do essentially the same job. More room for bugs.
Say, on Linux, you want to read the system log. It's a regular file, you open and read it in exactly the same way as any other file. You can use 'tail -f' to watch it, you can easily handle it in exactly the same way as you'd handle any other file on the system. On Windows, you have to use special API calls to read the event log.
If you want to configure something in Windows, you can't just read/write the configuration file - you have to use yet another specialized set of APIs to maipulate the registry.
If you write an application that handles barcode scanners for example, under Windows, you have to write different code if you're reading and RS-232 scanner compared to a scanner that shows up as a HID device. In a Unix-type OS, you just read
This, I think, is why you tend to get poorer quality software on Windows - not because Windows programmers are necessarily any less competent, but because of the maddeningly overcomplex (and often inconsistent) Windows API. I think Microsoft realises that Win32 is a crock of shit - and this is why they are trying to move to
The only time I don't use a package is when there isn't one available, for example, if you want to run Exim on RedHat.
Typically, I prefer to use Debian. If you use the packages, apt-get update && apt-get upgrade will upgrade them all when bugs are found (particularly important with security on an Internet server). If you're doing everything from source, it's quite a bit of hassle manually compiling new versions of things that have vulnerabilities.
Generally, go with the packages (or at least a BSD-style ports system).
You could do this 'visual design' thing years ago with JSP - no, nothing to do with Java, but Jackson Structured Programming.
:-)
Jackson Structured Programming was basically a design method for data processing type programs - things that took an input, did something to it, and emitted output. Think of many programs you'd pipe data through in Unix, and you have the typical type of thing JSP was aimed at. Except JSP was usually used by COBOL programmers for data processing type tasks.
With JSP, you drew the structure of your input, and the desired output which represented all the sequence, selection and iteration in the data. You'd then take these two structures, and merge them. This merging proccess brought you a program structure - another tree-like diagram. You would then recurse through the tree, turning the program structure into code. The idea was that all the work was done in the design - get the input and output structures right, and you'd have no logical errors in your code. For the kind of things JSP was aimed at, it actually worked very well.
There were programs available for VAX/VMS which could turn the program structure into compilable COBOL - completely automating the programming step. This was being done well over a decade ago.
Microsoft will now come up with its own version of JSP, and claim it as a great "innovation" of course