Hey DIY fan!
Check this out.
It's actually about PET plastic, but should be workable for polyacrylate as well. I've welded them together with solering irons, works great.
If you want to see a hardcore plan for using CDs, then check this one. I aint fucking around when it comes to recycling used CDs, or plastic bottles for that matter.
Re:Becuase of Stupidity of course
on
Web Services
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· Score: 2
But browsers are not OSs.
I've been saying this since I first heard Gates start pushing it. Web services is a concept only someone who is clueless or hoping to keep others clueless about computing fundamentals could love, like Gates.
The argument of leveraging "what's out there" is totally misleading. OSs are already out there. Limiting yourself to a browser is essentially just taking the responsibility off the sysadmins by saying everything has to be squeezed into HTML so they don't have to worry about their security policy, but that's totally naive. In order for web services to be useful, they have to be powerful and you're back to the question of why you didn't just write a brown paper app with FTP, TFTP, SSH or whatever protocol you needed for the networking chores? How does squeezing this existing functionality into HTTP represent an improvement?
The NY Times article seems to rely pretty heavily on the influence of CNN. From what I saw of the 9/11 thing, it looked to me like CNN was doing their damndest to drum up a war 24 hours after the attack. So, no surprise there.
If we look at a truly interactive forum like/. or the newsgroups, I think the results don't fit as well with the NY Times editorial.
Also, the premise that simply having more knowledge results in more tolerance is an ignorant and uneducated assumption at best. Simply knowing "the facts" isn't necessarily going to change anybody's thinking or behaviors. If this naive assumption were true, there would probably be more vegetarians than there are today.
However, human interaction and communication is what we, as humans, are all about and it's not as though tolerance is the yardstick by which we judge whether that is the right thing. So even if someone came up with impressively persuasive statistical evidence that communications technologies like newsgroups or/. were leading to intolerance, it would be little more than trivia as far as I'm concerned.
In the case of this editorial though, I don't think the examples are particularly persuasive.
If you're sick, try some peppermint tea.
If you're a libertarian . . . well, just imagine things are't have to be so black and white for a second.
In fact, I think taxes are borderline criminal myself and I know damn well that the US became a very wealthy nation without ever raising taxes. That's not some big secret that only libertarians are in on. But although I know this to be true, I still believe the goverment has a role in society and that there is possible to both big and benign. Things like currency should be handled by a government.
You, on the other hand, don't seem to be open to learning much about usury or its realtionship to the debate at hand.
Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said they were planning to work with the Japanese earth simulation center to convert United States weather modeling codes to work with the new computer.
Would that code most likely be in something like C, C++ or in Fortran or something else entirely? And what kind of changes would you be talking about when adapting it to vector based processors?
Any mad weather scientists out there like to fill in the lay public on the rough details?
The mammal-like reptiles had a skull structure very much like modern mammals and lived not only with the dinosaurs, but hundreds of millions of years before them. These creatures are considered the ancestors of all modern mammals and they would probably have had a facial structure similar to modern mammals given that they had a ridge of bone above the eye sockets where the jaw muscles from their jaw --similar in shape and function to a mammalian jaw, as opposed to a reptilian jaw-- connected to the skull.
Hey, thanks for the +1.
Obviously professional rack mounts have their pricey little 1U cases, but I skip that step. Good sheet metal design work is very expensive and bad sheet metal design is butt ugly and omnipresent. I just leave my boards out on the racks which you could also call shelves in this case or even statues I suppose. In fact, I make mine of portland cement, but that's another story.
As for the KVMs I use, they don't have any markers on them at all except the A,B,C,D on the front, but they are definitely cheap and come in USB also. I've had no problems with them. As I mentioned, I'm in Taiwan and that probably has something to do with my easy access to such goods, but I did buy a very similar model for only about twenty bucks in San Diego last year for my Dad and then I saw some more up on the Central Coast of California at an Electronics parts store rather than a computer store. They didn't have USB yet as of last year, but they were plenty cheap and most boards still support PS2 these days. If you see an el cheapo KVM, don't be afraid to give it a try. I was really impressed when I found it worked. I could never go back. I couldn't afford all the monitors and I'd have no place for them. Besides, CRTs put off a lof heat and Taiwan is already very very hot and humid. Maybe when LCD's are cheap it will be another story, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
Of course the next thing that happens after you get a switch and start filling it up with whatever boards you can find is that people start accusing you of being a hog for having so many PCs, but that fades quickly. I know my wife who was skeptical at first quit complaining the first time her box went down and I was able to switch her over to a new one in no time flat. Keeping the proxy server on a physically separate machine and then moving the P2P off on to its own board/drive really smooths network hassles out quite a bit. Another board handles the CDR, you see how quickly a four way switch starts to fill up and you're not even browsing/. or watching movies yet, let's not even mention screwing with unstable distros and what not. The more the merrier. I swear, the PCs actually seem to work better the more you put in a single room. It's weird. I bring bad drives over here and they magically start working once I put them on the network. Spooky.
Another thing I'm seeing here in Taiwan related to KVM that I haven't seen in the States is massive pre-packaged cable harnesses. Perhaps with the move to USB, they'll get scaled down a bit, but they have these monster suckers in cool colors that come in pack with connection for 4X PS2 Keyboard, PS2 Mouse, Monitor. These things look like equipment you'd find in a nuclear power plant, each insulated cable is about a half inch thick. I bought those for use at work and we rarely have KVM problems on those machines although you do want to be careful with the connection of those heavy cables so you don't rip the connectors off the boards. Luckily, those PS2 connectors are fairly hardy.
Buying them all pre-wired like that is awful convenient and you can't help but start getting ideas like, gee, if I had four of these and a sixteen way KVM and a sixteen port gigabit ethernet switch. . . . when Mosix gets support for memory pooling . . . drool.
Unfotunately, the monster cable packs cost more than twice as much as the KVM itself, but that's still not all that much compared to the equipment they replace that was mostly just going unused sitting on machines with dedicated tasks that just had someone flicking the monitors on now and then to see if everything was okay. They're cool alright, but USB versions will probably be even cooler.
I beg to differ and I think the original post is apparently fishing around without having actually tried using a KVM.
I build my own open air racks and I have no problems and they're actually cheaper and run cooler than cased PCs as well as being much easier to diagnose when problems occur. How is it more expensive to put four boards on a rack I build myself for thirty bucks than it is to buy four cases? It saves space too. I don't see the down side.
As for using a KVM in a mixed environment, I've never had a problem using the most generic PS2 KVM in a mixed network with two or three Linux distros and few versions of Windows. The only time I get problems is when a machine on a switch goes down while the switch is pointed at it, it can take out the mouse functionality on all the machines on that switch. But if the machines are network servers or running dedicated tasks as you'd expect in a rack mount situation, then they shouldn't be going down all the time and this won't be a big problem. Also, losing the mouse despite being inconvenient and requiring a reboot to fix doesn't mean your servers crash.
I keep two separate KVMs. One is for the boards I'm playing with and one is for the machines that are supposed to be stable. That works quite nicely. And once you try this, you realize you can add board, CPU, RAM units for such little cost your network starts to grow quickly. And why not, for the cost of a Dell PC you can add three or four boards/CPUs.
And all this functionality is from no-name totally generic beige KVM boxes with A,B,C,D on the front that cost about twelve bucks. They're availalbe in USB, or AT + Serial or whatever brightens your day. I don't see why you'd need a name brand or something specifically tailored for multiple OSs. Just buy one and try it, they're quite cheap.
And while you're at it, build your own racks and screw the cases. You don't need to encourage bad design work from Taiwan. I live in Taiwan and I can tell you that the people here are capable of making beautiful designs that put the Japanese to shame, but they go where the money is. If people keep buying these ugly cases, they'll keep making them. If the demand drops maybe they'll start making cool curvy home rack mounts. I say buy the ugly KVMs for now and ditch the cases. Maybe later we'll see both in designer styles at the right prices.
This isn't as far fetched as it may seem because if they were selling OEM designer home racks instead of cases, a KVM would be an obvious vlaue added feature.
And, there is an adaptor for swapping engines between cars, it's called a torch. If you keep the engine with a matching tranny all you have to do is shorten or lengthen the drive shaft to make it fit and possibly bang on some sheet metal and screw with the mounts, but it's not that big of a deal if you're swapping motors anyway.
Well, IANAL, but I play one on TV, so I decided to chase down some links, and it seems . . . ambiguous.
According to Title 17 Chapter 1, section 105,
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
But then it links to some footnotes that seem to suggest that while the US Government can own copyrights, the copyrighted material must be freely distributed to the public. So, that would still be something like open source.
I appreciate the notion that simply because a work is derivative --in this case of federal information, people's identities-- that quality of being derivative doesn't mean the work cannot still qualify for copyright protection itself. An analogy could be made to a song made up of samples. However as the samples are goverment information, I think the Freedom of Information Act would make it very difficult to keep the project as closed source.
Because it would be a government publication and government publications cannot be copyrighted. Isn't that the case? Perhaps it you wouldn't call that open souce. But wouldn't it have to be openly documented and copyright free?
And allow me to add, as a publisher of multilingual books that B&N will only stock English titles where Amazon takes any language. I think that's a real failing on B&N's part. They're not even trying to accomodate the global readership.
Big book distributors already want e-books.
on
Sharing Doesn't Hurt
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· Score: 2
At least in trade books there is an 800 pound Gorilla called Ingram. Ingram doesn't work with small time publishers. They set up subsidiaries for those trifiling concerns with less than a few million in sales.
If you're a publsiher with at least five titles and a proven sales record, a marketing department --web based marketing doesn't count-- and say a staff of three or four writers, you have earned the right to be rejected by one of those subsidiaries.
To the point though: if you are just a writer attempting to publish your own work, they don't even want you to apply to the subsidiaries --these are busy people trying to make a living after all. In the case of independent writers trying to self publish, Ingram strongly encourages authors to distribute electronically first. That's already the corporate policy and has been for several years.
So, the resistance to e-texts isn't coming from the corporate mega distributors, it's coming from the small time writers and specialty publishers.
Okay all you holy rollers. Was the point of my post A: that I lost data or B: that after a mere six months IBM didn't offer to send a replacement, but told me to go to a seek out a recovery solution for several grand?
The answer is B.
And, they actually told me that if I opened the case all my data would be instantly lost and this was why I should never attempt to recover my own date. In fact, I did!
If you read my post, it said I couldn't back it up, not that I never recovered it. I did! I popped the fucker open and loosened the screws and it started turning again and I got my data out although the drive arms flipped out the fourth time I powered it up and that was the end of the story. And the moral of the story is, those drives sucked.
Flamebait --whatever. IBM support sucked in this case.
Those bastards.
I bought one of those 20 Gig deskstars and the thing died in six months taking out all kinds of wavs that there was no way I could back up. Tech support told me to send it to a data recovery center for two grand. Assholes!
Listen to your friends at the DOE They say methane hydrate is so prevalent it would take us a thousand years to use it all up even if we all wire our houses up as high voltage plasma labs and commute a hundred miles to work and it wouldn't require a fuel cell infrastructure to be useful. So, relax, turn on some of those lights, run the dryer for an extra cycle. Leave the door open with the air conditioner on. There's plenty of energy and there always will be.
If you just hate burning dead swamp muck, there's the pages at Sandia with Bush himself saying how concentrated solar using nothing but mirrors could also easily handle the US power needs in a space the size of lake mead.
The question isn't "is there an answer to the problem?" as much as a question of "what exactly is the problem we're trying to answer and who decided it was a problem?"
I'm proud of having been liberal to the point of extremisim all my life and hope I always will be, but the evidence seems to suggest that burning oil is nowhere near as bad for the environment as many people have feared in the past and this crap about running out of oil twenty years from now has been going on since at least the seventies. I think it would be more realistic to assume that these alternatives will only become useful when they become cheap and that this is not such a terrible thing.
I think there is room for the MP3 analogy, but it's not going to happen with hydrogen. The infrastructure trade-off makes it no different than existing oil and gas, much more likely to be revolutionary in the sense of MP3, Divx is going to be high powered nanotech solar panels. Now that is what scares the shit out of petroleum companies because there's no infrastructure to control. Their product becomes irrelevant. As long as you've got abundant electricity, powering up a fuel cell car is not a problem and electric kicks ass all over diesel for torque.
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Brazil was privatizing is partly because of the political fallout from the loss of the world's largest offshore oil platform in March last year.
Then I did a search and found this link to a yahoo auction and was sadly disappointed to find that the whole series isn't worth more than fifty bucks. Wow. I guess I'll just keep them.
Exactly, it's the campus police that blow it by going way over the top. I'm sure it has something to do with being around snotty sorrority babes all day and feeling castrated.
Here's my little non-computer related antecdote.
Once I was riding my bike on the SDSU campus in an area where I wasn't supposed to be riding a bike. I had a cop hiding from behind a tree jump out and tackle me. The impact was enough to twist the bike frame and rims beyond repair. For what? All I had done was ride a bike in a walk zone.
The guy hadn't expected to cause so much damage apparently as he started getting apologetic as a crowd drew around thinking I must be on the FBI most wanted list or something. He said he wasn't going to write me a ticket, but then we walked, bleeding and bruised, to the police booth on the other side of campus all nice and calm like and he gave me a ticket once we got there.
I was like --What! You just said you were sorry for overreacting and you weren't going to give me a ticket. He said, I changed my mind. So, I told him my name was Go Fuck Yourself as far as he was concerned and I wanted to talk to his seargent.
What was his reaction? He went through my pockets, got my ID and wrote me up for midemeanor giving false information! I went to his sergeant the next day with my twisted bike and my story and he promised a full investigation.
Well court day came around and I never heard anything about this "investigation". The public defender told me to plead guilty and pay six hundred bucks!
Later I saw that cop quite a few times on campus and I told him I forgave him and I wasn't looking for revenge and he obviously felt guilty about the whole thing and became real buddy buddy like waving at me whenever he saw me. But the moral of the story is the campus cops have their nuts bunched up a bit too tight and don't really understand or particularly care about the law --much less have a reasonable sense of right and wrong.
I hope this professor gets a decent lawyer and the unversity pays for it. You've got to draw the line on these campus pigs and draw it tight. If you let them make the decisions, I can tell you from unfortunate experience they'll take all they can get and use force to get it.
That was my first thought as well. This sounds like it opens up the way for vehicles that would be extremely difficult to track. What's the DEA going to do? Kill all the dolphins? And if you're loading it with a supply that costs pennies to produce under friendly political circumstances in the Mideast or Southeast Asia like meth, ecstacy or hash as opposed to agirculturally intensive products like coke or heroin and if your topredo mules only cost a few thousand dollars to fabricate with negligible operating costs, then you don't care if three quarters of the shipments never make it. A few dozen twenty pound deliveries of meth, X or hash that made it safely could easily pay for a fairly large fleet of roughly made sea gliders.
They woudln't have to be used from across the ocean, of course. Just bring them a thousand miles off shore in fishing boats and launch them into a known current.
The GPS could be used quite sparingly in such a scenario, if at all.
The glider arrives, places a single phone call to a pick up crew before submerging to the shallow bottom and firing off a C02 bouy from that rear compartment where the ballast is. A small fishing boat comes around and brings up the glider by the bouy, extracts the contents, ditches the glider and on the way back to shore the fishermen drop the dope wrapped in a neoprene sheet that looks like a wetsuit and makes it float. It's picked up by a surfer. As the surfer comes to shore, he's already got his wetsuit off and rolled into a bundle casually tucked under his arm. Voila! Heck a wetsuit filled with water is probably coming close to twenty punds anyway. It could look quite natural.
Obviously too much James Bond lately. It's somewhat plausible though.
Or how about a huge sea glider filled with tons of weed in waterproof individual one ounce containers that just popped open on a crowded beach like Pacific Beach in San Diego or Santa Monica. No strings attatched, a goodwill mission from the Commuist Party of Mainland China That's even less plausible, but much more fun to imagine.
Or no, thousands of topless Thai prostititues in G-strings doing nasty dances to pirated MP3s. No, wait. That wouldn't work.
Reporting from Taiwan ahfoo sez:
That last quake cracked a lot of ferrocement buildings in Taipei, and the cranes falling from the 55th floor of the building down the street sounded like all hell breaking loose, but the power didn't even blink and that's what caused the chip productiong problems during the big one a few years ago. There was no influence on production in the science parks where the fabs are according to the local news.
AND Taiwan isn't the major source of RAM. Korea and Japan produce more RAM than Taiwan. Taiwan's got some too, and so does the US and probably some of those companies use the Taiwan fabs, but from what I've read most of it is from overseas.
For Taiwan think motherboard chipsets, video chips, sound chips, DSPs and some early CPU action that should pick up over time but not so much RAM. Of course it's all going to mainland soon. So, as far as price increases go. . . uhm, you been to mainland China lately? I think prices are going down long term.
Well, according to conservative monkeys like George Bush, solar is already the way to go as long as it's done in big facilities like the one mentionedhere. Ol' GeeBee likes the way it's being done in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way. You know --prudence. Nobody move to quickly now and nobody gonna get hurt. What incredible leadership.
It's just that Herbert Walker's favorite solar project isn't photovoltaics, it's solar concentrators --nothing but mirrors. They use them to power plain old steam turbines in the tens of megawatts range. You know, the ones that cost millions of dollars to operate and install. Ol' Georgie, he likes that strategy a lot more than the stuff this story is preaching because that way the power infrastructure doesn't get all distorted by having all these small time know-it-alls get all uppity and start talking all that free power socialist horseshit. It's just like bandwidth in the States. People think it HAS to cost money. They'll lose their jobs if it doesn't. Hell, if power gets too cheap, the Bush's aren't going to have any more ways to raise all that goddam campaign money. They barely cut it with Enron gouging full throttle. If the prices fall any lower, where's their margin gonna come from? You got to keep yer eye on the ball son.
But nanotech, yeah baby. We have to assume it will definitely lead to some interesting shit. Might be revolutionary in more ways than one if it enables end users to much too fast. Wouldn't be prudent.
Photovoltaic is interesting, but there's no reason nanotech won't spill over into thermoelectric stuff too or perhaps some kind of new ways of generating and harnessing plasmas in little MEMS devices. Who knows. But solar works in the here and now at least in the only important sense which is financially. That's one thing nukes will never be able to do.
And even if nanotech energy devices never come to pass. I strongly believe we're going to see a real social revolution when somebody hacks these glucose monitor MEMs microneedles to deliver safe clean IV hits of coke, meth, ecstacy etc and starts selling them on the street. Now there's a market rumored to be bigger than electronics.
Oh, Silicon Valley was the culprit?
And here I was thinking that some Texas fuckheads who specialized in manipulating power markets and later went on to have the biggest bankruptcy in history might have something to do with it. But that would be naive.
I thought about that back when Microsoft first brought a newsreader into Outlook. I even wrote a letter to Bill Gates just for fun welcoming him to the porn distribution business as I was doing research on porn at the time and felt I had some authority on the matter.
You know what? Nothing ever came of that? It doesn't stick. Micrsoft wasn't fazed by getting into newsgroup binary distribution for the same reason that telcos and ISPs aren't worried about it and for the same reason it wouldn't be a big issue for the government. Protesting against porn doesn't work in the age of the internet. Those days are over. You can still protest all you want as a minority, its just that you'll never get a majority to back you up and in the US, the majority does, in fact, rule.
Yeah, I don't think it's a major issue.
I make racks out of hand formed portland cement and newspapers mushed together into a slurry and then pressed into shape with nothing but gloved hands. I can easily stack four PC units along with room for a few audio amps in this kind of rack that goes up to the ceiling taking up the floor space that one ugly ol' PC case would take up.
I just lay the boards out on the racks with the PSUs and HDs off to the side and the ethernet cables dripping off of one end. It's a far cry from portable, but if you tend to collect quite a few machines, a rack is the way to go. I have way less problems with boards laying out open on my hand made racks than I do with the few machines I still have in conventional cases. And, when I do have problems they're way easier to fix and swapping parts is a breeze. Cheap cases suck and expensive ones are . . . expensive. I say build your own racks.
By the way, I got inspired to make these racks after I made a squashed spheroid sub-woofer encloscure out of the same cement/newspaper mixture about three feet in diameter and weighting at least a hundred pounds. It's the funky jelly donut from hell. This thing thumps big time. I highly recommend it although my downstairs neighbors mourn the day I built it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey DIY fan!
Check this out.
It's actually about PET plastic, but should be workable for polyacrylate as well. I've welded them together with solering irons, works great.
If you want to see a hardcore plan for using CDs, then check this one. I aint fucking around when it comes to recycling used CDs, or plastic bottles for that matter.
But browsers are not OSs.
I've been saying this since I first heard Gates start pushing it. Web services is a concept only someone who is clueless or hoping to keep others clueless about computing fundamentals could love, like Gates.
The argument of leveraging "what's out there" is totally misleading. OSs are already out there. Limiting yourself to a browser is essentially just taking the responsibility off the sysadmins by saying everything has to be squeezed into HTML so they don't have to worry about their security policy, but that's totally naive. In order for web services to be useful, they have to be powerful and you're back to the question of why you didn't just write a brown paper app with FTP, TFTP, SSH or whatever protocol you needed for the networking chores? How does squeezing this existing functionality into HTTP represent an improvement?
The NY Times article seems to rely pretty heavily on the influence of CNN. From what I saw of the 9/11 thing, it looked to me like CNN was doing their damndest to drum up a war 24 hours after the attack. So, no surprise there. /. or the newsgroups, I think the results don't fit as well with the NY Times editorial. /. were leading to intolerance, it would be little more than trivia as far as I'm concerned.
If we look at a truly interactive forum like
Also, the premise that simply having more knowledge results in more tolerance is an ignorant and uneducated assumption at best. Simply knowing "the facts" isn't necessarily going to change anybody's thinking or behaviors. If this naive assumption were true, there would probably be more vegetarians than there are today.
However, human interaction and communication is what we, as humans, are all about and it's not as though tolerance is the yardstick by which we judge whether that is the right thing. So even if someone came up with impressively persuasive statistical evidence that communications technologies like newsgroups or
In the case of this editorial though, I don't think the examples are particularly persuasive.
It shows you how serious they must be about pushing this new standard if they simultaneously are working on 30 Gig blue DVD rewriteables.
If you're sick, try some peppermint tea.
If you're a libertarian . . . well, just imagine things are't have to be so black and white for a second.
In fact, I think taxes are borderline criminal myself and I know damn well that the US became a very wealthy nation without ever raising taxes. That's not some big secret that only libertarians are in on. But although I know this to be true, I still believe the goverment has a role in society and that there is possible to both big and benign. Things like currency should be handled by a government.
You, on the other hand, don't seem to be open to learning much about usury or its realtionship to the debate at hand.
The article mentioned:
Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said they were planning to work with the Japanese earth simulation center to convert United States weather modeling codes to work with the new computer.
Would that code most likely be in something like C, C++ or in Fortran or something else entirely? And what kind of changes would you be talking about when adapting it to vector based processors?
Any mad weather scientists out there like to fill in the lay public on the rough details?
The mammal-like reptiles had a skull structure very much like modern mammals and lived not only with the dinosaurs, but hundreds of millions of years before them. These creatures are considered the ancestors of all modern mammals and they would probably have had a facial structure similar to modern mammals given that they had a ridge of bone above the eye sockets where the jaw muscles from their jaw --similar in shape and function to a mammalian jaw, as opposed to a reptilian jaw-- connected to the skull.
Hey, thanks for the +1. /. or watching movies yet, let's not even mention screwing with unstable distros and what not. The more the merrier. I swear, the PCs actually seem to work better the more you put in a single room. It's weird. I bring bad drives over here and they magically start working once I put them on the network. Spooky.
Obviously professional rack mounts have their pricey little 1U cases, but I skip that step. Good sheet metal design work is very expensive and bad sheet metal design is butt ugly and omnipresent. I just leave my boards out on the racks which you could also call shelves in this case or even statues I suppose. In fact, I make mine of portland cement, but that's another story.
As for the KVMs I use, they don't have any markers on them at all except the A,B,C,D on the front, but they are definitely cheap and come in USB also. I've had no problems with them. As I mentioned, I'm in Taiwan and that probably has something to do with my easy access to such goods, but I did buy a very similar model for only about twenty bucks in San Diego last year for my Dad and then I saw some more up on the Central Coast of California at an Electronics parts store rather than a computer store. They didn't have USB yet as of last year, but they were plenty cheap and most boards still support PS2 these days. If you see an el cheapo KVM, don't be afraid to give it a try. I was really impressed when I found it worked. I could never go back. I couldn't afford all the monitors and I'd have no place for them. Besides, CRTs put off a lof heat and Taiwan is already very very hot and humid. Maybe when LCD's are cheap it will be another story, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
Of course the next thing that happens after you get a switch and start filling it up with whatever boards you can find is that people start accusing you of being a hog for having so many PCs, but that fades quickly. I know my wife who was skeptical at first quit complaining the first time her box went down and I was able to switch her over to a new one in no time flat. Keeping the proxy server on a physically separate machine and then moving the P2P off on to its own board/drive really smooths network hassles out quite a bit. Another board handles the CDR, you see how quickly a four way switch starts to fill up and you're not even browsing
Another thing I'm seeing here in Taiwan related to KVM that I haven't seen in the States is massive pre-packaged cable harnesses. Perhaps with the move to USB, they'll get scaled down a bit, but they have these monster suckers in cool colors that come in pack with connection for 4X PS2 Keyboard, PS2 Mouse, Monitor. These things look like equipment you'd find in a nuclear power plant, each insulated cable is about a half inch thick. I bought those for use at work and we rarely have KVM problems on those machines although you do want to be careful with the connection of those heavy cables so you don't rip the connectors off the boards. Luckily, those PS2 connectors are fairly hardy.
Buying them all pre-wired like that is awful convenient and you can't help but start getting ideas like, gee, if I had four of these and a sixteen way KVM and a sixteen port gigabit ethernet switch. . . . when Mosix gets support for memory pooling . . . drool.
Unfotunately, the monster cable packs cost more than twice as much as the KVM itself, but that's still not all that much compared to the equipment they replace that was mostly just going unused sitting on machines with dedicated tasks that just had someone flicking the monitors on now and then to see if everything was okay. They're cool alright, but USB versions will probably be even cooler.
I beg to differ and I think the original post is apparently fishing around without having actually tried using a KVM.
I build my own open air racks and I have no problems and they're actually cheaper and run cooler than cased PCs as well as being much easier to diagnose when problems occur. How is it more expensive to put four boards on a rack I build myself for thirty bucks than it is to buy four cases? It saves space too. I don't see the down side.
As for using a KVM in a mixed environment, I've never had a problem using the most generic PS2 KVM in a mixed network with two or three Linux distros and few versions of Windows. The only time I get problems is when a machine on a switch goes down while the switch is pointed at it, it can take out the mouse functionality on all the machines on that switch. But if the machines are network servers or running dedicated tasks as you'd expect in a rack mount situation, then they shouldn't be going down all the time and this won't be a big problem. Also, losing the mouse despite being inconvenient and requiring a reboot to fix doesn't mean your servers crash.
I keep two separate KVMs. One is for the boards I'm playing with and one is for the machines that are supposed to be stable. That works quite nicely. And once you try this, you realize you can add board, CPU, RAM units for such little cost your network starts to grow quickly. And why not, for the cost of a Dell PC you can add three or four boards/CPUs.
And all this functionality is from no-name totally generic beige KVM boxes with A,B,C,D on the front that cost about twelve bucks. They're availalbe in USB, or AT + Serial or whatever brightens your day. I don't see why you'd need a name brand or something specifically tailored for multiple OSs. Just buy one and try it, they're quite cheap.
And while you're at it, build your own racks and screw the cases. You don't need to encourage bad design work from Taiwan. I live in Taiwan and I can tell you that the people here are capable of making beautiful designs that put the Japanese to shame, but they go where the money is. If people keep buying these ugly cases, they'll keep making them. If the demand drops maybe they'll start making cool curvy home rack mounts. I say buy the ugly KVMs for now and ditch the cases. Maybe later we'll see both in designer styles at the right prices.
This isn't as far fetched as it may seem because if they were selling OEM designer home racks instead of cases, a KVM would be an obvious vlaue added feature.
And, there is an adaptor for swapping engines between cars, it's called a torch. If you keep the engine with a matching tranny all you have to do is shorten or lengthen the drive shaft to make it fit and possibly bang on some sheet metal and screw with the mounts, but it's not that big of a deal if you're swapping motors anyway.
Well, IANAL, but I play one on TV, so I decided to chase down some links, and it seems . . . ambiguous.
According to Title 17 Chapter 1, section 105,
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
But then it links to some footnotes that seem to suggest that while the US Government can own copyrights, the copyrighted material must be freely distributed to the public. So, that would still be something like open source.
I appreciate the notion that simply because a work is derivative --in this case of federal information, people's identities-- that quality of being derivative doesn't mean the work cannot still qualify for copyright protection itself. An analogy could be made to a song made up of samples. However as the samples are goverment information, I think the Freedom of Information Act would make it very difficult to keep the project as closed source.
Because it would be a government publication and government publications cannot be copyrighted. Isn't that the case? Perhaps it you wouldn't call that open souce. But wouldn't it have to be openly documented and copyright free?
And allow me to add, as a publisher of multilingual books that B&N will only stock English titles where Amazon takes any language. I think that's a real failing on B&N's part. They're not even trying to accomodate the global readership.
At least in trade books there is an 800 pound Gorilla called Ingram. Ingram doesn't work with small time publishers. They set up subsidiaries for those trifiling concerns with less than a few million in sales.
If you're a publsiher with at least five titles and a proven sales record, a marketing department --web based marketing doesn't count-- and say a staff of three or four writers, you have earned the right to be rejected by one of those subsidiaries.
To the point though: if you are just a writer attempting to publish your own work, they don't even want you to apply to the subsidiaries --these are busy people trying to make a living after all. In the case of independent writers trying to self publish, Ingram strongly encourages authors to distribute electronically first. That's already the corporate policy and has been for several years.
So, the resistance to e-texts isn't coming from the corporate mega distributors, it's coming from the small time writers and specialty publishers.
Okay all you holy rollers. Was the point of my post
A: that I lost data
or
B: that after a mere six months IBM didn't offer to send a replacement, but told me to go to a seek out a recovery solution for several grand?
The answer is B.
And, they actually told me that if I opened the case all my data would be instantly lost and this was why I should never attempt to recover my own date. In fact, I did!
If you read my post, it said I couldn't back it up, not that I never recovered it. I did! I popped the fucker open and loosened the screws and it started turning again and I got my data out although the drive arms flipped out the fourth time I powered it up and that was the end of the story. And the moral of the story is, those drives sucked.
Flamebait --whatever. IBM support sucked in this case.
Those bastards.
I bought one of those 20 Gig deskstars and the thing died in six months taking out all kinds of wavs that there was no way I could back up. Tech support told me to send it to a data recovery center for two grand. Assholes!
Listen to your friends at the DOE They say methane hydrate is so prevalent it would take us a thousand years to use it all up even if we all wire our houses up as high voltage plasma labs and commute a hundred miles to work and it wouldn't require a fuel cell infrastructure to be useful. So, relax, turn on some of those lights, run the dryer for an extra cycle. Leave the door open with the air conditioner on. There's plenty of energy and there always will be.
If you just hate burning dead swamp muck, there's the pages at Sandia with Bush himself saying how concentrated solar using nothing but mirrors could also easily handle the US power needs in a space the size of lake mead.
The question isn't "is there an answer to the problem?" as much as a question of "what exactly is the problem we're trying to answer and who decided it was a problem?"
I'm proud of having been liberal to the point of extremisim all my life and hope I always will be, but the evidence seems to suggest that burning oil is nowhere near as bad for the environment as many people have feared in the past and this crap about running out of oil twenty years from now has been going on since at least the seventies. I think it would be more realistic to assume that these alternatives will only become useful when they become cheap and that this is not such a terrible thing.
I think there is room for the MP3 analogy, but it's not going to happen with hydrogen. The infrastructure trade-off makes it no different than existing oil and gas, much more likely to be revolutionary in the sense of MP3, Divx is going to be high powered nanotech solar panels. Now that is what scares the shit out of petroleum companies because there's no infrastructure to control. Their product becomes irrelevant. As long as you've got abundant electricity, powering up a fuel cell car is not a problem and electric kicks ass all over diesel for torque.
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Brazil was privatizing is partly because of the political fallout from the loss of the world's largest offshore oil platform in March last year.
Then I did a search and found this link to a yahoo auction and was sadly disappointed to find that the whole series isn't worth more than fifty bucks. Wow. I guess I'll just keep them.
Exactly, it's the campus police that blow it by going way over the top. I'm sure it has something to do with being around snotty sorrority babes all day and feeling castrated.
Here's my little non-computer related antecdote.
Once I was riding my bike on the SDSU campus in an area where I wasn't supposed to be riding a bike. I had a cop hiding from behind a tree jump out and tackle me. The impact was enough to twist the bike frame and rims beyond repair. For what? All I had done was ride a bike in a walk zone.
The guy hadn't expected to cause so much damage apparently as he started getting apologetic as a crowd drew around thinking I must be on the FBI most wanted list or something. He said he wasn't going to write me a ticket, but then we walked, bleeding and bruised, to the police booth on the other side of campus all nice and calm like and he gave me a ticket once we got there.
I was like --What! You just said you were sorry for overreacting and you weren't going to give me a ticket. He said, I changed my mind. So, I told him my name was Go Fuck Yourself as far as he was concerned and I wanted to talk to his seargent.
What was his reaction? He went through my pockets, got my ID and wrote me up for midemeanor giving false information! I went to his sergeant the next day with my twisted bike and my story and he promised a full investigation.
Well court day came around and I never heard anything about this "investigation". The public defender told me to plead guilty and pay six hundred bucks!
Later I saw that cop quite a few times on campus and I told him I forgave him and I wasn't looking for revenge and he obviously felt guilty about the whole thing and became real buddy buddy like waving at me whenever he saw me. But the moral of the story is the campus cops have their nuts bunched up a bit too tight and don't really understand or particularly care about the law --much less have a reasonable sense of right and wrong.
I hope this professor gets a decent lawyer and the unversity pays for it. You've got to draw the line on these campus pigs and draw it tight. If you let them make the decisions, I can tell you from unfortunate experience they'll take all they can get and use force to get it.
That was my first thought as well. This sounds like it opens up the way for vehicles that would be extremely difficult to track. What's the DEA going to do? Kill all the dolphins? And if you're loading it with a supply that costs pennies to produce under friendly political circumstances in the Mideast or Southeast Asia like meth, ecstacy or hash as opposed to agirculturally intensive products like coke or heroin and if your topredo mules only cost a few thousand dollars to fabricate with negligible operating costs, then you don't care if three quarters of the shipments never make it. A few dozen twenty pound deliveries of meth, X or hash that made it safely could easily pay for a fairly large fleet of roughly made sea gliders.
They woudln't have to be used from across the ocean, of course. Just bring them a thousand miles off shore in fishing boats and launch them into a known current.
The GPS could be used quite sparingly in such a scenario, if at all.
The glider arrives, places a single phone call to a pick up crew before submerging to the shallow bottom and firing off a C02 bouy from that rear compartment where the ballast is. A small fishing boat comes around and brings up the glider by the bouy, extracts the contents, ditches the glider and on the way back to shore the fishermen drop the dope wrapped in a neoprene sheet that looks like a wetsuit and makes it float. It's picked up by a surfer. As the surfer comes to shore, he's already got his wetsuit off and rolled into a bundle casually tucked under his arm. Voila! Heck a wetsuit filled with water is probably coming close to twenty punds anyway. It could look quite natural.
Obviously too much James Bond lately. It's somewhat plausible though.
Or how about a huge sea glider filled with tons of weed in waterproof individual one ounce containers that just popped open on a crowded beach like Pacific Beach in San Diego or Santa Monica. No strings attatched, a goodwill mission from the Commuist Party of Mainland China That's even less plausible, but much more fun to imagine.
Or no, thousands of topless Thai prostititues in G-strings doing nasty dances to pirated MP3s. No, wait. That wouldn't work.
Reporting from Taiwan ahfoo sez:
That last quake cracked a lot of ferrocement buildings in Taipei, and the cranes falling from the 55th floor of the building down the street sounded like all hell breaking loose, but the power didn't even blink and that's what caused the chip productiong problems during the big one a few years ago. There was no influence on production in the science parks where the fabs are according to the local news.
AND Taiwan isn't the major source of RAM. Korea and Japan produce more RAM than Taiwan. Taiwan's got some too, and so does the US and probably some of those companies use the Taiwan fabs, but from what I've read most of it is from overseas.
For Taiwan think motherboard chipsets, video chips, sound chips, DSPs and some early CPU action that should pick up over time but not so much RAM. Of course it's all going to mainland soon. So, as far as price increases go. . . uhm, you been to mainland China lately? I think prices are going down long term.
Well, according to conservative monkeys like George Bush, solar is already the way to go as long as it's done in big facilities like the one mentionedhere. Ol' GeeBee likes the way it's being done in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way. You know --prudence. Nobody move to quickly now and nobody gonna get hurt. What incredible leadership.
It's just that Herbert Walker's favorite solar project isn't photovoltaics, it's solar concentrators --nothing but mirrors. They use them to power plain old steam turbines in the tens of megawatts range. You know, the ones that cost millions of dollars to operate and install. Ol' Georgie, he likes that strategy a lot more than the stuff this story is preaching because that way the power infrastructure doesn't get all distorted by having all these small time know-it-alls get all uppity and start talking all that free power socialist horseshit. It's just like bandwidth in the States. People think it HAS to cost money. They'll lose their jobs if it doesn't. Hell, if power gets too cheap, the Bush's aren't going to have any more ways to raise all that goddam campaign money. They barely cut it with Enron gouging full throttle. If the prices fall any lower, where's their margin gonna come from? You got to keep yer eye on the ball son.
But nanotech, yeah baby. We have to assume it will definitely lead to some interesting shit. Might be revolutionary in more ways than one if it enables end users to much too fast. Wouldn't be prudent.
Photovoltaic is interesting, but there's no reason nanotech won't spill over into thermoelectric stuff too or perhaps some kind of new ways of generating and harnessing plasmas in little MEMS devices. Who knows. But solar works in the here and now at least in the only important sense which is financially. That's one thing nukes will never be able to do.
And even if nanotech energy devices never come to pass. I strongly believe we're going to see a real social revolution when somebody hacks these glucose monitor MEMs microneedles to deliver safe clean IV hits of coke, meth, ecstacy etc and starts selling them on the street. Now there's a market rumored to be bigger than electronics.
Oh, Silicon Valley was the culprit?
And here I was thinking that some Texas fuckheads who specialized in manipulating power markets and later went on to have the biggest bankruptcy in history might have something to do with it. But that would be naive.
I thought about that back when Microsoft first brought a newsreader into Outlook. I even wrote a letter to Bill Gates just for fun welcoming him to the porn distribution business as I was doing research on porn at the time and felt I had some authority on the matter.
You know what? Nothing ever came of that? It doesn't stick. Micrsoft wasn't fazed by getting into newsgroup binary distribution for the same reason that telcos and ISPs aren't worried about it and for the same reason it wouldn't be a big issue for the government. Protesting against porn doesn't work in the age of the internet. Those days are over. You can still protest all you want as a minority, its just that you'll never get a majority to back you up and in the US, the majority does, in fact, rule.
Yeah, I don't think it's a major issue.
I make racks out of hand formed portland cement and newspapers mushed together into a slurry and then pressed into shape with nothing but gloved hands. I can easily stack four PC units along with room for a few audio amps in this kind of rack that goes up to the ceiling taking up the floor space that one ugly ol' PC case would take up.
I just lay the boards out on the racks with the PSUs and HDs off to the side and the ethernet cables dripping off of one end. It's a far cry from portable, but if you tend to collect quite a few machines, a rack is the way to go. I have way less problems with boards laying out open on my hand made racks than I do with the few machines I still have in conventional cases. And, when I do have problems they're way easier to fix and swapping parts is a breeze. Cheap cases suck and expensive ones are . . . expensive. I say build your own racks.
By the way, I got inspired to make these racks after I made a squashed spheroid sub-woofer encloscure out of the same cement/newspaper mixture about three feet in diameter and weighting at least a hundred pounds. It's the funky jelly donut from hell. This thing thumps big time. I highly recommend it although my downstairs neighbors mourn the day I built it.