You're thinking of the PlayaNet folks. Really interesting stuff.
They get the additional fun of having to put up with Dr Megavolt. Last time I was out there (a few years back) I chatted with a few guys trying to do some long wire runs and RF comms. Appearantly everytime Dr. Volt's van drove by and fired the Tesla, they'd lose another piece of gear!
Microsoft loves to keep the debate on TCO, but that's not the only economic factor to look at.
ROI (Return on Investment) is significantly higher for a Linux system that is for Windows. Think about it, for about the same TCO, you get the whole slew of free ($) servers and desktop applications. Also, when then next version of Windows comes around, while your costs remain steady or even drop a bit, the Win shop next door is shelling out cash for an upgrade.
If TCO is the only thing you look at, you probably want to ditch that coffee pot as well.
No, he does mention the quasi-legal business strategies:
From a marketing perspective, we knew it was critical to "sim-ship" with (release on the same day as) Windows95, since that was a big deal worldwide and unlike Office, Windows had a huge marketing budget we could draft off of. We made our goal, and having Word95 as the only 32-bit application in the Japanese market just as Win95 hit really helped us too.
Makes sense. Ship all product at once. But wait, doesn't that mean that you get a jump on your competition because you have access to the new OS where your competitors dont?
Now Just Systems, makers of Ichitaro, also knew that Win95 was a big deal (they knew the WP story), and they also tried to hit the same date (which was widely known for more than a year), but they couldn't quite get it together, and shipped several months later.... We hit 40% market share of new sales in the year after launch of Word95 for Japan.
So he attributes success to being able to deliver a product months ahead of the competition, but Word ONLY had that edge because they had access to Win95 before its release - one would assume a few months earlier. Was Ichitaro another victim of MS "tweaking" the OS so that their app wouldn't run correctly? Sounds a good deal like monopoly abuse to me.
SFGate just posted a new
story. The advisory panel said to decertify their machines. Best paragraph:
In addition to the ban, panel members recommended that a secretary of state's office report released Wednesday, detailing alleged failings of Diebold in California, be forwarded to the state attorney general's office to consider
civil and criminal charges against the company.
Yeah I looked at the site. Did you look at the SpaceSaver site?? Note this pic shows the nice bit of metal underneath every car.
So your precious fsck'ing Mercedes would be fine.
...and get a grip. It's only a friggin car. You probably didn't even build it, you just paid too much for it and think it means something. Go rent Fight Club again. Go!
Scotty, we need more power!
on
PC In An XP Box
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Text, sans really cool pics. When he writes "Windows XP Box" he means the cardboard box that Windows XP comes in.
Introduction
I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my "Windows XP Box" in a Windows XP box. The external dimensions of the box are a tiny 243mm x 200mm x 48mm.
My requirements were:
* Use as powerful a motherboard as possible for the size i.e. a Nehemiah EPIA M10000.
* It must have an internal CD drive (this size eating requirement turned out be be very hard to meet).
* No bits could be cut off the motherboard to make it fit.
* The box must not bulge in an unsightly way, nor can the box be made bigger.
* It must not burst into flames when working hard (this should always be a requirement of a computer project).
Fortunately there is no longer any requirement for an internal floppy drive. That would have have defeated me.
Construction
The bits arrive and it looks like an impossible task, with too many bits to fit in a small space.
I nearly gave up and decided it was an impossible task. The Windows XP box was 3mm thinner and 12 mm narrower than the Adobe Acrobat box I had measured up when first deciding if the project was going to be possible. The challenge was to arrange the components into a 3D jigsaw, then decide how to build enough of an internal support case to get everything to stay in place.
Eventually it looked like I might have a possible layout, but the tolerances were tight. I had 6mm to spare on the long internal dimension of the box and only 3mm to spare on the thickness of the box, and this was not allowing for any thickness for the internal support case that holds everything in place.
In order to mount all the bits I was going to have to make an inner support case that would tightly slide into the cardboard box. I chose Wonderboard plastic as my construction material because it is reasonably strong and very easy to work with (it cuts with a Stanley knife). It would have been nice to use aluminium, but the cramped design made the chances of a short circuit too great.
The first construction step was to cut out a base plate the exact size of the inside of the cardboard box and double check where the bits will fit.
As the Wonderboard was 3mm thick this reduced my tolerance in two dimensions to zero. The CD drive would touch one side of the inner support case. The deep part of the CD drive would touch the heat sink on the motherboard, with the narrow bit being able to overlap it, and the far side of the motherboard touches the other side of the Wonderboard case. In the other dimension it was even harder. The top of the sound connector would touch the support case, and the underside of the motherboard would touch the cardboard box. Fortunately the hard drive can slide under the motherboard as this is above (below?) the unused PCI slot. The only place left for the PSU was above the hard drive with the bulky connectors facing down towards the CD both to the front and the back of the hard drive.
Now I could position the CD drive hard against the side and start assembling the support case. In the next picture you can see the step up between the thin part of the CD drive and the thicker part of the main body of the drive. The heat sink on the Mini-ITX board touches this step.
After much cutting and half a tube of glue the case was finished. I built pillars to support three corners of the motherboard and the power supply and added brackets to support the CD and the hard drive. In such a compact design cooling was a concern so I made fan mounting points in opposite corners of the case. To keep the CPU nice and cool I cut a hole for it it the side of the case and glued in a couple of plates to act as ducting so the CPU fan will only suck in cold outside air. The other two fans are the exhaust points. The fan guards were cut out of a metal speaker grill using an angle grinder as neatly drilling t
The near-future technology - researchers expect to have the product available as soon as 2003 - will use e-paper (electronic paper) as the major component
Wow, I can't wait for 2003 to get here so I can try this out...
The problem is that I don't trust the election to Diebold, not just my vote. Sure, I may get an absentee ballot, but the other 90% of the votes are up for grabs...
After the media abuse of the word "terrorist" that surrounded that story, I firmly believe that the word no longer has any meaning, and is ONLY used by persons trying to sway opinion.
Not a non-government force: The UN?? Not an un-declared attack: Bin-Laden called for war on the US long ago. Not an attack on civilians. Not an violent action to change political opinion: The US does that all the time.
It seems that there is no definition of terrorism that the US doesn't fall into - except "Anything that somebody we don't like does"
CVS on Windows has come a long way. For the CLI and server side check out CVSNT. The CVSNT guys have done work on smoothing out merges, and are looking into changing out RCS with a real DB - giving the possibility of scaling, meta-data handling and renaming. CVSNT has also been ported back into Linux.
For a kick-ass Windows client check out Tortoise CVS - it integrates into the explorer shell, shows you icon overlays for CVS status and allows right-click access to almost all CVS commands. Everyone in our office - even non-technical folk who freak at a CLI - use Tortoise to access CVS.
One can trasnfer files from one host to another while controlling it from a third, and the data doesn't even pass through the third machine. Is that neither uploading nor downloading, or both?
5) Tires that don't go flat. So important, I'm saying it twice.
Back in the MID 80s, I rode my bike everyday on a paper route, and patched a tube at least twice a week. Tried a bunch of products, and discovered "Tuffy Tube" (looks like it may be this product) and never got another flat (2+ more years delivering papers). Note the price is about $15, and cheaper if you shop around.
When I bought my mountain bike a few years back, I found a similar product that fit the tires, and have NEVER had a flat.
Please note, the above analysis in no way endorses the RIAA viewpoint that the primary cause of their troubles is from filesharing. In fact, didn't we see that filesharing has decreased and, looking at their album sales, they are still selling fewer units.
I remember reading awhile back (couldn't find the link) about how CD sales match CD prices. Price goes up, sales go down. Recently, CD prices have been climbing faster than usual. And it seems that they're not shipping as many units (gee, driving prices up?) So, it looks like the RIAA knows how to alter it's sales figures.
Now, Universal is lowering the prices on their CDs! My guess is that they're preparing to declare that the lawsuits worked. They're attempting to show that the dropping off of filesharing (as is happening) results in more CDs sold.
My hope is that they realized that P2P actually helps their business, and that they're looking at an exit strategy that saves them face - IE, they don't have to admit their wrong.
...and conversely, won't the PHB's just LOVE this stuff when an outgoing employee sends a.DOC to the entire organization that CAN'T be opened by any of the managers!
Here, we developed (to my loud grumbling) an extensive set of scripts within an Excel spreadsheet to handle complex wire and connection tables. Worked great in office 97.
Office 2k comes out, and the script doesn't work. The guy who wrote it spent a few days getting all the new bugs worked out, and it finally worked again.
Now we're using Office XP. The guy who wrote the script is long gone. Guess what! The script DOESN'T WORK. We had a guy look at it for a week trying to find the issue, and he got it to do 10% of what it had been doing.
Keep this in mind when creating those "QUICK and EASY" scripts. The more it does, the more likely it'll break during the next upgrade.
Med Tech: Yeah, I need to swab your mouth for this new DNA thing they're doing on everyone in the Navy.
Me: ummm... yeah... not too sure about that. Hey, I've only got 3 months left on my enlistment. What's gonna happen if we just "forget" and I miss this appointment.
Med Tech: Well, they'll be reviewing everyone's records in January - in about 4 months...
I program these types of systems for a living. Usually, everything I work on is HUGE. To put in in perspective, I recently finished the control system in the Chuang Residence. Alfred is very much into the latest and greatest - and had a 3 million dollar home theater put in (seats 7) as well as A/V distribuition (30 zones) throughout the house (61" HD plasma at the foot of his bed!).
So, it depends on the signal that you're routing.
Amplified: Great! it'll probably go as far as you need it. If you're going over a few hundered feet and don't care about the quality (think outdoor speakers), you'll want to look into doing with 70 volt transformers and matching speakers. (the higher voltage will drive the signal much farther, but the audio quality goes to hell). Generally with amplified signals the farther you go the quieter it gets.
Line level (non-amplified signal): Will often work just fine. Since it uses a much lower voltage it is much more succeptable to noise. The two biggest things to watch for are interference and ground loops. You get interference from power sources, running motors, wireless devices, etc. If you convert the signal to balanced it'll be less succeptable to interference (a balanced signal provides a ground reference). Small converters are available from several sources. Ground loops are caused when there is a voltage difference between the "ground" plane on either end of the wire. Often, you'll hear a slight 60 Hz hum. The PROPER way to eliminate this is to make sure all your equipment uses the same ground. If it's all on the same circuit in your house, then you're probably OK. If not, there are small inline devices to eliminate this as well. Look for "Hum Buckers" or "Electo-Optic isolators". Line level will go a suprising distance but you'll want a distribution amp to go over about a hundred feet. Keep in mind that the farther you go, the better chance of having noise problems.
Digital: Bleh! I really want this to work, but I haven't seen a successfull installation with more than 20 feet of wire! I worked one job where they tried both optical and copper but couldn't get it reliably (trying at about 75 feet of signal). When the signal degrades, the audio just goes away - not quiter or noisier. It suprises me that the optical signal won't go farther - it's light dammit! The issue seems to be that the TOSLink cables are designed around a plastic core that is easier to work with - but attenuates too much over distance. Having a device to rebuild the signal every 20 feet is problematic to say the least.
A few power users at our company built some extensive Excel spreadsheets using Office 2000. Really helpful, full of scripts. Those employees have since left the company, and golly, those damn scripts don't work on Office XP.
We had another user transfer 70% of the functions into new workbooks in Office XP. He left the company too. What happens when Office 2005 comes along?
People doing that much automation should not be relying on MS not to change.
About the same time those spreadsheets were developed, I was asked to do something similar for another department. We used a quick Excel sheet for a stopgap while I built the real solution. Took an old PC (wouldn't run Win2k so it was being scrapped), loaded RedHat and Zope, made a script to back it all up every night, taught myself Zope and turned the "spreadsheet" into a web app in Zope. I did ALL this in less time than it took the other guy to build his Excel solution. It's still running, and nobody has had to touch the app or the server for years now (yes, it's behind a firewall).
I did the control system programming for that exhibit.
Generally, the fish that survive depressurization are those that don't have a swim bladder (an organ that is basically a small bubble surrounded by a muscle - fish sqeezes - it sinks, relaxes - it floats, depressurizes - it pops)
Slashdot Mirror
They get the additional fun of having to put up with Dr Megavolt. Last time I was out there (a few years back) I chatted with a few guys trying to do some long wire runs and RF comms. Appearantly everytime Dr. Volt's van drove by and fired the Tesla, they'd lose another piece of gear!
ROI (Return on Investment) is significantly higher for a Linux system that is for Windows. Think about it, for about the same TCO, you get the whole slew of free ($) servers and desktop applications. Also, when then next version of Windows comes around, while your costs remain steady or even drop a bit, the Win shop next door is shelling out cash for an upgrade.
If TCO is the only thing you look at, you probably want to ditch that coffee pot as well.
Twice the size too. Gee, I wonder how they did that? ;-P
My ISP allows this. Heck, they're even set up to resell it.
So your precious fsck'ing Mercedes would be fine.
Text, sans really cool pics. When he writes "Windows XP Box" he means the cardboard box that Windows XP comes in.
Introduction
I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my "Windows XP Box" in a Windows XP box. The external dimensions of the box are a tiny 243mm x 200mm x 48mm.
My requirements were:
* Use as powerful a motherboard as possible for the size i.e. a Nehemiah EPIA M10000.
* It must have an internal CD drive (this size eating requirement turned out be be very hard to meet).
* No bits could be cut off the motherboard to make it fit.
* The box must not bulge in an unsightly way, nor can the box be made bigger.
* It must not burst into flames when working hard (this should always be a requirement of a computer project).
Fortunately there is no longer any requirement for an internal floppy drive. That would have have defeated me.
Construction
The bits arrive and it looks like an impossible task, with too many bits to fit in a small space.
I nearly gave up and decided it was an impossible task. The Windows XP box was 3mm thinner and 12 mm narrower than the Adobe Acrobat box I had measured up when first deciding if the project was going to be possible. The challenge was to arrange the components into a 3D jigsaw, then decide how to build enough of an internal support case to get everything to stay in place.
Eventually it looked like I might have a possible layout, but the tolerances were tight. I had 6mm to spare on the long internal dimension of the box and only 3mm to spare on the thickness of the box, and this was not allowing for any thickness for the internal support case that holds everything in place.
In order to mount all the bits I was going to have to make an inner support case that would tightly slide into the cardboard box. I chose Wonderboard plastic as my construction material because it is reasonably strong and very easy to work with (it cuts with a Stanley knife). It would have been nice to use aluminium, but the cramped design made the chances of a short circuit too great.
The first construction step was to cut out a base plate the exact size of the inside of the cardboard box and double check where the bits will fit.
As the Wonderboard was 3mm thick this reduced my tolerance in two dimensions to zero. The CD drive would touch one side of the inner support case. The deep part of the CD drive would touch the heat sink on the motherboard, with the narrow bit being able to overlap it, and the far side of the motherboard touches the other side of the Wonderboard case. In the other dimension it was even harder. The top of the sound connector would touch the support case, and the underside of the motherboard would touch the cardboard box. Fortunately the hard drive can slide under the motherboard as this is above (below?) the unused PCI slot. The only place left for the PSU was above the hard drive with the bulky connectors facing down towards the CD both to the front and the back of the hard drive.
Now I could position the CD drive hard against the side and start assembling the support case. In the next picture you can see the step up between the thin part of the CD drive and the thicker part of the main body of the drive. The heat sink on the Mini-ITX board touches this step.
After much cutting and half a tube of glue the case was finished. I built pillars to support three corners of the motherboard and the power supply and added brackets to support the CD and the hard drive. In such a compact design cooling was a concern so I made fan mounting points in opposite corners of the case. To keep the CPU nice and cool I cut a hole for it it the side of the case and glued in a couple of plates to act as ducting so the CPU fan will only suck in cold outside air. The other two fans are the exhaust points. The fan guards were cut out of a metal speaker grill using an angle grinder as neatly drilling t
The near-future technology - researchers expect to have the product available as soon as 2003 - will use e-paper (electronic paper) as the major component
Wow, I can't wait for 2003 to get here so I can try this out...
oh wait...
The problem is that I don't trust the election to Diebold, not just my vote. Sure, I may get an absentee ballot, but the other 90% of the votes are up for grabs...
So, how is it justified calling an attack on a Navy ship a terrorist act?
After the media abuse of the word "terrorist" that surrounded that story, I firmly believe that the word no longer has any meaning, and is ONLY used by persons trying to sway opinion.
Not a non-government force: The UN??
Not an un-declared attack: Bin-Laden called for war on the US long ago.
Not an attack on civilians.
Not an violent action to change political opinion: The US does that all the time.
It seems that there is no definition of terrorism that the US doesn't fall into - except "Anything that somebody we don't like does"
CVS on Windows has come a long way. For the CLI and server side check out CVSNT. The CVSNT guys have done work on smoothing out merges, and are looking into changing out RCS with a real DB - giving the possibility of scaling, meta-data handling and renaming. CVSNT has also been ported back into Linux.
For a kick-ass Windows client check out Tortoise CVS - it integrates into the explorer shell, shows you icon overlays for CVS status and allows right-click access to almost all CVS commands. Everyone in our office - even non-technical folk who freak at a CLI - use Tortoise to access CVS.
Well, I'm sure he got a patent for it anyway...
"Method for stopping a vehicle transponder from communicating with outside world" or something...
All you anti-static bag venders better watch out!
I nominate the term "sideloading".
5) Tires that don't go flat. So important, I'm saying it twice.
Back in the MID 80s, I rode my bike everyday on a paper route, and patched a tube at least twice a week. Tried a bunch of products, and discovered "Tuffy Tube" (looks like it may be this product) and never got another flat (2+ more years delivering papers). Note the price is about $15, and cheaper if you shop around.
When I bought my mountain bike a few years back, I found a similar product that fit the tires, and have NEVER had a flat.
I remember reading awhile back (couldn't find the link) about how CD sales match CD prices. Price goes up, sales go down. Recently, CD prices have been climbing faster than usual. And it seems that they're not shipping as many units (gee, driving prices up?) So, it looks like the RIAA knows how to alter it's sales figures.
Now, Universal is lowering the prices on their CDs! My guess is that they're preparing to declare that the lawsuits worked. They're attempting to show that the dropping off of filesharing (as is happening) results in more CDs sold.
My hope is that they realized that P2P actually helps their business, and that they're looking at an exit strategy that saves them face - IE, they don't have to admit their wrong.
...and conversely, won't the PHB's just LOVE this stuff when an outgoing employee sends a .DOC to the entire organization that CAN'T be opened by any of the managers!
Yeah, works great! Until you upgrade!
Here, we developed (to my loud grumbling) an extensive set of scripts within an Excel spreadsheet to handle complex wire and connection tables. Worked great in office 97.
Office 2k comes out, and the script doesn't work. The guy who wrote it spent a few days getting all the new bugs worked out, and it finally worked again.
Now we're using Office XP. The guy who wrote the script is long gone. Guess what! The script DOESN'T WORK. We had a guy look at it for a week trying to find the issue, and he got it to do 10% of what it had been doing.
Keep this in mind when creating those "QUICK and EASY" scripts. The more it does, the more likely it'll break during the next upgrade.
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA
I've often joked that their address pretty much sums up what I don't like about them, but I digress...
I would love it if the courts declare that SBC was barred from doing direct customer DSL sales.
Med Tech: Yeah, I need to swab your mouth for this new DNA thing they're doing on everyone in the Navy.
Me: ummm... yeah... not too sure about that. Hey, I've only got 3 months left on my enlistment. What's gonna happen if we just "forget" and I miss this appointment.
Med Tech: Well, they'll be reviewing everyone's records in January - in about 4 months...
Me: OK, thanks. Bye!
Sounds like you're non-too-familiar with absentee ballots.
I can already vote at home - or anywhere else. Photocopy my ballot before mailing it off or simply let someone else fill it in for me! No ID needed!
I program these types of systems for a living. Usually, everything I work on is HUGE. To put in in perspective, I recently finished the control system in the Chuang Residence. Alfred is very much into the latest and greatest - and had a 3 million dollar home theater put in (seats 7) as well as A/V distribuition (30 zones) throughout the house (61" HD plasma at the foot of his bed!).
So, it depends on the signal that you're routing.
Amplified: Great! it'll probably go as far as you need it. If you're going over a few hundered feet and don't care about the quality (think outdoor speakers), you'll want to look into doing with 70 volt transformers and matching speakers. (the higher voltage will drive the signal much farther, but the audio quality goes to hell). Generally with amplified signals the farther you go the quieter it gets.
Line level (non-amplified signal): Will often work just fine. Since it uses a much lower voltage it is much more succeptable to noise. The two biggest things to watch for are interference and ground loops. You get interference from power sources, running motors, wireless devices, etc. If you convert the signal to balanced it'll be less succeptable to interference (a balanced signal provides a ground reference). Small converters are available from several sources. Ground loops are caused when there is a voltage difference between the "ground" plane on either end of the wire. Often, you'll hear a slight 60 Hz hum. The PROPER way to eliminate this is to make sure all your equipment uses the same ground. If it's all on the same circuit in your house, then you're probably OK. If not, there are small inline devices to eliminate this as well. Look for "Hum Buckers" or "Electo-Optic isolators". Line level will go a suprising distance but you'll want a distribution amp to go over about a hundred feet. Keep in mind that the farther you go, the better chance of having noise problems.
Digital: Bleh! I really want this to work, but I haven't seen a successfull installation with more than 20 feet of wire! I worked one job where they tried both optical and copper but couldn't get it reliably (trying at about 75 feet of signal). When the signal degrades, the audio just goes away - not quiter or noisier. It suprises me that the optical signal won't go farther - it's light dammit! The issue seems to be that the TOSLink cables are designed around a plastic core that is easier to work with - but attenuates too much over distance. Having a device to rebuild the signal every 20 feet is problematic to say the least.
A few power users at our company built some extensive Excel spreadsheets using Office 2000. Really helpful, full of scripts. Those employees have since left the company, and golly, those damn scripts don't work on Office XP.
We had another user transfer 70% of the functions into new workbooks in Office XP. He left the company too. What happens when Office 2005 comes along?
People doing that much automation should not be relying on MS not to change.
About the same time those spreadsheets were developed, I was asked to do something similar for another department. We used a quick Excel sheet for a stopgap while I built the real solution. Took an old PC (wouldn't run Win2k so it was being scrapped), loaded RedHat and Zope, made a script to back it all up every night, taught myself Zope and turned the "spreadsheet" into a web app in Zope. I did ALL this in less time than it took the other guy to build his Excel solution. It's still running, and nobody has had to touch the app or the server for years now (yes, it's behind a firewall).
I did the control system programming for that exhibit.
Generally, the fish that survive depressurization are those that don't have a swim bladder (an organ that is basically a small bubble surrounded by a muscle - fish sqeezes - it sinks, relaxes - it floats, depressurizes - it pops)