High school electronics class was a fun time.. I used to charge up small capacitors and place the leads between the pages in my books. When walking the halls between classes, I would pull them out and shock people. Our halls were pretty crowded so you could be very covert. We also used the capacitor tester as a wimp detetector. Five or so people would hold hands with the end people each getting one of the charging leads. Another person would slowly turn up the voltage until someone wimped out and let go. Normally that person also got a little extra from the resulting arc.
Subscribe to mailing lists like Bugtraq and NT Bugtraq and any other OS or application specific products you are supporting. Not bleeding edge but not worth ignoring either.
I agree with the use of text editors. When in Windows I use Notetab. It is a drop in replacement for MS Notepad. It includes many addins and macros for dealing with any type of text file, including decent HTML support. It is great for viewing and editing multiple files at once. The 'light' version is free.
Of course my two sub teen kids mainly use MS Frontpage when they are in Windows. When they have problems getting it to do a specific task, I use one of the two above to fix it.
My PS fan on my older P200 tower died when I was away and eventually the surge protectors breaker tripped. Scary thought. I have three machines at the house that currently run 24/7. After that and a few more instances of fan failure, I now actually check the fans with my hand at least once daily. My main Samba server has had two fan failures in the last two years. One I noticed because I could not telnet in anymore. The second I felt the heat when I was reaching around to check the fan. The server has only been down 3 times in two years and two of them were because of the damn PS fan. A word of advice.. If the fan starts to make noise or you notice it running slower, replace it ASAP!
I was getting flooded with ATT calls also. Long story.. I got a bill from ATT for a phone number I had about 10 months previous at a different address. They mailed it to my old address and it was forwarded. Turns out the person that got my old number did not have long distance service but was accepting collect calls from somewhere in Central America. Since ATT handled the collect calls and they had no one to charge, they charged me, the last person with long distance service using that phone number. When I called and complained they wanted my current phone number and address. I fought it the first month and refused to give that information out. The next month I got a late charge and over $100 of new charges. I called to correct the issue and this time I gave them my phone number and address but gave a false spelling of my last name. I recieved a "final bill" of charges removed. For the next six months I recieved calls for my misspelled last name trying to get my to switch to ATT and tons of tons of mis-named junk mail. I finally tried the do not call route. They hung up on me so I called ATT customer service and complained. I recieved a letter in the mail that stated I would not recieve calls from them for the next 10 years. I have not recieved one since.
Here is an example of a ballastic missle submarine (aka Boomer)as a nuclear operator.
The boomer schedule was roughly 105 days in and 105 days out. While "out" you were on a rotating 18 hour schedule, of those 18 you were up and doing something for roughly 13 of them. That is an average of 18 out of 24 hours a day for a solid 115 days, no weekends, no holidays, no sunshine, no internet, and VERY limited comms with the outside world etc.. Thats 1890 hours of work. Consider that this cycle was twice a year for a total of 3780 hours. When in port or "in" we worked about 20 hours a week for about 9 weeks, again, this was twice a year. This is a grand total of 4100 hours, about 82 hours a week. It happens.
As others have stated, Atari joysticks could do diagonal. I don't have one around anymore but I believe diagonal was a combination of both directions, there was no specific contact pads for it. The 2600 joysticks were wired and capable of producing quite a few combinations of outputs from the actual 5 buttons it contained. The obvious 4 directions and fire, plus diagonal from two simutanious adjacent buttons, and all of the same + the fire button. I do not know if the 2600 was able to interput all of these but the C64 was. Why back when, I used a donor 2600 joystick to create a custom entry pad for a C64 program I made. It was a dart board scoring system. I tried many ways to get the actual pressure of the darts to signal to specific inputs and failed. I ended up contructing a self contained "scoring pad" using a breadboard, microswitches, and a few diodes and entered the information with that as people threw darts. I was only 14 at the time and it seemed like a good idea. I spent about a month building the unit and writing the program, I probably on used it five times once it was completed. None of my friends were into electronics or computers so I was the only one impressed with it.
If you browse the web on a console you won't get any pop-up,unders, or downs. You will not see any of the banner ads, no flash animation, nothing flying across the screen or images either. Does that mean Lynx users are next to be sued? It alters the intended look of a web page more then Gator does. After all, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean: [;dir=securitynode;dir=technology;dir=techpolicy;d ir=security;page=article;kw=;pos=ad2;sz=468x60;til e=2;ord=1025206824572?]
This is perfectly legal: the authorities are permitted to seize the "instrumentality of the crime".
I agree but wow, imagine if you had more wired devices like an X10 interface, ReplayTV, remote video camera, a portable MP3/hardrive, a network printer, Palm Pilot, eprom programmer. Where do you draw the line? What would they do with my diskless remote boot router? Do they do any diagrams before disconnecting everything? Could you claim that those devices were never attached to the network? What about wireless stuff that was in your car at the time? Do you have to give them your passwords?
There are too many situations where they could simply screw up, waste your time and get nothing out of it. Of course now they can dig deeper and find that pirated copy of WFW that you had on an old 130MB Quantum in the heap of old stuff.
If you don't like the crap they're trying to sell, listen to a different station, go buy music you do like, whatever
Where do you find or hear about this music that you may like? Napster? another P2P with your bandwidth capped CM? another radio station in your area? Online in some crappy quality that you must pay every month to hear? How about some other method that is being sued or has been shut down recently.
Its not that easy. Clear Channel owns most major markets. In DC they control 90% of the market. They have a pop, rock, oldies, news, casual, and a jazz station. These stations do not compete with each other. The choices are very limited. I don't actually listen to the radio much but I did find WHFS pretty decent but its hard to pick up in my area.
I've used Mitchell books for various electrical problems and projects over the years, They are far more in depth then a Chiltons or a Haynes manual. I do not know what they contain as far as computer codes and diagnostics are concerned though. The manuals are very expensive but you can usually find them at a larger community library. Worth a look if the regular manuals are not detaled enough for your project.
I view this differently. The department store operation and computer selling in general is cut throat. Walmart needed a way to stand above the crowd and sell PC's for less then the competition. Walmart and Microtel got together and started offering cheap PC's with no OS at all. To 99.99% of computer users that planned to stay legal, the PC was useless, remember the first versions had a Winmodem so in theory, Linux was out also. Microtel switched modems and shortly there after started shipping with Lindows. Both Walmart and Microtel come out looking better because Walmart is getting more for there money and Microtel added very little cost to their bottom line. Now the same is happening with Mandrake. Mircotel ships a more stable full operation system with the PC's (no disto jokes, just making a point here). Again both companies gain. Walmart could probably care less what the hell the machine runs, as long as they are not paying any more for it, after all, they initally were happy selling it with nothing on it. I think Microtel's and more so Walmart's involvement in choosing Linux is next to null.
This is very interesting but I think others have failed going down the cheap appliance subsidized by a monthly fee road before.
IMHO this would be a good reason for AOL to create a well running Linux client was fully integrated into their services. If these machines started selling, it would not be long before companies started releasing "add-on" software, either naturally occuring via supply and demand or with some AOL pressure.
I bought my daughter a 5-in-1 Aiptek (camera/webcam/voice recorder/movie thing/something else) for christmas. It works but the quality of the thing sucks. It will only take pictures in the higher res mode in really bright light, I mean really bright like the sun behind you or pointing directly at a light source. The webcam works but seems to crash when running longer then 10 minutes. This could be anything but its frustrating. Try getting drivers for an Aiptek device. You have to fill out an online form and hope you get a response back so you can get in, I tried this three times and I never got a single response. Luckily I found a mirror in Japan using Google. I had other issues with it but no one has used it for a while so I forget what they were.
Good spare to keep in the car in case of accidents So you are the a##hole that causes the rubbernecking at accident scenes!!
I make every effort to NOT look at accident scenes. If its too close to my side of the road I will actually hold my hand near that side of my face to prevent myself from seeing the scene.
The US government and remaining states have finally closed the MS antitrust case. Most of the deal was sealed but information was leaked that MS will now control much of the internet domain name space. One senator was quoted as saying "Now the Internet will be run by a true innovator"
In two weeks..
Open source and GPL advocates are suffering from strange unexplained outages. Redhat, Slashdot, Sourceforge and other popular sites have been unreachable for days. ICANN/MS/SANS stated "Unsecured software, also known as GPL, is more then likely the cause of their problems".
Similar story.. In the early 90's, I was on a nuclear submarine and we were having problems with one of our lithium bromide air conditioning units. This was keeping us from departing for sea. The Navy was finally able to track down one of the original members of the design team that worked for Carrier in the early 60's. He came out of retirement and spent roughly 6 hours looking over our unit and previous operating logs. I believe has was paid roughly $12k for his services. The result was that the entire unit was on shaky ground but by replacing one spray nozzle the unit was up and running fine. Li Br is a strong salt so internal corrosion was a major factor.
I guess you wouldn't mind me making all sorts of long distance calls using your phone service.
Yes I agree with you, if you have the ability to connect to my wireless services during a drive by then by all means, give it a try. The difference though is by using my phone line and calling Afganistan, I will incur excess charges that I would not have had, you would be actively using my lines, not passively and I would be directly charged for it. The cable company and satelite companies are not seeing excess costs by you picking their broadcast signal from the air or from a cable. I think your comparison would be closer to say that you could listen to my cordless phone conversations that I am broadcasting to your space and I would not incur any damage. It was my choice to use these devices and I am fully aware that they can be intercepted, same with baby monitors, cell phones, and pagers.
Finally, the issue of security on WiFi has already been beat to death, but I'll mention it again anyway
This is a valid concern. Even though I live only a few miles from huge data centers including one from AOL, I am still somewhat rural. For this reason I will have to wait years for broadband. I would give up some amount of security for bandwidth if given the choice.
The 'death' of cable or DSL? Not bloody likely
I agree, but in areas where the others are not available it seems like a good choice.
I believe that if its on my land, I should be able to use it as I see fit. If the cable company supplies me with basic cable and the same line has more information on it, I should be able to do what I want with the extra stuff. If a satellite company's signal is bouncing off my land I should be able to do whatever I want with that signal. I have no contract with them, I did not ask for the signal. I am going to use it as I see fit. Send DirecTV a certified letter giving them 15 days to remove their signal from your property and see what happens. Someone tried this before and it did not get very far.
Did you read any of the previous posts before you posted?
DVHS's purpose is QUALITY, not convienence. Far superior to a DVD. If you enjoy jumping around to different parts of a movie, like being the remote jockey, or do not have a HDTV, then it is not for you. If you do have a HDTV and this does not at least spark your interest, you got burned by a TV salesman. Some people would rather sit back in thier home theater room and watch a full resolution HD movie without interuption.
It very well may flop, you may not find enough of these people to keep it floating.
It's common knowledge amongst audiophiles that high quality audio can only be reproduced outside the electrically noisy environment inside a PC case
Every time audio and computer are mentioned, you will always find a thread about computers making too much noise. Self proclaimed audiophiles will bitch about everything. I suggest that you try to make some music on the PC before jumping on the noisy bandwagon. I have made several hundred elctronica type audio files on my PC's over the years. I start with a midi file, record to wav and burn them as audio cd's. That's kind of the simple version, I do not make the original midi files but I usually spend 10 to 20 hours on a song tweaking the instuments, channel reverb, chorus and volumes etc... The only limiting quality factor is the initial instrument quality that you sound card has. Some of the best files I have were made with a generic $14 Yamaha chipset hardware wavetable card in combination with an old Soundscape Elite. The SB live is good also but I do not like the stock instrument definitions that come with the card.
My home stereo consists of a recent Yahmaha reciever and a Yamaha M4 amp (old but good) for the subs. Driving roughly 10 year old Infinity's. The sound quality of my files is better then 99% of the cd's I have bought in the store and rival some of the DDD Telarc labeled discs like BachBusters and Beethoven Or Bustfor background noise, hiss, and dynamic range.
Slashdot Mirror
High school electronics class was a fun time..
I used to charge up small capacitors and place the leads between the pages in my books. When walking the halls between classes, I would pull them out and shock people. Our halls were pretty crowded so you could be very covert. We also used the capacitor tester as a wimp detetector. Five or so people would hold hands with the end people each getting one of the charging leads. Another person would slowly turn up the voltage until someone wimped out and let go. Normally that person also got a little extra from the resulting arc.
This may have been mentioned already...
Subscribe to mailing lists like Bugtraq and NT Bugtraq and any other OS or application specific products you are supporting. Not bleeding edge but not worth ignoring either.
Andromeda does not need a backend. A reasonable choice if you are SQL impared.
I agree with the use of text editors. When in Windows I use Notetab. It is a drop in replacement for MS Notepad. It includes many addins and macros for dealing with any type of text file, including decent HTML support. It is great for viewing and editing multiple files at once. The 'light' version is free.
A good free HTML editor is 1st page 2000.
Of course my two sub teen kids mainly use MS Frontpage when they are in Windows. When they have problems getting it to do a specific task, I use one of the two above to fix it.
My PS fan on my older P200 tower died when I was away and eventually the surge protectors breaker tripped. Scary thought. I have three machines at the house that currently run 24/7. After that and a few more instances of fan failure, I now actually check the fans with my hand at least once daily. My main Samba server has had two fan failures in the last two years. One I noticed because I could not telnet in anymore. The second I felt the heat when I was reaching around to check the fan. The server has only been down 3 times in two years and two of them were because of the damn PS fan. A word of advice.. If the fan starts to make noise or you notice it running slower, replace it ASAP!
I was getting flooded with ATT calls also. Long story.. I got a bill from ATT for a phone number I had about 10 months previous at a different address. They mailed it to my old address and it was forwarded. Turns out the person that got my old number did not have long distance service but was accepting collect calls from somewhere in Central America. Since ATT handled the collect calls and they had no one to charge, they charged me, the last person with long distance service using that phone number. When I called and complained they wanted my current phone number and address. I fought it the first month and refused to give that information out. The next month I got a late charge and over $100 of new charges. I called to correct the issue and this time I gave them my phone number and address but gave a false spelling of my last name. I recieved a "final bill" of charges removed. For the next six months I recieved calls for my misspelled last name trying to get my to switch to ATT and tons of tons of mis-named junk mail. I finally tried the do not call route. They hung up on me so I called ATT customer service and complained. I recieved a letter in the mail that stated I would not recieve calls from them for the next 10 years. I have not recieved one since.
Here is an example of a ballastic missle submarine (aka Boomer)as a nuclear operator.
The boomer schedule was roughly 105 days in and 105 days out. While "out" you were on a rotating 18 hour schedule, of those 18 you were up and doing something for roughly 13 of them. That is an average of 18 out of 24 hours a day for a solid 115 days, no weekends, no holidays, no sunshine, no internet, and VERY limited comms with the outside world etc.. Thats 1890 hours of work. Consider that this cycle was twice a year for a total of 3780 hours. When in port or "in" we worked about 20 hours a week for about 9 weeks, again, this was twice a year. This is a grand total of 4100 hours, about 82 hours a week.
It happens.
As others have stated, Atari joysticks could do diagonal. I don't have one around anymore but I believe diagonal was a combination of both directions, there was no specific contact pads for it. The 2600 joysticks were wired and capable of producing quite a few combinations of outputs from the actual 5 buttons it contained. The obvious 4 directions and fire, plus diagonal from two simutanious adjacent buttons, and all of the same + the fire button. I do not know if the 2600 was able to interput all of these but the C64 was. Why back when, I used a donor 2600 joystick to create a custom entry pad for a C64 program I made. It was a dart board scoring system. I tried many ways to get the actual pressure of the darts to signal to specific inputs and failed. I ended up contructing a self contained "scoring pad" using a breadboard, microswitches, and a few diodes and entered the information with that as people threw darts. I was only 14 at the time and it seemed like a good idea. I spent about a month building the unit and writing the program, I probably on used it five times once it was completed. None of my friends were into electronics or computers so I was the only one impressed with it.
If you browse the web on a console you won't get any pop-up,unders, or downs. You will not see any of the banner ads, no flash animation, nothing flying across the screen or images either. Does that mean Lynx users are next to be sued? It alters the intended look of a web page more then Gator does. After all, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean:d ir=security;page=article;kw=;pos=ad2;sz=468x60;til e=2;ord=1025206824572?]
[;dir=securitynode;dir=technology;dir=techpolicy;
This is perfectly legal: the authorities are permitted to seize the "instrumentality of the crime".
I agree but wow, imagine if you had more wired devices like an X10 interface, ReplayTV, remote video camera, a portable MP3/hardrive, a network printer, Palm Pilot, eprom programmer. Where do you draw the line?
What would they do with my diskless remote boot router? Do they do any diagrams before disconnecting everything? Could you claim that those devices were never attached to the network? What about wireless stuff that was in your car at the time? Do you have to give them your passwords?
There are too many situations where they could simply screw up, waste your time and get nothing out of it. Of course now they can dig deeper and find that pirated copy of WFW that you had on an old 130MB Quantum in the heap of old stuff.
If you don't like the crap they're trying to sell, listen to a different station, go buy music you do like, whatever
Where do you find or hear about this music that you may like? Napster? another P2P with your bandwidth capped CM? another radio station in your area? Online in some crappy quality that you must pay every month to hear? How about some other method that is being sued or has been shut down recently.
Its not that easy. Clear Channel owns most major markets. In DC they control 90% of the market. They have a pop, rock, oldies, news, casual, and a jazz station. These stations do not compete with each other. The choices are very limited. I don't actually listen to the radio much but I did find WHFS pretty decent but its hard to pick up in my area.
I've used Mitchell books for various electrical problems and projects over the years, They are far more in depth then a Chiltons or a Haynes manual. I do not know what they contain as far as computer codes and diagnostics are concerned though. The manuals are very expensive but you can usually find them at a larger community library. Worth a look if the regular manuals are not detaled enough for your project.
I view this differently. The department store operation and computer selling in general is cut throat. Walmart needed a way to stand above the crowd and sell PC's for less then the competition. Walmart and Microtel got together and started offering cheap PC's with no OS at all. To 99.99% of computer users that planned to stay legal, the PC was useless, remember the first versions had a Winmodem so in theory, Linux was out also. Microtel switched modems and shortly there after started shipping with Lindows. Both Walmart and Microtel come out looking better because Walmart is getting more for there money and Microtel added very little cost to their bottom line. Now the same is happening with Mandrake. Mircotel ships a more stable full operation system with the PC's (no disto jokes, just making a point here). Again both companies gain. Walmart could probably care less what the hell the machine runs, as long as they are not paying any more for it, after all, they initally were happy selling it with nothing on it. I think Microtel's and more so Walmart's involvement in choosing Linux is next to null.
This is very interesting but I think others have failed going down the cheap appliance subsidized by a monthly fee road before.
IMHO this would be a good reason for AOL to create a well running Linux client was fully integrated into their services. If these machines started selling, it would not be long before companies started releasing "add-on" software, either naturally occuring via supply and demand or with some AOL pressure.
I think "The Tech-Report" should do some reporting on web hosting options!! It appears /.'d in only 5 minutes..
I bought my daughter a 5-in-1 Aiptek (camera/webcam/voice recorder/movie thing/something else) for christmas.
It works but the quality of the thing sucks. It will only take pictures in the higher res mode in really bright light, I mean really bright like the sun behind you or pointing directly at a light source. The webcam works but seems to crash when running longer then 10 minutes. This could be anything but its frustrating. Try getting drivers for an Aiptek device. You have to fill out an online form and hope you get a response back so you can get in, I tried this three times and I never got a single response. Luckily I found a mirror in Japan using Google. I had other issues with it but no one has used it for a while so I forget what they were.
Good spare to keep in the car in case of accidents
So you are the a##hole that causes the rubbernecking at accident scenes!!
I make every effort to NOT look at accident scenes. If its too close to my side of the road I will actually hold my hand near that side of my face to prevent myself from seeing the scene.
Next Week..
The US government and remaining states have finally closed the MS antitrust case. Most of the deal was sealed but information was leaked that MS will now control much of the internet domain name space. One senator was quoted as saying "Now the Internet will be run by a true innovator"
In two weeks..
Open source and GPL advocates are suffering from strange unexplained outages. Redhat, Slashdot, Sourceforge and other popular sites have been unreachable for days. ICANN/MS/SANS stated "Unsecured software, also known as GPL, is more then likely the cause of their problems".
Similar story..
In the early 90's, I was on a nuclear submarine and we were having problems with one of our lithium bromide air conditioning units. This was keeping us from departing for sea. The Navy was finally able to track down one of the original members of the design team that worked for Carrier in the early 60's. He came out of retirement and spent roughly 6 hours looking over our unit and previous operating logs. I believe has was paid roughly $12k for his services. The result was that the entire unit was on shaky ground but by replacing one spray nozzle the unit was up and running fine. Li Br is a strong salt so internal corrosion was a major factor.
I guess you wouldn't mind me making all sorts of long distance calls using your phone service.
Yes I agree with you, if you have the ability to connect to my wireless services during a drive by then by all means, give it a try. The difference though is by using my phone line and calling Afganistan, I will incur excess charges that I would not have had, you would be actively using my lines, not passively and I would be directly charged for it. The cable company and satelite companies are not seeing excess costs by you picking their broadcast signal from the air or from a cable. I think your comparison would be closer to say that you could listen to my cordless phone conversations that I am broadcasting to your space and I would not incur any damage. It was my choice to use these devices and I am fully aware that they can be intercepted, same with baby monitors, cell phones, and pagers.
Finally, the issue of security on WiFi has already been beat to death, but I'll mention it again anyway
This is a valid concern. Even though I live only a few miles from huge data centers including one from AOL, I am still somewhat rural. For this reason I will have to wait years for broadband. I would give up some amount of security for bandwidth if given the choice.
The 'death' of cable or DSL? Not bloody likely
I agree, but in areas where the others are not available it seems like a good choice.
I believe that if its on my land, I should be able to use it as I see fit. If the cable company supplies me with basic cable and the same line has more information on it, I should be able to do what I want with the extra stuff. If a satellite company's signal is bouncing off my land I should be able to do whatever I want with that signal. I have no contract with them, I did not ask for the signal. I am going to use it as I see fit. Send DirecTV a certified letter giving them 15 days to remove their signal from your property and see what happens. Someone tried this before and it did not get very far.
Did you read any of the previous posts before you posted?
DVHS's purpose is QUALITY, not convienence. Far superior to a DVD. If you enjoy jumping around to different parts of a movie, like being the remote jockey, or do not have a HDTV, then it is not for you. If you do have a HDTV and this does not at least spark your interest, you got burned by a TV salesman.
Some people would rather sit back in thier home theater room and watch a full resolution HD movie without interuption.
It very well may flop, you may not find enough of these people to keep it floating.
in last weeks paper. It's online. Geared more toward consumer electronics but more interesting then wired's column.
It's common knowledge amongst audiophiles that high quality audio can only be reproduced outside the electrically noisy environment inside a PC case
Every time audio and computer are mentioned, you will always find a thread about computers making too much noise. Self proclaimed audiophiles will bitch about everything. I suggest that you try to make some music on the PC before jumping on the noisy bandwagon. I have made several hundred elctronica type audio files on my PC's over the years. I start with a midi file, record to wav and burn them as audio cd's. That's kind of the simple version, I do not make the original midi files but I usually spend 10 to 20 hours on a song tweaking the instuments, channel reverb, chorus and volumes etc... The only limiting quality factor is the initial instrument quality that you sound card has. Some of the best files I have were made with a generic $14 Yamaha chipset hardware wavetable card in combination with an old Soundscape Elite. The SB live is good also but I do not like the stock instrument definitions that come with the card.
My home stereo consists of a recent Yahmaha reciever and a Yamaha M4 amp (old but good) for the subs. Driving roughly 10 year old Infinity's. The sound quality of my files is better then 99% of the cd's I have bought in the store and rival some of the DDD Telarc labeled discs like BachBusters and Beethoven Or Bustfor background noise, hiss, and dynamic range.