It started off as a "scratch an itch" sort of project: Rockwell Automation basically threw down the gauntlet when I asked them about Linux support and they responded that communicating with a PLC from Linux was not possible. I proved them completely wrong - first with the PLC5/SLC-500/Pyramid Integrator series, and then once again with the ControlLogix/Micrologix.
Profit wasn't the motive at first, then after I exited the industrial automation industry, it became a burden - a huge burden - to continue to support the packages. I also started to have a change of heart regarding the value of my time. I started off by asking for donations - and got absolutely nothing back. I then took the software off the free ftp server and got a total of 2 sales. Underwhelming to say the least.
As of today, I know personally of 2 different commercial software packages from 2 different software companies that are built on my software - as in sections copied verbatim (no, neither IBM nor SCO are involved there). Do I get so much as a thank you let alone a commission of any sort, nope.
Have I learned, you bet I have. My software packages today are commercial only with no source code available. It's a matter of survival at this point - gotta take care of number one first.
I developed a couple of programming libraries for talking to industrial PLCs - Allen Bradley stuff. It started to cost me some pretty significant money to keep up with new hardware releases. The amount of money I made total (gross) was maybe $500. An entry level PLC costs closer to $3000.
So yeah, nobody willing to spend money on my work killed the work right off.
Heck, any movie that has Tom Cruise getting shot at repeatedly can't be that bad! It sucked in that those damned aliens kept missing. I was rooting for them to hit him and they kept disappointing...
I have distinct memories of using the "CB Simulator" chat system on CompuServe back in 1986. This certainly qualifies as a 2-way messaging system.
The Unix "talk" command has to figure in there somewhere too.
SMS messages have been around before 2005 (I am guessing), so that would certainly qualify as one-way messaging. Then again, so would telegrams and email.
OK, since Al Qaeda folk don't exactly have a uniform that is distinguished from the local fashion, how exactly will we know if they are either dead or hiding? If Al Qaeda were to stop fighting tomorrow, would we believe them defeated, or are they just waiting for us to leave so that they can resume their activities?
As much as I hate to say it, we are fighting a war based on ideology and have absolutely no way to know if we have won.
I am thinking of the Modicons and Allen Bradley PLCs around the world.
On the PLC5 and the SLC-500, security (if set) was generally an afterthought and then normally used to keep factory floor folk out of the PLC. I know because I knew where to find the text-encoded password in the memory dump files.
The ControlLogix was a similar open book - rarely if ever secured. Then again, you could get on the backplane via the ENBT adapter and then talk directly to any card in the system including the SERCOS cards and the ControlNet/DeviceNet/Data Highway cards.
Modicons = what security.
Of course, this was some 10 years ago and things might have improved somewhat since then (not holding my breath though).
And yes, Allen Bradley and Modicon are used in a LOT of critical infrastructure locations.
DesqVIEW was useful but really just as a fancy menu / full screen task switcher.
As someone who ran a 4 node BBS on a single 386-40 with 4 high speed nodes (USR Sportsters and Dual Standards) using DesqView and PCBoard, I think your description of "fancy menu / full screen task switcher" is a touch off. DesqView could easily handle running all 4 nodes at once plus an operators console. It was always interesting watching all 4 nodes in operation at once (windowed mode - in text).
Since it is presumed that the Kinect will only "work" with Kinect enabled games, sell the Kinect at it's "discounted" price of $150 or whatever it's current sell price is when purchased with a Kinect enabled game. If the Kinect is sold stand alone (no game bought at the same time), then sell it for $50 more. Of course, you then have to make sure that all the Kinect enabled games are at least $50 to make sure that isn't an advantage route to getting just the Kinect for less.
That latency can be a real bitch let me tell you - at least with the Post Orifice. Took them over 12 days to deliver a priority package to me from Detroit to Chicago. Their response to that: sorry about that.
I think the first amendment part of this stems from the "you shall not tell anyone about this" issue. It's from the perspective of the recipient of the letter. She is commanded to "tell no one about this" under pain of incarceration. This is all backed up with the power of law. Since you have an abridgment of the right to free speech and that abridgment is codified in law (a federal law - wrote by Congress no less), that is a pretty on-it's-face contravention of the First Amendment.
Now as others have wrote, this may fall into the "obstructing an investigation" trap and that may prove a valid issue, not being to even talk with a lawyer about this makes this pretty simply a First Amendment issue.
Like many others are saying on here - you need to give us a lot more information here. There is a huge difference in the cost per gig between a Netgear and a NetApp. You also didn't mention if your cost analysis includes your OpEx costs (Operational Expenses) - things like hard costs (labor) and soft costs (power, hvac, floorspace, etc).
Tell us more and we'll be able to help you out better.
Probably because we don't have a requirements doc of any sort here. I would be quite surprised if they weren't trying to do something highly fancy (web/AJAX front end, GIS tie in, method of attaching scans of important documents to each burial (birth records, military records, death cert, etc...), method of attaching pictures to each burial, public access with requisite security and high availability, offsite data replication and encryption (EMC/NetApp), distributed database with full read/write capabilities across all nodes (MySQL probably wouldn't cut it here though it might with DRDB behind it).
I don't know - but I would bet that this really isn't that trivial a problem - especially the GIS tie in part (drawing maps/plots on a screen in an accurate manner).
I was in Chicago for a couple of months at the beginning of the year. While there, I subscribed to Clear Internet (http://www.clear.com) - a 4G provider with (I think) Sprint backing it.
My results were absolutely horrible - on average, I was getting 51k download speeds. This was as measured on the modem itself (no router/firewall/PC - right from the status screen on the modem). There was nothing I could do to improve this and the people at Clear were completely baffled by this. According to the Clear folk, I was about 1/10 mile from the nearest tower. I was getting excellent signal and PSNR.
In my mind, either Clear was totally messed up or 4G has a lot more hype than delivery.
So (pulling numbers out of the air), you are suggesting that 80% of $20,000 is more than 20% of $250,000 (presuming ridiculous levels of spending for the low income earner and ridiculous levels of savings by the "high" income earner)?
You will always need the analog side of electronics, even in digital systems.
As a limited example list: decoupling caps, local bus stiffeners, weak/strong pull-up and pull-down, termination, current limiting, pulse shaping, pulse doubling, one-shot generator.
Just try to implement a power supply, let alone design one, without an analog electronics understanding of how things are working and how they will work.
You really do need a good understanding of analog electronics, even in an "all-digital" world.
I would recommend you get your hands on an old copy of "Electronic Communications" by Schrader (or however you spell his name). It is a College-level book that will take you from basic DC circuits (Ohms law and friends) all the way up to the design (circuit level) of microwave transceivers.
If you need to learn your way around RF systems, this is the book to get. It is the only book I kept when I went to college many years ago...
I have an old Dell PowerEdge 350 that I used for quite some time as my home router/Asterisk box. Just recently retired it - replaced it with a VMWare ESXi 4.0 box with a single VM running my router/Asterisk instance. Works like a charm too.
Find someone who has an old rack mount server for sale (eBay is your friend, so is CraigsList), install a Linux Distro of your choice and unless you are trying to run a BGP instance with a full view, you should be fine.
Modern drives have "servo tracks" on them - used for setting the head position. If you use an eraser powerful enough to wipe the drive, then the servo track is most likely also wiped - rendering the drive totally useless to most folk.
On the factory floor at the Caterpillar Medium Engine plant in Mossville Illinois during the summer. Temperatures where I had to work exceeded 100 degrees regularly and there was no air flow to speak of in the area. The noise level was outrageous and there was a persistent mist in the air that you weren't too sure what it consisted of.
Nothing like trying to program and debug ladder logic when you can't think or necessarily breathe. If you screwed up in your programming, you brought down the entire production line for the plant.
Slashdot Mirror
It started off as a "scratch an itch" sort of project: Rockwell Automation basically threw down the gauntlet when I asked them about Linux support and they responded that communicating with a PLC from Linux was not possible. I proved them completely wrong - first with the PLC5/SLC-500/Pyramid Integrator series, and then once again with the ControlLogix/Micrologix.
Profit wasn't the motive at first, then after I exited the industrial automation industry, it became a burden - a huge burden - to continue to support the packages. I also started to have a change of heart regarding the value of my time. I started off by asking for donations - and got absolutely nothing back. I then took the software off the free ftp server and got a total of 2 sales. Underwhelming to say the least.
As of today, I know personally of 2 different commercial software packages from 2 different software companies that are built on my software - as in sections copied verbatim (no, neither IBM nor SCO are involved there). Do I get so much as a thank you let alone a commission of any sort, nope.
Have I learned, you bet I have. My software packages today are commercial only with no source code available. It's a matter of survival at this point - gotta take care of number one first.
I developed a couple of programming libraries for talking to industrial PLCs - Allen Bradley stuff. It started to cost me some pretty significant money to keep up with new hardware releases. The amount of money I made total (gross) was maybe $500. An entry level PLC costs closer to $3000.
So yeah, nobody willing to spend money on my work killed the work right off.
What exactly does this do to the host organism (us) that is carrying these infected (and sub sequentially killed off) cells?
Since I don't speak micro-biologist, I'm not sure that was even addressed or answered in the article.
Um.... Storage vMotion on VMware is an Enterprise feature, not Enterprise Plus.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html
(Yeah, I know, 5.0 instead of 4.1 - I couldn't find the 4.1 chart right off)
Heck, any movie that has Tom Cruise getting shot at repeatedly can't be that bad! It sucked in that those damned aliens kept missing. I was rooting for them to hit him and they kept disappointing...
I have distinct memories of using the "CB Simulator" chat system on CompuServe back in 1986. This certainly qualifies as a 2-way messaging system.
The Unix "talk" command has to figure in there somewhere too.
SMS messages have been around before 2005 (I am guessing), so that would certainly qualify as one-way messaging. Then again, so would telegrams and email.
OK, since Al Qaeda folk don't exactly have a uniform that is distinguished from the local fashion, how exactly will we know if they are either dead or hiding? If Al Qaeda were to stop fighting tomorrow, would we believe them defeated, or are they just waiting for us to leave so that they can resume their activities?
As much as I hate to say it, we are fighting a war based on ideology and have absolutely no way to know if we have won.
I am thinking of the Modicons and Allen Bradley PLCs around the world.
On the PLC5 and the SLC-500, security (if set) was generally an afterthought and then normally used to keep factory floor folk out of the PLC. I know because I knew where to find the text-encoded password in the memory dump files.
The ControlLogix was a similar open book - rarely if ever secured. Then again, you could get on the backplane via the ENBT adapter and then talk directly to any card in the system including the SERCOS cards and the ControlNet/DeviceNet/Data Highway cards.
Modicons = what security.
Of course, this was some 10 years ago and things might have improved somewhat since then (not holding my breath though).
And yes, Allen Bradley and Modicon are used in a LOT of critical infrastructure locations.
They don't know what they are going to be missing... :)
DesqVIEW was useful but really just as a fancy menu / full screen task switcher.
As someone who ran a 4 node BBS on a single 386-40 with 4 high speed nodes (USR Sportsters and Dual Standards) using DesqView and PCBoard, I think your description of "fancy menu / full screen task switcher" is a touch off. DesqView could easily handle running all 4 nodes at once plus an operators console. It was always interesting watching all 4 nodes in operation at once (windowed mode - in text).
Ron
OK, so here is how they can solve the problem...
Since it is presumed that the Kinect will only "work" with Kinect enabled games, sell the Kinect at it's "discounted" price of $150 or whatever it's current sell price is when purchased with a Kinect enabled game. If the Kinect is sold stand alone (no game bought at the same time), then sell it for $50 more. Of course, you then have to make sure that all the Kinect enabled games are at least $50 to make sure that isn't an advantage route to getting just the Kinect for less.
R
This looks to me like the video equivalent of audio compression - squeezing the life out of the media to make it fit within a certain constraint,
Thanks but until the entire chain is HDR, I'll pass.
Ron
That latency can be a real bitch let me tell you - at least with the Post Orifice. Took them over 12 days to deliver a priority package to me from Detroit to Chicago. Their response to that: sorry about that.
Never again....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mod_Squad
Link is going to be pissed about this...
I think the first amendment part of this stems from the "you shall not tell anyone about this" issue. It's from the perspective of the recipient of the letter. She is commanded to "tell no one about this" under pain of incarceration. This is all backed up with the power of law. Since you have an abridgment of the right to free speech and that abridgment is codified in law (a federal law - wrote by Congress no less), that is a pretty on-it's-face contravention of the First Amendment.
Now as others have wrote, this may fall into the "obstructing an investigation" trap and that may prove a valid issue, not being to even talk with a lawyer about this makes this pretty simply a First Amendment issue.
Like many others are saying on here - you need to give us a lot more information here. There is a huge difference in the cost per gig between a Netgear and a NetApp. You also didn't mention if your cost analysis includes your OpEx costs (Operational Expenses) - things like hard costs (labor) and soft costs (power, hvac, floorspace, etc).
Tell us more and we'll be able to help you out better.
Probably because we don't have a requirements doc of any sort here. I would be quite surprised if they weren't trying to do something highly fancy (web/AJAX front end, GIS tie in, method of attaching scans of important documents to each burial (birth records, military records, death cert, etc...), method of attaching pictures to each burial, public access with requisite security and high availability, offsite data replication and encryption (EMC/NetApp), distributed database with full read/write capabilities across all nodes (MySQL probably wouldn't cut it here though it might with DRDB behind it).
I don't know - but I would bet that this really isn't that trivial a problem - especially the GIS tie in part (drawing maps/plots on a screen in an accurate manner).
Nothing felt in either Forest Park Illinois or Westland (burb of Detroit) Michigan.
For what it's worth...
I was in Chicago for a couple of months at the beginning of the year. While there, I subscribed to Clear Internet (http://www.clear.com) - a 4G provider with (I think) Sprint backing it.
My results were absolutely horrible - on average, I was getting 51k download speeds. This was as measured on the modem itself (no router/firewall/PC - right from the status screen on the modem). There was nothing I could do to improve this and the people at Clear were completely baffled by this. According to the Clear folk, I was about 1/10 mile from the nearest tower. I was getting excellent signal and PSNR.
In my mind, either Clear was totally messed up or 4G has a lot more hype than delivery.
So (pulling numbers out of the air), you are suggesting that 80% of $20,000 is more than 20% of $250,000 (presuming ridiculous levels of spending for the low income earner and ridiculous levels of savings by the "high" income earner)?
This is crap!
You will always need the analog side of electronics, even in digital systems.
As a limited example list: decoupling caps, local bus stiffeners, weak/strong pull-up and pull-down, termination, current limiting, pulse shaping, pulse doubling, one-shot generator.
Just try to implement a power supply, let alone design one, without an analog electronics understanding of how things are working and how they will work.
You really do need a good understanding of analog electronics, even in an "all-digital" world.
I would recommend you get your hands on an old copy of "Electronic Communications" by Schrader (or however you spell his name). It is a College-level book that will take you from basic DC circuits (Ohms law and friends) all the way up to the design (circuit level) of microwave transceivers.
If you need to learn your way around RF systems, this is the book to get. It is the only book I kept when I went to college many years ago...
I have an old Dell PowerEdge 350 that I used for quite some time as my home router/Asterisk box. Just recently retired it - replaced it with a VMWare ESXi 4.0 box with a single VM running my router/Asterisk instance. Works like a charm too.
Find someone who has an old rack mount server for sale (eBay is your friend, so is CraigsList), install a Linux Distro of your choice and unless you are trying to run a BGP instance with a full view, you should be fine.
Modern drives have "servo tracks" on them - used for setting the head position. If you use an eraser powerful enough to wipe the drive, then the servo track is most likely also wiped - rendering the drive totally useless to most folk.
This one is easy.
On the factory floor at the Caterpillar Medium Engine plant in Mossville Illinois during the summer. Temperatures where I had to work exceeded 100 degrees regularly and there was no air flow to speak of in the area. The noise level was outrageous and there was a persistent mist in the air that you weren't too sure what it consisted of.
Nothing like trying to program and debug ladder logic when you can't think or necessarily breathe. If you screwed up in your programming, you brought down the entire production line for the plant.
Fun Times!