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User: Mister+Transistor

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  1. Re:Employees suck! on FBI Password Database Compromised by Consultant · · Score: 1

    I agree completely. Here's a quote from me:

    "Employee Loyalty" died the same day they changed "Personnel" to "Human Resources".

    Feel free to use it; I haven't patented it yet...

  2. Re:Gimme! on Rebirth of the U.S. Arcade? · · Score: 1

    Hmm the old modules were called "Red Boxes" which were the credit totalizers, the "Blue Box" and "Grey Box" were the selection logic and core memory ("Tormat"!) driver/sensors.

    Later in the 70's they used custom MOS IC's, for this, then again with CMOS 4000 IC gate logic. Finally, in the '80's they went to a custom masked MK3840 MCU.

  3. Re:As someone who builds arcade machines... on Rebirth of the U.S. Arcade? · · Score: 1

    Heh. You just reinvented the Credit Multiplier.

    Seeburg did that in the 1960's with discrete transistor flip-flops. Jukeboxes and vending machines that use multi-coin rejectors (as GP pointed out, expensive) use the circuit to make a quarter register 5 "nickel pulses". I used to work for Stern on the old Seeburg line in the '80s and we were still making some of that 20 year old stuff.

    The pricing was set by wire jumpers, the difficulty is remoting them somehow for rapid price changes.

  4. Check out Fugawi on A Car Navigation System That Takes Pictures · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There's a PC/Win prog called "Fugawi Global Navigator" that can associate images and/or sounds with waypoints or GPS fixes. I know it interfaces with PDA/Smartphones too, so it may use them as a camera for input instead of just using a regular pre-existing image or sound file.

    Some cool features; it can use nearly any map source, standard USGS maps, NOAA marine charts, GeoTIFF's and aerial/satellite imagery. It has 3-D elevation views and GPS driving assist.

    No, I don't work for them :)

    I'm not as sure, but I think the latest offerings from DeLorme may finally have the photo association feature too.

  5. Re:Slashdot on Why Vista Release Date Really Slipped · · Score: 1

    Fur?

    Don't pengiuns have feathers?

  6. Re:Which is more important to you? on U.S. Pressures ISPs on Data Retention · · Score: 1

    Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is Russia before the Cold War.

    Back then they thought Communism was a good idea; the state would take care of all your needs. Plenty of security, but little to no personal freedom.

  7. Re:It's in IL, not NJ on Student Faces Expulsion for Blog Post · · Score: 1

    Well, as my dear old Dad used to tell me, If God wanted to give Illinois an Enema, Joliet is where he'd stick it!

    Actually, other than the notorious Stateville Prison there, it's a pretty nice area.

  8. Re:don't have time?! on Student Faces Expulsion for Blog Post · · Score: 1

    A couple of corrections to both scenarios:

    Since he's a juvenile, he won't bear a permanent adult arrest record.

    Also, the law requires him to be in school 'til 18 (unless he enlists or is emancipated legally) so he will get his education, albeit at a private school. This will just punish his parents, at least financially...

  9. It's in IL, not NJ on Student Faces Expulsion for Blog Post · · Score: 4, Insightful

    New Jersey doesn't have a monopoly on Plainfields. There are many other Plainfields like it, but this one is mine. ;)

    Clue: it's in the CHICAGO Sun-Times.

    Further clue: from TFA - "Joliet Police".

    I live near there - Plainfield is where the big Tornado disaster occurred about 12-13 years ago.

  10. Re:People use admin login on windows? on Microsoft Employees May Lose Admin Rights · · Score: 1

    On a normal XP install, the user you create is administrator-equivalent in security to the actual account named "administrator", so even though you're not using the named admin account you are still effectively administrator.

    This security then made worse by using the "keep user logged in at all times" option (not requiring a login screen).

  11. Re:AVG here.. on Best of the Free Anti-virus Choices? · · Score: 1

    This is a good observation.

    We use XP SP2 at work with CA E-trust AV which is not free, I know, but bear with me - it deploys the same way, by "pushing" out from a server.

    Even with the firewall turned off, we still had to use a registry tweak to turn on remote access for the push to work.

    Of course, then it had to be set back after the push or else it would be the same security risk it originally was with SP1.

    FWIW, I use and recommend AVG Free myself! I heard Intel was buying/thinking of buying/getting in bed with them.

  12. Re:Woah! on Flawed AMD Chip Can Lead To Data Corruption · · Score: 1

    I get a calculator! Actually, I get 54. Why do you ask?

  13. Re:An old problem on Flawed AMD Chip Can Lead To Data Corruption · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll go you one better - I have formed my own personal postulate/theory/law that:

    No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free.

    and it's corollary:

    It is impossible to completely test a sufficiently complex system in every possible way to be certain that it's bug-free.

    In that vein, someone once said "Foolproof is impossible because fools are so ingenious", and "As soon as an idiot-proof system is devised, they go and invent a better idiot!"

  14. Re:An old problem on Flawed AMD Chip Can Lead To Data Corruption · · Score: 5, Informative

    You may be referring to the early MC6800 8-bit processors. The first ones had a major problem in that the internal registers were dynamic RAM style memory, and synchronized to the internal state clock. If you halted the processor for an extended period of time, the refresh clock to them ceased and the registers got hot, drew too much current and burned up!

    I'm pretty sure that gave rise to the joke "Halt and Catch Fire"...

    I always figured that if you were to burn out a register from overuse, it would be the carry bit ;)

    Anyway, as to the story at hand, it sounds like this would only ever occur a) to only 3000 processors total - MAYBE, and b) would only ever happen under such an artifically contrived laboratory stress-test/benchmark situation. Any CPU running in a real system would a) have to do other things like service hardware interrupts, and b) wouldn't do something useless like perform a looping calculation without checking to see if it was done periodically. It really sounds like this is a big non-issue in reality.

  15. Re:WHY? on Microsoft Bypasses HOSTS File · · Score: 4, Funny

    IIRC, it's a hangover from Windows 3.1 or maybe Win95.

  16. Re:Nanotubes.. on IBM Creates Ring Oscillator on a Single Nanotube · · Score: 4, Informative

    Most semiconductors only turn on at a certain voltage level. For example, most silicon transistors turn on at about positive 0.7 volts. Any less than that and the trasistor won't conduct, even if you go below 0 volts to a negative voltage.

    What the person was saying about nanotubes is they will "turn on" or begin to conduct again after the voltage drops below 0 to a certain negative level. Kind of like a device that takes the absolute value of the voltage, and if it's above a certain value it conducts or switches "on".

  17. Cool! on IBM Creates Ring Oscillator on a Single Nanotube · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right in the middle of the 6-meter Amateur Radio band! Sounds like a nice local oscillator for an ultra-tiny nano "rig". Now, to figure out how to directly modulate it for direct FM or FSK.

  18. I don't think they have a leg to stand on on Suing Google Over Pagerank · · Score: 3, Informative

    IIRC It was already upheld in a court that search results and rankings were officially considered "opinion", and as such was constitutionally-protected free speech.

    If my opinion is that your site sucks, you can't sue me for that.

  19. Drat! on Accordion Hero Postmortem · · Score: 1

    From the name, I was rather hoping it would be a(n) FPS!

    Next: Mime Blasters!

  20. Re:Aargh - I was just getting used to twisted pair on Verizon To Use New Tech With Old Cables · · Score: 1

    You're thinking of the older 10-base2 Ethernet with BNC connectors, and earlier 1 Mb/s nets like Arcnet or Corvus. Three things:

    1. You most likeley used 50 Ohm BNC's but the Cable systems use 75 Ohm F-connectors. Those are somewhat more reliable than BNC's, and are much easier to replace.

    2. Those early nets were daisy-chained from connector to connector, and any break would take down part of or the whole network. With the co-ax system the Cable system uses, they are usually radiating in a "star" configuration using n-way splitters as the "hub". That way even with a catastrophic short to ground on 1 node, it would just reduce the signal strength at the other connectors by 1/n (half for a 2-way, 1/4 for 4 way, etc.)

    3. The cable signal doesn't go straight to a NIC. Unlike Net cards, you are not sending analog RF to the computer directly, you still need a cable modem to decode the RF signal back to digital data. That data gets turned back into different RF for the net, and the net cards have their own RF transciever onboard. The exception to this would be an internal cable modem PC card (I would imagine they exist, but not everyone will have one).

  21. TV Commercial ad on World of Queuecraft · · Score: 1

    Isn't there an ad for this game running in the U.S. ? The video rental store has a copy, called "Let's Wait In Line"

  22. 2001 Reference, too. on NASA Names New Spacecraft 'Altair' · · Score: 1

    We get a bonus reference to 2001: A Space Odessey as well.

    The Ares 1B was the egg-like shuttle that Heywood Floyd took from the Space Station to the Moon.

    Aso, the Ares vehicles are called Ares I and Ares V, presumably after the naming conventions of Saturn I and V. However, the Saturn I was actually called Saturn 1B, so there's the logical linkage to the Ares 1B.

    From that, we can clearly see that Werner Von Braun is related to Kevin Bacon!

  23. Re:They've hit rock bottom on SCO Announces Plan to Increase Revenue · · Score: 1

    Cripes.

    At this rate, next week they'll be robbing 7-11's and jacking old ladies!

  24. Re:on-demand bombing on Help Break Original Enigma Messages · · Score: 1

    I know we got at least one - I've seen it. The U505 was captured with Enigma and codebooks intact despite the crew's best efforts to scuttle the sub. It now resides, as I do, in a museum in Chicago :) This was a large part of the story from the movie.

    Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry has a beautifully re-vamped exhibit there, they built it it's own underground "pen" to live in. You walk in 3 stories above the bottom of the "drydock" at standing on deck level, then go around a huge spiral ramp outside the craft until you get to the bottom were all the artifacts are.

    They have the Enigma there on loan from the NSA, and no, I don't work there.

  25. Thank IBM! on RFID Injection Required for Datacenter Access · · Score: 1

    You can thank IBM for some public awareness of RFID systems from their new series of Helpdesk commericial advertisements.

    You know the one, with the desk in the middle of the road that stops a truck, "The Boxes told me you were lost!", blah, blah...

    That's sufficiently creepy that more than one non-techie friend commented to me about it, with the general attitude of "Hmmm, I didn't know they could do that. Chalk up another one for Big Brother."

    So, thank IBM for the public awareness campaign, and for having put it in a (no doubt unintentionally) scary way.