Whoops. They backed off the MP3 levy down to $25/40GB, but I didn't see that in the main chart. I'm not Canadian, so I haven't followed this too closely.
These are the original batteries that came with the Apple bluetooth mouse, and are only a few months old (the mouse hasn't been out that long); expiration date 2013. Are yours older? Or did apple buy special OEM batteries (the mouse has a low-batt sensor, so this wouldn't be necessary)?
one day I noticed the icemaker in our freezer made the sound it does before it drops the cubes into the bucket. So, I looked in to see if I could watch it work... then I noticed that an extra metal tube went under the ice cube mold. I thought, wow, that's kinda neat - they must circulate a little extra freon through there to make sure the cubes are super-cold*. So, I decided to touch it to see how cold it was. It turns out that it wasn't a cooler, but a heating element that was used to slightly melt the edge of the cubes to release them from the mold. And it was very hot.
That's how I burned my finger in a freezer.
(* I was thinking that didn't make too much sense because I knew icemakers were often add-on features, and replumbing the freon would be too complicated to do for an accessory)
yeah, 150W is pretty toasty... I guess I wouldn't call it a laptop because I wouldn't want it anywhere near my groin!
It would take some really good engineering to pull this off. I was thinking of liquid cooling it through a huge magnesium heatsink on the back of the LCD. (Yep, reliability just went down the drain, so to speak). The rest of the case would be milled magnesium, too - it's an awesome metal! (story: I borrowed some metal stock from our machine shop once to hold down a mechanism I was testing. I thought I had aluminum, which would have worked, but I accidently got magnesium and it was too light!)
- puts out a lot of noise and emissions. - poor fuel economy and range is poor - not too good in snow - seats only two comfortably - high insurance rates, high cost of ownership. - carbon fiber construction isn't really repairable (heck, there are only a few places that can fix aluminum bodies)
Yeah, this board takes 150W max, but under a 20" lcd, you've got a lot more room for extra batteries. I'm proposing an extreme machine here - like I said, it'll be extreme (speed, heat, size) and only some people will find it attractive. The case would be much smaller than a desktop (imagine a 20" lcd plus two inches of thickness), and you could transport it much more easily than a desktop because it's self-contained -- no keyboard or monitor to setup and connect.
I wonder why there is no ferrari-like niche in the laptop world -- ultimate performance that makes a lot of sacrifices that most people wouldn't make. How hard would it be to slap this dual processor motherboard onto a 20" LCD screen, and add a few SCSI 2.5" drives in a raid? There are people who'd go for it, even though it would weigh 20 pounds.
So, you're happy that eeye - a company you don't have any relationship with - has had access to your computer for the last six months? And that's fine with your customers, too?
Ok, what about someone else who found the hole independently? Or, what if someone has broken into eeye's systems and has been monitoring their email for a "heads up" on unreleased flaws. (or the home computer of a microsoft security person). Or someone at their ISP or on their cablemodem monitoring their email. You're happy to give all these people access to your computer, too, right? Compartimentilization is very hard to do outside a rigorous structure (like the NSA) which has very strict rules, procedures, and punishments to allow enforcement.
A virus or worm that takes advantage of this flaw is only one indicator - people using the flaw for other purposes are probably not going to tell the world about it. The point is that it's impossible to tell if no harm has been done.
The objective of these missions is to learn more about mars.. if we were just interplanetary joyriding, then, yes, I'd want the rover back -- but that's not the case here.
Besides, the rovers are only a small portion of the cost of the mission - even if we could magically get these back for free, it would be worth the effort to build new rovers that incorporate the things learned on previous missions and provide new and different capabilities.
I guess I should have moderated that a bit... a new G5 (as the asker is getting) will come with panther, and it's not meeting the specs on the nolf2 box ("at least 10.2.6"). It's been over three months and my patience has been wearing thin. Apple can sell it, but they should be informing the customers of the incompatibility or else they'll start to look bad.
MacPlay doesn't have their act together with this game: NOLF2 only plays on QuickTime 6.3. The most current version of QuickTime is 6.5, and Panther cannot be downgraded below 6.4. It's a mess and customers who upgraded to Panther have been stuck waiting... Our only hope is that someone (apple or MacPlay) fesses up and fixes their problem. I'm a bit disappointed that Apple continues to sell faulty game - they should wait until it's fixed.
Actually, I'm an EE who has has some on-orbit hardware and software. Your examples are kindof primitive because these instruments have been implemented in a variety of very different ways, but I'll run with them.
Cell phones use a range of frequencies. Sometimes these frequencies are reused, and this is either CDMA or TDMA. TDMA is essentially cooperation; CDMA will suffer the same power differential problems that near-frequency transmissions will.
Cordless phones are similar - either multiple FM frequencies (49MHz), or some form of CDMA/TDMA (2.4GHz+). CB's use different AM channels and also use a form of TDMA (you don't start talking until the other guy says "over"... thus, you are time-dividing a single chanel).
Even at different frequencies, transponders* need to have realively close amplitudes- that's what I was saying in a previous post. TV-relay satellites can well-control their uplink power; cell phones are commanded to vary their power by the towers. These options may not be available to mars rovers, where you want even more reliability and have little ability to change the ground stations (i.e. if a tv uplink is wildly putting out too much power causing other uplinks to be lost, you can bet someone will drive there pronto and pull the plug. Or, if the signal is too weak, someone will realign the antenna or replace the power amp)
(*This is probably not a problem for the DSN, where they can much better filter the signals for special situations. Assuming, of course, that a fault hasn't put the signals on top of each other.)
Did a little research on this specific mission (before I was just talking based on my experience with the much smaller satellites I worked on), and I learned some stuff:
The forwarders are much better (bigger antennas, more solar cells = better power budget, higher orbit means the earth is visible for a bigger portion of the day), but they're another link in the system and prone to failure. (I'm guessing that they don't provide as many emergency debug options, either)
This page includes a description of the low-bandwidth control channel that communicates directly to the DSN.
I couldn't find mention of how much use the high gain-to-DSN path gets vs. via-relay-satellites path - does anyone have this info?
Master/slave would have less than one quarter the reliability, and cooperation doesn't work if one is going haywire (as did Spirit).
Different frequencies is good, but if they are close together and picked up the the same transponder (a likely scenario), a difference in amplititude could mess up the auto gain control and you'd lose the quiet one. A difference in amplitude could be caused by a number of reasons - poor aim, weak transmitter batteries, haywire transmit power setting, or a special max-power emergency reach-home mode. If the transmitters are frequency-agile (by design or accident), then they could still accidently transmit on the same frequency.
Physical seperation is your best bet if you want signifcant bandwidth and want the most flexibility to recover from a variety of failure modes.
The launches are clustered so tightly (2 weeks) because the optimal launch window for mars occurs every two years. Otherwise, it might make sense to do a yearly launch so that design problems (like the flash memory error) can be thoroughly tested and fixed.
Having two rovers operating at the same time might cause a reliability problem... if spirit had kept randomly transmitting at odd times, it might have interefered with good data being sent from opportunity. Nasa thought of that, and that's probably why the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet - hence, only one is visible to earth and/or the relay satellite at a time, so they can't interfere.
Why does the system need special hardware at all? (Other than the obvious answer that someone spending $700 would feel ripped off if it just enabled a built-in software function). It doesn't look like this card is a crypto co-processor.
What good is hardware protection for part of the image transfer when other parts of the chain-of-custody aren't vouched for (lens, CCD, camera, camera's uploadable firmware, USB driver, and the rest of the PC)? At best, it seems like a feel-good measure, and at worst, it's a poor patch for real security. I couldn't find any more info on canon's site, so I'll have to withold judgement, but I'd like to see more details.
I wrote some demo fibre channel block-device drivers for vxWorks a few years ago, and I found that VxWorks's FAT FS was buggy. The bug only affected one flavor (I don't remember if it was FAT12, 16, or 32), but it was clearly reproducible and clearly an OS fault. It was a corner case and we found some way around it (like avoiding an writes with a length of 1MB).
Here's the usual rant you see here on slashdot, and it's true: since it was closed source, we couldn't verify that we'd caught all the bad cases, and we couldn't submit the fix to back to WindRiver.
No, actually, one of the draws of the onhand and fossil watches is that they'll execute your own code. I'm not sure if that's a draw for m3wthr33, too, but I'm sure it would lead to a neat homebrew games scene. (provided, of course, it's not too hard to get the games loaded. example: the hp28 calculator could do all sorts of cool user-programmable things, but user programs didn't take off until the hp48sx came out with a serial port)
Did you ever notice that Sam's club is named after Sam Walton, and that Walmart is named after a guy with the same exact name? What are the chances of that?!
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops. They backed off the MP3 levy down to $25/40GB, but I didn't see that in the main chart. I'm not Canadian, so I haven't followed this too closely.
This is the country that already has some pretty high media levies based on the assumption that illegal copies are being made. It's currently $0.21 (data CD) and $0.77 (audio CD), but there are proposed increases, including an $840 levy on each 40GB iPod! ($0.021/MB)
ha ha! I'm posting this from my 17" AlBook! It's beautiful, but lacks pageup/pagedown keys, and it's only single processor, but I still love it!
download it and look in /Developer/qt/doc/html/index.html
It's not monolithic, but it's all in one download.
I just checked my cordless mouse, and no tester.
These are the original batteries that came with the Apple bluetooth mouse, and are only a few months old (the mouse hasn't been out that long); expiration date 2013. Are yours older? Or did apple buy special OEM batteries (the mouse has a low-batt sensor, so this wouldn't be necessary)?
one day I noticed the icemaker in our freezer made the sound it does before it drops the cubes into the bucket. So, I looked in to see if I could watch it work... then I noticed that an extra metal tube went under the ice cube mold. I thought, wow, that's kinda neat - they must circulate a little extra freon through there to make sure the cubes are super-cold*. So, I decided to touch it to see how cold it was. It turns out that it wasn't a cooler, but a heating element that was used to slightly melt the edge of the cubes to release them from the mold. And it was very hot.
That's how I burned my finger in a freezer.
(* I was thinking that didn't make too much sense because I knew icemakers were often add-on features, and replumbing the freon would be too complicated to do for an accessory)
yeah, 150W is pretty toasty... I guess I wouldn't call it a laptop because I wouldn't want it anywhere near my groin!
It would take some really good engineering to pull this off. I was thinking of liquid cooling it through a huge magnesium heatsink on the back of the LCD. (Yep, reliability just went down the drain, so to speak). The rest of the case would be milled magnesium, too - it's an awesome metal! (story: I borrowed some metal stock from our machine shop once to hold down a mechanism I was testing. I thought I had aluminum, which would have worked, but I accidently got magnesium and it was too light!)
You can make the same argument for a ferrari-
- puts out a lot of noise and emissions.
- poor fuel economy and range is poor
- not too good in snow
- seats only two comfortably
- high insurance rates, high cost of ownership.
- carbon fiber construction isn't really repairable (heck, there are only a few places that can fix aluminum bodies)
Yeah, this board takes 150W max, but under a 20" lcd, you've got a lot more room for extra batteries. I'm proposing an extreme machine here - like I said, it'll be extreme (speed, heat, size) and only some people will find it attractive. The case would be much smaller than a desktop (imagine a 20" lcd plus two inches of thickness), and you could transport it much more easily than a desktop because it's self-contained -- no keyboard or monitor to setup and connect.
I wonder why there is no ferrari-like niche in the laptop world -- ultimate performance that makes a lot of sacrifices that most people wouldn't make. How hard would it be to slap this dual processor motherboard onto a 20" LCD screen, and add a few SCSI 2.5" drives in a raid? There are people who'd go for it, even though it would weigh 20 pounds.
(related link tadpole sparcbook)
So, you're happy that eeye - a company you don't have any relationship with - has had access to your computer for the last six months? And that's fine with your customers, too?
Ok, what about someone else who found the hole independently? Or, what if someone has broken into eeye's systems and has been monitoring their email for a "heads up" on unreleased flaws. (or the home computer of a microsoft security person). Or someone at their ISP or on their cablemodem monitoring their email. You're happy to give all these people access to your computer, too, right? Compartimentilization is very hard to do outside a rigorous structure (like the NSA) which has very strict rules, procedures, and punishments to allow enforcement.
A virus or worm that takes advantage of this flaw is only one indicator - people using the flaw for other purposes are probably not going to tell the world about it. The point is that it's impossible to tell if no harm has been done.
Also today, Seagate launched a family of server-class 2.5" drives sporting 10k rpm and an Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel interface. No details on Seagate's web site yet, though.
Would you really want them back?
The objective of these missions is to learn more about mars.. if we were just interplanetary joyriding, then, yes, I'd want the rover back -- but that's not the case here.
Besides, the rovers are only a small portion of the cost of the mission - even if we could magically get these back for free, it would be worth the effort to build new rovers that incorporate the things learned on previous missions and provide new and different capabilities.
I guess I should have moderated that a bit... a new G5 (as the asker is getting) will come with panther, and it's not meeting the specs on the nolf2 box ("at least 10.2.6"). It's been over three months and my patience has been wearing thin. Apple can sell it, but they should be informing the customers of the incompatibility or else they'll start to look bad.
MacPlay doesn't have their act together with this game: NOLF2 only plays on QuickTime 6.3. The most current version of QuickTime is 6.5, and Panther cannot be downgraded below 6.4. It's a mess and customers who upgraded to Panther have been stuck waiting... Our only hope is that someone (apple or MacPlay) fesses up and fixes their problem. I'm a bit disappointed that Apple continues to sell faulty game - they should wait until it's fixed.
Actually, I'm an EE who has has some on-orbit hardware and software. Your examples are kindof primitive because these instruments have been implemented in a variety of very different ways, but I'll run with them.
Cell phones use a range of frequencies. Sometimes these frequencies are reused, and this is either CDMA or TDMA. TDMA is essentially cooperation; CDMA will suffer the same power differential problems that near-frequency transmissions will.
Cordless phones are similar - either multiple FM frequencies (49MHz), or some form of CDMA/TDMA (2.4GHz+). CB's use different AM channels and also use a form of TDMA (you don't start talking until the other guy says "over"... thus, you are time-dividing a single chanel).
Even at different frequencies, transponders* need to have realively close amplitudes- that's what I was saying in a previous post. TV-relay satellites can well-control their uplink power; cell phones are commanded to vary their power by the towers. These options may not be available to mars rovers, where you want even more reliability and have little ability to change the ground stations (i.e. if a tv uplink is wildly putting out too much power causing other uplinks to be lost, you can bet someone will drive there pronto and pull the plug. Or, if the signal is too weak, someone will realign the antenna or replace the power amp)
(*This is probably not a problem for the DSN, where they can much better filter the signals for special situations. Assuming, of course, that a fault hasn't put the signals on top of each other.)
Did a little research on this specific mission (before I was just talking based on my experience with the much smaller satellites I worked on), and I learned some stuff:
How rovers communicate with earth
- the Deep Space Network (DSN) communicates directly with the rovers, but is busy because it also tracks 28 other missions.
- the rovers can talk to one of two mars-orbiting satellites that will forward the messages.
The forwarders are much better (bigger antennas, more solar cells = better power budget, higher orbit means the earth is visible for a bigger portion of the day), but they're another link in the system and prone to failure. (I'm guessing that they don't provide as many emergency debug options, either)
This page includes a description of the low-bandwidth control channel that communicates directly to the DSN.
I couldn't find mention of how much use the high gain-to-DSN path gets vs. via-relay-satellites path - does anyone have this info?
Master/slave would have less than one quarter the reliability, and cooperation doesn't work if one is going haywire (as did Spirit).
Different frequencies is good, but if they are close together and picked up the the same transponder (a likely scenario), a difference in amplititude could mess up the auto gain control and you'd lose the quiet one. A difference in amplitude could be caused by a number of reasons - poor aim, weak transmitter batteries, haywire transmit power setting, or a special max-power emergency reach-home mode. If the transmitters are frequency-agile (by design or accident), then they could still accidently transmit on the same frequency.
Physical seperation is your best bet if you want signifcant bandwidth and want the most flexibility to recover from a variety of failure modes.
The launches are clustered so tightly (2 weeks) because the optimal launch window for mars occurs every two years. Otherwise, it might make sense to do a yearly launch so that design problems (like the flash memory error) can be thoroughly tested and fixed.
Having two rovers operating at the same time might cause a reliability problem... if spirit had kept randomly transmitting at odd times, it might have interefered with good data being sent from opportunity. Nasa thought of that, and that's probably why the two rovers are on opposite sides of the planet - hence, only one is visible to earth and/or the relay satellite at a time, so they can't interfere.
Why does the system need special hardware at all? (Other than the obvious answer that someone spending $700 would feel ripped off if it just enabled a built-in software function). It doesn't look like this card is a crypto co-processor.
What good is hardware protection for part of the image transfer when other parts of the chain-of-custody aren't vouched for (lens, CCD, camera, camera's uploadable firmware, USB driver, and the rest of the PC)? At best, it seems like a feel-good measure, and at worst, it's a poor patch for real security. I couldn't find any more info on canon's site, so I'll have to withold judgement, but I'd like to see more details.
I wrote some demo fibre channel block-device drivers for vxWorks a few years ago, and I found that VxWorks's FAT FS was buggy. The bug only affected one flavor (I don't remember if it was FAT12, 16, or 32), but it was clearly reproducible and clearly an OS fault. It was a corner case and we found some way around it (like avoiding an writes with a length of 1MB).
Here's the usual rant you see here on slashdot, and it's true: since it was closed source, we couldn't verify that we'd caught all the bad cases, and we couldn't submit the fix to back to WindRiver.
Domain Name: MIT.EDU
Registrant:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
Contacts:
Jeffrey I. Schiller
jis@mit.edu
Domain record activated: 23-May-1985
Domain record last updated: 29-Nov-2000
That's no fun ;-)
No, actually, one of the draws of the onhand and fossil watches is that they'll execute your own code. I'm not sure if that's a draw for m3wthr33, too, but I'm sure it would lead to a neat homebrew games scene. (provided, of course, it's not too hard to get the games loaded. example: the hp28 calculator could do all sorts of cool user-programmable things, but user programs didn't take off until the hp48sx came out with a serial port)
The SPOT watches will have: a 28 MHz ARM7 processor, 64KB ROM, 48KB RAM, and a 12Kb/sec radio downlink.
You could just wait until someone hacks this to run their own code. It runs a scaled-down version of Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment.
Did you ever notice that Sam's club is named after Sam Walton, and that Walmart is named after a guy with the same exact name? What are the chances of that?!
Didja know that those silver candy balls used on cupcakes have real silver? Check the label next time you see a container of them. They don't seem to be legal anymore in CA, TX, CO, NJ, AZ, and FL. Darn, and so tasty!