Ah! That explains it. I knew Seymour Cray was working on a GaAs computer -- he had renounced silicon and was assembling some of the world's best GaAs equipment. So, that was bought by Tera
Here's the interesting part of my post: Tera replaced the 24 GaAs chips for one CMOS chip. Here's their blurb from the website:
----
Early MTA systems had been built using Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) technology for all logic design. Today, GaAs parts are predominantly used in cellular phones, not high performance computers. As a result of the semiconductor market's focus on CMOS technology for computer systems, there is little support for GaAs technology.
Cray's transition to using CMOS technology in the MTA will occur in stages.
In the first stage, a single CMOS MTA "Torrent" microprocessor replaces 24 GaAs ASICs that had represented 16 different ASIC designs. Torrent chips support up to 128 virtual processors, or threads, and will run at least as fast as today's MTA processors. A Torrent chip requires 50 watts of power compared with 1,000 watts for the GaAs design. The Torrent processor board requires 1,025 connections versus 14,400 connections on the GaAs board.
----
Somewhere else on their page they say the system is "Water cooled at 4KW per processor". So, even with the reduced-power CMOS, they are putting out a lot of heat!
Cryptome has a posting showing the porn mpg download logs from a court computer. Its a letter from the court's administrative offices to one of the chief judges, giving the IP (and who's assigned to it) of the downloader.
The downloads were at lunchtime, but jeeze, there are a lot of downloads. It looks like it was some sort of sharing software involved, by the looks of the filenames and the IP numbers.
The letter is from the adminstrative offices of the court to a chief judge, indicating the IP and registered owner of that IP. The log was captured as part of their "security intrusion detection" system because of the large volume of traffic. Sounds a little funny-- the volume of traffic is going the wrong way to be a massive data leak. I wonder how the judges like this "security" precaution being used to spy on them.
The administrative office goes on to complain about sexually-oriented websites are likely to contain "computer viruses, trojan horses, and other harmful products". First off, the administrator didn't notice that these weren't websites, and second, all the files were videos. A decent security system would have blocked.vbs and maybe other executables, but since mpgs don't (yet) contain virses and trojans horses, they *ARE* safe to download.
Sure, I'd be weirded out if someone was doing their thing to porn in the office next door, but it doesn't take a porn download to enable that sort of behavior. Besides, by the quantity of the downloads, it doesn't look like there was much time to view them.
Actually, phone numbers in the US had fewer digits... Remember PEnsylvania-65000? I thought that the two letters (and their associated nmeuonic) were to limit the number of digits to 5.
But, this article only refers to this number as a contact number -- not an account number. It would work like my cell phone now -- the only number I give to people I care about (companines usually get my land line number, which I never answer because, well, it's usually a solicitor)
This page has info on the gas gun (range G) used in the test, including many many pretty pictures (a shame to slashdot it!). The range (pictured, of course) is only 1000 feet long, so that's why the scramjet portion of the flight was only 300 feet. They also show loading and firing of the beast, but with probably a different payload.
At 2.4 km/s, it looks like this test was fairly heavy. The launcher can launch a 4", 2kg target to 6 km/sec.
Re:Cheap launches / First Athena Launch
on
Budget Satellite
·
· Score: 1
We had launch insurance, so we collected that, but, still... I think we had to pay for that seperately-- it wasn't included by Lockheed Martin. Now, the NASA GAS-can is another story-- it piggybacks on the shuttle, in a little trash-can looking cylinder just inside the main hatch door - you can have a self-contained experiment, or use a giant spring to pop out a small satellite. So, anyway, they'd take it a little more seriously if the shuttle blew up.
But, seriously, that was quite a bummer. My satellites kept blowing up or getting hopelessly delayed.
Where I worked we used a similar antenna-- A rolled up piece of regular measuring tape. Of course, the yellow looked funny, but we couldn't find a good supplier of raw material that didn't have some outrageous minimum buy. We also tried scrubbing off the paint, but found that once we got the smallest nick in the tape, it would soon fail there. So, AFAIK, we launched with the yellow tape. These were also handy for use in hinges -- once a panel opened, we wanted it to stay open, dammit, and the tape did that. But, you could do worse. One small satellite's primary antenna was made of copper tape, kapton tape (space-qualified packing tape), and bamboo.
Cheap launches / First Athena Launch
on
Budget Satellite
·
· Score: 1
Instead, they are on the Athena 1 rocket... I used to work for Defense Systems (bought by CTA, bought by Orbital... you know the drill), and my satellite -- GemStar -- was the first to go on this model rocket. The price of the rocket was many times more than our vehicle, and we played the usual space chicken game (where they threaten to launch a slab of concrete and then when we're ready, all of the sudden they weren't really ready). Finally, launch day, and we're watching the video and it goes up and and up... and after about a minute it's going at an amazing speed, and then all of the sudden makes a 90 degree turn. The thing is going so fast that the thrust of the rocket doesn't even affect its direction. The range officer blew it up. Oh well. When I was with DSI we also made bouys -- the joke was that we should just upload the bouy software to the satellites because they always seem to end up in the ocean anyway.
The reason for the failure was that the guidance control loop had some undamped and unintended oscillations.. and there was only a limitied amount of hydrolic fluid on board to control the position of the thrusters. Once the fluid was expended (it was just squirted out after being used), there was no more directional control.
After our flight, they changed the name of the rocket from the LMLV-1 to the Athena to distance the second rocket from this first failure. Ironically, the second one failed too.
Yeah, I'm using the pro keyboard with my Thunder K7 under windows 98, 2000, and linux. No special drivers needed. Here's a few more tidbits of info that'll hopefully be helpful:
0. There's a slight flaw in the design of the whole keyboard. It's not obvious at first... I generally get a few crumbs in my keyboards (just a few - it's not a buffet in there) and guess what happens with a clear case? The crumbs sink to the bottom and you can see them through the back. Gross.
1. Setting the bios to use the usb keyboard works fine -- until you reflash the bios and it loses the setting and you have to dig up your iopener keyboard to get back into the bios to change it back (doh!)
2. Under linux, the extra keys look like they are being lost at a rather low level. X doesn't see the difference in keys, and the kernel seems to map a bunch of undefined keys to 0. I didn't look into the USB HID spec, and wasn't ambitous enough to mod it to print out the pre-looked up raw codes.
3. The "help" key is the insert key, right where it should be. I don't think anyone mentioned that.
4. The keyboard is really well made, feels solid, and is just a joy to use. However, this is a drawback when trying to open it (perhaps to change the green LEDs out for some k-rad white LEDs) -- the bottom edge of the keyboard seems to clip the top half on both sides, so you it's impossible to push it one way and have it snap apart. It looks like a special tool is needed if it's at all possible. Fortuantly, since the case was clear I could see the damage to the top half (the holes were stretching out) before I tore it all to pieces.
5. I was able to listen to CD's with my usb cd-rw through the keyboard's hub. I thought this was supposed to be a no-no, (because a low-rate keyboard may only include a low-rate hub) but it worked. Didn't feel ambitious enough to try burning.
As I understand it, the transponders do most of the actual identification-- they return the plane's ID and altitude, and without a transponder, the radar's range is limited.
The solution that some hang glider pilots use (and, for that matter, many boaters), is use a radar corner reflector -- pretty effective. And, since the radar is relatively high frequency, the reflector doesn't have to be that big.
Oh, you mean like when you bend a paperclip too many times?
No, just kidding. You're right-- they design them so that no parts become dislodged (safety wires hold most/all nuts) and the screws elongate rather than crack off.
What's wrong with court-house halls -- why must it be halls of legislation? That's what 2600 is doing. Now, if they were causing property destruction, then you might be able to say it was the streets. Or if they pirated dvd's in secret, then you might say it was the alleyways. But they did none of that -- I think they chose the best option.
My former bank always had an irda-compatible printer right near the deposit slot, and I always thought it would be fun to start printing out things for them to find in the morning. Nice, harmless fun.
But, controlling the keyboard and mouse from outside is a little different -- You could sniff the passwords during the day, and with a pair of binoculars, re-enter them at night. I know there are lots of passwords on the systems, but I wonder if there is a time lockout so they can't be used at night. Hey, high security safes have these; it's about time the computers do, too.
But, then again, they probably wouldn't have too many keyboards at a bank. People already walk off with their pens all the time...
Here are a couple of applications:
Cheap radar. These things, since they are spread spectrum, don't interfere with each other and are ideal for watching reflected signals (since you are the sender and know the chirping pattern you used to transmit with)
Complicated imaging. They had some pictures of a larynx -- instead of doing speech recogintion on sound waves, they were doing it by watching the actual parts of the body that move to form the sounds!
Even more complicated imaging. They had a 3-d radar system to detect reinforcement rods in concrete. Pretty neat
The above site also has the FCC rules regulating the transmission (since these are single pulses, not repetitive waves, the FCC isn't sure what to do with them) and LLNL's response. One curious thing about ultra-wide radar is that the frequency response of the antennas themselves are the limiting factor on what frequencies actually get transmitted -- so aftermarket antennas might not be so easy to use since they are a vital part of the circuit.
> Another system that would work, or possibly even better, would be to take
> something like SlashCode or Zope (or any of the other weblog engines) and publish papers by category just like we do
> articles now.
Actually, someone has done this one step better. Check out http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs -- it is a huge database of scientific papers, with all the usual sorting options (topic, author, date, etc.). It also uses the bibliographies of the papers and builds links from them, so you can click through to related papers.
But what's coolest is the option that finds related papers -- either by word usage, or by similar references. The also monitor how people search and use this to build up a better "related to" database. (as a privacy nut, it looks ok to me)
The papers are all stored on individual's or institutional websites... this is just a search index (which also has caches).
"We registered nissancomputer.com and offered it to him for free," Schindler said. "But he has no interest in being Nissan Computer -- his real name -- because he wants to exploit the substantial confusion.... If Ui Nissan was using nissancomputer.com, there would not be a lawsuit."
Ok, so Nissan Motor Co Ltd wants Nissan.Com, when it hasn't registered NissanMotorCoLtd.com and NissanMotor.com and NissanMotors.com isn't good enough? I think Uzi's got a good case.
Slashdot Mirror
>an IBM 3033--although I believe that the Crays
>used some funky proprietary coolant (it was
>pink!).
The cray-1 didn't even bother with heatsinks... the liquid flowed right over the chips!
Ah! That explains it. I knew Seymour Cray was working on a GaAs computer -- he had renounced silicon and was assembling some of the world's best GaAs equipment. So, that was bought by Tera
Here's the interesting part of my post: Tera replaced the 24 GaAs chips for one CMOS chip. Here's their blurb from the website:
----
Early MTA systems had been built using Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) technology for all logic design. Today, GaAs parts are predominantly used in cellular phones, not high performance computers. As a result of the semiconductor market's focus on CMOS technology for computer systems, there is little support for GaAs technology.
Cray's transition to using CMOS technology in the MTA will occur in stages.
In the first stage, a single CMOS MTA "Torrent" microprocessor replaces 24 GaAs ASICs that had represented 16 different ASIC designs. Torrent chips support up to 128 virtual processors, or threads, and will run at least as fast as today's MTA processors. A Torrent chip requires 50 watts of power compared with 1,000 watts for the GaAs design. The Torrent processor board requires 1,025 connections versus 14,400 connections on the GaAs board.
----
Somewhere else on their page they say the system is "Water cooled at 4KW per processor". So, even with the reduced-power CMOS, they are putting out a lot of heat!
Cryptome has a posting showing the porn mpg download logs from a court computer. Its a letter from the court's administrative offices to one of the chief judges, giving the IP (and who's assigned to it) of the downloader.
.vbs and maybe other executables, but since mpgs don't (yet) contain virses and trojans horses, they *ARE* safe to download.
The downloads were at lunchtime, but jeeze, there are a lot of downloads. It looks like it was some sort of sharing software involved, by the looks of the filenames and the IP numbers.
The letter is from the adminstrative offices of the court to a chief judge, indicating the IP and registered owner of that IP. The log was captured as part of their "security intrusion detection" system because of the large volume of traffic. Sounds a little funny-- the volume of traffic is going the wrong way to be a massive data leak. I wonder how the judges like this "security" precaution being used to spy on them.
The administrative office goes on to complain about sexually-oriented websites are likely to contain "computer viruses, trojan horses, and other harmful products". First off, the administrator didn't notice that these weren't websites, and second, all the files were videos. A decent security system would have blocked
Sure, I'd be weirded out if someone was doing their thing to porn in the office next door, but it doesn't take a porn download to enable that sort of behavior. Besides, by the quantity of the downloads, it doesn't look like there was much time to view them.
Actually, phone numbers in the US had fewer digits... Remember PEnsylvania-65000? I thought that the two letters (and their associated nmeuonic) were to limit the number of digits to 5.
But, this article only refers to this number as a contact number -- not an account number. It would work like my cell phone now -- the only number I give to people I care about (companines usually get my land line number, which I never answer because, well, it's usually a solicitor)
This page has info on the gas gun (range G) used in the test, including many many pretty pictures (a shame to slashdot it!). The range (pictured, of course) is only 1000 feet long, so that's why the scramjet portion of the flight was only 300 feet. They also show loading and firing of the beast, but with probably a different payload.
At 2.4 km/s, it looks like this test was fairly heavy. The launcher can launch a 4", 2kg target to 6 km/sec.
We had launch insurance, so we collected that, but, still... I think we had to pay for that seperately-- it wasn't included by Lockheed Martin. Now, the NASA GAS-can is another story-- it piggybacks on the shuttle, in a little trash-can looking cylinder just inside the main hatch door - you can have a self-contained experiment, or use a giant spring to pop out a small satellite. So, anyway, they'd take it a little more seriously if the shuttle blew up.
But, seriously, that was quite a bummer. My satellites kept blowing up or getting hopelessly delayed.
Where I worked we used a similar antenna-- A rolled up piece of regular measuring tape. Of course, the yellow looked funny, but we couldn't find a good supplier of raw material that didn't have some outrageous minimum buy. We also tried scrubbing off the paint, but found that once we got the smallest nick in the tape, it would soon fail there. So, AFAIK, we launched with the yellow tape. These were also handy for use in hinges -- once a panel opened, we wanted it to stay open, dammit, and the tape did that. But, you could do worse. One small satellite's primary antenna was made of copper tape, kapton tape (space-qualified packing tape), and bamboo.
It doesn't cost too much to get into space, if you've got something small. For cost a US "educational facility" $1500. under the Get Away Special (GAS-CAN) program. But that's not what those people are doing...
Instead, they are on the Athena 1 rocket... I used to work for Defense Systems (bought by CTA, bought by Orbital... you know the drill), and my satellite -- GemStar -- was the first to go on this model rocket. The price of the rocket was many times more than our vehicle, and we played the usual space chicken game (where they threaten to launch a slab of concrete and then when we're ready, all of the sudden they weren't really ready). Finally, launch day, and we're watching the video and it goes up and and up... and after about a minute it's going at an amazing speed, and then all of the sudden makes a 90 degree turn. The thing is going so fast that the thrust of the rocket doesn't even affect its direction. The range officer blew it up. Oh well. When I was with DSI we also made bouys -- the joke was that we should just upload the bouy software to the satellites because they always seem to end up in the ocean anyway.
The reason for the failure was that the guidance control loop had some undamped and unintended oscillations.. and there was only a limitied amount of hydrolic fluid on board to control the position of the thrusters. Once the fluid was expended (it was just squirted out after being used), there was no more directional control.
After our flight, they changed the name of the rocket from the LMLV-1 to the Athena to distance the second rocket from this first failure. Ironically, the second one failed too.
Yeah, I'm using the pro keyboard with my Thunder K7 under windows 98, 2000, and linux. No special drivers needed. Here's a few more tidbits of info that'll hopefully be helpful:
0. There's a slight flaw in the design of the whole keyboard. It's not obvious at first... I generally get a few crumbs in my keyboards (just a few - it's not a buffet in there) and guess what happens with a clear case? The crumbs sink to the bottom and you can see them through the back. Gross.
1. Setting the bios to use the usb keyboard works fine -- until you reflash the bios and it loses the setting and you have to dig up your iopener keyboard to get back into the bios to change it back (doh!)
2. Under linux, the extra keys look like they are being lost at a rather low level. X doesn't see the difference in keys, and the kernel seems to map a bunch of undefined keys to 0. I didn't look into the USB HID spec, and wasn't ambitous enough to mod it to print out the pre-looked up raw codes.
3. The "help" key is the insert key, right where it should be. I don't think anyone mentioned that.
4. The keyboard is really well made, feels solid, and is just a joy to use. However, this is a drawback when trying to open it (perhaps to change the green LEDs out for some k-rad white LEDs) -- the bottom edge of the keyboard seems to clip the top half on both sides, so you it's impossible to push it one way and have it snap apart. It looks like a special tool is needed if it's at all possible. Fortuantly, since the case was clear I could see the damage to the top half (the holes were stretching out) before I tore it all to pieces.
5. I was able to listen to CD's with my usb cd-rw through the keyboard's hub. I thought this was supposed to be a no-no, (because a low-rate keyboard may only include a low-rate hub) but it worked. Didn't feel ambitious enough to try burning.
As I understand it, the transponders do most of the actual identification-- they return the plane's ID and altitude, and without a transponder, the radar's range is limited.
The solution that some hang glider pilots use (and, for that matter, many boaters), is use a radar corner reflector -- pretty effective. And, since the radar is relatively high frequency, the reflector doesn't have to be that big.
Oh, you mean like when you bend a paperclip too many times?
No, just kidding. You're right-- they design them so that no parts become dislodged (safety wires hold most/all nuts) and the screws elongate rather than crack off.
What's wrong with court-house halls -- why must it be halls of legislation? That's what 2600 is doing. Now, if they were causing property destruction, then you might be able to say it was the streets. Or if they pirated dvd's in secret, then you might say it was the alleyways. But they did none of that -- I think they chose the best option.
My former bank always had an irda-compatible printer right near the deposit slot, and I always thought it would be fun to start printing out things for them to find in the morning. Nice, harmless fun.
But, controlling the keyboard and mouse from outside is a little different -- You could sniff the passwords during the day, and with a pair of binoculars, re-enter them at night. I know there are lots of passwords on the systems, but I wonder if there is a time lockout so they can't be used at night. Hey, high security safes have these; it's about time the computers do, too.
But, then again, they probably wouldn't have too many keyboards at a bank. People already walk off with their pens all the time...
I've been watching this subject for a couple of years now... The first link I found was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's MIR site, where they have a very similar setup.
Here are a couple of applications:
Cheap radar. These things, since they are spread spectrum, don't interfere with each other and are ideal for watching reflected signals (since you are the sender and know the chirping pattern you used to transmit with)
Complicated imaging. They had some pictures of a larynx -- instead of doing speech recogintion on sound waves, they were doing it by watching the actual parts of the body that move to form the sounds!
Even more complicated imaging. They had a 3-d radar system to detect reinforcement rods in concrete. Pretty neat
The above site also has the FCC rules regulating the transmission (since these are single pulses, not repetitive waves, the FCC isn't sure what to do with them) and LLNL's response. One curious thing about ultra-wide radar is that the frequency response of the antennas themselves are the limiting factor on what frequencies actually get transmitted -- so aftermarket antennas might not be so easy to use since they are a vital part of the circuit.
> Another system that would work, or possibly even better, would be to take
> something like SlashCode or Zope (or any of the other weblog engines) and publish papers by category just like we do
> articles now.
Actually, someone has done this one step better. Check out http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs -- it is a huge database of scientific papers, with all the usual sorting options (topic, author, date, etc.). It also uses the bibliographies of the papers and builds links from them, so you can click through to related papers.
But what's coolest is the option that finds related papers -- either by word usage, or by similar references. The also monitor how people search and use this to build up a better "related to" database. (as a privacy nut, it looks ok to me)
The papers are all stored on individual's or institutional websites... this is just a search index (which also has caches).
"We registered nissancomputer.com and offered it to him for free," Schindler said. "But he has no interest in being Nissan Computer -- his real name -- because he wants to exploit the substantial confusion.... If Ui Nissan was using nissancomputer.com, there would not be a lawsuit."
Ok, so Nissan Motor Co Ltd wants Nissan.Com, when it hasn't registered NissanMotorCoLtd.com and NissanMotor.com and NissanMotors.com isn't good enough? I think Uzi's got a good case.