Colbert's routine reminded me a lot of Jon Stewart's performance at the Oscars (one of the only times I've ever even watched). What I saw that night was a decent and funny performance delivered to a crowd that was so full of itself that it could not emit a laugh. They were present for awards sans comedy.
In Colbert's case, though, the crowd was most certainly attending for comedy. However, I think their blank stares were the result of hearing something they'd rather not. The dinner is always a roast and fun is always "poked." But... I think perhaps this went to a new level.
I see one of two possibilities. One is that Colbert misjudged his audience and that's why his routine did not do well. Or, Colbert recognized that he was given a rare opportunity to speak directly to the President, in a public setting, and in a place where the President could not simply leave. *If* that is the case, then yes, it did take balls. Huge balls.
Of course, unless Colbert actually comes out at some point in the future and makes known what his intentions were that night, we may never really know.
I have to wonder what I might do in such a situation. Like many Americans, I do hold a certain respect for the office of the President, or for any elected office, I suppose. It's that respect which keeps most (though it seems less so lately) political discourse civil. But surely there comes a time when transgressions like Bush's reach a point where you need to take a stand, respectable office or no.
Huh... You know, this sounds almost exactly like what happened to my drive about a year, maybe two, ago. At the time, though, I never actually checked to see if StarForce was infecting my system. I make it habit of always cracking any game I buy, but of course SF will be installed along with the game initially.
One day, my CDRW/DVD combo drive just stopped accepting blank discs. At first it was only RW discs, but quickly it spread to all discs. It never got to the point of refusing to read regular CDs, though. The drive worked just fine under Linux, which was okay since that's where I usually burned CDs anyway.
Eventually, when I upgraded my computer, I installed a fresh copy of Windows and the problem magically went away...
Because that's only an illusion of security. Your MAC is not hardcoded on PCs. In fact, you can quite easily change your MAC in Linux when configuring your network device.
My understanding, though I could be mistaken, is that even when you are using WEP, the MAC address is still sent unencrypted (so you can do things like filtering). Because of this, somebody needs only to sniff a little bit of traffic to find a valid MAC and set their machine to use it.
That said, I still use WEP on my AP in my apartment. My laptop has a 802.11g card with WPA, but both my DS and my PDA only do 802.11b and only support WEP, unfortunately. But... I really don't do enough of the wireless to worry about it and when I do something important there's always a second layer of encryption (i.e. SSL, etc.). And my desktop PC, where I do most of my work, is connected by a wire.
I've used the standard version of Kerberos. It comes from MIT and there are no licensing agreements. It's free. I've also browsed through the docs on using NFSv4 (with Kerberos) and have never seen any mention of a license.
Also, the company you have linked to is in South Africa. So... any concerns about exporting crypto would seem to be moot.
Why is this under a "more-reasons-to-privitize" department? I'm all for private ventures going into space, but you're quite delusional if you expect there to be any large scale investment in global warming research by the private sector. Yes, I know there might be some exceptions, but privitization is not going to give us better research.
Better rockets, cheaper missions, maybe... but, in general, this sort of basic scientific research is *exactly* the sort of thing the government should be doing. Of course, in a perfect world, the government wouldn't be trying to stifle the scientists either...
Yes, I've heard of them... even saw them being manufactured once at a Honeywell plant. But the poster did not say that propellant was the *only* way to move a satellite. The discussion was about hiding satellites and changing their orbits to avoid detection. That's not something you're going to do without propellant (and a lot of it).
Reaction wheels are great, but they only have a few real uses. One is to orient the satellite for communicating with Earth, or aiming a telescope at a star, etc. Another is to orient the satellite before igniting the engine, but, as the poster mentioned, most sats contain little additional fuel after they have been placed in their intended orbits.
Would you really want your memory erased with a pill? The emotional stress of a memory is just as important as the events. I guess it is true that ignorance is bliss, but I think the people in this community have chosen to forgo that bliss for the truth, that is in many cases harsh. This looks to me just like another way to escape reality. I can only speak with limited authority as I have never experienced something that I would consider absolutely horrible. I think however In the long run I would like to be able to remember. Why not just give them some heroin to ease their pain?
Yes, there really are times when it is better to forget than remember. I've had more than enough surgery thus far in my life, and I can tell you that those short-term memory blanking drugs can work wonders. The first time I was given one was after a 9 (nine!) hour surgery. I had to be awake when they removed the breathing tube to make sure I would begin breathing on my own. But this is a very unpleasant experience and not one that needs to be remembered. On that occasion, because the drug did not work 100%, I still remember a few small fragments, but not much. And based on what I *do* remember, I'm glad to be unaware of the rest.
The second time was for an outpatient upper endoscopy (camera down your throat). I got the drug again for that procedure. Worked like a charm. I remember lying down on the table, then I remember the nurse telling me it was over and I could sit up. Of course, as is the case with short-term memory blanking, those are the parts I remember... for all I know, she could have asked me to sit up five times before I finally remembered long enough to do it. But, again, this was a very appropriate situation to lose one's memory. Having a big camera in a tube down my throat is not something I'd like to play back in my mind later when I'm bored.
Re:Is this really that significat???
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Honestly now...
Coca-cola is a private company. The government is by definition a public body that we, ideally, control. If Coke invents some new thing and decides to keep it a secret, you can tell them how you feel by not buying any Coke. You have no choice with the government.
They take your taxes, period. I think it is quite reasonable to insist that what the government does/creates with our money be made, if at all possible, public. That's how government is supposed to work.
I've got an 19" LG Flatron (L1980U). It's a 6-bit panel with, I think, a 16ms response time. So far, I've been exceptionally happy with it. My previous monitor was a 19" Sun Trinitron monitor which was also very nice, but the panel is so much better.
As for the flickering, I can say that I've seen none at all. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these comparisons are *very* relative. That is, what one person finds unbearable is fine to a second person. For myself, I see no flickering and I also play a fair number of games and have had no issues with ghosting. Another user may find faults.
I find the best solution is to shop around online and pick a few models you like. Then try to find them, or something very close, in an actual store. Hopefully said store will have them properly hooked up (i.e. native resolution, digital input) so you can adaquately judge them. When I did my comparisons, I found that the screens at the local Best Buy were all using the analog input and the larger screens were running at 1024x768 instead of 1280x1024. Making any sort of comparison there was useless.
Ignoring him is definitely not the best thing to do here. As the PA guys mentioned recently, we can't afford to ignore Thompson because *other* people will still listen to him.
Just a few days ago Thompson was on CNN. He has name recognition and so he can easily get into the media's spotlight. Once there he can spout off about whatever he feels like. If nobody pushes back, he wins by default.
And it's equally sad when somebody continues to put forth that there is some ravenous horde of atheistic scientists who get no end of satisfaction from belittling other peoples' religious beliefs.
The fact is, this is simply not true. Of course there are some. Any field always has nuts and jerks. But I have found that most scientists quite accepting of other peoples beliefs. Maybe they don't agree, but they hardly belittle.
Through my college career, I have worked with many astronomers. The two I have been (and continue to be) employed by are both very devout Catholics. Has this stopped them from probing the depths of the universe? Not at all.
As for your last comment... I would hardly call galactic rotation "simple". It's really quite complex, but given our current understanding, we can make predictions on how it should behave. What has been found is that galaxies are rotating faster than their masses should allow. Thus dark matter is introduced. Nobody is claiming to factually know what dark matter is. It's not a "thing" to base decisions on. Rather, it is a placeholder. Eventually, somebody will figure out that a) dark matter is made of substance X, or b) our original theory about how galaxies rotate was wrong.
I'm glad somebody else thinks this way. After hearing all the buzz with RSS I finally decided to give it a try. I had just finshed building my MythTV box and one of the Myth plugins is MythNews, an RSS aggregator. Great, I thought.
I installed it, selected a few feeds, and tried it out. What a waste! The program worked well enough, but the information content was so minimal, I was almost better off not knowing.
This lack of content wasn't MythNews' fault, of course, but content-free news seems to be an epidemic in the RSS world. Hmph.
>>What I miss is a sensor that would let the sucker blow cool, dry nighttime air in to chill the house during the spring and fall without adding water. Just turn off the pump, not the fan.
In my house we have a separate thermostat for the furnace and the cooler. The cooler thermostat has switches on it so that the fan and pump can be controlled separately.
This is from a house built in 1977 and the wires were there already. Maybe, in your case, the necessary wires are already present, but you lack a thermostat that can use them?
I assume self-balancing to mean that the cycle will remain upright all on its own. The cycle in question does not do that. It requires the human rider to use his/her body to provide balance to the whole thing.
If you read the article, you will see that this is more of a semi-Segway. It is *NOT* self-balancing. It's still a unicycle, and you still need to know how to ride a unicycle and keep your balance.
What this does do is use a gyroscope and sensor to detect when the rider leans forward or backwards and then accelerates or decelerate the wheel.
If I recall correctly from my high school history classes, disease was not the only major factor.
The Aztecs (and perhaps the Incas, I don't remember) were not at all well liked. They were empire builders and they built their empires by conquering their smaller neighbors. When the Spanish showed up and stirred the nest, many of the formerly subjugated states rose up and rebelled.
These rebellions, along with disease, brought about the very swift destruction of these empires.
Let's not forget that these sats are geosynchronous, which puts them out at roughly 25K miles. The shadow cast by the Earth is much smaller than near the Earth. And, of course, these sats won't necessarily be in the path of that shadow at all.
So, I think it's fair to assume that they spend most of their time in the light soaking up power. Also, solar cell panels on large expensive satellites are usually computer guided. They deploy and then track the Sun so they'll get most of the power most of the time.
The link you gave only mentions the three existing satellites. They generate 4.3kW of power. Those sats, however, are almost 10 years old now. The article doesn't say, but I would guess that these new sats generate even more power (more efficient and/or bigger cells).
We are using a PIC 16F877 microcontroller. We chose a PIC because it was simple to implement, simple to program (not counting compiler bugs), and power efficient.
Radiation is certainly a concern, but there have been a handful of other successful small satellite missions using PICs so there is some prior usage. I don't have links handy, though. I do know, however, that because of cost and simplicity, a number of other Cubesats are also using PICs.
A hang or single event upset is still a danger, though. To provide some protection, we have a simple onboard clock chip which has an alarm feature. This alarm is set to trigger weekly and this will reset the PIC.
The 16F877 model has flash memory for program storage making it great for development. We could have added another layer of safety by using the 16C877 which is the same chip, but with EEPROM program storage.
For storing sensor data and persistent settings, our board has 64K of FRAM (Ferromagnetic RAM). We had done some reading/research that indicated this would perform well in space.
Still, in low Earth orbit, there really isn't THAT much radiation, so the problems should be minimal. Also, the planned lifetime for this satellite is not very long. If we needed it for years, we probably would have made some different choices.
It's mostly just software documentation and doesn't touch too much on the hardware issues, but they are mentioned. I like talking about this.:) So if you've got any more questions feel free to ask.
I work on the UA's Cubesat program. I'm the one who wrote the (minimal) operating program for our four cubesats. This program has been a lot of fun.
I'm not entirely sure what we'll find with our design, but as 10cm cubes go, ours isn't bad. It stores sensor information on a timed schedule and has two-way communication with our ground station, plus an autonomous beacon transmitting on a separate frequency.
I think the article was a little misleading about the usage of COTS parts in these things. For sure, we did not build our own microprocessor, but most of the work tying together components is custom designed stuff by students. Our controller board (with PIC microcontroller), our power board (with AA batteries and charge regulator), and the radio board were all student designed and built.
The components on those boards, such as the PIC, the radio, and the AD converters is, of course, COTS, but that's about it.
Launch will be "Real Soon Now". Can't wait... and I really hope it works!
I was given a slightly broken Sony Clie, one of the older ones. B&W 160x160 resolution.
Several rows near the bottom of the display would often not show, or would flicker on and off. It was enough to make it fairly useless. I found the fault to be the cable which runs from the display PCB to the main processor PCB. A VERY small cable which had about 60 wires in it.
There was no way I could fix it, but I had recently helped somebody (a retired engineer) set up a new desktop PC. In return, he made an attempt to fix it. He took it home and spent several hours with it under a microscope and using the smallest gauge wire he could find, manage to repair the cable.
The PDA lives in my pocket each day, but I have yet to have a single problem with the display again.
I would strongly suggest finding an older used Sony Clie. I'm using a Clie S300 model. It's B&W with a 160x160 screen. Admittedly, this is low res by current PDA standards, but the text is still very readable.
The best aspect of this model is that the contrast on the screen is superb and excellent for reading. I previously used a Palm Vx for the same tasks, but comparing the screens is like comparing night and day. Even with the backlight on, the Clie's battery (internal LiIon) lasts for several hours.
As for reading software... I'm a little biased. I'm the author of Weasel Reader. It runs on Palm OS and is under the GPL. I wrote it specifically for reading Project Gutenberg texts, but you can read any text file. See http://gutenpalm.sf.net for more info.
I had the same thing happen to me when I got IL-2 Sturmovik. I could install the game fine, but it crashed every time I tried to run it. I grabbed a no-CD patch for it from the Net and it worked just fine.
Being a glutton for punnishment, I decided to tell the lusers at Infogrames about it. The only way to contact them is with their lame online messaging system. And then it was always automated responses. When I poseted a followup saying that I had solved the problem by cracking the game, they immediately closed the support ticket because I had said it was "solved". Grrrrr... I tried a few more times, but they never would actually write to me. Bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
Colbert's routine reminded me a lot of Jon Stewart's performance at the Oscars (one of the only times I've ever even watched). What I saw that night was a decent and funny performance delivered to a crowd that was so full of itself that it could not emit a laugh. They were present for awards sans comedy.
In Colbert's case, though, the crowd was most certainly attending for comedy. However, I think their blank stares were the result of hearing something they'd rather not. The dinner is always a roast and fun is always "poked." But... I think perhaps this went to a new level.
I see one of two possibilities. One is that Colbert misjudged his audience and that's why his routine did not do well. Or, Colbert recognized that he was given a rare opportunity to speak directly to the President, in a public setting, and in a place where the President could not simply leave. *If* that is the case, then yes, it did take balls. Huge balls.
Of course, unless Colbert actually comes out at some point in the future and makes known what his intentions were that night, we may never really know.
I have to wonder what I might do in such a situation. Like many Americans, I do hold a certain respect for the office of the President, or for any elected office, I suppose. It's that respect which keeps most (though it seems less so lately) political discourse civil. But surely there comes a time when transgressions like Bush's reach a point where you need to take a stand, respectable office or no.
Maybe this dinner was one of those times.
Huh... You know, this sounds almost exactly like what happened to my drive about a year, maybe two, ago. At the time, though, I never actually checked to see if StarForce was infecting my system. I make it habit of always cracking any game I buy, but of course SF will be installed along with the game initially.
One day, my CDRW/DVD combo drive just stopped accepting blank discs. At first it was only RW discs, but quickly it spread to all discs. It never got to the point of refusing to read regular CDs, though. The drive worked just fine under Linux, which was okay since that's where I usually burned CDs anyway.
Eventually, when I upgraded my computer, I installed a fresh copy of Windows and the problem magically went away...
Because that's only an illusion of security. Your MAC is not hardcoded on PCs. In fact, you can quite easily change your MAC in Linux when configuring your network device.
My understanding, though I could be mistaken, is that even when you are using WEP, the MAC address is still sent unencrypted (so you can do things like filtering). Because of this, somebody needs only to sniff a little bit of traffic to find a valid MAC and set their machine to use it.
That said, I still use WEP on my AP in my apartment. My laptop has a 802.11g card with WPA, but both my DS and my PDA only do 802.11b and only support WEP, unfortunately. But... I really don't do enough of the wireless to worry about it and when I do something important there's always a second layer of encryption (i.e. SSL, etc.). And my desktop PC, where I do most of my work, is connected by a wire.
You sure about that?
I've used the standard version of Kerberos. It comes from MIT and there are no licensing agreements. It's free. I've also browsed through the docs on using NFSv4 (with Kerberos) and have never seen any mention of a license.
Also, the company you have linked to is in South Africa. So... any concerns about exporting crypto would seem to be moot.
Why is this under a "more-reasons-to-privitize" department? I'm all for private ventures going into space, but you're quite delusional if you expect there to be any large scale investment in global warming research by the private sector. Yes, I know there might be some exceptions, but privitization is not going to give us better research.
Better rockets, cheaper missions, maybe... but, in general, this sort of basic scientific research is *exactly* the sort of thing the government should be doing. Of course, in a perfect world, the government wouldn't be trying to stifle the scientists either...
Yes, I've heard of them... even saw them being manufactured once at a Honeywell plant. But the poster did not say that propellant was the *only* way to move a satellite. The discussion was about hiding satellites and changing their orbits to avoid detection. That's not something you're going to do without propellant (and a lot of it).
Reaction wheels are great, but they only have a few real uses. One is to orient the satellite for communicating with Earth, or aiming a telescope at a star, etc. Another is to orient the satellite before igniting the engine, but, as the poster mentioned, most sats contain little additional fuel after they have been placed in their intended orbits.
Would you really want your memory erased with a pill? The emotional stress of a memory is just as important as the events. I guess it is true that ignorance is bliss, but I think the people in this community have chosen to forgo that bliss for the truth, that is in many cases harsh. This looks to me just like another way to escape reality. I can only speak with limited authority as I have never experienced something that I would consider absolutely horrible. I think however In the long run I would like to be able to remember. Why not just give them some heroin to ease their pain?
Yes, there really are times when it is better to forget than remember. I've had more than enough surgery thus far in my life, and I can tell you that those short-term memory blanking drugs can work wonders. The first time I was given one was after a 9 (nine!) hour surgery. I had to be awake when they removed the breathing tube to make sure I would begin breathing on my own. But this is a very unpleasant experience and not one that needs to be remembered. On that occasion, because the drug did not work 100%, I still remember a few small fragments, but not much. And based on what I *do* remember, I'm glad to be unaware of the rest.
The second time was for an outpatient upper endoscopy (camera down your throat). I got the drug again for that procedure. Worked like a charm. I remember lying down on the table, then I remember the nurse telling me it was over and I could sit up. Of course, as is the case with short-term memory blanking, those are the parts I remember... for all I know, she could have asked me to sit up five times before I finally remembered long enough to do it. But, again, this was a very appropriate situation to lose one's memory. Having a big camera in a tube down my throat is not something I'd like to play back in my mind later when I'm bored.
Honestly now...
Coca-cola is a private company. The government is by definition a public body that we, ideally, control. If Coke invents some new thing and decides to keep it a secret, you can tell them how you feel by not buying any Coke. You have no choice with the government.
They take your taxes, period. I think it is quite reasonable to insist that what the government does/creates with our money be made, if at all possible, public. That's how government is supposed to work.
I've got an 19" LG Flatron (L1980U). It's a 6-bit panel with, I think, a 16ms response time. So far, I've been exceptionally happy with it. My previous monitor was a 19" Sun Trinitron monitor which was also very nice, but the panel is so much better.
As for the flickering, I can say that I've seen none at all. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these comparisons are *very* relative. That is, what one person finds unbearable is fine to a second person. For myself, I see no flickering and I also play a fair number of games and have had no issues with ghosting. Another user may find faults.
I find the best solution is to shop around online and pick a few models you like. Then try to find them, or something very close, in an actual store. Hopefully said store will have them properly hooked up (i.e. native resolution, digital input) so you can adaquately judge them. When I did my comparisons, I found that the screens at the local Best Buy were all using the analog input and the larger screens were running at 1024x768 instead of 1280x1024. Making any sort of comparison there was useless.
Ignoring him is definitely not the best thing to do here. As the PA guys mentioned recently, we can't afford to ignore Thompson because *other* people will still listen to him.
Just a few days ago Thompson was on CNN. He has name recognition and so he can easily get into the media's spotlight. Once there he can spout off about whatever he feels like. If nobody pushes back, he wins by default.
And it's equally sad when somebody continues to put forth that there is some ravenous horde of atheistic scientists who get no end of satisfaction from belittling other peoples' religious beliefs.
The fact is, this is simply not true. Of course there are some. Any field always has nuts and jerks. But I have found that most scientists quite accepting of other peoples beliefs. Maybe they don't agree, but they hardly belittle.
Through my college career, I have worked with many astronomers. The two I have been (and continue to be) employed by are both very devout Catholics. Has this stopped them from probing the depths of the universe? Not at all.
As for your last comment... I would hardly call galactic rotation "simple". It's really quite complex, but given our current understanding, we can make predictions on how it should behave. What has been found is that galaxies are rotating faster than their masses should allow. Thus dark matter is introduced. Nobody is claiming to factually know what dark matter is. It's not a "thing" to base decisions on. Rather, it is a placeholder. Eventually, somebody will figure out that a) dark matter is made of substance X, or b) our original theory about how galaxies rotate was wrong.
That's just how science works.
I'm glad somebody else thinks this way. After hearing all the buzz with RSS I finally decided to give it a try. I had just finshed building my MythTV box and one of the Myth plugins is MythNews, an RSS aggregator. Great, I thought.
I installed it, selected a few feeds, and tried it out. What a waste! The program worked well enough, but the information content was so minimal, I was almost better off not knowing.
This lack of content wasn't MythNews' fault, of course, but content-free news seems to be an epidemic in the RSS world. Hmph.
>>What I miss is a sensor that would let the sucker blow cool, dry nighttime air in to chill the house during the spring and fall without adding water. Just turn off the pump, not the fan.
In my house we have a separate thermostat for the furnace and the cooler. The cooler thermostat has switches on it so that the fan and pump can be controlled separately.
This is from a house built in 1977 and the wires were there already. Maybe, in your case, the necessary wires are already present, but you lack a thermostat that can use them?
Except that the thermostat is inside the house and the house is being fed by the evaporative cooler which will raise the humidity.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but the humidity sensor would need to be outdoors.
So what does self-balancing mean?
I assume self-balancing to mean that the cycle will remain upright all on its own. The cycle in question does not do that. It requires the human rider to use his/her body to provide balance to the whole thing.
If you read the article, you will see that this is more of a semi-Segway. It is *NOT* self-balancing. It's still a unicycle, and you still need to know how to ride a unicycle and keep your balance.
What this does do is use a gyroscope and sensor to detect when the rider leans forward or backwards and then accelerates or decelerate the wheel.
It's still a really neat contraption, though.
If I recall correctly from my high school history classes, disease was not the only major factor.
The Aztecs (and perhaps the Incas, I don't remember) were not at all well liked. They were empire builders and they built their empires by conquering their smaller neighbors. When the Spanish showed up and stirred the nest, many of the formerly subjugated states rose up and rebelled.
These rebellions, along with disease, brought about the very swift destruction of these empires.
In that case...
Take THAT baby Jesus!
Let's not forget that these sats are geosynchronous, which puts them out at roughly 25K miles. The shadow cast by the Earth is much smaller than near the Earth. And, of course, these sats won't necessarily be in the path of that shadow at all.
So, I think it's fair to assume that they spend most of their time in the light soaking up power. Also, solar cell panels on large expensive satellites are usually computer guided. They deploy and then track the Sun so they'll get most of the power most of the time.
The link you gave only mentions the three existing satellites. They generate 4.3kW of power. Those sats, however, are almost 10 years old now. The article doesn't say, but I would guess that these new sats generate even more power (more efficient and/or bigger cells).
We are using a PIC 16F877 microcontroller. We chose a PIC because it was simple to implement, simple to program (not counting compiler bugs), and power efficient.
l
:) So if you've got any more questions feel free to ask.
Radiation is certainly a concern, but there have been a handful of other successful small satellite missions using PICs so there is some prior usage. I don't have links handy, though. I do know, however, that because of cost and simplicity, a number of other Cubesats are also using PICs.
A hang or single event upset is still a danger, though. To provide some protection, we have a simple onboard clock chip which has an alarm feature. This alarm is set to trigger weekly and this will reset the PIC.
The 16F877 model has flash memory for program storage making it great for development. We could have added another layer of safety by using the 16C877 which is the same chip, but with EEPROM program storage.
For storing sensor data and persistent settings, our board has 64K of FRAM (Ferromagnetic RAM). We had done some reading/research that indicated this would perform well in space.
Still, in low Earth orbit, there really isn't THAT much radiation, so the problems should be minimal. Also, the planned lifetime for this satellite is not very long. If we needed it for years, we probably would have made some different choices.
If you're still interested, my documentation for the code I wrote is at:
http://bach.as.arizona.edu/~cubesat/cubesat_manua
It's mostly just software documentation and doesn't touch too much on the hardware issues, but they are mentioned. I like talking about this.
I work on the UA's Cubesat program. I'm the one who wrote the (minimal) operating program for our four cubesats. This program has been a lot of fun.
I'm not entirely sure what we'll find with our design, but as 10cm cubes go, ours isn't bad. It stores sensor information on a timed schedule and has two-way communication with our ground station, plus an autonomous beacon transmitting on a separate frequency.
I think the article was a little misleading about the usage of COTS parts in these things. For sure, we did not build our own microprocessor, but most of the work tying together components is custom designed stuff by students. Our controller board (with PIC microcontroller), our power board (with AA batteries and charge regulator), and the radio board were all student designed and built.
The components on those boards, such as the PIC, the radio, and the AD converters is, of course, COTS, but that's about it.
Launch will be "Real Soon Now". Can't wait... and I really hope it works!
I was given a slightly broken Sony Clie, one of the older ones. B&W 160x160 resolution.
Several rows near the bottom of the display would often not show, or would flicker on and off. It was enough to make it fairly useless. I found the fault to be the cable which runs from the display PCB to the main processor PCB. A VERY small cable which had about 60 wires in it.
There was no way I could fix it, but I had recently helped somebody (a retired engineer) set up a new desktop PC. In return, he made an attempt to fix it. He took it home and spent several hours with it under a microscope and using the smallest gauge wire he could find, manage to repair the cable.
The PDA lives in my pocket each day, but I have yet to have a single problem with the display again.
I would strongly suggest finding an older used Sony Clie. I'm using a Clie S300 model. It's B&W with a 160x160 screen. Admittedly, this is low res by current PDA standards, but the text is still very readable.
The best aspect of this model is that the contrast on the screen is superb and excellent for reading. I previously used a Palm Vx for the same tasks, but comparing the screens is like comparing night and day. Even with the backlight on, the Clie's battery (internal LiIon) lasts for several hours.
As for reading software... I'm a little biased. I'm the author of Weasel Reader. It runs on Palm OS and is under the GPL. I wrote it specifically for reading Project Gutenberg texts, but you can read any text file. See http://gutenpalm.sf.net for more info.
I had the same thing happen to me when I got IL-2 Sturmovik. I could install the game fine, but it crashed every time I tried to run it. I grabbed a no-CD patch for it from the Net and it worked just fine.
Being a glutton for punnishment, I decided to tell the lusers at Infogrames about it. The only way to contact them is with their lame online messaging system. And then it was always automated responses. When I poseted a followup saying that I had solved the problem by cracking the game, they immediately closed the support ticket because I had said it was "solved". Grrrrr... I tried a few more times, but they never would actually write to me. Bastards.
If I might ask, where did you get a ROM/GROM for the emulator? And where did you find a Parsec ROM?
:(
I've just downloaded the emulator, and compiled it successfully, but I've been to a number of TI99 sites and haven't found any of the needed files.