ARCNet was very popular for places like air ports where you could have extremely long runs. I even remember reading about it being used for an ROV back in the day.
Works great if you also happen to have a Silo on the property. You could also use it for a really long wifi shot. If you are a HAM you could use it for EME shoots. Or you could use it for for home radio astronomy. And there does seem to be a good number of free channels you can get but they are a little odd.
Actaually the BBC PC isn't far from the perfect embedded system trainer. From the Wilkipedia. "The machine included a number of extra I/O interfaces: serial and parallel printer ports; an 8-bit general purpose digital I/O port; a port offering four analogue inputs, a light pen input, and switch inputs; and an expansion connector (the "1 MHz bus") that enabled other hardware to be connected. Extra ROMs could be fitted (four on the PCB or sixteen with expansion hardware) and accessed via paged memory. An Econet network interface and a disk drive interface were available as options. All motherboards had space for the electronic components, but Econet was rarely fitted. Additionally, an Acorn proprietary interface called the "Tube" allowed a second processor to be added. Three models of second processor were offered by Acorn, based on the 6502, Z80 and 32016 CPUs. The Tube was later used in third-party add-ons, including a Zilog Z80 board and hard disk drive from Torch that allowed the BBC machine to run CP/M programs."
Four A2Ds 8 bits of GIO, and switch inputs. All available from Basic on a machine with a Floppy, Keyboard, and Monitor. Sweet. I so wanted one of these back in the day. Too expensive and not really available in the US at the time.
The color coding or different connectors could just make things worse. Also we need to look as this as not just one problem. Take the air to the blood pressure cuff going into the IV. That one is easy IMHO. A different connector is the solution. The IV being fed into the O2 line is also easy. Again a different connector is the solution. Now the spinal anesthetic going into a IV and not the spine is harder problem. I do not know if different connectors are the solution because both are probably injected into the an IV type line. For that I think training and more training is the only real solution. Maybe tagging the lines carefully.
I would say that this problem isn't as simple as most commenters on slashdot think it is. I also think what we have is more than one problem and one than more solution. Thing is this is a really serious problem and great care must be taken. After all if you make it worse more people might suffer and die. This makes things a little more touchy than most programing issues where the worst that can happen is you make more users yell profanities. BTW before anybody bothers to point out programing bugs that can cost people lives please not that I said "than most" and I didn't use the word all. I do know that medical devices, safety systems, and aviation systems all can be life critical systems but that is a small minority of all the programming that happens.
Funny but I was thinking that I would love to have some framed prints of those. I mean really they look so cool. I really want the 3d Tic Tac Toe
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
That is for the most part true. Thing is that when Windows 95 came out those programs where for the most part DOS and not yet Windows. Windows 95 sucked less than Windows 3.11 but that isn't saying a lot. Honestly the only two windows programs that I had to use when Windows 95 came out was... Trumpet WinSock and Netscape. Everything else that was a must use was DOS. OS/2 wasn't at the top of my list only because it cost too much and was not in wide spread use. Some of our users used it and loved it and frankly it was a much better OS than Windows 95. Also the Native OS/2 software that was available tended to be very good compared to the Windows Software available at the time. In the end the quality of an OS shouldn't be determined by the ability to run a DOS program. As to your comment about Linux today. Yep that is the gotcha. There is always one program that you can not seem to live without and it will run on Windows. That is how Microsoft stays in business. And that is why the fear web based apps so much.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
So did OS/2. When Windows 95 came out most people where using Windows to run DOS programs. It took a while for Windows software to replace DOS. About the only Windows 3 software I ran was Netscape.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Your buddy was right and you still are clueless. OS/2 was a much better OS than Windows 95. It had a better UI, it was a lot more stable, and was really a very modern OS. There are still some knowledgeable companies that are just now migrating the last of their systems off of OS/2
Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit. I hate to say it but the terms arrogant and ass would seem to bet apply to you and not your friend. That and Microsoft got the hardware manufactures to install it. Had IBM gotten everybody on board with OS/2 it would have one. In this case it was all marketing and you bought it.
Google docs isn't FOSS. Chrome isn't FOSS. Microsoft just has not seen a huge uptake of in Use of OpenOffice by large organisations. Same with Firefox. However With Google behind it Chrome and Google Docs is far more of a threat. Most people using OpenOffice would have just gotten a copy of Office from work so they are not a lost sale. Most people using Firefox are home users and in to tech "but that is changing" so that isn't a real worry. PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Apache means that you can run things like Wordpress and Drupal on a Windows server as well as you Linux and then add in little pieces of ASP.NET to tie it to you real systems.
Chrome and Google docs do have the potential to take business away from Microsoft because Google is a business. That is what people don't get. Microsoft worries more about RedHat than Linux.
Sorry I should have made that more clear. Microsoft likes Firefox better than Chrome. They doubt that many large organizations would ever standardize on Firefox since it is FOSS. They do worry about Chrome since I could see a big company making that the standard browser. BTW Chrome is my default browser but I still use Firefox sometimes.
As long as it runs on Windows they don't care. Google Docs is seen are more of a threat than OpenOffice ever was. PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby... They run on Windows so they are all good with that. Firefox? Better than Chrome and it runs on Windows. Plus they don't sell IE and Microsoft knows that it has lost the "standards" war when it comes to browsers.
Helium balloons stop because you are lifting the balloon. Helium will never reach equilibrium because it is the lightest gas in the atmosphere. It will keep going up until it reaches the top and then be lost to as you said the solar wind. Also it is so rare that it will never reach a large enough percentage of the atmosphere to be extracted.
So yes in simple terms it will just keep going up. As the air gets less dense so will the He. All the way up until it gets blown away by the solar wind. That is why there is so little of it in the Atmosphere of the Earth or any of the inner planets. Not enough gravity to keep it.
Yep I do take offense on both counts. Yes I am a Christian and a Linux user. BTW Life of Brian was a funny movie. And I don't mind none Open Source software on Linux.
I do find it annoying when Linux zealots try to enforce their version of "Freedom" on everyone else but not every Linux users or developer is a Zealot. In fact they are just a vocal minority. BTW it is totally fine for a church to find it unacceptable for people to watch the Life of Brian. Just as it is fine for PETA to find it unacceptable for people to eat meat. That part is opinion and freedom of speech. As to wanting it to be banned. Well it is good to want. Really was there ever any real chance of it being banned?
Now what I find unacceptable are some of the "policies" that have become part of the Linux Kernel like the lack of a stable binary driver interface. The reasoning for it is best contrived and it's sole function is to try and keep closes source drivers a pain under Linux.
Why not? We deal with large amounts of chemical energy every day. While putting turbines like that over a city would be dumb even with Helium I don't see a big problem with using Hydrogen for this. Don't let the Hindenberg syndrome scare you. That crash wasn't any worse than hundreds of aircraft crashes that have happened since. It just happen to be filmed.
Actually no. It was for the Navy. The Army, Army Air Corp, and later USAF really didn't get into air ships much. They may have used it for barrage balloons but Hydrogen is just as good since you don't care a whole lot of those burn. And it was for not just blimps but also Zeppelins.
When created it made all the sense in the world. In the 1920s and 30s how could anybody bomb the US? Only by airship. Well maybe if Mexico or Canada decided to go to war with the US but that was unlikely.
BTW the Navy used it in AEW blimps up till the 1960s I believe and are thinking about bringing back airships as sensor platforms. We are not too concerned about SAMS since SAM sites tend to have a short life time and MANPADs lack the range to hit airships.
Umm.... It leaves the earth. You know is is lighter than air so it goes up and away. It is not like Oxygen, or Argon, or Neon, or Nitrogen. It also isn't like Hydrogen which when released is so reactive that a good a precentage will combine with other elements and tend to stick around. So yes it is pretty much gone.
The problem with UAVs is bandwidth and lag. Unless you are going totally automated that will prevent them from replacing manned aircraft 100%. As long as you have wetware in the loop you will be limited to what a UAV can do or how many of them you can have. But yes I have heard of everything you spoke about. The F-22 uses stealth. Cruise missiles are not much of an innovation. or at least not a recent one. The first wide spread use of a cruse missile was the German V-1 in WWII. UAVs? The Ryan Firebee drones saw serice in Vietnam. Remote control? The Germans and the US used that in a number of weapons in WWII including converting old B-24s and B-17s into massive remote control flying bombs. And got give you a lot more educations in Cruise missiles. Loon and Regulus. Snark, Mace, and Matador. HoundDog. There you go. Two sea launched, three ground launched, and one air launched cruise missile. Off of them where probably retired from service before you where born. Oh and those are just US ones. UAV and cruise missiles are old tech. They are as old as jet fighters. In fact the UK ministry of defense stopped almost all future fighter development because they did a study that showed that UAVs would replace them. Of course that was over forty years ago and they where wrong. Let me explain exactly what makes modern cruise missiles different. 1. Cheap GPS. 2. Cheap computers. It is all about the guidance systems. Heck the truth is that the Air Force probably wishes it had all those old Mace, Matadors, and Snarks sitting out in AZ just waiting. For less than a grand each they could put modern guidance systems and have some big cheap cruise missiles to toss around.
No. Turbofan engines, composite construction, FBW, advanced avionics. And F-22 or even F-15 really is in a totaly different class then an Mig-19, F-8, of F-105.
"willfully used WMDs against civilians (carpet bombing, nuclear weapons" You mean WWII? First carpet bombing are not considered WMDs. Second Japan had already crossed the NBC line using chemical and biological weapons in China. A little deal that people forget. Wow this post sounds a lot like soviet propaganda at this point. trades big brother style protection for bases? A protection racket? What? You expect the US to protect other nations with out bases? It seems like many nations have decided to rewrite history to manufacture a villan and to manufacture a nice sense of moral superiority. The difference is that the US has step back twice and both times the rest of the world burned and dragged us in to put out the fire. The US learned that it is better to fight small fires than to wait for the world to burn. And before you say that you don't want the US to get involved just think about when ever anything happens how often do you hear where is the US and why are then not doing X. As to this spiting the west... It is a drone with a bomb. It is not a threat to the West. Look at it and you will see that it isn't all that exciting. No the west sees this and chuckles. This is for domestic consumption.
Except this was just a simple database program that keeps track of problems. It is not a flight control system. And if you know what you are doing XP is actually not that insecure. It sure isn't so insecure that I would worry about running this program on it.
Well the problem with your rebuttal is. The system that was infected was not mission critical. It was a simple form+database app. Might have even been written in Visual Basic or FoxPro. What it does is the mechanics enter in problems and if too many flags are registered on a plane it puts up a warning to ground the plane until the cause is found. A handy check but not mission critical since the pilot and the ground crew shouldn't need a machine to tell them that. Also the problem was the ground crews where not entering the data in a timely manner because the PC was too slow. They are blaming that in the trojans but again not the cause of the crash. What we have here is a simple database app that was running slow so it got ignored. Not really a system that needs "100%" uptime PS nothing is 100% usually people talk about five nines of reliability. 99.999% That is the goal for high availability systems like telecom. For mission critical systems in aviation you have redundant systems. This system was not even a high availably system. It was little more than book keeping and didn't cause the crash at all.
Honestly Windows 7 and XP are not tinker toy OSs. They are not Windows 98 folks. In fact that are not terrible OSs at all. Most "security" problems I have seen are caused by User IQ errors more than anything. For an embedded system that you are not going to let your kids surf the net on it isn't too bad. I would rather see something like QNX, Solaris, AIX, VMS, OpenBSD or even Linux used for this kind of system but Windows does have good development tools, lots of developers, and runs on the vast majority of COTS hardware. Trust me at some point there will be enough Linux users that a good number of them will be dumb enough to run an attachment found on their email.
Slashdot Mirror
ARCNet was very popular for places like air ports where you could have extremely long runs. I even remember reading about it being used for an ROV back in the day.
Works great if you also happen to have a Silo on the property.
You could also use it for a really long wifi shot.
If you are a HAM you could use it for EME shoots.
Or you could use it for for home radio astronomy.
And there does seem to be a good number of free channels you can get but they are a little odd.
Actaually the BBC PC isn't far from the perfect embedded system trainer.
From the Wilkipedia.
"The machine included a number of extra I/O interfaces: serial and parallel printer ports; an 8-bit general purpose digital I/O port; a port offering four analogue inputs, a light pen input, and switch inputs; and an expansion connector (the "1 MHz bus") that enabled other hardware to be connected. Extra ROMs could be fitted (four on the PCB or sixteen with expansion hardware) and accessed via paged memory. An Econet network interface and a disk drive interface were available as options. All motherboards had space for the electronic components, but Econet was rarely fitted. Additionally, an Acorn proprietary interface called the "Tube" allowed a second processor to be added. Three models of second processor were offered by Acorn, based on the 6502, Z80 and 32016 CPUs. The Tube was later used in third-party add-ons, including a Zilog Z80 board and hard disk drive from Torch that allowed the BBC machine to run CP/M programs."
Four A2Ds 8 bits of GIO, and switch inputs. All available from Basic on a machine with a Floppy, Keyboard, and Monitor. Sweet.
I so wanted one of these back in the day. Too expensive and not really available in the US at the time.
The color coding or different connectors could just make things worse.
Also we need to look as this as not just one problem.
Take the air to the blood pressure cuff going into the IV.
That one is easy IMHO. A different connector is the solution.
The IV being fed into the O2 line is also easy. Again a different connector is the solution.
Now the spinal anesthetic going into a IV and not the spine is harder problem.
I do not know if different connectors are the solution because both are probably injected into the an IV type line.
For that I think training and more training is the only real solution. Maybe tagging the lines carefully.
I would say that this problem isn't as simple as most commenters on slashdot think it is. I also think what we have is more than one problem and one than more solution.
Thing is this is a really serious problem and great care must be taken. After all if you make it worse more people might suffer and die. This makes things a little more touchy than most programing issues where the worst that can happen is you make more users yell profanities. BTW before anybody bothers to point out programing bugs that can cost people lives please not that I said "than most" and I didn't use the word all. I do know that medical devices, safety systems, and aviation systems all can be life critical systems but that is a small minority of all the programming that happens.
Funny but I was thinking that I would love to have some framed prints of those. I mean really they look so cool. I really want the 3d Tic Tac Toe
That is for the most part true. Thing is that when Windows 95 came out those programs where for the most part DOS and not yet Windows.
Windows 95 sucked less than Windows 3.11 but that isn't saying a lot.
Honestly the only two windows programs that I had to use when Windows 95 came out was...
Trumpet WinSock and Netscape. Everything else that was a must use was DOS.
OS/2 wasn't at the top of my list only because it cost too much and was not in wide spread use.
Some of our users used it and loved it and frankly it was a much better OS than Windows 95.
Also the Native OS/2 software that was available tended to be very good compared to the Windows Software available at the time.
In the end the quality of an OS shouldn't be determined by the ability to run a DOS program.
As to your comment about Linux today. Yep that is the gotcha. There is always one program that you can not seem to live without and it will run on Windows.
That is how Microsoft stays in business.
And that is why the fear web based apps so much.
So did OS/2.
When Windows 95 came out most people where using Windows to run DOS programs.
It took a while for Windows software to replace DOS. About the only Windows 3 software I ran was Netscape.
Your buddy was right and you still are clueless.
OS/2 was a much better OS than Windows 95. It had a better UI, it was a lot more stable, and was really a very modern OS.
There are still some knowledgeable companies that are just now migrating the last of their systems off of OS/2
Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit. I hate to say it but the terms arrogant and ass would seem to bet apply to you and not your friend.
That and Microsoft got the hardware manufactures to install it. Had IBM gotten everybody on board with OS/2 it would have one. In this case it was all marketing and you bought it.
Google docs isn't FOSS.
Chrome isn't FOSS.
Microsoft just has not seen a huge uptake of in Use of OpenOffice by large organisations. Same with Firefox.
However With Google behind it Chrome and Google Docs is far more of a threat.
Most people using OpenOffice would have just gotten a copy of Office from work so they are not a lost sale.
Most people using Firefox are home users and in to tech "but that is changing" so that isn't a real worry.
PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Apache means that you can run things like Wordpress and Drupal on a Windows server as well as you Linux and then add in little pieces of ASP.NET to tie it to you real systems.
Chrome and Google docs do have the potential to take business away from Microsoft because Google is a business.
That is what people don't get. Microsoft worries more about RedHat than Linux.
Sorry I should have made that more clear.
Microsoft likes Firefox better than Chrome. They doubt that many large organizations would ever standardize on Firefox since it is FOSS. They do worry about Chrome since I could see a big company making that the standard browser.
BTW Chrome is my default browser but I still use Firefox sometimes.
As long as it runs on Windows they don't care.
Google Docs is seen are more of a threat than OpenOffice ever was.
PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby... They run on Windows so they are all good with that.
Firefox? Better than Chrome and it runs on Windows. Plus they don't sell IE and Microsoft knows that it has lost the "standards" war when it comes to browsers.
Helium balloons stop because you are lifting the balloon. Helium will never reach equilibrium because it is the lightest gas in the atmosphere. It will keep going up until it reaches the top and then be lost to as you said the solar wind.
Also it is so rare that it will never reach a large enough percentage of the atmosphere to be extracted.
So yes in simple terms it will just keep going up. As the air gets less dense so will the He. All the way up until it gets blown away by the solar wind.
That is why there is so little of it in the Atmosphere of the Earth or any of the inner planets.
Not enough gravity to keep it.
And you can not get it to compile under a more modern version?
Nope but ewwwww.
Yep I do take offense on both counts.
Yes I am a Christian and a Linux user. BTW Life of Brian was a funny movie.
And I don't mind none Open Source software on Linux.
I do find it annoying when Linux zealots try to enforce their version of "Freedom" on everyone else but not every Linux users or developer is a Zealot.
In fact they are just a vocal minority.
BTW it is totally fine for a church to find it unacceptable for people to watch the Life of Brian. Just as it is fine for PETA to find it unacceptable for people to eat meat. That part is opinion and freedom of speech. As to wanting it to be banned. Well it is good to want. Really was there ever any real chance of it being banned?
Now what I find unacceptable are some of the "policies" that have become part of the Linux Kernel like the lack of a stable binary driver interface. The reasoning for it is best contrived and it's sole function is to try and keep closes source drivers a pain under Linux.
Why not?
We deal with large amounts of chemical energy every day.
While putting turbines like that over a city would be dumb even with Helium I don't see a big problem with using Hydrogen for this.
Don't let the Hindenberg syndrome scare you. That crash wasn't any worse than hundreds of aircraft crashes that have happened since. It just happen to be filmed.
Actually no.
It was for the Navy. The Army, Army Air Corp, and later USAF really didn't get into air ships much.
They may have used it for barrage balloons but Hydrogen is just as good since you don't care a whole lot of those burn.
And it was for not just blimps but also Zeppelins.
When created it made all the sense in the world. In the 1920s and 30s how could anybody bomb the US? Only by airship. Well maybe if Mexico or Canada decided to go to war with the US but that was unlikely.
BTW the Navy used it in AEW blimps up till the 1960s I believe and are thinking about bringing back airships as sensor platforms. We are not too concerned about SAMS since SAM sites tend to have a short life time and MANPADs lack the range to hit airships.
Umm.... It leaves the earth. You know is is lighter than air so it goes up and away.
It is not like Oxygen, or Argon, or Neon, or Nitrogen.
It also isn't like Hydrogen which when released is so reactive that a good a precentage will combine with other elements and tend to stick around.
So yes it is pretty much gone.
The problem with UAVs is bandwidth and lag. Unless you are going totally automated that will prevent them from replacing manned aircraft 100%.
As long as you have wetware in the loop you will be limited to what a UAV can do or how many of them you can have.
But yes I have heard of everything you spoke about. The F-22 uses stealth. Cruise missiles are not much of an innovation. or at least not a recent one.
The first wide spread use of a cruse missile was the German V-1 in WWII.
UAVs? The Ryan Firebee drones saw serice in Vietnam.
Remote control? The Germans and the US used that in a number of weapons in WWII including converting old B-24s and B-17s into massive remote control flying bombs.
And got give you a lot more educations in Cruise missiles.
Loon and Regulus.
Snark, Mace, and Matador.
HoundDog.
There you go. Two sea launched, three ground launched, and one air launched cruise missile.
Off of them where probably retired from service before you where born.
Oh and those are just US ones.
UAV and cruise missiles are old tech. They are as old as jet fighters.
In fact the UK ministry of defense stopped almost all future fighter development because they did a study that showed that UAVs would replace them. Of course that was over forty years ago and they where wrong.
Let me explain exactly what makes modern cruise missiles different.
1. Cheap GPS.
2. Cheap computers.
It is all about the guidance systems.
Heck the truth is that the Air Force probably wishes it had all those old Mace, Matadors, and Snarks sitting out in AZ just waiting.
For less than a grand each they could put modern guidance systems and have some big cheap cruise missiles to toss around.
No.
Turbofan engines, composite construction, FBW, advanced avionics. And F-22 or even F-15 really is in a totaly different class then an Mig-19, F-8, of F-105.
"willfully used WMDs against civilians (carpet bombing, nuclear weapons" You mean WWII?
First carpet bombing are not considered WMDs.
Second Japan had already crossed the NBC line using chemical and biological weapons in China. A little deal that people forget. Wow this post sounds a lot like soviet propaganda at this point. trades big brother style protection for bases? A protection racket? What? You expect the US to protect other nations with out bases? It seems like many nations have decided to rewrite history to manufacture a villan and to manufacture a nice sense of moral superiority. The difference is that the US has step back twice and both times the rest of the world burned and dragged us in to put out the fire.
The US learned that it is better to fight small fires than to wait for the world to burn.
And before you say that you don't want the US to get involved just think about when ever anything happens how often do you hear where is the US and why are then not doing X.
As to this spiting the west... It is a drone with a bomb. It is not a threat to the West. Look at it and you will see that it isn't all that exciting.
No the west sees this and chuckles. This is for domestic consumption.
This isn't much of a threat to Turkey. You have F-16s and AIM-120s and Nato AWACS coverage.
Except this was just a simple database program that keeps track of problems. It is not a flight control system. And if you know what you are doing XP is actually not that insecure. It sure isn't so insecure that I would worry about running this program on it.
It comes with slots and will be available in platinum!
Well the problem with your rebuttal is.
The system that was infected was not mission critical. It was a simple form+database app. Might have even been written in Visual Basic or FoxPro.
What it does is the mechanics enter in problems and if too many flags are registered on a plane it puts up a warning to ground the plane until the cause is found.
A handy check but not mission critical since the pilot and the ground crew shouldn't need a machine to tell them that.
Also the problem was the ground crews where not entering the data in a timely manner because the PC was too slow.
They are blaming that in the trojans but again not the cause of the crash.
What we have here is a simple database app that was running slow so it got ignored. Not really a system that needs "100%" uptime PS nothing is 100% usually people talk about five nines of reliability. 99.999% That is the goal for high availability systems like telecom. For mission critical systems in aviation you have redundant systems.
This system was not even a high availably system. It was little more than book keeping and didn't cause the crash at all.
Honestly Windows 7 and XP are not tinker toy OSs. They are not Windows 98 folks. In fact that are not terrible OSs at all.
Most "security" problems I have seen are caused by User IQ errors more than anything.
For an embedded system that you are not going to let your kids surf the net on it isn't too bad.
I would rather see something like QNX, Solaris, AIX, VMS, OpenBSD or even Linux used for this kind of system but Windows does have good development tools, lots of developers, and runs on the vast majority of COTS hardware.
Trust me at some point there will be enough Linux users that a good number of them will be dumb enough to run an attachment found on their email.