My job is in QA. Your statement says that my job is impossible. Here are a few ways you can test stability:
1) See if the OS comes back online after a power cycle 2) Insert and remove device drivers 3) Send mangled data across the various data busses 4) Run programs that try to allocate all the memory 5) Run programs that try to hog all the CPU 6) Run a program that fills the hardisk/erases the hardisk/refills the hardisk 7) Do all the above all at the same time
The OS is a control point, and should be able to handle all of this and more GRACEFULLY.
(Gracefully being an undefined weasle word indicating that it should fail in a somewhat predictable manner that won't completely piss off the vast majority of administrators.)
Fortunately, it's only 12 months until 1/3 of Congress is up for election. If we get rid of these dangerous morons, maybe we'll have a chance to keep an American brand on the future.
Man, I wish that I could be that optimistic. Do you really believe that there is any way this side of Hell that the 1/3rd will be replaced by anything other that carbon copies of what's already there? Will it be Democans or Republicrats next time, while they vie for the lukewarm, clueless 'center' and all the other parties are locked out?
You also need a big honkin' soldering iron as each of those capacitor leads are soldered to many layers of copper foil, which make excellent heat sinks. It takes 50 to 100 watts of heat to heat up all those layers in an expeditious fashion.
I would first practice this art on an old scrapped motherboard. A true geek always has a few of these around. Practice your unsoldering technique until you can get a capacitor off (no jokes pls) in 20 seconds with no damage to the board.
You obviously have a bad soldering technique. If you're taking 20sec to decap a board with a 50W iron, you're likely damaging the board. I can easily decap a board to the point of being ready to insert the new one in 10sec with a 20W iron. A 50W iron should be reserved for putting together copper pipes.
1) Clean the connection with alcohol until it shines (then clean it again). 2) Clean the tip of your hot iron till it shines (then clean it again). 3) Wet the tip of the iron with some clean flux-cored solder (a little smoke should rise from the tip) 4) Touch one of the lead-through pads while apply a slight pressure to the cap so that the lead pulls halfway out. The cap will let go when it's ready. 5) Touch the the other pad and push the cap so the other lead pulls completely out. (Again, just a little pressure. It will let go when it's ready.) 6) Touch a bit of solder to the tip of the iron, flow the solder on the first lead and pull the cap away from the board. 7) If everything was really clean, you'll immediately be able to reflow the solder and suck it out from the cap side with a spring loaded solder sucker. 8) Clean everything till it's shiny before trying to put in the new cap. 8) Profit!!
Fair enough, I expect that stuff to be super expensive due to the added hardness and limited economies of scale, but surely with the economies of scale which the consumer gear manufacturers can leverage, they could at least give us something acceptable.
Yes. They could. And then their competitor would produce something that was just a little less acceptable, but charge $20 less. Everybody would look at the two next to each other at the big-box store, decide they are esssentially the same, and choose to save $20. Acceptable Corp. doesn't make the sales, loses its economy of scale, then buys the cheap caps so that it can reduce it's price $20 and stay in the market.
And so goes capitalism and the eternal search for mediocrity.
If you're that worried about a clock signal, you're fooling yourself to rely on NTP. To do it right, you'll be pulling your time directly off a GPS or other satellite signal.
Funny that one of the largest organizations in the world that has to work consistently and without errors on an international scale has determined and implemented the best solution to this problem 100 yrs ago. The US military uses Zulu time on a 24hr/day basis. Get rid of the AM/PM confusion. Base all time on one defined location. I believe (but have no way to confirm) that the military organization os nearly all other countries do the same.
Hmm? Must be a reason.
Really, though, in the final analysis, time is just an abstract concept used to organize a disparate organization of people. We wouldn't even really care if we were still subsistance farmers or nomadic herders. It's only when we start having to allocate our days, and meeting each other at predictable moments that time marking becomes useful. It used to be that only local time was useful, because it to days to get to someplace where local time was significantly different; but now you can be in a different local time in hours, or communicate with someone in a different local time in seconds. It only makes sense for the time reference to expand to incorporate the new reality.
I'm all for One World Time, because it makes SENSE!
My orange juice container had another seal hidden under the lid. The orange juice maker claims that this is to keep out people who haven't paid for the juice. But it just causes a lot of extra headaches for me.
(Just playing devil's advocate *hopefully* with a fresh perspective >8*)
This makes sense to my untrained eye, but I'll go you one better.
Instead of throwing off a lot of little rocks, throw two very large ones. Time a shaped explosive, composed of a constellations of tactical nukes, so that the asteroid is cracked somewhere near the middle perpendicular to the axis of rotation. The shaped charge is important to cause a split, and not a shatter. The two halves will acellerate in opposite directions, either of which is good for the Earth.
Open Document doesn't cook you're breakfast for you, so you assume that their is no way it will benefit you?
How does having multiple gas stations in my town benefit me when I always buy from the same one anyway? I should get the city council to shut down all of those other stations.
Even better, if I can get them to switch all the school busses to a specialized fuel that only has one supplier. Yeah, then there would be a whole industry that would just go out of business. We only need one supplier, right? Why do we have to have multiple supplier all selling the same thing? It's ridiculous, and doesn't benefit me.
Do people develop emotional dependence on Texeco gas and get all zealotous when somebody mentions Chevron?
Yes. They will also argue for months about which brand of motor oil is the best.
anything at all related to computers, down to such trivial choices as text editors: instant Jihad!
That's because you're hanging out with computer geeks. Hang out with the EAA geeks and the argument will be over aluminum vs glass vs wood or whether the big wing goes in the front or the rear.
Really, though, if no one really cared enough to defend their position, things would get boring fairly quickly.
There is slightly more to hitting a target halfway around the world than just the type of fuel used...but to answer you question directly, you'll have to watch the interviews of the Air Force engineers that were actually working on the projects.
However there are a number of problems with this obvious idea. Say, I want to go to the main Perl site. Which address should I type into my browser? Is it perl.org.us? Why? Am I supposed to know who Larry Wall is and that he is an American?
If I'm at home, and I want to get to my main server, I type:
ssh aslan
No need to type:
ssh aslan.ernest.isa-geek.org
You shouldn't have to type perl.com, or larrywall.com. Just perl or larrywall. Individual cc domains would only insure that you got the page in your own language (if one exist). Otherwise, if you don't know which country the page is in, that is what Google is for (and you would always get Google in your own language).
Sir Peter Blakes problem was that he was on a yacht and he fought back at the wrong time. He had already lost before he began fighting. Being on a cruise ship with the pirates at a safe distance...totally different tactical situation.
The baseline frequency in country music is way to low. The pirates don't know what is pick-up truck is. Now you could possilby be talking about some of the more recent stuff, like 'The Dixie Chicks', but all that is indistinquishable from the typical Pop pablum.
How many of those 5MW turbine propellers can I put on my roof before the homeowner's association pitches a fit?
If I have a dinky VAWT producing a few measely kW, can't I use that to light the ugly advertising (or even the front of my establishment) instead of main's power?
Very large number of small devices carrying the cost of electrical interconnection? You mean like the cost of running a power line all the way to Sharon Harris (nuclear plant 30miles from my house that powers my lights), vs one to my roof? Massive maintenance overhead? Like the overhead for all the other motors in my house (dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, fans, etc)?
Not all power generation has to be in the multi-MW range from a huge centralized facility. Once you get over that misconception, you see that considerations other than ultimate efficiency and maximum power have impact on the equation.
thinks of DRM as bunch of BS, the corporate world is still heading in that direction.
Heading in that direction? Heading implies a movement. Corporations aren't heading in that direction, they've been anchored there for many years. They sit in that port doing very little business, thinking they're protecting their property. But all they're really doing is limiting thier profit.
Look, I thought I was going to be the next great Shareware author back in the early 90's. I developed a couple less-than-notable amateurish titles (even got a check for one of them once...but I think the person was just trying to be charitable) Anyway, to make a long story longer, I looked around for ways to make sure I got paid for my work. I was smart enough to realize that the only way to keep my bits safe was to keep my bits on my computer. There is no way to lock down the bits once you ship them, because they must eventually be opened/unencrypted if shipping them is to be worthwhile.
You see, the trick is not the key...that's the hard way. The trick is the lock. At some point, no matter how intricate the lock, there must eventually be an if...else statement that determines if you'll get in or not. Hardwire the if statement(s), and you'll always get in, no matter how many keys are asked for. In the digital world this just requires substituting a conditional branch for an unconditional one.
Informed OS developers aren't against DRM because they find it evil. Informed OS developers are against DRM because it is pointless.
looks promising technologies that have to this point only been theorized disgusted with general microsoft bashing Judge technology by it's merits and pitfalls not by it's creators past acheivement
You can't judge a technology, only an implementation. Implementations from a vendor tend to follow the same quality trends. So a company known for slipshod and insecure implementations is experimenting with some unproven technologies, and you call that 'promising'?
They're just creating a shell and letting people tinker with it.
I don't own an MP3 player, but I would fork out some cash if it had an interface that would allowed an internet connection and had an application that would find songs I like and download them for me. Provide some way for me to rate the songs. I know there is a Linux program that does this, but I've never been able to get it to work (not that I've tried very much).
It's along the lines of what the other posters are saying about the end-to-end solution.
I looked at the specs on their website. 30mi range and top speed of 25mph.
GEM isn't the solution I've been looking for. The don't have enough speed or range. Actually, the GEM give you 540lbs of cargo, but I only need about 300. The person who markets the single seater "to work and back" 50/50* solution will have a waiting market.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful? How about "apologetic bull"?
My job is in QA. Your statement says that my job is impossible. Here are a few ways you can test stability:
1) See if the OS comes back online after a power cycle
2) Insert and remove device drivers
3) Send mangled data across the various data busses
4) Run programs that try to allocate all the memory
5) Run programs that try to hog all the CPU
6) Run a program that fills the hardisk/erases the hardisk/refills the hardisk
7) Do all the above all at the same time
The OS is a control point, and should be able to handle all of this and more GRACEFULLY.
(Gracefully being an undefined weasle word indicating that it should fail in a somewhat predictable manner that won't completely piss off the vast majority of administrators.)
Fortunately, it's only 12 months until 1/3 of Congress is up for election. If we get rid of these dangerous morons, maybe we'll have a chance to keep an American brand on the future.
Man, I wish that I could be that optimistic. Do you really believe that there is any way this side of Hell that the 1/3rd will be replaced by anything other that carbon copies of what's already there? Will it be Democans or Republicrats next time, while they vie for the lukewarm, clueless 'center' and all the other parties are locked out?
Please, say it could be so!
You also need a big honkin' soldering iron as each of those capacitor leads are soldered to many layers of copper foil, which make excellent heat sinks. It takes 50 to 100 watts of heat to heat up all those layers in an expeditious fashion.
I would first practice this art on an old scrapped motherboard. A true geek always has a few of these around. Practice your unsoldering technique until you can get a capacitor off (no jokes pls) in 20 seconds with no damage to the board.
You obviously have a bad soldering technique. If you're taking 20sec to decap a board with a 50W iron, you're likely damaging the board. I can easily decap a board to the point of being ready to insert the new one in 10sec with a 20W iron. A 50W iron should be reserved for putting together copper pipes.
1) Clean the connection with alcohol until it shines (then clean it again).
2) Clean the tip of your hot iron till it shines (then clean it again).
3) Wet the tip of the iron with some clean flux-cored solder (a little smoke should rise from the tip)
4) Touch one of the lead-through pads while apply a slight pressure to the cap so that the lead pulls halfway out. The cap will let go when it's ready.
5) Touch the the other pad and push the cap so the other lead pulls completely out. (Again, just a little pressure. It will let go when it's ready.)
6) Touch a bit of solder to the tip of the iron, flow the solder on the first lead and pull the cap away from the board.
7) If everything was really clean, you'll immediately be able to reflow the solder and suck it out from the cap side with a spring loaded solder sucker.
8) Clean everything till it's shiny before trying to put in the new cap.
8) Profit!!
I think these jokes will overload the moderators permissivity and have you all charged with -1 Funny.
Fair enough, I expect that stuff to be super expensive due to the added hardness and limited economies of scale, but surely with the economies of scale which the consumer gear manufacturers can leverage, they could at least give us something acceptable.
Yes. They could. And then their competitor would produce something that was just a little less acceptable, but charge $20 less. Everybody would look at the two next to each other at the big-box store, decide they are esssentially the same, and choose to save $20. Acceptable Corp. doesn't make the sales, loses its economy of scale, then buys the cheap caps so that it can reduce it's price $20 and stay in the market.
And so goes capitalism and the eternal search for mediocrity.
If you're that worried about a clock signal, you're fooling yourself to rely on NTP. To do it right, you'll be pulling your time directly off a GPS or other satellite signal.
Funny that one of the largest organizations in the world that has to work consistently and without errors on an international scale has determined and implemented the best solution to this problem 100 yrs ago. The US military uses Zulu time on a 24hr/day basis. Get rid of the AM/PM confusion. Base all time on one defined location. I believe (but have no way to confirm) that the military organization os nearly all other countries do the same.
Hmm? Must be a reason.
Really, though, in the final analysis, time is just an abstract concept used to organize a disparate organization of people. We wouldn't even really care if we were still subsistance farmers or nomadic herders. It's only when we start having to allocate our days, and meeting each other at predictable moments that time marking becomes useful. It used to be that only local time was useful, because it to days to get to someplace where local time was significantly different; but now you can be in a different local time in hours, or communicate with someone in a different local time in seconds. It only makes sense for the time reference to expand to incorporate the new reality.
I'm all for One World Time, because it makes SENSE!
Danit!! Should have taken the time to read the replies before I replied. So much for my fresh perspective.
My orange juice container had another seal hidden under the lid. The orange juice maker claims that this is to keep out people who haven't paid for the juice. But it just causes a lot of extra headaches for me.
(Just playing devil's advocate *hopefully* with a fresh perspective >8*)
This makes sense to my untrained eye, but I'll go you one better.
Instead of throwing off a lot of little rocks, throw two very large ones. Time a shaped explosive, composed of a constellations of tactical nukes, so that the asteroid is cracked somewhere near the middle perpendicular to the axis of rotation. The shaped charge is important to cause a split, and not a shatter. The two halves will acellerate in opposite directions, either of which is good for the Earth.
Open Document doesn't cook you're breakfast for you, so you assume that their is no way it will benefit you?
How does having multiple gas stations in my town benefit me when I always buy from the same one anyway? I should get the city council to shut down all of those other stations.
Even better, if I can get them to switch all the school busses to a specialized fuel that only has one supplier. Yeah, then there would be a whole industry that would just go out of business. We only need one supplier, right? Why do we have to have multiple supplier all selling the same thing? It's ridiculous, and doesn't benefit me.
Do people develop emotional dependence on Texeco gas and get all zealotous when somebody mentions Chevron?
Yes. They will also argue for months about which brand of motor oil is the best.
anything at all related to computers, down to such trivial choices as text editors: instant Jihad!
That's because you're hanging out with computer geeks. Hang out with the EAA geeks and the argument will be over aluminum vs glass vs wood or whether the big wing goes in the front or the rear.
Really, though, if no one really cared enough to defend their position, things would get boring fairly quickly.
There is slightly more to hitting a target halfway around the world than just the type of fuel used...but to answer you question directly, you'll have to watch the interviews of the Air Force engineers that were actually working on the projects.
Actually take a look at how DNS works and all your questions will be answered.
However there are a number of problems with this obvious idea. Say, I want to go to the main Perl site. Which address should I type into my browser? Is it perl.org.us? Why? Am I supposed to know who Larry Wall is and that he is an American?
If I'm at home, and I want to get to my main server, I type:
ssh aslan
No need to type:
ssh aslan.ernest.isa-geek.org
You shouldn't have to type perl.com, or larrywall.com. Just perl or larrywall. Individual cc domains would only insure that you got the page in your own language (if one exist). Otherwise, if you don't know which country the page is in, that is what Google is for (and you would always get Google in your own language).
Sir Peter Blakes problem was that he was on a yacht and he fought back at the wrong time. He had already lost before he began fighting. Being on a cruise ship with the pirates at a safe distance...totally different tactical situation.
Bzzt! Wrong!
The baseline frequency in country music is way to low.
The pirates don't know what is pick-up truck is.
Now you could possilby be talking about some of the more recent stuff, like 'The Dixie Chicks', but all that is indistinquishable from the typical Pop pablum.
How many of those 5MW turbine propellers can I put on my roof before the homeowner's association pitches a fit?
If I have a dinky VAWT producing a few measely kW, can't I use that to light the ugly advertising (or even the front of my establishment) instead of main's power?
Very large number of small devices carrying the cost of electrical interconnection? You mean like the cost of running a power line all the way to Sharon Harris (nuclear plant 30miles from my house that powers my lights), vs one to my roof? Massive maintenance overhead? Like the overhead for all the other motors in my house (dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, fans, etc)?
Not all power generation has to be in the multi-MW range from a huge centralized facility. Once you get over that misconception, you see that considerations other than ultimate efficiency and maximum power have impact on the equation.
Considering that the Apollo program was a cover show for developing ICBM's, my guess is that the Apollo program would not exist at all.
Nope. They can't get the water to stay in the hole long enough to see if it perks.
thinks of DRM as bunch of BS, the corporate world is still heading in that direction.
Heading in that direction? Heading implies a movement. Corporations aren't heading in that direction, they've been anchored there for many years. They sit in that port doing very little business, thinking they're protecting their property. But all they're really doing is limiting thier profit.
Look, I thought I was going to be the next great Shareware author back in the early 90's. I developed a couple less-than-notable amateurish titles (even got a check for one of them once...but I think the person was just trying to be charitable) Anyway, to make a long story longer, I looked around for ways to make sure I got paid for my work. I was smart enough to realize that the only way to keep my bits safe was to keep my bits on my computer. There is no way to lock down the bits once you ship them, because they must eventually be opened/unencrypted if shipping them is to be worthwhile.
You see, the trick is not the key...that's the hard way. The trick is the lock. At some point, no matter how intricate the lock, there must eventually be an if...else statement that determines if you'll get in or not. Hardwire the if statement(s), and you'll always get in, no matter how many keys are asked for. In the digital world this just requires substituting a conditional branch for an unconditional one.
Informed OS developers aren't against DRM because they find it evil. Informed OS developers are against DRM because it is pointless.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of those making less than $1 per day are illiterat, don't have computers or speak english.
looks promising
technologies that have to this point only been theorized
disgusted with general microsoft bashing
Judge technology by it's merits and pitfalls not by it's creators past acheivement
You can't judge a technology, only an implementation. Implementations from a vendor tend to follow the same quality trends. So a company known for slipshod and insecure implementations is experimenting with some unproven technologies, and you call that 'promising'?
Can I have a toke of that stuff your smoking?
They're just creating a shell and letting people tinker with it.
I don't own an MP3 player, but I would fork out some cash if it had an interface that would allowed an internet connection and had an application that would find songs I like and download them for me. Provide some way for me to rate the songs. I know there is a Linux program that does this, but I've never been able to get it to work (not that I've tried very much).
It's along the lines of what the other posters are saying about the end-to-end solution.
I looked at the specs on their website. 30mi range and top speed of 25mph.
GEM isn't the solution I've been looking for. The don't have enough speed or range. Actually, the GEM give you 540lbs of cargo, but I only need about 300. The person who markets the single seater "to work and back" 50/50* solution will have a waiting market.
*50 miles at 50mph.