I just found Big Dead Place a couple days ago, and read their account of one of these 'hacker attacks' and Raytheon Polar Services' (RPSC) reaction to it.
Short version: Everyone at the pole was pissed. Denver (RPSC headquarters) took away their porn^H^H^H^Hnet access, and thus made a bunch of already deprived individuals even more deprived.
"Kudos to the Denver IT staff for quickly responding to a hacker attack on South Pole Station. The attack occurred Friday night Denver time and our crack professional team denied the attacker access by immediately pulling the plug on Pole. They got back to dealing with the aftermath of this knee jerk response sometime Wednesday shortly after the last chocolate sprinkle donut had been eaten but shortly before nap time."
I have Akira sitting on my DVD shelf. The nice one, in the metal tin... fun movie, love the music.
So, anyway... I was watching American Chopper a while back, and I got to thinking:
"I wonder what would happen if I went to OCC with one of the turboshaft engines that MTT uses for their bike, a copy of Akira, and asked Paul Jr. to replicate the Kaneda bike..."
And then I remembered... they're artists. They're not really engineers. Making that bike work would require so many engineering challenges to be overcome that, well... they'd have to outsource a lot of it.
But I'd sure love to watch them build one!
(Too bad I can't afford it... anybody else want to join in and start a pool? We could have the 'Slashdot Bike' built! (Anyone remember the 'Slashdot PT Cruiser'?) Too bad the.com boom is well and truly dead, or we'd be looking at a fleet of the things!)
The version in the article... it looks a bit fat and heavy. I don't know how much fun it'll be to ride. As much as I like the appearance, it's just pointless if all it does it look pretty.
I'm noticing a fair amount of discussion here regarding "...why 74 amps/speakers?" As someone who has worked on pipe organs, here's what I am assuming:
They have one for each stop (or subset of stops) on the original organ.
What is this "stop" I refer to? It's a collection of pipes with a specific sound... Vox Humana, Trumpet, etc., that the organist can choose and (in some cases) assign to a specific keyboard.
An organ the size of the Trinity Church Aeolian-Skinner would have had dozens of stops. Even a small pipe organ has quite a few -- more than 10 is quite common.
Each stop has a default keyboard with a specific name, related to which wind chest the pipes are located on ("Great", "Swell", "Choir"... though those are just starting points).
Along with the location of these pipes on certain wind chests comes other factors... only the set of pipes on a chest called 'swell' can have their volume controlled -- usually by way of a set of shutters that open and close. The rest of the organ pipes play at the same volume all. the. time.
Another thing about pipe organs... some of them (I don't know about this specific one) run on very high pressure. Normal for the pipe organs I worked on was 8 to 10 inches of water. I heard one that ran at 80 inches of water, and the 'attack' of the sound was like a gunshot. I have yet to hear a speaker that can duplicate that sound.
Warm Guinness?!?
on
PeltierBeer
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· Score: 2, Informative
Warm Guinness? Ick! It's supposed to be ice cold, and that's the way I love it. Okay, maybe you're German... I know a two exchange students that like warm beer -- to the point they'll use a small immersion heater. But warm Guinness? Surely you must be daft!
Granted, Per Øyvind Arnesen is using Guinness Draught in a can, and my supply is current the "rocket widget" bottled version... but as I recall the advice on the side is the same:
"To really enjoy Guinness Draught, chill for at least 2 hours."
There you have it, straight from the side of the bottle.
"...when all content is automatically tagged with the geographical location of its production?"
I would love to have all my digital media tagged in this manner! Yes, high-end Nikon equipment accepts GPS input (remember this?), but that's a separate, external device.
I'd love to see it built into cameras (both still & video) and audio recorders. And for visual data, add in a compass so I can know both where it was taken, and which direction it was pointing!
I can do without knowing where an email/document/webpage was written, though. Sometimes more data is good... and sometimes it's just noise.
Well, that's odd... I thought my ISP's nameserver was being a flake, but you just proved it's not limited to me!
No, it's most certainly not a/.-ing from a link in a comment. It was dead when I wrote it, otherwise I would have used a wearcam.org link instead of the Google one.
I encountered an interesting "no photography" rule when I was in Connecticut last year. While visiting Gillette Castle (as in William Gilette, the actor famous for portraying Sherlock Holmes), I was informed that I could not take a camera inside the "castle" -- because someone owned the copyright on images of anything inside!
Normally, if one takes a picture of something, you did the work, you own the copyright. (Simple enough.) However, for some reason, Connecticut has sold the rights to images of everything inside the mansion, and the staff have to waste their time trying to make sure people don't bring cameras in. Ridiculous.
If I remember correctly, Steve Mann was allowd to use his body-mounted computers while taking tests at MIT. The reasoning was -- since he never took the stuff off -- that it was just another part of his body. I wonder what would happen if he tried to enter Gillette Castle...?
(Though I haven't visited, I believe that Biltmore has the same no-camera rule for the same reason...)
It's all about greed... when people realize all this greed is hurting the common good, things will change. Problem is, the greedy ones are busy trying to convince us we're all "better off this way."
The above computer program(s) is/are being made available for copying, through downloading, at the above location without authorization from the copyright owner(s).
When I went to college, the entire school was eligible for the university's Lexis-Nexis site license. This didn't mean just the law school... this meant everybody. Software was available that I could have loaded on my PC, and I could have searched from my dorm room.
The university's library computers (and computer labs) had the software on them as well.
Now here's the interesting part -- if you were a resident of the surrounding towns (not affiliated with the university in any other way!), you were eligible to use the library -- and all its' resources.
Yes, that included Lexis-Nexis. (And JAMA, and The Lancet, and a hundred other publications that cost more than some cars.)
I have no illusions -- Lexis-Nexis was getting a considerable amount of money for allowing such use... far more than they'd ever be able to wring out of a public library. The university needed the subscription, it was just a happy circumstance that everyone else benefited.
It's not just management that must be faulted for using needlessly complex language, engineers are guilty of bowing to the peer-pressure as well. The phrase "doublespeak" has been around longer than I have, and has many children -- "nukespeak," for example.
Searching Google, I find that "nukespeak" doesn't have the meaning I learned years ago. Apparently, its' popular meaning relates to the PR campaigns attempting to sway public opinion toward atomic power. The meaning I learned was entirely different -- it referred to the insanely complex, self-important language used when something bad happened (no matter how minor!) and one had to file an incident report with the NRC.
You'd see phrases like this:
gravitational disassembly -- "I dropped it and it broke."
spontaneous energetic disassembly -- "The damn thing just exploded!"
vehicle-assisted structural realignment -- "Joe backed a forklift into the wall."
There were hundreds of these oddball phrases... but it's been something like 15 years since I saw this, and a Google search for funny "NRC incident report" returns zero results -- which means, I guess, that (by decree?) NRC incident reports just aren't funny. (NRC reports are only available to specific people in the first place, so it's not as if they're out there on the web somewhere.)
I still remember the first time the "check engine" light came on in a car I was driving. I was on an interstate highway in South Carolina, coming up on an exit. This amber light comes on, so I took the exit and shut off the engine as soon as I was safely out of the way.
I didn't know what was wrong, so I treated it with the same caution I would have were it the oil pressure light.
(Turns out it was only an indication of emissions equipment malfunctioning -- in this case, the oxygen sensor was going.)
If my car suddenly went metric on me, I'd be looking for a safe place to stop not out of worry over a ticket, but because I want to know WTF is going on with my (in this case) costs-almost-as-much-as-a-house BMW. I mean, hell, if VW can make a car that doesn't get schizophrenic on me, why can't BMW??
Last thing:
Cops in western Washington State... not too bad. (But what's with all the motorcycle cops in a place famous for its' rain?!?)
Cops in South Carolina? Holy hell, they've got WAY too much time on their hands. I used to count speed traps out of boredom, and more than once I'd come home from a 68 mile trip having counted over a dozen.
I used speed because it was the first example that came to mind. If you watch that video, he pans over the instrument cluster and goes "... it's all in metric." (Or words to that effect.)
If my car suddenly started displaying speeds in metric, I know what my reaction would be -- ignore the speedometer and try to drive with the flow of traffic. (I'd be looking for a safe place to stop, too -- but the first worry is to maintain a similar velocity with the vehicles around me.) The problem is that the 'flow of traffic' may or may not be going the speed limit.
(It's frequently the case here in Washington State. Close to me on I-5 it's a 70 MPH zone. 8 miles further south it drops to 60 MPH... but does anyone slow down? Rarely.)
This fellow has tried to bring this car in for service. He's been told what he'd experiencing is normal, and the "vehicle [is] operating as designed at this time." This has obviously frustrated him to the point where he feels the need to have a video camera mounted in the car to document these events.
How long does he have to put up with this before it becomes negligance? How severe do the problems have to be?
Now that I think more about it -- and considering further the transmission problems he's been having -- I don't think it's too far-fetched to wonder if a computer malfunction could shut down the engine at highway speeds, thus causing an accident. (Perhaps suddenly spitting out the key at a very inopportune time -- vs. immediately, like in the video.)
Consider the following (idea inspired by this video):
You put a copy-protected CD in your car CD player
Your car suddenly behaves in an unexpected and unpredictable manner directly because of the non-standard effect of said CD
(I'm thinking back to the copy-protected CDs that would lock up Macs hard)
You, say, get a speeding ticket because the display is now in KM/H instead of MPH.
While you are certainly responsible for the manner in which you operate your vehicle, what liability would the car manufacturer have, or the embedded OS vendor (Microsoft)*, or the company that released the CD?
Certainly the excuse "my car's computer crashed" would hold about as much weight in court as "the dog ate my homework." But once fined (having incurred a loss as a direct (?) result of negligance), would the owner have a legal recource against the (car mfg | OS vendor | record company)?
With the continuing march of integration, what liabilities will be incurred when a CD crashes the OS on something (larger | more expensive | more dangerous) than "just" a PC? It sounds to me like a possibility for scaring the RIAA away from doing weird things to CDs... but IANAL, and I think this could use some discussion.
* In this case I'd expect, more likely than not, that Microsoft's contract with BMW absolves them of all liability, thus securely pinning all lawsuits on BMW.
"A correction re: Ipods; they use a real IDE laptop hard drive, not PCMCIA..."
I have an old 286 laptop with a 40 MB, half-height, 3½-inch drive in it. That doesn't mean all my desktops are now using "laptop" drives, not by a long shot! So, we need some standards here. When referring to hard drives, definitions should be as follows:
5¼" (or larger): "Dinosaur"
3½", full height: "Server"
3½", half height: "Desktop"
2½", (any height): "Laptop"
1.8", less than 10.5mm: "PCMCIA" or "PC Card"
Tell me, please, why a drive placed in a PCMCIA enclosure isn't a "real" hard drive. Note that I never said it wasn't an ATA drive (the interface "IDE" drives actually use these days)... I just said they were the PCMCIA form-factor drives that I thought (and have now confirmed) Toshiba manufactures.
Just because a manufacturer uses one as a laptop's main drive doesn't change the fact that it's the same physical size as a PCMCIA card.
"Doesn't taking their $20 payoff constitute an agreement that they have paid their debt? If they have in fact engaged in price fixing, they owe us a hell of a lot more than $20 each. I suspect that taking the $20 in hush-money will preclude one from participating in any future, similar legal action against them."
Damn skippy.
Too bad I don't have Microsoft-level resources for lawyers, or I might end up owning the RIAA. (Yeah, right.) On second thought, I'd better be careful -- MS might get ideas...
The question of SSNs also came up, and was addressed -- it looks like they have a legitimate reason for asking.
Some MP3 players, certainly! Just reverse engineer the file format, any hardware keys embedded in the drive firmware/written to the disk, update their (likely totally custom) BIOS to address the drive, etc. There are a bunch of devices out there based on laptop drives, surely some of them will tolerate a replacement.
(With the iPod, though, it won't work; iPods don't use laptop drives, they use the even smaller PCMCIA (Toshiba?) drives. These tiny drives still don't have the capacity you're used to in a laptop drive.)
Twist the idea a little, though... what Compact Flash (Type II) players out there can handle an IBM Microdrive? You'll need extra battery capacity and the BIOS to address the drive... but there's a gig of musical goodness for you, in a tiny size.
Still, I like the solid state ones for a reason -- no moving parts. That way when I'm moving around I don't have to worry about bumping the thing and causing a head crash.
"...refills grandpa's heart medication with viagra..."
Funny you should choose that phrase...
Sildenafil citrate (Viagra) was orininally researched as a heart medication. Pfizer only found out about the, uh, uplifting side effects when their male test patients were extremely reluctant to return test formulations of the drug.
I think this one truly fits the definition of a "happy accident!"
There's a book out there entitled "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow." (I'd link to Amazon, but according to them it's out of print; they don't even show a decent picture of the cover.)
Almost everything you mentioned is in there.
I have another parking spot story for you -- this one's a little more practical though.
I know a fellow who worked at Hamilton Standard in the 60s. One time when the parking lot was being repainted, he and a friend waylaid the person responsible for stenciling on the 'reserved spot' numbers. They didn't make any disappear, though --
they made sure two of the numbers were duplicated, thus assuring two young engineers their own parking spaces.
Since the person whose spot they'd duplicated never knew any better, never missed anything, the spots were assured until the next time the lot was painted.
I always thought that was pretty cool.
(He never did go bowling in that long underground hallway between buildings, though.)
Think about it... they want software in their language, and it's not available. So...
If it's closed source (MS Office), don't buy something you don't want, and tell the company what you do want. It's called "market pressure."
If the sofware is open source, you can translate it yourself -- and likely have working, native language software faster than a closed-source solution.
This is news because they managed to get Microsoft to support a language (spoken | written | read) by (relatively) few people. The only reason Microsoft probably even paid any attention to them was the threat they'd teach the children anything but Microsoft products.
Would this have happened in the absence of open source? I doubt it. I guess that means open source is working. (Strange way for it to 'work' though...)
I used to see ads for Dolch all the time when Byte was still a print magazine. I always thought they were a neat idea, since that was (pretty much) the only option if you wanted a portable computer that would take an osciloscope card.
Fast forward to present times, and you have the FlexPac, a P4 portable with all the bells and whistles of a "desktop". (Yes, I know the page talks about P-IIIs, but their main page references P4 FlexPacs.)
They were never cheap... but someone has to make these cases -- find their supplier! (I know, I know, that's what you're trying to do...) A nice case like Dolch is using (with an integrated LCD and keyboard) should be available for $1000 to $1500.
If that approach fails, get thee to your local yellow pages, find a metal shop that does custom work, and have them build you one. Have it painted at an autobody shop -- perhaps a nice coat of Imron (epoxy paint -- very nice, very durable... but very nasty to work with!) and some clearcoat to protect it in those overhead bins.
There are some very talented people out there, incredibly innovative and artistic, they just happen to be gearheads instead of geeks. Get to know your local machinist, you'll be surprised!
Finally, I think the MicroATX form factor gives you more options than FlexATX does, though the FlexATX case options tend to pack things closer together (and thus be much smaller). For example, MicroATX allows 4 devices (generally 3 PCI and 1 AGP) vs. FlexATX's 2, and there are a lot more cases out there for the MicroATX size. I'd swear I've seen cases that include an LCD built-in, but I don't remember where I saw them right now... and my Google skills aren't kicking in.
"This really makes me wonder. If you were building a device that was designed to fly really fast, for a really short time, at the end of which it would be blown into lots of very small pieces, how much time would you spend making it durable?"
Quite a bit, actually.
Cruise missiles don't fly for minutes, they fly for (potentially) hours.
They get launched (none too gently!) from ships, submarines, bombers, and whatever else we manage to bolt them onto.
Before they're launched, they sit around for ages with little or no maintenance.
Cruise missile engines are started with a pyrotechnic cartridge (a small rocket motor starts things spinning), so they have to withstand that abuse.
(And they get only one chance to start.)
Our military is famous for demanding things be over-built; they're paranoid about failure, and take some extreme steps to prevent unexpected outcomes. (Spending a lot of money on engines is one approach, they don't care -- it's not their money.)
The 26-minute figure is, in this case, absolutely related to fuel carrying capability, not engine reliability. Turbine engines are a rather nasty environment for moving parts -- hot particulate combustion products, lubrication problems, extreme rotational speeds -- as a result, engines really can't be built cheaply, and even the 'disposable' ones are going to last a lot longer than 26 minutes... or even an hour.
Another important point is the fact that missile engines are operating closer to the limits of their design (running hot and fast) versus the stresses the same engine would be subject to in a different situation (a jetpack, for instance).
The gas-turbine-powered Indianapolis race car is an interesting example of bearing failure. It ran almost the entire race, only to fail about 3 laps from the finish due to a cheap bearing. They'd used a commercial engine (not cheap or designed for a short life by any stretch!), and it lasted almost the whole race -- but not quite.
(It was Parnelli Jones driving a Granatelli/Pratt & Whitney car in the 1967 Indy 500, if you're interested.)
I visited the Smithsonian Air & Space museum about 2 years ago, and noticed a cool device that was, I believe, based on an engine built by the Williams company.
(Williams makes some very small turbojet engines, famously for use in cruise missiles)
If I remember correctly, the Jetpack was a very Buck Rogers-looking device, with considerably greater endurance than the Bell Rocketbelt. Unlike the Rocketbelt with its' flight time of ~30 seconds (depending on which model you get your hands on); the Jetpack had a flight time of about 7 minutes, and featured a helmet shaker that would get your attention when you were about to run out of fuel.
(I want to say the Smithsonian display claimed a flight time of 30 minutes...)
So there's the problem... we can easily build an engine -- turbofan or rocket -- that'll lift itself, some fuel, and a person -- it just can't lift very much fuel, and these engines (or rockets) are thirsty!!
I can't seem to find much mention of the Jetpack on the Air & Space site, so here's what I can find:
"The WASP (Williams Aerial Survey Platform) had a jet engine on the bottom; a single occupant essentially stood on the fuel tank. Williams International, in Walled Lake, Michigan, makes little fanjet engines for cruise missiles, which were ideal for one-man jet belts. Bell worked with them on a jet belt with 7-minute endurance, which first flew on 7 April 1969. Later Williams developed the WASP, later renamed the "X-JET", which looked like a pilot standing in a garbage can. The 600-pound turbofan was mounted in front of the pilot, and the WASP could stay airborne for 30 minutes, reach speeds of 60 mph, and land in a four-square-foot area. It is unknown where the project stands today. It was a contract with the Army Tank Automotive Command. "
"However, despite the belt's apparent popularity, it turned out to be a commercial failure, mainly due to its limited use because of its short duration use. The Army's higher priority of missile development also contributed toward the loss of Army interest. The Army, and also Marine Corps which had considered the belt, did not adopt it and Bell no longer became sought its further development. In January, 1970, a license to sell and manufacture the Bell Jet Belt was granted by Bell Aerospace Textron to Williams International (formerly Williams Research Corp.) of Walled Lake, Michigan. Williams went onto to develop an improved, longer-duration jet-powered version of the belt."
This site seems to confirm my "30 minute flight time" recollection -- but the quote is "...an endurance of up to 26 minutes was anticipated", which would seem to say it was never achieved.
All that said, this thing looks interesting. High-bypass turbofan, ducting similar to an AV-8(A|B) Harrier, carbon fiber for light weight... I want to see video of it flying!
If I were talking about electronics, I'd call that a 'sneak circuit.' All the subdirectories the/. editors didn't include in the robots.txt file are indexed by Google.
(At least, I figure they overlooked this... give it a few days, then check for an updated exclusion list.)
On the other hand, I still can't seem to dig up my old comment... and not for lack of trying, either. I suggested a donation fund for a Google Search Appliance, archives on CD for/. subscribers so you could grep the database... that kind of thing. If anyone else manages to dig it up, I'd sure like to know how you found it!
Slashdot Mirror
I just found Big Dead Place a couple days ago, and read their account of one of these 'hacker attacks' and Raytheon Polar Services' (RPSC) reaction to it.
Short version: Everyone at the pole was pissed. Denver (RPSC headquarters) took away their porn^H^H^H^Hnet access, and thus made a bunch of already deprived individuals even more deprived.
There's a ~500 K newsletter-spoof PDF on the site that expresses some of their feelings.
- "Kudos to the Denver IT staff for quickly responding to a hacker attack on South Pole Station. The attack occurred Friday night Denver time and our crack professional team denied the attacker access by immediately pulling the plug on Pole. They got back to dealing with the aftermath of this knee jerk response sometime Wednesday shortly after the last chocolate sprinkle donut had been eaten but shortly before nap time."
There's also: Top Ten Reasons South Pole Can't Access the InternetSome other interesting things on the site:
So, anyway... I was watching American Chopper a while back, and I got to thinking:
- "I wonder what would happen if I went to OCC with one of the turboshaft engines that MTT uses for their bike, a copy of Akira, and asked Paul Jr. to replicate the Kaneda bike..."
And then I remembered... they're artists. They're not really engineers. Making that bike work would require so many engineering challenges to be overcome that, well... they'd have to outsource a lot of it.But I'd sure love to watch them build one!
(Too bad I can't afford it... anybody else want to join in and start a pool? We could have the 'Slashdot Bike' built! (Anyone remember the 'Slashdot PT Cruiser'?) Too bad the .com boom is well and truly dead, or we'd be looking at a fleet of the things!)
The version in the article... it looks a bit fat and heavy. I don't know how much fun it'll be to ride. As much as I like the appearance, it's just pointless if all it does it look pretty.
I'm noticing a fair amount of discussion here regarding "...why 74 amps/speakers?" As someone who has worked on pipe organs, here's what I am assuming:
- They have one for each stop (or subset of stops) on the original organ.
What is this "stop" I refer to? It's a collection of pipes with a specific sound... Vox Humana, Trumpet, etc., that the organist can choose and (in some cases) assign to a specific keyboard. An organ the size of the Trinity Church Aeolian-Skinner would have had dozens of stops. Even a small pipe organ has quite a few -- more than 10 is quite common.Each stop has a default keyboard with a specific name, related to which wind chest the pipes are located on ("Great", "Swell", "Choir"... though those are just starting points).
Along with the location of these pipes on certain wind chests comes other factors... only the set of pipes on a chest called 'swell' can have their volume controlled -- usually by way of a set of shutters that open and close. The rest of the organ pipes play at the same volume all. the. time.
Another thing about pipe organs... some of them (I don't know about this specific one) run on very high pressure. Normal for the pipe organs I worked on was 8 to 10 inches of water. I heard one that ran at 80 inches of water, and the 'attack' of the sound was like a gunshot. I have yet to hear a speaker that can duplicate that sound.
Warm Guinness? Ick! It's supposed to be ice cold, and that's the way I love it. Okay, maybe you're German... I know a two exchange students that like warm beer -- to the point they'll use a small immersion heater. But warm Guinness? Surely you must be daft!
Granted, Per Øyvind Arnesen is using Guinness Draught in a can, and my supply is current the "rocket widget" bottled version... but as I recall the advice on the side is the same:
- "To really enjoy Guinness Draught, chill for at least 2 hours."
There you have it, straight from the side of the bottle.-
"...when all content is automatically tagged with the geographical location of its production?"
I would love to have all my digital media tagged in this manner! Yes, high-end Nikon equipment accepts GPS input (remember this?), but that's a separate, external device.I'd love to see it built into cameras (both still & video) and audio recorders. And for visual data, add in a compass so I can know both where it was taken, and which direction it was pointing!
I can do without knowing where an email/document/webpage was written, though. Sometimes more data is good... and sometimes it's just noise.
Well, that's odd... I thought my ISP's nameserver was being a flake, but you just proved it's not limited to me!
No, it's most certainly not a /.-ing from a link in a comment. It was dead when I wrote it, otherwise I would have used a wearcam.org link instead of the Google one.
Gotta chalk this one up to "coincidence."
I encountered an interesting "no photography" rule when I was in Connecticut last year. While visiting Gillette Castle (as in William Gilette, the actor famous for portraying Sherlock Holmes), I was informed that I could not take a camera inside the "castle" -- because someone owned the copyright on images of anything inside!
Normally, if one takes a picture of something, you did the work, you own the copyright. (Simple enough.) However, for some reason, Connecticut has sold the rights to images of everything inside the mansion, and the staff have to waste their time trying to make sure people don't bring cameras in. Ridiculous.
With the increasing ubiquity of digital cameras, cameras in phones, cameras in PDAs, cameras in watches, cameras "in" people... where do you draw the line? Can you even draw a line?
If I remember correctly, Steve Mann was allowd to use his body-mounted computers while taking tests at MIT. The reasoning was -- since he never took the stuff off -- that it was just another part of his body. I wonder what would happen if he tried to enter Gillette Castle...?
(Though I haven't visited, I believe that Biltmore has the same no-camera rule for the same reason...)
It's all about greed... when people realize all this greed is hurting the common good, things will change. Problem is, the greedy ones are busy trying to convince us we're all "better off this way."
Riiight.
I don't know what's funnier... that they're claiming copyright infringement of OpenOffice, or that they thought Microsoft Office came as RPMs!!
This is the part I refer to:
-
What was located as infringing content:
Oh hell, I needed a laugh this morning...Filename: /mandrake_current/SRPMS/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1-9mdk. src.rpm /mandrake_current/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/OpenOffice.or g-libs-1.0.1-9mdk.i586.rpm
(199,643kb)
Filename:
(35,444kb)
The above computer program(s) is/are being made available for copying, through downloading, at the above location without authorization from the copyright owner(s).
This desk looks very nice. I particularly like the rackmount piece, it integrates nicely.
All in all, it's a nice finish, a nice rack (mount), but not huge. This is a work desk, not a lounging desk.
Still, it's given me ideas, perhaps it'll help you too.
(Yes, it's off the Penny Arcade domain. No, the link isn't to a comic strip.)
When I went to college, the entire school was eligible for the university's Lexis-Nexis site license. This didn't mean just the law school... this meant everybody. Software was available that I could have loaded on my PC, and I could have searched from my dorm room.
The university's library computers (and computer labs) had the software on them as well.
Now here's the interesting part -- if you were a resident of the surrounding towns (not affiliated with the university in any other way!), you were eligible to use the library -- and all its' resources.
Yes, that included Lexis-Nexis. (And JAMA, and The Lancet, and a hundred other publications that cost more than some cars.)
I have no illusions -- Lexis-Nexis was getting a considerable amount of money for allowing such use... far more than they'd ever be able to wring out of a public library. The university needed the subscription, it was just a happy circumstance that everyone else benefited.
Here's to libraries with deep pockets.
It's not just management that must be faulted for using needlessly complex language, engineers are guilty of bowing to the peer-pressure as well. The phrase "doublespeak" has been around longer than I have, and has many children -- "nukespeak," for example.
Searching Google, I find that "nukespeak" doesn't have the meaning I learned years ago. Apparently, its' popular meaning relates to the PR campaigns attempting to sway public opinion toward atomic power. The meaning I learned was entirely different -- it referred to the insanely complex, self-important language used when something bad happened (no matter how minor!) and one had to file an incident report with the NRC.
You'd see phrases like this:
- gravitational disassembly -- "I dropped it and it broke."
- spontaneous energetic disassembly -- "The damn thing just exploded!"
- vehicle-assisted structural realignment -- "Joe backed a forklift into the wall."
There were hundreds of these oddball phrases... but it's been something like 15 years since I saw this, and a Google search for funny "NRC incident report" returns zero results -- which means, I guess, that (by decree?) NRC incident reports just aren't funny. (NRC reports are only available to specific people in the first place, so it's not as if they're out there on the web somewhere.)I still remember the first time the "check engine" light came on in a car I was driving. I was on an interstate highway in South Carolina, coming up on an exit. This amber light comes on, so I took the exit and shut off the engine as soon as I was safely out of the way.
I didn't know what was wrong, so I treated it with the same caution I would have were it the oil pressure light.
(Turns out it was only an indication of emissions equipment malfunctioning -- in this case, the oxygen sensor was going.)
If my car suddenly went metric on me, I'd be looking for a safe place to stop not out of worry over a ticket, but because I want to know WTF is going on with my (in this case) costs-almost-as-much-as-a-house BMW. I mean, hell, if VW can make a car that doesn't get schizophrenic on me, why can't BMW??
Last thing:
Cops in South Carolina? Holy hell, they've got WAY too much time on their hands. I used to count speed traps out of boredom, and more than once I'd come home from a 68 mile trip having counted over a dozen.
I used speed because it was the first example that came to mind. If you watch that video, he pans over the instrument cluster and goes "... it's all in metric." (Or words to that effect.)
If my car suddenly started displaying speeds in metric, I know what my reaction would be -- ignore the speedometer and try to drive with the flow of traffic. (I'd be looking for a safe place to stop, too -- but the first worry is to maintain a similar velocity with the vehicles around me.) The problem is that the 'flow of traffic' may or may not be going the speed limit.
(It's frequently the case here in Washington State. Close to me on I-5 it's a 70 MPH zone. 8 miles further south it drops to 60 MPH... but does anyone slow down? Rarely.)
This fellow has tried to bring this car in for service. He's been told what he'd experiencing is normal, and the "vehicle [is] operating as designed at this time." This has obviously frustrated him to the point where he feels the need to have a video camera mounted in the car to document these events.
How long does he have to put up with this before it becomes negligance? How severe do the problems have to be?
Now that I think more about it -- and considering further the transmission problems he's been having -- I don't think it's too far-fetched to wonder if a computer malfunction could shut down the engine at highway speeds, thus causing an accident. (Perhaps suddenly spitting out the key at a very inopportune time -- vs. immediately, like in the video.)
Consider the following (idea inspired by this video):
- You put a copy-protected CD in your car CD player
- Your car suddenly behaves in an unexpected and unpredictable manner directly because of the non-standard effect of said CD
- You, say, get a speeding ticket because the display is now in KM/H instead of MPH.
While you are certainly responsible for the manner in which you operate your vehicle, what liability would the car manufacturer have, or the embedded OS vendor (Microsoft)*, or the company that released the CD?(I'm thinking back to the copy-protected CDs that would lock up Macs hard)
Certainly the excuse "my car's computer crashed" would hold about as much weight in court as "the dog ate my homework." But once fined (having incurred a loss as a direct (?) result of negligance), would the owner have a legal recource against the (car mfg | OS vendor | record company)?
With the continuing march of integration, what liabilities will be incurred when a CD crashes the OS on something (larger | more expensive | more dangerous) than "just" a PC? It sounds to me like a possibility for scaring the RIAA away from doing weird things to CDs... but IANAL, and I think this could use some discussion.
* In this case I'd expect, more likely than not, that Microsoft's contract with BMW absolves them of all liability, thus securely pinning all lawsuits on BMW.
- "A correction re: Ipods; they use a real IDE laptop hard drive, not PCMCIA..."
I have an old 286 laptop with a 40 MB, half-height, 3½-inch drive in it. That doesn't mean all my desktops are now using "laptop" drives, not by a long shot! So, we need some standards here. When referring to hard drives, definitions should be as follows:- 5¼" (or larger): "Dinosaur"
- 3½", full height: "Server"
- 3½", half height: "Desktop"
- 2½", (any height): "Laptop"
- 1.8", less than 10.5mm: "PCMCIA" or "PC Card"
Tell me, please, why a drive placed in a PCMCIA enclosure isn't a "real" hard drive. Note that I never said it wasn't an ATA drive (the interface "IDE" drives actually use these days)... I just said they were the PCMCIA form-factor drives that I thought (and have now confirmed) Toshiba manufactures.Just because a manufacturer uses one as a laptop's main drive doesn't change the fact that it's the same physical size as a PCMCIA card.
In fact, when the iPod first came out, these drives were idendified early on as the hardware Apple used.
Note the "interface" section of the press release:
- Interface: PC Card ATA -- 68pin AT (ATA-2 through ATA-5)
Curious.JWZ had a very good point -- this was discussed on BoingBoing, and here's what he had to say:
- "Doesn't taking their $20 payoff constitute an agreement that they have paid their debt? If they have in fact engaged in price fixing, they owe us a hell of a lot more than $20 each. I suspect that taking the $20 in hush-money will preclude one from participating in any future, similar legal action against them."
Damn skippy.Too bad I don't have Microsoft-level resources for lawyers, or I might end up owning the RIAA. (Yeah, right.) On second thought, I'd better be careful -- MS might get ideas...
The question of SSNs also came up, and was addressed -- it looks like they have a legitimate reason for asking.
Some MP3 players, certainly! Just reverse engineer the file format, any hardware keys embedded in the drive firmware/written to the disk, update their (likely totally custom) BIOS to address the drive, etc. There are a bunch of devices out there based on laptop drives, surely some of them will tolerate a replacement.
(With the iPod, though, it won't work; iPods don't use laptop drives, they use the even smaller PCMCIA (Toshiba?) drives. These tiny drives still don't have the capacity you're used to in a laptop drive.)
Twist the idea a little, though... what Compact Flash (Type II) players out there can handle an IBM Microdrive? You'll need extra battery capacity and the BIOS to address the drive... but there's a gig of musical goodness for you, in a tiny size.
Still, I like the solid state ones for a reason -- no moving parts. That way when I'm moving around I don't have to worry about bumping the thing and causing a head crash.
- "...refills grandpa's heart medication with viagra..."
Funny you should choose that phrase...Sildenafil citrate (Viagra) was orininally researched as a heart medication. Pfizer only found out about the, uh, uplifting side effects when their male test patients were extremely reluctant to return test formulations of the drug.
I think this one truly fits the definition of a "happy accident!"
There's a book out there entitled "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow." (I'd link to Amazon, but according to them it's out of print; they don't even show a decent picture of the cover.)
Almost everything you mentioned is in there.
I have another parking spot story for you -- this one's a little more practical though.
- I know a fellow who worked at Hamilton Standard in the 60s. One time when the parking lot was being repainted, he and a friend waylaid the person responsible for stenciling on the 'reserved spot' numbers. They didn't make any disappear, though --
- they made sure two of the numbers were duplicated, thus assuring two young engineers their own parking spaces.
I always thought that was pretty cool.Since the person whose spot they'd duplicated never knew any better, never missed anything, the spots were assured until the next time the lot was painted.
(He never did go bowling in that long underground hallway between buildings, though.)
Think about it... they want software in their language, and it's not available. So...
- If it's closed source (MS Office), don't buy something you don't want, and tell the company what you do want. It's called "market pressure."
- If the sofware is open source, you can translate it yourself -- and likely have working, native language software faster than a closed-source solution.
This is news because they managed to get Microsoft to support a language (spoken | written | read) by (relatively) few people. The only reason Microsoft probably even paid any attention to them was the threat they'd teach the children anything but Microsoft products.Would this have happened in the absence of open source? I doubt it. I guess that means open source is working. (Strange way for it to 'work' though...)
So you're to blame for
- Dec. 17th's PvP
and likely countless others! ("Countless" because I haven't even tried to find 'em...)and
Dec. 27th's Angst Tech
Cool.
I used to see ads for Dolch all the time when Byte was still a print magazine. I always thought they were a neat idea, since that was (pretty much) the only option if you wanted a portable computer that would take an osciloscope card.
Fast forward to present times, and you have the FlexPac, a P4 portable with all the bells and whistles of a "desktop". (Yes, I know the page talks about P-IIIs, but their main page references P4 FlexPacs.)
They were never cheap... but someone has to make these cases -- find their supplier! (I know, I know, that's what you're trying to do...) A nice case like Dolch is using (with an integrated LCD and keyboard) should be available for $1000 to $1500.
If that approach fails, get thee to your local yellow pages, find a metal shop that does custom work, and have them build you one. Have it painted at an autobody shop -- perhaps a nice coat of Imron (epoxy paint -- very nice, very durable... but very nasty to work with!) and some clearcoat to protect it in those overhead bins.
There are some very talented people out there, incredibly innovative and artistic, they just happen to be gearheads instead of geeks. Get to know your local machinist, you'll be surprised!
Finally, I think the MicroATX form factor gives you more options than FlexATX does, though the FlexATX case options tend to pack things closer together (and thus be much smaller). For example, MicroATX allows 4 devices (generally 3 PCI and 1 AGP) vs. FlexATX's 2, and there are a lot more cases out there for the MicroATX size. I'd swear I've seen cases that include an LCD built-in, but I don't remember where I saw them right now... and my Google skills aren't kicking in.
- "This really makes me wonder. If you were building a device that was designed to fly really fast, for a really short time, at the end of which it would be blown into lots of very small pieces, how much time would you spend making it durable?"
Quite a bit, actually.- Cruise missiles don't fly for minutes, they fly for (potentially) hours.
- They get launched (none too gently!) from ships, submarines, bombers, and whatever else we manage to bolt them onto.
- Before they're launched, they sit around for ages with little or no maintenance.
- Cruise missile engines are started with a pyrotechnic cartridge (a small rocket motor starts things spinning), so they have to withstand that abuse.
- (And they get only one chance to start.)
- Our military is famous for demanding things be over-built; they're paranoid about failure, and take some extreme steps to prevent unexpected outcomes. (Spending a lot of money on engines is one approach, they don't care -- it's not their money.)
The 26-minute figure is, in this case, absolutely related to fuel carrying capability, not engine reliability. Turbine engines are a rather nasty environment for moving parts -- hot particulate combustion products, lubrication problems, extreme rotational speeds -- as a result, engines really can't be built cheaply, and even the 'disposable' ones are going to last a lot longer than 26 minutes... or even an hour.Another important point is the fact that missile engines are operating closer to the limits of their design (running hot and fast) versus the stresses the same engine would be subject to in a different situation (a jetpack, for instance).
The gas-turbine-powered Indianapolis race car is an interesting example of bearing failure. It ran almost the entire race, only to fail about 3 laps from the finish due to a cheap bearing. They'd used a commercial engine (not cheap or designed for a short life by any stretch!), and it lasted almost the whole race -- but not quite.
(It was Parnelli Jones driving a Granatelli/Pratt & Whitney car in the 1967 Indy 500, if you're interested.)
I visited the Smithsonian Air & Space museum about 2 years ago, and noticed a cool device that was, I believe, based on an engine built by the Williams company.
(Williams makes some very small turbojet engines, famously for use in cruise missiles)
If I remember correctly, the Jetpack was a very Buck Rogers-looking device, with considerably greater endurance than the Bell Rocketbelt. Unlike the Rocketbelt with its' flight time of ~30 seconds (depending on which model you get your hands on); the Jetpack had a flight time of about 7 minutes, and featured a helmet shaker that would get your attention when you were about to run out of fuel.
(I want to say the Smithsonian display claimed a flight time of 30 minutes...)
So there's the problem... we can easily build an engine -- turbofan or rocket -- that'll lift itself, some fuel, and a person -- it just can't lift very much fuel, and these engines (or rockets) are thirsty!!
I can't seem to find much mention of the Jetpack on the Air & Space site, so here's what I can find:
- www.flying-contraptions.com
- "The WASP (Williams Aerial Survey Platform) had a jet engine on the bottom; a single occupant essentially stood on the fuel tank. Williams International, in Walled Lake, Michigan, makes little fanjet engines for cruise missiles, which were ideal for one-man jet belts. Bell worked with them on a jet belt with 7-minute endurance, which first flew on 7 April 1969. Later Williams developed the WASP, later renamed the "X-JET", which looked like a pilot standing in a garbage can. The 600-pound turbofan was mounted in front of the pilot, and the WASP could stay airborne for 30 minutes, reach speeds of 60 mph, and land in a four-square-foot area. It is unknown where the project stands today. It was a contract with the Army Tank Automotive Command. "
- Smithsonian Air & Space Museum page about the Bell Rocketbelt
- "However, despite the belt's apparent popularity, it turned out to be a commercial failure, mainly due to its limited use because of its short duration use. The Army's higher priority of missile development also contributed toward the loss of Army interest. The Army, and also Marine Corps which had considered the belt, did not adopt it and Bell no longer became sought its further development. In January, 1970, a license to sell and manufacture the Bell Jet Belt was granted by Bell Aerospace Textron to Williams International (formerly Williams Research Corp.) of Walled Lake, Michigan. Williams went onto to develop an improved, longer-duration jet-powered version of the belt."
- Page mostly about the Bell Rocketbelt, but attributes a turbojet-based belt to them as well
- This site seems to confirm my "30 minute flight time" recollection -- but the quote is "...an endurance of up to 26 minutes was anticipated", which would seem to say it was never achieved.
- Here's another (similar) picture, but the site it links to is a 404.
All that said, this thing looks interesting. High-bypass turbofan, ducting similar to an AV-8(A|B) Harrier, carbon fiber for light weight... I want to see video of it flying!Wow.
Damn.
Would you look at that.
If I were talking about electronics, I'd call that a 'sneak circuit.' All the subdirectories the /. editors didn't include in the robots.txt file are indexed by Google.
(At least, I figure they overlooked this... give it a few days, then check for an updated exclusion list.)
On the other hand, I still can't seem to dig up my old comment... and not for lack of trying, either. I suggested a donation fund for a Google Search Appliance, archives on CD for /. subscribers so you could grep the database... that kind of thing. If anyone else manages to dig it up, I'd sure like to know how you found it!