But the specific examples given are a reach! An 'internet' at that time could have just as easily pushed it the other way too.
I've always been fascinated by this, WW2 broke out while industrial technology was very high in comparison to the information and media technology of the time.
IT was so low that the average person could be convinced that the other side were inhuman monsters, but industrial technology was good enough for us to bomb each other fairly easily.
In the case of WW2 the problem fixed itself in an odd way. The technology leaps that resulted from the war resulted in Television and jet travel, allowing information exchange and cultural awareness that was lacking when it started. Populations that had previously been scared with made-up xenophobic propaganda started listening to each other's music and watching each other's monster movies! It became easier to make war, and harder to convince an informed population to do it.
I have a 1938 radio and a 1948 television. If you look inside them the technology difference is mind-blowing. The tech leap during the war was incredible. Technology never progressed that fast before in history, and would not again until the computer industry came along and Moore's law kicked in.
So the internet may not have prevented Hitler, but his monsterous actions definitely helped set the stage for its development.
Of course there are the obvious TSA stories, but I think the more common stuff may actually be worse.
Working as a contractor for a giant Electronics retailer that shall remain nameless, I saw a memo regarding their policy of searching people's bags as they left, and sometimes entered, the stores.
The public reason given for searching those who left the store was, of course, loss of merchandise. The public reason given for searching those entering was safety...
However the REAL reason for both of these, was to (paraphrasing from memory) 'Establish [company name] as the authority figure in the sales transaction and subsequent customer service encounters...'
Yikes! 'We're in charge here, we've got big scary minimum-wage thugs, You'd better Buy as we say!'
Now if that's not 'Security Theatre' at it's worst, I don't know what is....
This is an ancient security problem, spoofing the card response is pretty trivial. You can hear it on a Shady O'Rack shortwave radio. I showed this to an employer who was installing the cards, and they went ahead and installed them anyway.
The thing is, you don't even need the hardware. All you need is a reader to read the number of the card, which you can do through a pocket, and get the 36 bit number. Then you can just ORDER a card or keyfob on line! You can't do that with a brass key, a legit locksmith won't sell it to you unless you have the original.
But a prox card is not a brass key. It is MUCH EASIER to get into a prox building than a brass key building!
Stopping the talk does *NOT* solve the problem. HID and their parent company, Assa Abloy, are fleecing their shareholders by sweeping this under the rug. They have to solve it before it puts them out of business.
When this eventually hits the mainstream media, and their stock goes to hell, their shareholders will have a good case, assuming there's anything left to take.
In fairness, it's part of a compatibility chain that goes back before microcontrollers. 'Weigand' cards allowed digital swipe cards that had no internal microcontroller in the card, or the reader. This was huge back before microcontrollers were affordable. It was also very hard to fake a weigand card. HID prox cards descended from these and maintained compatibility with the old systems. Most of their readers still support weigand and can replace the old readers.
It is time for them to break the chain and only offer challenge/response products from now on. The world has grown up, and anything less is not responsible. Also, when the story breaks they can say 'Oh, those are our old, discontinued products.' and turn it into a sales opportunity.
Anyone who's played with robots, or just programmed anything for that matter, knows that things don't always go the way you planned... My latest project recently emptied five cans of spraypaint into the air while I desperately tried to unplug the battery... Hey, I found a bug!
I would like to know what their safety procedures are like. This goes against everything I know about gun safety. It's also very scary because anyone can do it! We may have a sad period in home robotics where peoples ability to build things gets ahead of their understanding of control systems safety.
Most of the ones I've tried have worked fine, whether I needed them or not. I have noticed though that OSS drivers were flakey.
PlanetCCRMA simplifies ALSA installation and configuration on Redhat and Fedora. It's worked with all the on-board sound cards I've run across, which surprised me. Works great with most cards.
The only ones that seem to stink are the ones targetted to gamers, with lots of explosions and bikini babes on the box. I've tested these and they tend to suck for various reasons, locked sample rate, very noisy, etc... The less expensive ones are actually better.
This is my old neighborhood, about five houses away. I used to walk by it every day with the dog. I never had the guts to run up and take a look through it...
It's made with lots of common stuff including tractor parts and other farm equipment, and alot of cinder blocks. The story goes that they wanted to put it in a museum but at the time Tombaugh was still using it on a regular basis. It's commonly known around the area that although CT discovered pluto and used the telescope right up until he died, it was NOT the telescope he used to discover pluto.
It's not actually in Las Cruces, it's in Mesilla Park, across the tracks from Las Cruces. It's just a few blocks from Clyde Tombaugh elementary school.
Not a bad item to own if you've got the space, and it would be better than where it is, which is mostly under trees.
Musical computing is what I do now, at this place, and it's definitely true that computers are not musical enough.
First, the computer is theoretically a completely general tool, but the ones we use come packaged as an office tool. Using them for other purposes generally requires alot of work against this, even in our favorite operating systems. (though FAR less so)
The next problem is computer hardware. It's quite a daunting task in most cases to connect a keyboard or other controller to a computer. It has to be easy for non-geeks. (USB makes this much better than it has been.) In addition, the vast majority of low-end keyboards are awful. They usually have undersize keys, and almost never have velocity, which both become a problem once you move beyond 'mary had a little lamb'.
Creative makes a keyboard that is integrated into the qwerty keyboard. I think this is a fantastic idea. However, the same problems apply, undersize keys (they can be shorter, but they must be wide enough) proprietary, or at least nonstandard drivers, and very cheap construction. It is basically unusable, if they're wondering why it's not selling. Great idea though.
It is a travesty that all 'toy' musical instruments for children are really unplayable. What are we doing to our kids! Even the adult ones under $300 all lack velocity, and often have cheap keys that 'bounce.'
Using the qwerty keyboard as an instrument is not a bad idea. It is fundamentally different from typing. As an adult student of piano I thought my keyboard use as a geek would help. Maybe a little, but one key difference is that key hits when typing are INTERLEAVED, hence we get letters in order. Musical key hits are SYNCRONIZED, you often hit several keys at once. Learning the difference can be tough at first.
It does allow monoponic (one sound at a time) playing, and for that it's pretty neat. Many synth packages already do this, but the feature's not intended to be useful outside of testing. The PC keyboard sends key down and key up messages, so it may be possible to have polyphony (multiple sounds at once and chords) on keyboards whose internal multiplexing doesn't prevent it. Libraries intended for text keyboard use won't work for this.
Learning the piano I also realize that all those hours mastering Bruce Lee on the c64 when I was 13 were exactly the time when my brain could have been mastering music. The idea that you can't learn later is a myth. You learn differently. But the willingness, and the ability, to sit there for 6 to 8 hours a day trying to master something happens when you're young. (Luckily I did this with electronics and computers, so I'm now employed!)
Computers make GREAT musical instruments, and allow music to be made in most of the old ways and many completely new ways. Of course it's up to the musician to use them to make GOOD music.
The computer and toy industries have to start making products that are really useful to normally skilled people in normal situations, which are neither too technical or so stripped down as to be useless. Also, there need to be more musical games, which teach fundamentals, and are also fun. The only reason why the techological revolution isn't also a musical one is that we just haven't bothered. There's an instrument in every home and classroom now, and if we aren't cheap and lazy about it, they would be useful.
If you buy something at a store in cash, the can put those 'by opening this you agree' contracts on them, but those don't mean much and they still can't identify you.
By making you get an update they can collect information on you, which has dollar value, and more importantly, get you to click and EULA on the firmware which extends to other things as well as saying that it can be ammended at any time and remain binding.
This is creeping into everything. I just sent away for my credit reports today. If you get your credit report from a credit agency through the web, they make you click an agreement which covers all sorts of things in addition to making you waive certain rights under the FCRA in some cases, as well as asking for all sorts of information in order to give it to you which is not required. If you send for it by mail, you only have to give the information required by law and you waive no rights.
If you make enough noise, you can probably get them to send you the update in the mail, but you still must identify yourself to them and the effort is not worth it.
The article doesn't mention it, but it's not about time to market, or cutting corners or anything. They want to 1) identify the customer 2) get them to enter into some sort of agreement.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to collect personally identifiable information online on children under 13. Most sites won't collect information on children under 13 as a result, or will simply block access when a child states their actual age. (As if they won't try again.)
But Real Media has a new idea. They simply have made it IMPOSSIBLE to tell them that you're under 13. The form doesn't go that low!
RealPlayer is definitely an awful product to deal with for many reasons. It's spyware, adware, and it is so tough even for an expert to remove all the things it slips into your machine that it's better just to reinstall.
Each and every aspect of this company and its products just send the same message to the customer: We are scummy, scummy, SCUMMY!
But this age thing makes it look like they put being scummy and skirting the law even above profit, because it's not even getting them anything! Can this really make them enough to be worth it?
More people should be willing to come out and say when a company is plainly unethical. Thanks Click and Clack!
The idea that the merchant doesn't have to touch the card makes it pretty unlikely that they'll check the id and the signature of the buyer, so this encourages fraud. It should at least require a PIN.
Also, there is no way for the customer to control access to the card. My sister recently picked me up at Kennedy airport, and as she was holding the parking fee money out the window, the attendant charged the fee to her EZpass because he was too lazy to look up. There wasn't enough room on the pass so she got hit with a penalty. He wouldn't even look up from his paper when she complained.
So you'll have to keep your card in a metalic wallet, because the lack of physical contact means you can't really control when it's accessed.
It's interesting that I can build a wand and get someone's information off the license in their pocket. Now you could potentially get their credit card number too.
It may be slightly faster, but beyond that I don't see how it's better for the consumer or the business.
Well, so far Dell, HP, and generic. All coils will have some magnetic vibration, and all capacitors have some electrostatic vibration, with a rapidly changing signal. We've got some EE profs here and it seems that this noise can be greatly reduced but not eliminated. It really is very faint anyway.
If you reduce the ambient noise enough, you can hear all kinds of things. Even LCD panels make noise, especially if they're fluorescent. There's a point where you have to say, good enough!
I read an interesting article where these automotive engineers worked for months to eliminate every source of noise they could from the inside of their prototype car. The engine was inaudible, the fans, silent. Wind noise was reduced as far as possible.
When they had someone test the car, his first question was, "Why are the tires so loud?"
I work in a computer music and acoustics research lab and we're always after a quieter PC. We've considered a solutions like this, but we've decided it wouldn't really be necessary for long. Here's why.
Among the many reasons for having a hard drive in every computer, two of the big ones were the Microsoft vision statement, and the fact that the network was much slower than disk. The latter is no longer the case.
The fact that network is now faster than local disk is a MAJOR development.
We've experimented with RedHat 9 with nfs root on older hardware with no disk and no fans, with 100Mb bootable NICs. We found to our surprise that they ran faster than with standard (non UDMA) ide. So, we're trying it now with newer hardware and gigabit, and some BIG heatsinks. So far, so good. We can optimize the central storage for speed, and the systems do, in fact, run noticeably faster in most cases, in addition to being nearly* silent.
We hadn't counted on the added bonuses, but there are many. We can change an entire system disk by moving dirs, reexporting, and booting the machine up. Poof, new system. We can install and uninstall packages on machines while they're off! We no longer have two or three extra gigs on each machine, all our nfsroots are from a single physical filesystem (so far) so they all have the same amount of free space, much more efficient! And if a machine offends you, you can yank the plug out. No local fsck!
*Note that the machine is never truly silent. Without any fans or disks, you can still hear a certain noise that sounds like it's happening when the disk used to seek. It's the toroids in the power supply! The network traffic causes HF noise in the power lines, which is filtered in the power supply and causes the chokes to vibrate slightly. The noise is very low, it would easily be drowned out by the quietest of fans, but in a totally silent room with no other PC sound, it's quite audible. There is also some low and infrequent clicking while the machine is warming up and cooling down, due to the thermal expansion of the heat sinks. This doesn't happen during use, when the temperature is more or less constant.
I'm supposed to document all this and I've been lazy, so if you want the rundown on booting redhat 9 without a hard drive, write to my spare address (snotius@hotmail.com) and I'll finish the page and send you the link.
I saw this post in the morning and knowing I'd be down that way, I went!
I expected it to be interesting. It was much more interesting than I thought. There were some items there that were amazing historical objects.
Lisas, PDP-11s, a restored PDP-5, the orinal Xerox machines with the first GUI, and a great collection of every PDA going back into history.
That was just the Vintage Computer Festival. Then, there was the museum!
The Computer History Museum is just incredible. It HAS to be seen. It's really great that they're doing this, it won't be until after we're all dead that people realize how absolutely important this history is. They're still trying to get it off the ground, so help 'em out any way you can, even if it's just going and bringing all your friends.
The collection goes back through all types of calculating tools, but if you just look at the items from the last fifty years, it's as if you're looking at a thousands of years of human achievement. The pace of change is so far accellerated in computers as compared to most other forms of technology that we're losing very important history.
It goes through a cycle where it's useful, then it's junk, then it's nostalgic junk, and eventually it's recognized as historically important. Most items are discarded long before that. The items are extemely rare now. Many others have already been lost forever. There is a real risk that we could lose this history before its importance is widely recognized. There's still so much out there, and it's going fast.
If you're nearby or if you're vising the bay area you should really go see it.
IBM argues in the counterclaims that SCO is prohibited from treating any code it distributed under the GPL as proprietary, and that its current plan to require payment from Linux users isn't legal.
Why, oh why, don't they seek an injunction against SCO contacting organizations and demanding royalties while this is pending? This is a no-brainer. They have alot more than they need!
I'm not in the UK, so I can't tell my story there, but spam has ruined my life!
First of all, it's almost impossible to answer all of it! But that's just the beginning of the problem.
At first, I thought it was great. I got tons of credit, a new mortgage at 0%, and a fat check from some guy in Nigeria. But now my 'manhood' and my wife's breasts are so huge that neither of us can move or even feed ourselves.
If we didn't have the army of hot teenage sluts to take care of us, we'd be dead by now.
I hope they will put an end to spam before any more innocent people suffer this horrible fate.
Yes this is really neat. It's a great project. You will rarely save money with this approach, but it's no reason not to try it.
The most important reason is that you are learning to use the parts by example which is really cool. You get the benefit of the hard work of the designers and testers. When you start from scratch with a new part, even with all the specs and theory it sometimes takes a few tries to get it right.
I spend as much time as I can building stuff out of junk because it is what I love. Over the years I've figured out that some cool stuff isn't worth the salvage labor. You can get it another way and it will work better, especially when it's a newer surface-mount, multi-layer board. You really have to weigh the alternatives carefully.
However, you definitely do well when you find boards with parts in sockets and things like that. Old ISA cards and very old motherboards are a great source of unpluggable parts. Most of them have serial eeproms like 9346's, you can get 8051 and 6811 microcontrollers off old modems just by popping them out, UV eproms and eeproms to make your NIC bootable, and if you're lucky you can find an ANCIENT card covered in sockets full of 74xx logic chips of all kinds.
Sadly, the newer things are the less you can do with them. Newer toys, electronics, and computers are becoming so cheap and highly integrated that it's getting really hard to do anything interesting with them. The speak'n'spell was completely hackable. Today's toys just have a transistor and a tiny chip under a drop of epoxy. No label or anything.
It's good to see people are keeping it alive, and not letting the multilayer surface mount stuff slow them down!
I have been buying 802.11 cards like crazy trying to find one that will work well with Linux for mobile self-propelled linux boxes.
WHat I have found is that almost all the new cards out there, brand name, no name, etc, are based on the broadcom chip, for which there is no driver.
Now it's true that there are wierd FCC rules, such as the one that the antenna connectors must be proprietary, as if that makes a difference, but that doesn't explain certain things.
For instance, the SMC, Siemens, and Linksys cards all USED to work. The new cards from these vendors, such as the Linksys WPC11, don't work, but have the SAME MODEL NUMBER even though they are entirely different cards. They all give the same codes or similar when inserted, they all have similar antenna shapes, they all have two dimples in the bottom of the antenna where one dimple has a bump from the injection molder.
Now, the only difference I can see on the BOX between the old and the new ones is that the new ones mention Windows XP. So, can it be that MS would only support chipsets with proprietary specs? It sure looks that way. I really can't understand why multiple vendors would completely change the card and keep the same model number. This makes no sense. I think it's as simple as not supporting linux compatible hardware in each release of windows. Not so far fetched, how many product boxes do you see that even MENTION linux? You're not gonna get that 'designed for windows XP' logo if you don't do as you're told.
Now, the older cards work just fine, I have a prism card and it's great. Problem is I only have one, which serves no purpose at all. ALso, aparantly the Netgear card DOES work, but not well, under linux, and Cisco's Aironets are supposed to work fine, though they cost twice as much and I'll gladly pay, but I have yet to find a retail channel for these (help)
So I've bought six different types of cards ranging in price from $49 to $79 and they are ALL broadcom products. You can see the similarities in the physical construction of the card as soon as you take it out of the box. Slight differences in antenna shape, but always with the broadcommy squareness.
Also, you can order parts real cheap and configure them to put out a carrier on any frequency you want, so this really sounds like baloney. Not that it isn't the reason they're giving, but it isn't the reason. We're talking about less than 0.1 watt here. If the military doesn't like the signal they can just move to the livingroom. Seems to block it just fine from my experience.
So I have an awesome little laptop robot and I can only control it from windows or mac and I have another one that I haven't even bothered with because I can't operate them at the same time.
You're absolutely right. These are not robots, they're cool cars.
I have to correct you on the SRL thing though. Most SRL machines are remote control, which technically makes them 'puppets.' (I don't think they'd like to hear that)
However, SRL is a big group of people and they have had many different true robots.
My favorite was a bunch of robots about the size of garbage cans that knew each other's locations and moved in a swarming pattern. They were covered with rotting meat, and they made the audience puke!
They have others too. They're usually the smaller ones that get smashed by the big ones. I think it's reasonable that the largest, most destructive machines are not autonomous though! That could get ugly pretty quick.
Incidently I once asked Mark Pauline (whom I don't know very well) about computer controlled hydraulics. He said it's technically straightforward, but it's a very bad idea. He said 'you're talking about a situation where a bug in your code causes someone to get hit in the head with 500 pounds of metal.'
This guy practically invented danger. He's got a firing range in his BATHROOM. If he gives you safety advice, you LISTEN!!!
Too bad, there were TONS of women competing at the event. It may have been close to even. The defending champ was a lady. I personally know at least four women who competed.
This rules. It was a great day, and not only sfgate, but SLASHDOT? I'm shocked!
Although the whole place was packed with robot people these weren't really robots. It was awesome, and Jim Mason's fire extinguisher rocket broke 100mph at the end of the track. He builds the giant fire cannons for burningman. He's brilliant but he smells awful.
Kimric Smythe (who's in SRL and runs an accordion shop and gallery in Oakland) made a propane jet powered vacuum cleaner. It made a HUGE flame but went nowhere. He got 'most pathetic engineering'. It looked incredibly cool but he burned the hell out of some photographer's leg and there was some skin falling off.. In addition to incinerating the track...
Remember the name of that junkyard, kids! It's the most wonderful place around. All your favorite robot parts, and all the obsolete computers you can crush with a forklift! A few weeks back there was a whole PDP-11. You can get dual 133 pentiums, apple ][e's, there was an Osbourne once. I got a magnatherm, a big medical thing that they used to use to microwave your body parts for therapudic reasons before they found out that was... um... Bad... It's got nixies and a built-in O-scope! Lights up a bulb with no cord. You can put a bag of popcorn on one of the paddles and it will make microwave popcorn right there in the middle of the room. I'm pretty sure it's illegal.
Anyway, if you're into geek stuff you need to crawl around that place for a while. It's greasy geek heaven. Stay away from the old army crane, it's kinda radioactive. Don't pet the hairless squirrels. They're not nice.
=mortimer
(First my job, then my favorite junkyard and the technology art group I'm a member of (q-box) have been slashdotted. I feel shiny.)
This article in the NY times is one of the best things I've seen on the subject, so I had to pass it along.
It's true that it is very hard to find an alternative viewpoint in the media in this country, and surprising when the press is so profit-driven. This is the best explanation of this problem that I've seen so far, and suggests that it is this very profit motive that causes large media companies in the US to take the side of the party in power.
This article in the NY times is one of the best things I've seen on the subject, so I have to pass it along.
It's true that it is very hard to find an alternative viewpoint in the media in this country, and surprising when the press is so profit-driven. This is the best explanation of this problem that I've seen so far, and suggests that it is this very profit motive that causes large media companies to take the side of the party in power.
Or maybe a choice of f-tp, or perhaps tf-tp if you're sensitive....
(Actually, I'm quite impressed that they're doing this. It's a taboo that needs to be broken. There is plenty of freedom to innovate in this area! Good for them!)
Slashdot Mirror
But the specific examples given are a reach! An 'internet' at that time could have just as easily pushed it the other way too.
I've always been fascinated by this, WW2 broke out while industrial technology was very high in comparison to the information and media technology of the time.
IT was so low that the average person could be convinced that the other side were inhuman monsters, but industrial technology was good enough for us to bomb each other fairly easily.
In the case of WW2 the problem fixed itself in an odd way. The technology leaps that resulted from the war resulted in Television and jet travel, allowing information exchange and cultural awareness that was lacking when it started. Populations that had previously been scared with made-up xenophobic propaganda started listening to each other's music and watching each other's monster movies! It became easier to make war, and harder to convince an informed population to do it.
I have a 1938 radio and a 1948 television. If you look inside them the technology difference is mind-blowing. The tech leap during the war was incredible. Technology never progressed that fast before in history, and would not again until the computer industry came along and Moore's law kicked in.
So the internet may not have prevented Hitler, but his monsterous actions definitely helped set the stage for its development.
=Rich
Of course there are the obvious TSA stories, but I think the more common stuff may actually be worse.
Working as a contractor for a giant Electronics retailer that shall remain nameless, I saw a memo regarding their policy of searching people's bags as they left, and sometimes entered, the stores.
The public reason given for searching those who left the store was, of course, loss of merchandise. The public reason given for searching those entering was safety...
However the REAL reason for both of these, was to (paraphrasing from memory) 'Establish [company name] as the authority figure in the sales transaction and subsequent customer service encounters...'
Yikes! 'We're in charge here, we've got big scary minimum-wage thugs, You'd better Buy as we say!'
Now if that's not 'Security Theatre' at it's worst, I don't know what is....
=R
This is an ancient security problem, spoofing the card response is pretty trivial. You can hear it on a Shady O'Rack shortwave radio. I showed this to an employer who was installing the cards, and they went ahead and installed them anyway.
The thing is, you don't even need the hardware. All you need is a reader to read the number of the card, which you can do through a pocket, and get the 36 bit number. Then you can just ORDER a card or keyfob on line! You can't do that with a brass key, a legit locksmith won't sell it to you unless you have the original.
But a prox card is not a brass key. It is MUCH EASIER to get into a prox building than a brass key building!
Stopping the talk does *NOT* solve the problem. HID and their parent company, Assa Abloy, are fleecing their shareholders by sweeping this under the rug. They have to solve it before it puts them out of business.
When this eventually hits the mainstream media, and their stock goes to hell, their shareholders will have a good case, assuming there's anything left to take.
In fairness, it's part of a compatibility chain that goes back before microcontrollers. 'Weigand' cards allowed digital swipe cards that had no internal microcontroller in the card, or the reader. This was huge back before microcontrollers were affordable. It was also very hard to fake a weigand card. HID prox cards descended from these and maintained compatibility with the old systems. Most of their readers still support weigand and can replace the old readers.
It is time for them to break the chain and only offer challenge/response products from now on. The world has grown up, and anything less is not responsible. Also, when the story breaks they can say 'Oh, those are our old, discontinued products.' and turn it into a sales opportunity.
=Rich
Anyone who's played with robots, or just programmed anything for that matter, knows that things don't always go the way you planned... My latest project recently emptied five cans of spraypaint into the air while I desperately tried to unplug the battery... Hey, I found a bug!
I would like to know what their safety procedures are like. This goes against everything I know about gun safety. It's also very scary because anyone can do it! We may have a sad period in home robotics where peoples ability to build things gets ahead of their understanding of control systems safety.
Will this lead to laws regulating robots?
=R
Most of the ones I've tried have worked fine, whether I needed them or not. I have noticed though that OSS drivers were flakey.
PlanetCCRMA simplifies ALSA installation and configuration on Redhat and Fedora. It's worked with all the on-board sound cards I've run across, which surprised me. Works great with most cards.
The only ones that seem to stink are the ones targetted to gamers, with lots of explosions and bikini babes on the box. I've tested these and they tend to suck for various reasons, locked sample rate, very noisy, etc... The less expensive ones are actually better.
See the ALSA sound card matrix before you buy.
=R
This is my old neighborhood, about five houses away. I used to walk by it every day with the dog. I never had the guts to run up and take a look through it...
It's made with lots of common stuff including tractor parts and other farm equipment, and alot of cinder blocks. The story goes that they wanted to put it in a museum but at the time Tombaugh was still using it on a regular basis. It's commonly known around the area that although CT discovered pluto and used the telescope right up until he died, it was NOT the telescope he used to discover pluto.
It's not actually in Las Cruces, it's in Mesilla Park, across the tracks from Las Cruces. It's just a few blocks from Clyde Tombaugh elementary school.
Not a bad item to own if you've got the space, and it would be better than where it is, which is mostly under trees.
=R
Musical computing is what I do now, at this place, and it's definitely true that computers are not musical enough.
First, the computer is theoretically a completely general tool, but the ones we use come packaged as an office tool. Using them for other purposes generally requires alot of work against this, even in our favorite operating systems. (though FAR less so)
The next problem is computer hardware. It's quite a daunting task in most cases to connect a keyboard or other controller to a computer. It has to be easy for non-geeks. (USB makes this much better than it has been.) In addition, the vast majority of low-end keyboards are awful. They usually have undersize keys, and almost never have velocity, which both become a problem once you move beyond 'mary had a little lamb'.
Creative makes a keyboard that is integrated into the qwerty keyboard. I think this is a fantastic idea. However, the same problems apply, undersize keys (they can be shorter, but they must be wide enough) proprietary, or at least nonstandard drivers, and very cheap construction. It is basically unusable, if they're wondering why it's not selling. Great idea though.
It is a travesty that all 'toy' musical instruments for children are really unplayable. What are we doing to our kids! Even the adult ones under $300 all lack velocity, and often have cheap keys that 'bounce.'
Using the qwerty keyboard as an instrument is not a bad idea. It is fundamentally different from typing. As an adult student of piano I thought my keyboard use as a geek would help. Maybe a little, but one key difference is that key hits when typing are INTERLEAVED, hence we get letters in order. Musical key hits are SYNCRONIZED, you often hit several keys at once. Learning the difference can be tough at first.
It does allow monoponic (one sound at a time) playing, and for that it's pretty neat. Many synth packages already do this, but the feature's not intended to be useful outside of testing. The PC keyboard sends key down and key up messages, so it may be possible to have polyphony (multiple sounds at once and chords) on keyboards whose internal multiplexing doesn't prevent it. Libraries intended for text keyboard use won't work for this.
Learning the piano I also realize that all those hours mastering Bruce Lee on the c64 when I was 13 were exactly the time when my brain could have been mastering music. The idea that you can't learn later is a myth. You learn differently. But the willingness, and the ability, to sit there for 6 to 8 hours a day trying to master something happens when you're young. (Luckily I did this with electronics and computers, so I'm now employed!)
Computers make GREAT musical instruments, and allow music to be made in most of the old ways and many completely new ways. Of course it's up to the musician to use them to make GOOD music.
The computer and toy industries have to start making products that are really useful to normally skilled people in normal situations, which are neither too technical or so stripped down as to be useless. Also, there need to be more musical games, which teach fundamentals, and are also fun. The only reason why the techological revolution isn't also a musical one is that we just haven't bothered. There's an instrument in every home and classroom now, and if we aren't cheap and lazy about it, they would be useful.
This is an interesting trend.
If you buy something at a store in cash, the can put those 'by opening this you agree' contracts on them, but those don't mean much and they still can't identify you.
By making you get an update they can collect information on you, which has dollar value, and more importantly, get you to click and EULA on the firmware which extends to other things as well as saying that it can be ammended at any time and remain binding.
This is creeping into everything. I just sent away for my credit reports today. If you get your credit report from a credit agency through the web, they make you click an agreement which covers all sorts of things in addition to making you waive certain rights under the FCRA in some cases, as well as asking for all sorts of information in order to give it to you which is not required. If you send for it by mail, you only have to give the information required by law and you waive no rights.
If you make enough noise, you can probably get them to send you the update in the mail, but you still must identify yourself to them and the effort is not worth it.
The article doesn't mention it, but it's not about time to market, or cutting corners or anything. They want to 1) identify the customer 2) get them to enter into some sort of agreement.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to collect personally identifiable information online on children under 13. Most sites won't collect information on children under 13 as a result, or will simply block access when a child states their actual age. (As if they won't try again.)
But Real Media has a new idea. They simply have made it IMPOSSIBLE to tell them that you're under 13. The form doesn't go that low!
RealPlayer is definitely an awful product to deal with for many reasons. It's spyware, adware, and it is so tough even for an expert to remove all the things it slips into your machine that it's better just to reinstall.
Each and every aspect of this company and its products just send the same message to the customer: We are scummy, scummy, SCUMMY!
But this age thing makes it look like they put being scummy and skirting the law even above profit, because it's not even getting them anything! Can this really make them enough to be worth it?
More people should be willing to come out and say when a company is plainly unethical. Thanks Click and Clack!
The idea that the merchant doesn't have to touch the card makes it pretty unlikely that they'll check the id and the signature of the buyer, so this encourages fraud. It should at least require a PIN.
Also, there is no way for the customer to control access to the card. My sister recently picked me up at Kennedy airport, and as she was holding the parking fee money out the window, the attendant charged the fee to her EZpass because he was too lazy to look up. There wasn't enough room on the pass so she got hit with a penalty. He wouldn't even look up from his paper when she complained.
So you'll have to keep your card in a metalic wallet, because the lack of physical contact means you can't really control when it's accessed.
It's interesting that I can build a wand and get someone's information off the license in their pocket. Now you could potentially get their credit card number too.
It may be slightly faster, but beyond that I don't see how it's better for the consumer or the business.
Well, so far Dell, HP, and generic. All coils will have some magnetic vibration, and all capacitors have some electrostatic vibration, with a rapidly changing signal. We've got some EE profs here and it seems that this noise can be greatly reduced but not eliminated. It really is very faint anyway.
If you reduce the ambient noise enough, you can hear all kinds of things. Even LCD panels make noise, especially if they're fluorescent. There's a point where you have to say, good enough!
I read an interesting article where these automotive engineers worked for months to eliminate every source of noise they could from the inside of their prototype car. The engine was inaudible, the fans, silent. Wind noise was reduced as far as possible.
When they had someone test the car, his first question was, "Why are the tires so loud?"
=mortimer
I work in a computer music and acoustics research lab and we're always after a quieter PC. We've considered a solutions like this, but we've decided it wouldn't really be necessary for long. Here's why.
Among the many reasons for having a hard drive in every computer, two of the big ones were the Microsoft vision statement, and the fact that the network was much slower than disk. The latter is no longer the case.
The fact that network is now faster than local disk is a MAJOR development.
We've experimented with RedHat 9 with nfs root on older hardware with no disk and no fans, with 100Mb bootable NICs. We found to our surprise that they ran faster than with standard (non UDMA) ide. So, we're trying it now with newer hardware and gigabit, and some BIG heatsinks. So far, so good. We can optimize the central storage for speed, and the systems do, in fact, run noticeably faster in most cases, in addition to being nearly* silent.
We hadn't counted on the added bonuses, but there are many. We can change an entire system disk by moving dirs, reexporting, and booting the machine up. Poof, new system. We can install and uninstall packages on machines while they're off! We no longer have two or three extra gigs on each machine, all our nfsroots are from a single physical filesystem (so far) so they all have the same amount of free space, much more efficient! And if a machine offends you, you can yank the plug out. No local fsck!
*Note that the machine is never truly silent. Without any fans or disks, you can still hear a certain noise that sounds like it's happening when the disk used to seek. It's the toroids in the power supply! The network traffic causes HF noise in the power lines, which is filtered in the power supply and causes the chokes to vibrate slightly. The noise is very low, it would easily be drowned out by the quietest of fans, but in a totally silent room with no other PC sound, it's quite audible. There is also some low and infrequent clicking while the machine is warming up and cooling down, due to the thermal expansion of the heat sinks. This doesn't happen during use, when the temperature is more or less constant.
I'm supposed to document all this and I've been lazy, so if you want the rundown on booting redhat 9 without a hard drive, write to my spare address (snotius@hotmail.com) and I'll finish the page and send you the link.
=mortimer
I saw this post in the morning and knowing I'd be down that way, I went!
I expected it to be interesting. It was much more interesting than I thought. There were some items there that were amazing historical objects.
Lisas, PDP-11s, a restored PDP-5, the orinal Xerox machines with the first GUI, and a great collection of every PDA going back into history.
That was just the Vintage Computer Festival. Then, there was the museum!
The Computer History Museum is just incredible. It HAS to be seen. It's really great that they're doing this, it won't be until after we're all dead that people realize how absolutely important this history is. They're still trying to get it off the ground, so help 'em out any way you can, even if it's just going and bringing all your friends.
The collection goes back through all types of calculating tools, but if you just look at the items from the last fifty years, it's as if you're looking at a thousands of years of human achievement. The pace of change is so far accellerated in computers as compared to most other forms of technology that we're losing very important history.
It goes through a cycle where it's useful, then it's junk, then it's nostalgic junk, and eventually it's recognized as historically important. Most items are discarded long before that. The items are extemely rare now. Many others have already been lost forever. There is a real risk that we could lose this history before its importance is widely recognized. There's still so much out there, and it's going fast.
If you're nearby or if you're vising the bay area you should really go see it.
=Rich
IBM argues in the counterclaims that SCO is prohibited from treating any code it distributed under the GPL as proprietary, and that its current plan to require payment from Linux users isn't legal.
Why, oh why, don't they seek an injunction against SCO contacting organizations and demanding royalties while this is pending? This is a no-brainer. They have alot more than they need!
I'm not in the UK, so I can't tell my story there, but spam has ruined my life!
First of all, it's almost impossible to answer all of it! But that's just the beginning of the problem.
At first, I thought it was great. I got tons of credit, a new mortgage at 0%, and a fat check from some guy in Nigeria. But now my 'manhood' and my wife's breasts are so huge that neither of us can move or even feed ourselves.
If we didn't have the army of hot teenage sluts to take care of us, we'd be dead by now.
I hope they will put an end to spam before any more innocent people suffer this horrible fate.
It's very simple. It's a layoff.
They wouldn't do this just to complete a project, it isn't going to speed it up. They know that. It's just a brutal way of deciding who stays.
The chumps. Quit.
Yes this is really neat. It's a great project. You will rarely save money with this approach, but it's no reason not to try it.
The most important reason is that you are learning to use the parts by example which is really cool. You get the benefit of the hard work of the designers and testers. When you start from scratch with a new part, even with all the specs and theory it sometimes takes a few tries to get it right.
I spend as much time as I can building stuff out of junk because it is what I love. Over the years I've figured out that some cool stuff isn't worth the salvage labor. You can get it another way and it will work better, especially when it's a newer surface-mount, multi-layer board. You really have to weigh the alternatives carefully.
However, you definitely do well when you find boards with parts in sockets and things like that. Old ISA cards and very old motherboards are a great source of unpluggable parts. Most of them have serial eeproms like 9346's, you can get 8051 and 6811 microcontrollers off old modems just by popping them out, UV eproms and eeproms to make your NIC bootable, and if you're lucky you can find an ANCIENT card covered in sockets full of 74xx logic chips of all kinds.
Sadly, the newer things are the less you can do with them. Newer toys, electronics, and computers are becoming so cheap and highly integrated that it's getting really hard to do anything interesting with them. The speak'n'spell was completely hackable. Today's toys just have a transistor and a tiny chip under a drop of epoxy. No label or anything.
It's good to see people are keeping it alive, and not letting the multilayer surface mount stuff slow them down!
I have been buying 802.11 cards like crazy trying to find one that will work well with Linux for mobile self-propelled linux boxes.
WHat I have found is that almost all the new cards out there, brand name, no name, etc, are based on the broadcom chip, for which there is no driver.
Now it's true that there are wierd FCC rules, such as the one that the antenna connectors must be proprietary, as if that makes a difference, but that doesn't explain certain things.
For instance, the SMC, Siemens, and Linksys cards all USED to work. The new cards from these vendors, such as the Linksys WPC11, don't work, but have the SAME MODEL NUMBER even though they are entirely different cards. They all give the same codes or similar when inserted, they all have similar antenna shapes, they all have two dimples in the bottom of the antenna where one dimple has a bump from the injection molder.
Now, the only difference I can see on the BOX between the old and the new ones is that the new ones mention Windows XP. So, can it be that MS would only support chipsets with proprietary specs? It sure looks that way. I really can't understand why multiple vendors would completely change the card and keep the same model number. This makes no sense. I think it's as simple as not supporting linux compatible hardware in each release of windows. Not so far fetched, how many product boxes do you see that even MENTION linux? You're not gonna get that 'designed for windows XP' logo if you don't do as you're told.
Now, the older cards work just fine, I have a prism card and it's great. Problem is I only have one, which serves no purpose at all. ALso, aparantly the Netgear card DOES work, but not well, under linux, and Cisco's Aironets are supposed to work fine, though they cost twice as much and I'll gladly pay, but I have yet to find a retail channel for these (help)
So I've bought six different types of cards ranging in price from $49 to $79 and they are ALL broadcom products. You can see the similarities in the physical construction of the card as soon as you take it out of the box. Slight differences in antenna shape, but always with the broadcommy squareness.
Also, you can order parts real cheap and configure them to put out a carrier on any frequency you want, so this really sounds like baloney. Not that it isn't the reason they're giving, but it isn't the reason. We're talking about less than 0.1 watt here. If the military doesn't like the signal they can just move to the livingroom. Seems to block it just fine from my experience.
So I have an awesome little laptop robot and I can only control it from windows or mac and I have another one that I haven't even bothered with because I can't operate them at the same time.
I don't feel very free to innovate.
You're absolutely right. These are not robots, they're cool cars.
I have to correct you on the SRL thing though. Most SRL machines are remote control, which technically makes them 'puppets.' (I don't think they'd like to hear that)
However, SRL is a big group of people and they have had many different true robots.
My favorite was a bunch of robots about the size of garbage cans that knew each other's locations and moved in a swarming pattern. They were covered with rotting meat, and they made the audience puke!
They have others too. They're usually the smaller ones that get smashed by the big ones. I think it's reasonable that the largest, most destructive machines are not autonomous though! That could get ugly pretty quick.
Incidently I once asked Mark Pauline (whom I don't know very well) about computer controlled hydraulics. He said it's technically straightforward, but it's a very bad idea. He said 'you're talking about a situation where a bug in your code causes someone to get hit in the head with 500 pounds of metal.'
This guy practically invented danger. He's got a firing range in his BATHROOM. If he gives you safety advice, you LISTEN!!!
Too bad, there were TONS of women competing at the event. It may have been close to even. The defending champ was a lady. I personally know at least four women who competed.
This rules. It was a great day, and not only sfgate, but SLASHDOT? I'm shocked!
Although the whole place was packed with robot people these weren't really robots. It was awesome, and Jim Mason's fire extinguisher rocket broke 100mph at the end of the track. He builds the giant fire cannons for burningman. He's brilliant but he smells awful.
Kimric Smythe (who's in SRL and runs an accordion shop and gallery in Oakland) made a propane jet powered vacuum cleaner. It made a HUGE flame but went nowhere. He got 'most pathetic engineering'. It looked incredibly cool but he burned the hell out of some photographer's leg and there was some skin falling off.. In addition to incinerating the track...
Remember the name of that junkyard, kids! It's the most wonderful place around. All your favorite robot parts, and all the obsolete computers you can crush with a forklift! A few weeks back there was a whole PDP-11. You can get dual 133 pentiums, apple ][e's, there was an Osbourne once. I got a magnatherm, a big medical thing that they used to use to microwave your body parts for therapudic reasons before they found out that was... um... Bad... It's got nixies and a built-in O-scope! Lights up a bulb with no cord. You can put a bag of popcorn on one of the paddles and it will make microwave popcorn right there in the middle of the room. I'm pretty sure it's illegal.
Anyway, if you're into geek stuff you need to crawl around that place for a while. It's greasy geek heaven. Stay away from the old army crane, it's kinda radioactive. Don't pet the hairless squirrels. They're not nice.
=mortimer
(First my job, then my favorite junkyard and the technology art group I'm a member of (q-box) have been slashdotted. I feel shiny.)
This article in the NY times is one of the best things I've seen on the subject, so I had to pass it along.
It's true that it is very hard to find an alternative viewpoint in the media in this country, and surprising when the press is so profit-driven. This is the best explanation of this problem that I've seen so far, and suggests that it is this very profit motive that causes large media companies in the US to take the side of the party in power.
Very interesting and important.
(previous submission accidental)
This article in the NY times is one of the best things I've seen on the subject, so I have to pass it along.
It's true that it is very hard to find an alternative viewpoint in the media in this country, and surprising when the press is so profit-driven. This is the best explanation of this problem that I've seen so far, and suggests that it is this very profit motive that causes large media companies to take the side of the party in power.
They're just trying to keep up with apple...
Here's the competition...
Or maybe a choice of f-tp, or perhaps tf-tp if you're sensitive....
(Actually, I'm quite impressed that they're doing this. It's a taboo that needs to be broken. There is plenty of freedom to innovate in this area! Good for them!)