Yeah, I had to refer to http://www.strata.com/support/3dmanual/ch13/ch13_7 .html for the NTSC/PAL numbers... but every source I've looked at for those resolutions numbers always seem to be different. I guess the D-1 PAL is more common, with 576 scan lines. Probably some interesting history behind how most of the world got the higher resolution, slightly lower framerate PAL std instead of NTSC.
Haven't come across a 1440x900 LCD panel yet, but I'm sure they exist. If you do the math, it comes out to 16:10, though (unless the pixels ain't square for some reason). Anyway, it's pretty frustrating that we haven't reached digital convergence yet between common HDTV and computer formats & displays yet. But I guess that would make them too cheap:P
There are very, very few useful summaries. Try starting with this synopsis
Cheat-sheet of the some of the basic lingo I found frustrating:
Formats:
p = "progressive scan"
good
i = "interlaced"
bad, unless the jittering doesn't bother you and you need to watch fast motion (e.g. watching sports while drunk or on caffiene high - probably rules out most geeks right there)
1080p60
1920x1080 progressive at 60 frames per second - this should be the sweet spot for playback on a 24" high-res widescreen active-matrix LCD computer monitor - possibly the/only/ device with a high enough native resolution and refresh rate. All other displays I've seen (plasmas, TFT LCDs, digital projectors typically sold as "HD" sets) typically have a native resolution of max 1366x768, and resort to rescaling. However, this format takes twice as much bandwidth as any of the next three formats, so hardly any equipment supports it at the moment.
1080i60
1920x1080 interlaced at 60 frames per second. One of the HDTV specs.
1080p30
1920x1080 progressive at 30 frames per second - takes the same bandwidth as the above without jittering
720p60
1280x720 progressive, the other HDTV spec
720p24
1280x720 progressive at 24 frames per second - used on some HD DVDs
480p
720x480 progressive ED: Enhanced definition TV - used by most DVDs
480i
720x480 interlaced SD: Standard definition, supported by most DV equipment using firewire, SVideo, or composite interconnects. For anything above this, you need to use the analog YPbPr component output or some type of digital DVI / HDMI interconnect. HDMI differs from DVI in that it includes audio and a copy protection flag. There's another
NTSC
648x486 i30 US TV format
PAL
720x486 i25 Europe TV format
4:3
Normal "Square" aspect ratio
16:9
Widescreen aspect ratio
Interconnects:
Digital:
HD-SDI : High def serial digital interconnect
Mostly for video editing equipment, carrying video and multiple audio channels. Typically a single high-bandwidth BNC connection
SDI : serial digital interconnect
carries SD video, similar to DV carried over firewire
HDMI
compact digital interconnect, also carries digital audio channels. Also encumbered by copy protection flag
DVI
Many forms of this, single-link (up to 1920x1200), dual-link (twice the pins for higher res displays, like Apple cinema display), DVI-I (can also carry analog signals). DVI-D tends to be the most common nowadays... the analog pins could make things confusing.
Analog:
RGBHV
5 BNC connectors carrying separate channels for red, green, blue, horizontal, and vertical sync. Used by most computers via the more common HD15 interconnect (which also includes some data pins to allow the monitor and video card to exchange DDC informtion)
RGBCs
4 BNC connectors - H and V are put on one Composite sync line
RGsB
3 BNC connectors - the Green channel carries the composite sync signal, used on older *NIX workstations
Component YPbPr
3 BNC or RCA connectors carrying luminance & composite sync, luminance - blue, and luminance - red.
SVideo
the little 4-pin round connector, usually carries Y/C (luminance & chrominance) channels. Should be able to support a maximum resolution of 800x600.
Composite video
Single BNC or RCA connector
It's amazing how seldom things match up with computer components:
16:10
Widescreen aspect ratio used by most LCD computer monitors
4:3
Aspect ratio used by mo
*** Disclaimer *** I work for a major defence contractor that sells Sats and stuff
The Air Force had always launched and maintained most of the military communication satellites. These uplinks usually form the trunk of deployed military networks... after all, it wouldn't be too convenient for the Army to subscribe to the nearest middle east DSL line or for the Navy to spool thousands of miles worth of fiber behind a flotilla. So most of what the military considers the "network" is this wireless communications system, which needs to be heavily secured, defended, etc.
One of the first things the Air Force is responsible for during an invasion is to take out the enemy's command and control infrastructure - destroying their radar, microwave tranceivers, satcomm, and other network and surveillance equipment. Whether this is done using bombs/missiles, jamming equipment, or perhaps some kind of network attack/exploit, I suppose you could agree that the latter modes could be less destructive and more subtle in terms of offering you counterintelligence options ("no, the invading force is actually over *here*". And the less infrastructure you physically destroy, the less you have to rebuild later, I guess.
While some of this might be carried on over the internet, I imagine the vast majority would occur over isolated military intranets.
I'd be pretty surprised if Air Force honeynets and botnets start duking it out with the supposed North Korean hacker army over the normal internet we know and love, playing a game of cat 'n' mouse over the tattered remains of a compromised IIS server... though I wonder who/would/ be doing that kind of thing, among the NSA, CIA, or maybe even the FBI at first.
Stop fooling yourself thinking that spending hours tweaking everything will save time. Just admit that you like tweaking:P
I'll echo the "Use WindowMaker" mantra. The only reason I'm running Gnome now is for the little graphical workspace switcher. I'm still upset that the window thumbnails don't dynamically update their contents anymore like Enlightenment or even older versions of Gnome.
I usually configure my window managers to use Meta + various mouse keys to move/resize windows. Gnome's Metacity does not allow you to move the window title above the top of the screen - very annoying when you want to put, say, a web browser's various rows of buttons off-screen so you can fit more precious content onto your screen (more so than you could get with using the full screen view, which isn't available for all apps). Window Maker does the right thing, and allows you to move the window off the top of the screen (but only if you use the Meta-click technique, so the titlebar only disappears if you prove that you know how to move the window back without it).
I also configure focus-follows-mouse, and disable raise-on-click. This allows me to organize my workspace and have more control, say, copying and pasting stuff between windows without the "behind" window popping to the foreground unless I tell it to (by Meta-clicking on it or clicking on the titlebar/frame).
Configure a larger virtual desktop in the Xorg.conf if you really want more scrollable space. I imagine this would be more complicated with your dual-monitor setup, though... maybe you just want to add a few pixels to the top of each screen. I trust that you've read and configured the extra Xorg directives that came with your Nvidia / ATi drivers to optimize your Xorg.conf already.
Also useful to configure some means of "pushing" windows back, usually by middle-clicking on the titlebar/frame or Meta-down.
I've heavily configured gkrellm - it works great as an app launcher that works under any window manager, in addition to doing all of its normal monitoring. It can really give you a good feeling for what your computer is doing, when it's finished downloading or compiling or transferring to USB drives, how well your RAID throughput is behaving, etc From the default, I usually tweak it to use a better theme (the default wastes a few columns of pixels on the sides!), show system CPU time and network TX / disk writes as inverted, and of course set it to sticky so it's always in its corner when I switch virtual desktops.
Learn to use gnu screen. It's indispensible for managing multiple consoles. I usually start mine as "screen -e ^Zz", since I use Ctrl-a quite more often than Ctrl-z... what a silly default.
Give the Galeon web browser a serious try. It has much better tab management than Mozilla, even with Mozilla's tabextensions plugin. Plus, it remembers the last tab state after crashes by default... why isn't that a standard Mozilla feature yet??!
Check out Hotkeys for making use of those extra multimedia button keys on your keyboard for launching apps.
Does anyone know of a mechanism for launching apps using keystrokes like Win-e for explorer.exe under MS windows? Best I could do outside of mapping "extra" keys with hotkey is to map the Super key to gnome's "Run command" dialog and then type in the app... weak.
Well, it's all water under the bridge now... what he does need is a new name for his product, right? I vote for the subject... in that it still alludes to "that Redmond OS" and how he improves upon it. Any others?
I have one of the Washington DC Metro Smartcards used to operate their turnstiles. Since I keep it in my wallet and sit on it most of the time, the internal circuitry got a bit damaged. It now only works if I twist the card slightly while holding it over the sensor.
But this just goes on to highlight the fact that it shouldn't be too hard to simply put an off switch on RFID, so it's only activated if you, say, short an exposed terminal on the card/passport. Shouldn't be too hard to grow a mod community around a feature like this...
You might be able to partition your work in these three ways with most modern software. But ideally you'd want three computers within easy reach.
Development would be your main beefy machine... the one you'd likely do most of your work/coding under and have fully tricked out. You might also end up breaking it occasionally because some stupidly packaged OS-level library update.
Test would be a machine you could tear down and build up / reimage cleanly from scratch to make sure your installation instructions work. Mostly to make sure that you didn't forget to include some obscure dependency that you have stashed away somewhere on your development machine. Depending on your comfort level and whether you use Development or Production as your primary machine, you might get away with having Development and Test be the same box.
Production would be the machine that you're not allowed to do new stuff to until you've made sure that nothing broke when you did it to Test. This would be a good machine to demo the last working state of your software one, plus run various servers (email, database, etc.) that don't change often. Think of it as the machine you would do your email correspondence & timecard on... If your company has a competent IT staff, this machine might not even be maintained by you.
Anyway, some hopelessly process-based engineering advice.
Everyone pretty much had a tall fence and metal gates around their property. Most were easy to climb, though others were lined with spikes or broken glass on top. Everyone had at least 2 dogs roaming their property, usually 3 or 4. So if you were known to the family and the dogs, you could pretty much walk in and make yourself comfortable, while every other visitor would get a loud welcome.
Since my international school schedule was often out of sync with my Thai cousins' schedules, I'd spend a lot of time with their dogs. These dogs were quite different from American dogs, in that they were only marginally domesticated to respect their owners. Since they had plenty of other dogs in their household, the retained a lot of the wolf-pack mentality.
Anyway, dogs can be poisoned, gates can be scaled, and locks can be defeated. As far as crime was concerned (and I think this is still true in several third world countries) anything is pretty much fair game for thieves unless you actually have an armed guard there protecting your property or neighborhood. Since live-in guards / housekeepers are quite affordable, that's the route many people pretty much take.
So for a Southeast Asian to come here, it's kind of strange to walk into a house and have no one to greet you and let you in, since most of the houses back east basically came occupied full-time.
That's probably just to obscure the fact that they likely still haven't placed anti-aircraft missile batteries up there, like everyone assumes they have since 9/11.
You can still look at fairly high resolution pics of the roof of the White House from older 1988 USGS aerial photo data. Same thing with the blurred-out capitol buildings. Interestingly, the roof of the Pentagon is there in all its glory, albeit they obviously pasted in a DoD-reviewed patch of footage (it's pretty easy to see the seams).
Verizon has this deal with the Metro board (the org that runs the DC subway) for "exclusivity" rights since 1993 or so. The original 8 year deal was supposed to give Metro an $8 million emergency backup communications system. But they renewed the agreement for, like 16 years, for pretty much nothing compared to what other places like NYC's Port Authority gets for allowing telecoms to run cells in the Lincoln tunnel and such.
So basically, if you live and work in DC and take the Metro, Verizon's the only cell service that would work in most of the underground stations.
This was on the Washington Post a week or so ago on their 4-part series grilling Metro... I'd dig up the link, but it's already too far back on their search engine:P
Extended warranty! How can I lose?! (that episode where he becomes very smart... until he decides to go back to normal)
Take a look at some midrange digital cameras that have good video clip & audio recording. Oftentimes you can even do some minor editing and trimming on the spot.
I've pretty much stopped taking my miniDV camcorder anywhere since I got a new digicam. My Canon Powershot A85 camera can record quite a bit of low res video and audio on a 60x 1GB CF. It can only do 640x480 at 15fps for about 30 seconds, but I'm sure there are cameras out that can go indefinitely at a decent resolution and frame rate nowadays. The quality is only marginally worse than my Samsung SCD27 camcorder, since the miniDV has pretty bad interlacing artifacts after I import it onto a computer.
It's just so much easier to carry the camera around in my pocket and whip it out to grab shorts within a second or so. The miniDV would just take too long to boot up, so I'd miss all of the moments from the kids while waiting 5-10 seconds for it to warm up and focus.
Sometimes I can even be bothered to carry a mini tripod around... I picked up a Slik Mini-Pro V after hearing some good reviews about its predecessors. It's pretty much a full pan/tilt mount, and it even sticks to windows!
If you already carry a laptop around and can keep it with someone you trust during recording, the USB2.0 logitech quickcam 4000 series might be a good option, and opens the door to doing stuff like wifi webcasts and stuff too at a fairly decent quality.
Anyway, that's the extent of my highly amateur recording experience:P
Ugh... "smooth" scrolling mousewheels suck
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 1
I bought the MS wireless mouse a few months ago. I could not get used to the lack of tactile feedback on mouse scrollwheel. This makes it next to useless in games, where flicking it back and forth the wrong amount would give you the handknife instead of the rocket launcher. In other apps, the consequences aren't quite as bad, but I still want to be able to consistently advance pages by "3 clicks", or consistent zoom from 100% to 50%, etc.
This mouse lives in a drawer now. Maybe I'll drag it out someday when that "smooth" extra axis might be marginally useful for VRML and X3D or something. But I just use a plain MS 5-button USB scroll mouse now.
So I went to the extra trouble of installing recent builds of GPE and OPIE (based on Familiar 0.8) on an iPaq h5450 I got from work. I ran Minimo under GPE, but didn't find it all that useful. It didn't even have bookmarks, so I'd have to type in my sites by hand each time. The konqueror-based browser under opie was much nicer.
I got my greatest kick from installing a 1GB CF card in it and running debian-ARM off of it using chroot. I could run mozilla on a 640x480 vnc virtual framebuffer, displayed using OPIE's nice VNC client keypebble in 1/2 scale full screen mode. It was readable, fully functional (albeit a bit slow) and the scrollbars were a nice small size (I don't know why all of the programs in GPE and OPIE need such large scrollbars that take up, like, 5-10% of the meager screen real estate). Unfortunately, keypebble would consume all of the CPU time on screen refreshes, so this wasn't very good for battery life.
Anyway, the touchscreen crapped out soon thereafter, which means I can't get past the calibration screen under WinCE or OPIE, so now I'm pretty much stuck with GPE (which uses xstroke and isn't as picky as the iPaq digitizer calibration hardware, I guess). But it's still kinda painful to try to push buttons since all my strokes are skewed a bit, no matter how I calibrate the screen now.
So I'm pretty much back to reading pages with Plucker and occasionally Avantgo on my aging Visor Pro, even though it's starting to lose lines on its greyscale screen and the button don't register half the time unless I stroke them a certain way. For my part, I'm planning on holding out until someone offers a cameraless GSM Treo 650 (so I can use it at work - does anyone know if it's straightforward enough to just open it up and remove it yourself?). From there, I'd hope I could move straight to a Zaurus-phone in a few years, if I could afford to have one knocking around in my pockets.
It's nice that Minimo is progressing, but I'd much rather see a full firefox with a slimmed UI, especially since the devices are powerful enough to support this already.
I've run into at least one laptop that runs KNOPPIX fine, but hangs when loading Linux from disk (under Knoppix, Debian, and Redhat FC3). These distributions all install fine, but they invariably hang up halfway through the boot process, on inane things like starting up the print service (and stuff that has nothing to do with hardware). It's always in the same spot (but on different services between the different distros).
Really has me frustrated. BTW, the hardware in question is an Alienware Area-51m laptop.
Remastering your own KNOPPIX is easy and it works.
I built a custom system maintenance image for work in a couple of hours. Among the changes:
Stripped out games, i18n (takes up a lot of space)
installed some extra utilities (gkrellm, iftop, etc.)
captive-ntfs ntoskrnl and ntfs.sys files already stored in/var/lib/captive
installed DOSemu to run Ghost and DriveImage (previous backup standards). This allows me to do backups and restores over the network, or from a USB2.0 / firewire drive (that isn't always detected properly under real DOS). I can even backup and restore to SATA or SCSI/RAID arrays that aren't supported under DOS.
Unfortunately, DOSemu stripped out wholedisk access, so I have to restore the MBR with dd .:( Anyone know how to hack wholedisk access back into the dosemu source?
Custom scripts to automate connecting to our fileservers and detecting/backing up drives with partimage, dd, etc.
And of course, custom backgrounds:P
Pretty damn useful... it's the only system maintenance CD that boots on all of our hardware.
If only grub could be bootstrapped from CD, we would also use it to boot into existing systems and it'd be perfect!
Why should the burden of proof be put on the environmentalists for what level of resource consumption & pollution the planet can handle? The corporations ought to be on the hook for funding the research that shows that their operations won't have long-term adverse effects. It just makes sense... would you want to contemplate the consequences of your actions before or after the fact?
Along a similar thread, aerosols and other pollutants end up reducing global warming by seeding clouds and increasing cloud cover, which generally reflects more sunlight energy away from the ecosphere. ( ref ) So could more pollution be a way to counter global warming? Do we even have a planned response for when global warming finally does occur, other than to head for higher ground?
It does seem like governments are spending more time setting arbitrary controls on resource consumption and waste production, when they should be tracking quantitative measurements and setting cumulative budgets on system inputs & outputs.
Ultimately, if we don't want to take the blame for anything we do, we'd want to become fully self-sufficient... balancing our system inputs and outputs such that all of our waste byproducts are processed, treated, and cleaned. That way, we won't be leaning on the environment for cleaning up our exhaust, and we'll achieve some form of population scalability. Almost like making sure everyone can live in their own isolated biosphere.
But in our current system, there's very little incentive to pursue this (other than maybe for long-term space colonization... ha)
I'm obviously a bit different from you, but here's what I've been looking for:
Large, hi-res color display
big but slim
touchscreen & navigation buttons
GSM / GPRS worldphone
Synch with Multisync
IR / Bluetooth. Don't really care much about Wifi, I can set up a bridge with my laptop if I really want to extend Wifi for some reason.
Removable storage (SD / MMC)
No camera
No antenna "stub" - they're not really necessary for good reception, other than to make the device look like a phone
Software:
Primary PIM device - all of my other calendars & address books on other computers and group pages would sync off this one.
mapping software with bluetooth GPS support, so I can stick the GPS receiver somewhere (on the dashboard, on my shoulder) where it gets reception, and use the actual map in front of me. Mapopolis seems pretty good in this respect, though my wet dream would be something more like Google's Keyhole Earthviewer with remote GPS support (maybe it'll be usable through VNC to a home computer)
ssh, with enough keybindings to actually make it usable (amazing how many virtual or real keyboards don't include enough keys of a "standard" 101 key keyboard to do everything you need to in a terminal
VNC, preferably through and ssh tunnel
Offline browsing with Plucker or something sufficiently plucker-like
Online browsing with Avantgo or a full-featured browser
Maybe some kind of IM thing, though I haven't really gotten into any of the current crop
Would be nice to have some sort of media player, but I don't care all that much
So far, I've got my sights set on the next version of the Treo 650 (without a camera, because of work no-camera policies, not that I would miss the camera much anyway). It probably fails on the VNC through SSH thing (unless someone made an integrated secure VNC client already). Also, I should be able to migrate up from my Visor Pro fairly easily, and though I haven't gotten multisync to work yet, I'm pretty happy with using JPilot to sync under Linux (I've never been able to get any of the Win32 tools to restore any of my Visors from backup properly when they get hard reset.)
I've played a bit with an iPaq h5450 from work, and haven't been too happy with it. Of course, it was running PocketPC 2002, but the touchscreen petered out before I could upgrade it to PocketPC 2003, and it costs $200 to replace (no thank you). I'm currently running GPE 2.5 on it (since xstroke isn't as picky as WinCE and OPIE about the touchscreen not working right), but GPE isn't quite as usable as OPIE. I've even gone through the lengths of installing a Debian ARM distro on a 1GB compactflash so I could run mozilla on it. While all that is interesting, I don't really use it for more than viewing Plucker pages at the moment:P
PalmOS still seems to have more genuinely useful software than WinCE and even Linux on handhelds at the moment, so I'm not too afraid of going the Treo route... it does break my long-standing "no devices more than $200 in my pocket" rule, but if there's anything "convergence" would do for me, it would be to justify replacing 2-3 $200 devices so I can bend this rule a bit:>
Much manufacturing is already outsourced. More software engineering is getting outsourced. What will be the most important thing that America contributes to the world market in the not-too-distant future?
Distribution rights for copyrighted media and patent licenses!
So all it will take for the US economy to collapse is basically the rest of the world deciding not to honor US IP. What a great thing it is to base our economy on.
So the US just has to enforce their IP rights... I guess that's why we spend 15% of our budget on the military. At least it's less than what we spend on the Treasury department (presumably mostly on interest payments on the national debt)
Numbers: (from a few years back, I ought to update this) http://hairball.bumba.net/~rwa2/misc/USbudg et/hist/US_Historical_budget,_1962_-_2008.html
It's supposed to have a -passwdfile option so you could point it to ~/.vnc/passwd (I don't know why it just defaults to that). But I found that that just didn't work for some reason, at least with the Dag Wiers rpm.
Still eagerly awaiting a better *NIX option for sharing out:0... newer gnome and kde dists are supposed to have something, just haven't had a chance to play with them yet.
I've been using Knoppix at work as the rescue disk for most of our computers. Found that it had a few shortcomings. Fortunately for us, it's very easy to create customized knoppix CDs, viz the:
Remastering Howto
In a day, I was basically able to create a new Knoppix CD that can:
run gkrellm & xosview (I have no idea why they omitted these very useful system status packages)
run extra network utilities like etherape and netcat
has ntfs.sys & ntoskernel.dll for captive-ntfs already in/var/lib/captive/ (unfortunately, knoppix creates symlinks from the readonly/var to a rw/var on ramdisk, which captive-ntfs doesn't like for some reason. Anyway, need a bootup script that removes those symlinks and copies the actual files to the/var ramdisk)
run freedos under xdosemu, with the filesystem already populated with some DOS-based system rescue software such as Ghost and PowerQuest DriveImage. This gives the added benefit that I can do backups and restores using these programs over the network by mounting the file server with the images via NFS or SMB (unfortunately, this only works with Ghost, PowerQuest fails to write large files to the Linux filesystem which dosemu exposes as a "DOS network drive" with lredir). Wish dosemu.conf still allowed "wholedisk" access, but should be able to hack up a script that will automatically add detected partitions to dosemu.conf
updated mozilla / firefox browser
be free of cruft (games, openoffice-de, etc.)
boot kernel 2.6 by default (change the syslinux.conf boot options)
Console users might like to try CenterICQ. I pretty much leave it up all the time within a Screen session, and can connect to it via ssh from wherever... work, home, PDA, etc.
I've been looking for a way to cripple Verizon's business model ever since they screwed me out of $130 for a month's worth of local phone service. Now all I need to do is create, say, a free SMS/WML-based directory gateway that lets people update their own and lookup their friends' addresses. Dirt simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I had to refer to http://www.strata.com/support/3dmanual/ch13/ch13_7 .html for the NTSC/PAL numbers... but every source I've looked at for those resolutions numbers always seem to be different. I guess the D-1 PAL is more common, with 576 scan lines. Probably some interesting history behind how most of the world got the higher resolution, slightly lower framerate PAL std instead of NTSC.
:P
Haven't come across a 1440x900 LCD panel yet, but I'm sure they exist. If you do the math, it comes out to 16:10, though (unless the pixels ain't square for some reason). Anyway, it's pretty frustrating that we haven't reached digital convergence yet between common HDTV and computer formats & displays yet. But I guess that would make them too cheap
There are very, very few useful summaries. Try starting with this synopsis
Cheat-sheet of the some of the basic lingo I found frustrating:
Formats:
p = "progressive scan" good i = "interlaced" bad, unless the jittering doesn't bother you and you need to watch fast motion (e.g. watching sports while drunk or on caffiene high - probably rules out most geeks right there) 1080p60 1920x1080 progressive at 60 frames per second - this should be the sweet spot for playback on a 24" high-res widescreen active-matrix LCD computer monitor - possibly theInterconnects:
Digital: HD-SDI : High def serial digital interconnect Mostly for video editing equipment, carrying video and multiple audio channels. Typically a single high-bandwidth BNC connection SDI : serial digital interconnect carries SD video, similar to DV carried over firewire HDMI compact digital interconnect, also carries digital audio channels. Also encumbered by copy protection flag DVI Many forms of this, single-link (up to 1920x1200), dual-link (twice the pins for higher res displays, like Apple cinema display), DVI-I (can also carry analog signals). DVI-D tends to be the most common nowadays... the analog pins could make things confusing. Analog: RGBHV 5 BNC connectors carrying separate channels for red, green, blue, horizontal, and vertical sync. Used by most computers via the more common HD15 interconnect (which also includes some data pins to allow the monitor and video card to exchange DDC informtion) RGBCs 4 BNC connectors - H and V are put on one Composite sync line RGsB 3 BNC connectors - the Green channel carries the composite sync signal, used on older *NIX workstations Component YPbPr 3 BNC or RCA connectors carrying luminance & composite sync, luminance - blue, and luminance - red. SVideo the little 4-pin round connector, usually carries Y/C (luminance & chrominance) channels. Should be able to support a maximum resolution of 800x600. Composite video Single BNC or RCA connectorIt's amazing how seldom things match up with computer components:
16:10 Widescreen aspect ratio used by most LCD computer monitors 4:3 Aspect ratio used by mo*** Disclaimer *** I work for a major defence contractor that sells Sats and stuff
/would/ be doing that kind of thing, among the NSA, CIA, or maybe even the FBI at first.
The Air Force had always launched and maintained most of the military communication satellites. These uplinks usually form the trunk of deployed military networks... after all, it wouldn't be too convenient for the Army to subscribe to the nearest middle east DSL line or for the Navy to spool thousands of miles worth of fiber behind a flotilla. So most of what the military considers the "network" is this wireless communications system, which needs to be heavily secured, defended, etc.
One of the first things the Air Force is responsible for during an invasion is to take out the enemy's command and control infrastructure - destroying their radar, microwave tranceivers, satcomm, and other network and surveillance equipment. Whether this is done using bombs/missiles, jamming equipment, or perhaps some kind of network attack/exploit, I suppose you could agree that the latter modes could be less destructive and more subtle in terms of offering you counterintelligence options ("no, the invading force is actually over *here*". And the less infrastructure you physically destroy, the less you have to rebuild later, I guess.
While some of this might be carried on over the internet, I imagine the vast majority would occur over isolated military intranets.
I'd be pretty surprised if Air Force honeynets and botnets start duking it out with the supposed North Korean hacker army over the normal internet we know and love, playing a game of cat 'n' mouse over the tattered remains of a compromised IIS server... though I wonder who
Stop fooling yourself thinking that spending hours tweaking everything will save time. Just admit that you like tweaking :P
... weak.
I'll echo the "Use WindowMaker" mantra. The only reason I'm running Gnome now is for the little graphical workspace switcher. I'm still upset that the window thumbnails don't dynamically update their contents anymore like Enlightenment or even older versions of Gnome.
I usually configure my window managers to use Meta + various mouse keys to move/resize windows. Gnome's Metacity does not allow you to move the window title above the top of the screen - very annoying when you want to put, say, a web browser's various rows of buttons off-screen so you can fit more precious content onto your screen (more so than you could get with using the full screen view, which isn't available for all apps). Window Maker does the right thing, and allows you to move the window off the top of the screen (but only if you use the Meta-click technique, so the titlebar only disappears if you prove that you know how to move the window back without it).
I also configure focus-follows-mouse, and disable raise-on-click. This allows me to organize my workspace and have more control, say, copying and pasting stuff between windows without the "behind" window popping to the foreground unless I tell it to (by Meta-clicking on it or clicking on the titlebar/frame).
Configure a larger virtual desktop in the Xorg.conf if you really want more scrollable space. I imagine this would be more complicated with your dual-monitor setup, though... maybe you just want to add a few pixels to the top of each screen. I trust that you've read and configured the extra Xorg directives that came with your Nvidia / ATi drivers to optimize your Xorg.conf already.
Also useful to configure some means of "pushing" windows back, usually by middle-clicking on the titlebar/frame or Meta-down.
I've heavily configured gkrellm - it works great as an app launcher that works under any window manager, in addition to doing all of its normal monitoring. It can really give you a good feeling for what your computer is doing, when it's finished downloading or compiling or transferring to USB drives, how well your RAID throughput is behaving, etc From the default, I usually tweak it to use a better theme (the default wastes a few columns of pixels on the sides!), show system CPU time and network TX / disk writes as inverted, and of course set it to sticky so it's always in its corner when I switch virtual desktops.
Learn to use gnu screen. It's indispensible for managing multiple consoles. I usually start mine as "screen -e ^Zz", since I use Ctrl-a quite more often than Ctrl-z... what a silly default.
Give the Galeon web browser a serious try. It has much better tab management than Mozilla, even with Mozilla's tabextensions plugin. Plus, it remembers the last tab state after crashes by default... why isn't that a standard Mozilla feature yet??!
Check out Hotkeys for making use of those extra multimedia button keys on your keyboard for launching apps.
Does anyone know of a mechanism for launching apps using keystrokes like Win-e for explorer.exe under MS windows? Best I could do outside of mapping "extra" keys with hotkey is to map the Super key to gnome's "Run command" dialog and then type in the app
Well, have fun.
Well, it's all water under the bridge now... what he does need is a new name for his product, right? I vote for the subject... in that it still alludes to "that Redmond OS" and how he improves upon it. Any others?
I have one of the Washington DC Metro Smartcards used to operate their turnstiles. Since I keep it in my wallet and sit on it most of the time, the internal circuitry got a bit damaged. It now only works if I twist the card slightly while holding it over the sensor.
But this just goes on to highlight the fact that it shouldn't be too hard to simply put an off switch on RFID, so it's only activated if you, say, short an exposed terminal on the card/passport. Shouldn't be too hard to grow a mod community around a feature like this...
and you can even put them in a smiley shape, so you can head off that question right at the nub
You might be able to partition your work in these three ways with most modern software. But ideally you'd want three computers within easy reach.
Development would be your main beefy machine... the one you'd likely do most of your work/coding under and have fully tricked out. You might also end up breaking it occasionally because some stupidly packaged OS-level library update.
Test would be a machine you could tear down and build up / reimage cleanly from scratch to make sure your installation instructions work. Mostly to make sure that you didn't forget to include some obscure dependency that you have stashed away somewhere on your development machine. Depending on your comfort level and whether you use Development or Production as your primary machine, you might get away with having Development and Test be the same box.
Production would be the machine that you're not allowed to do new stuff to until you've made sure that nothing broke when you did it to Test. This would be a good machine to demo the last working state of your software one, plus run various servers (email, database, etc.) that don't change often. Think of it as the machine you would do your email correspondence & timecard on... If your company has a competent IT staff, this machine might not even be maintained by you.
Anyway, some hopelessly process-based engineering advice.
It was the same way in Thailand (at least with relatives' houses, I didn't really live that close to any of my good friends).
d e/thaihousesbindex.htm
For one thing, most of the old, traditional-style Thai houses were open-air.
http://www.orientalarchitecture.com/thaicountrysi
Not really much to keep people out.
Everyone pretty much had a tall fence and metal gates around their property. Most were easy to climb, though others were lined with spikes or broken glass on top. Everyone had at least 2 dogs roaming their property, usually 3 or 4. So if you were known to the family and the dogs, you could pretty much walk in and make yourself comfortable, while every other visitor would get a loud welcome.
Since my international school schedule was often out of sync with my Thai cousins' schedules, I'd spend a lot of time with their dogs. These dogs were quite different from American dogs, in that they were only marginally domesticated to respect their owners. Since they had plenty of other dogs in their household, the retained a lot of the wolf-pack mentality.
Anyway, dogs can be poisoned, gates can be scaled, and locks can be defeated. As far as crime was concerned (and I think this is still true in several third world countries) anything is pretty much fair game for thieves unless you actually have an armed guard there protecting your property or neighborhood. Since live-in guards / housekeepers are quite affordable, that's the route many people pretty much take.
So for a Southeast Asian to come here, it's kind of strange to walk into a house and have no one to greet you and let you in, since most of the houses back east basically came occupied full-time.
Mod parent up!
:>
All the guy is looking for is the official howto. DISA maintains them all.
Here it is again: http://iase.disa.mil/
All these posts and only one AC hits it
They have very detailed step-by-step guidelines for securing all kinds of boxes and OSs (including all of the administrative procedures).
Even other sites link in to their work:
http://csrc.nist.gov/pcig/cig.html
You can still look at fairly high resolution pics of the roof of the White House from older 1988 USGS aerial photo data. Same thing with the blurred-out capitol buildings. Interestingly, the roof of the Pentagon is there in all its glory, albeit they obviously pasted in a DoD-reviewed patch of footage (it's pretty easy to see the seams).
Verizon has this deal with the Metro board (the org that runs the DC subway) for "exclusivity" rights since 1993 or so. The original 8 year deal was supposed to give Metro an $8 million emergency backup communications system. But they renewed the agreement for, like 16 years, for pretty much nothing compared to what other places like NYC's Port Authority gets for allowing telecoms to run cells in the Lincoln tunnel and such.
:P
So basically, if you live and work in DC and take the Metro, Verizon's the only cell service that would work in most of the underground stations.
This was on the Washington Post a week or so ago on their 4-part series grilling Metro... I'd dig up the link, but it's already too far back on their search engine
Extended warranty! How can I lose?!
:P
(that episode where he becomes very smart... until he decides to go back to normal)
Take a look at some midrange digital cameras that have good video clip & audio recording. Oftentimes you can even do some minor editing and trimming on the spot.
I've pretty much stopped taking my miniDV camcorder anywhere since I got a new digicam. My Canon Powershot A85 camera can record quite a bit of low res video and audio on a 60x 1GB CF. It can only do 640x480 at 15fps for about 30 seconds, but I'm sure there are cameras out that can go indefinitely at a decent resolution and frame rate nowadays. The quality is only marginally worse than my Samsung SCD27 camcorder, since the miniDV has pretty bad interlacing artifacts after I import it onto a computer.
It's just so much easier to carry the camera around in my pocket and whip it out to grab shorts within a second or so. The miniDV would just take too long to boot up, so I'd miss all of the moments from the kids while waiting 5-10 seconds for it to warm up and focus.
Sometimes I can even be bothered to carry a mini tripod around... I picked up a Slik Mini-Pro V after hearing some good reviews about its predecessors. It's pretty much a full pan/tilt mount, and it even sticks to windows!
If you already carry a laptop around and can keep it with someone you trust during recording, the USB2.0 logitech quickcam 4000 series might be a good option, and opens the door to doing stuff like wifi webcasts and stuff too at a fairly decent quality.
Anyway, that's the extent of my highly amateur recording experience
I bought the MS wireless mouse a few months ago. I could not get used to the lack of tactile feedback on mouse scrollwheel. This makes it next to useless in games, where flicking it back and forth the wrong amount would give you the handknife instead of the rocket launcher. In other apps, the consequences aren't quite as bad, but I still want to be able to consistently advance pages by "3 clicks", or consistent zoom from 100% to 50%, etc.
This mouse lives in a drawer now. Maybe I'll drag it out someday when that "smooth" extra axis might be marginally useful for VRML and X3D or something. But I just use a plain MS 5-button USB scroll mouse now.
So I went to the extra trouble of installing recent builds of GPE and OPIE (based on Familiar 0.8) on an iPaq h5450 I got from work. I ran Minimo under GPE, but didn't find it all that useful. It didn't even have bookmarks, so I'd have to type in my sites by hand each time. The konqueror-based browser under opie was much nicer.
I got my greatest kick from installing a 1GB CF card in it and running debian-ARM off of it using chroot. I could run mozilla on a 640x480 vnc virtual framebuffer, displayed using OPIE's nice VNC client keypebble in 1/2 scale full screen mode. It was readable, fully functional (albeit a bit slow) and the scrollbars were a nice small size (I don't know why all of the programs in GPE and OPIE need such large scrollbars that take up, like, 5-10% of the meager screen real estate). Unfortunately, keypebble would consume all of the CPU time on screen refreshes, so this wasn't very good for battery life.
Anyway, the touchscreen crapped out soon thereafter, which means I can't get past the calibration screen under WinCE or OPIE, so now I'm pretty much stuck with GPE (which uses xstroke and isn't as picky as the iPaq digitizer calibration hardware, I guess). But it's still kinda painful to try to push buttons since all my strokes are skewed a bit, no matter how I calibrate the screen now.
So I'm pretty much back to reading pages with Plucker and occasionally Avantgo on my aging Visor Pro, even though it's starting to lose lines on its greyscale screen and the button don't register half the time unless I stroke them a certain way. For my part, I'm planning on holding out until someone offers a cameraless GSM Treo 650 (so I can use it at work - does anyone know if it's straightforward enough to just open it up and remove it yourself?). From there, I'd hope I could move straight to a Zaurus-phone in a few years, if I could afford to have one knocking around in my pockets.
It's nice that Minimo is progressing, but I'd much rather see a full firefox with a slimmed UI, especially since the devices are powerful enough to support this already.
I've run into at least one laptop that runs KNOPPIX fine, but hangs when loading Linux from disk (under Knoppix, Debian, and Redhat FC3). These distributions all install fine, but they invariably hang up halfway through the boot process, on inane things like starting up the print service (and stuff that has nothing to do with hardware). It's always in the same spot (but on different services between the different distros).
Really has me frustrated. BTW, the hardware in question is an Alienware Area-51m laptop.
I built a custom system maintenance image for work in a couple of hours. Among the changes:
Unfortunately, DOSemu stripped out wholedisk access, so I have to restore the MBR with dd .
Pretty damn useful... it's the only system maintenance CD that boots on all of our hardware.
If only grub could be bootstrapped from CD, we would also use it to boot into existing systems and it'd be perfect!
Along a similar thread, aerosols and other pollutants end up reducing global warming by seeding clouds and increasing cloud cover, which generally reflects more sunlight energy away from the ecosphere. ( ref ) So could more pollution be a way to counter global warming? Do we even have a planned response for when global warming finally does occur, other than to head for higher ground?
It does seem like governments are spending more time setting arbitrary controls on resource consumption and waste production, when they should be tracking quantitative measurements and setting cumulative budgets on system inputs & outputs.
Ultimately, if we don't want to take the blame for anything we do, we'd want to become fully self-sufficient... balancing our system inputs and outputs such that all of our waste byproducts are processed, treated, and cleaned. That way, we won't be leaning on the environment for cleaning up our exhaust, and we'll achieve some form of population scalability. Almost like making sure everyone can live in their own isolated biosphere. But in our current system, there's very little incentive to pursue this (other than maybe for long-term space colonization... ha)
- Large, hi-res color display
- big but slim
- touchscreen & navigation buttons
- GSM / GPRS worldphone
- Synch with Multisync
- IR / Bluetooth. Don't really care much about Wifi, I can set up a bridge with my laptop if I really want to extend Wifi for some reason.
- Removable storage (SD / MMC)
- No camera
- No antenna "stub" - they're not really necessary for good reception, other than to make the device look like a phone
Software:So far, I've got my sights set on the next version of the Treo 650 (without a camera, because of work no-camera policies, not that I would miss the camera much anyway). It probably fails on the VNC through SSH thing (unless someone made an integrated secure VNC client already). Also, I should be able to migrate up from my Visor Pro fairly easily, and though I haven't gotten multisync to work yet, I'm pretty happy with using JPilot to sync under Linux (I've never been able to get any of the Win32 tools to restore any of my Visors from backup properly when they get hard reset.)
I've played a bit with an iPaq h5450 from work, and haven't been too happy with it. Of course, it was running PocketPC 2002, but the touchscreen petered out before I could upgrade it to PocketPC 2003, and it costs $200 to replace (no thank you). I'm currently running GPE 2.5 on it (since xstroke isn't as picky as WinCE and OPIE about the touchscreen not working right), but GPE isn't quite as usable as OPIE. I've even gone through the lengths of installing a Debian ARM distro on a 1GB compactflash so I could run mozilla on it. While all that is interesting, I don't really use it for more than viewing Plucker pages at the moment :P
PalmOS still seems to have more genuinely useful software than WinCE and even Linux on handhelds at the moment, so I'm not too afraid of going the Treo route... it does break my long-standing "no devices more than $200 in my pocket" rule, but if there's anything "convergence" would do for me, it would be to justify replacing 2-3 $200 devices so I can bend this rule a bit :>
Much manufacturing is already outsourced. More software engineering is getting outsourced. What will be the most important thing that America contributes to the world market in the not-too-distant future?
g et/hist /US_Historical_budget,_1962_-_2008.html
Distribution rights for copyrighted media and patent licenses!
So all it will take for the US economy to collapse is basically the rest of the world deciding not to honor US IP. What a great thing it is to base our economy on.
So the US just has to enforce their IP rights... I guess that's why we spend 15% of our budget on the military. At least it's less than what we spend on the Treasury department (presumably mostly on interest payments on the national debt)
Numbers: (from a few years back, I ought to update this)
http://hairball.bumba.net/~rwa2/misc/USbud
It's supposed to have a -passwdfile option so you could point it to ~/.vnc/passwd (I don't know why it just defaults to that). But I found that that just didn't work for some reason, at least with the Dag Wiers rpm.
:0 ... newer gnome and kde dists are supposed to have something, just haven't had a chance to play with them yet.
Still eagerly awaiting a better *NIX option for sharing out
For our part, here's what we've settled on:
Win32 UltraVNC Linux / *NIX TightVNC for virtual framebuffers x11vnc for sharing outx11vnc -forever -passwd mysecretpw
Mac OS X OSXVNC for the server VNCViewer as the client I've heard good things about Chicken of the VNC (but haven't gotten around to trying it yet) Have fun!In a day, I was basically able to create a new Knoppix CD that can:
Console users might like to try CenterICQ. I pretty much leave it up all the time within a Screen session, and can connect to it via ssh from wherever ... work, home, PDA, etc.
I've been looking for a way to cripple Verizon's business model ever since they screwed me out of $130 for a month's worth of local phone service. Now all I need to do is create, say, a free SMS/WML-based directory gateway that lets people update their own and lookup their friends' addresses. Dirt simple.