For some reason, I do really well with cheap keyboards. The computer store I worked in years ago sold Mitsumi keyboards, and they always worked well. Well, except for the fact that I learned to type on a mechanical typewritter, and would beat the shit out of the keys. The keyboards would survive for about a year. It wasn't really a big deal, we were selling them for $15/ea.
I did the Windows version, beacuse I was downstairs smoking (I don't smoke in the room my Linux machines are in), so I installed the one version behind Win32 compile. It showed WPM.
My CPM should be 5x higher. If I remember right, a "word" for WPM is 5 characters.
You sound like a man that needs a portable voice recorder.:)
My inspirations usually come to me at the wrong times, like when I'm sleeping, or driving somewhere.. I have to concentrate to keep the details til I can stop and write them down.
I used to make my assistant (now regional sr. admin) laugh, I'd have problems, and start just talking at him. not really with him, everything I'd say was going over his head, because if I have to talk through something, it's usually pretty complex. But, I'd talk at him for 5 minutes, explaining the problem, and then come up with the answer, and thank him.:)
You said everything with your first words.. "According to current scientific knowledge". In future years, we'll realize how primitive we are now. Our elders see it. Ask someone who's 90 about life in their childhood.
There's so much we haven't learned yet, you can't say that the manipulation of electromagnetic radiation is the end-all of our technology. There's plenty more to come. Imagine going back 100 years, and telling people about microwave and satellite communication. They'd be like "Oh no, that can't happen"
I think we're really looking in all the wrong places. We're putting human assumptions on alien life.
We assume they would be using radio communication, or that they'd bother with a high-power laser. What if their communication is completely different. Like, something we haven't even considered to be a possibility yet, even in SciFi.. In a transmission media we don't even realize, we may be receiving communications from them, but we simply don't have the equipment to hear it.. We can't even decipher what any other creature on this planet is trying to communicate, why should we even be so egotistical to thing that not only would we know how to receive their communication, but have the vaugest idea of what they're saying.
I thought the idea of SETI was that we'd pick up an omni-directional broadcast, with some alien saying "here we are, can anyone hear me" A laser would be directional. It would have to be intended for Earth, and would need to be tracking many years ahead of where we are. We aren't broadcasting the same signal, why would they? There could be many planets near by with the same idea of listening, but if no one's talking, there's no communcation.
Maybe pulsars aren't just some celestial event, maybe they're beacons, and when we're ready to go to them, we'll find more information. But for now (and the next hundred+ years), we won't be going anywhere near them. Like, we haven't even managed to get a person to the next planet yet. There isn't enough "push" to develop to the next level. Imagine if every country spent their military budget on developing space travel. we'd alerady have a flag on Pluto, along with a bunch of empty beer cans from tourists.
But no, we waste our resources blowing each other up, or making sure we're on the virge of it every day. Remember the cold war? Ya, 40 years of "I'm going to kill you all", just for it to fall apart, and both sides realize that those people we were so scared of for so long aren't really that bad.
I grew up knowing the Soviet Union was the evil Red Army, who had so many weapons pointed at us because they hate us so much. Now, thanks to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the Internet, I now frequently talk to a Russian, and really, he's a nice guy. I've seen some beautiful pictures around where he lives, where not too long ago I would have believed was a frozen wasteland.
If only all of our governments would give up on this nonsense and cooperate in things, or better yet, ditch the whole "This is ours, you can't play with it" mentality, we'd make a lot more progress.
Actually, I was reading up on this a while back.. They'd use the gravity of the star to tack. Well, kinda.
It seems like a good idea, if they want to send something away from Sol for a long duration in one direction. Not too much navigation necessary (or possible).
The one thing I don't see really mentioned is debris in space. You know, micrometeors, and the like. It should make for a nice shreaded solar sail by the time it gets to the edge of the solar system. Hopefully it didn't encounter enough debris hitting it to knock it off course, or stop it all together.
But hey, if they're just looking to find out how fast a solar sail will accelerate away from SOL at Earth's distance, cool. It'd probably make for a faster way to get from Earth to our neighboring (outward) planets, if they can point it in the right direction. 1 degree makes a big difference over a few million miles.:)
APC masterswitches do that. Well, it locks you out after x attempts for x minutes.
It became a pain in the ass when some winner started trying to password scan one of the masterswitches. A machine went down, and everyone was locked out from it. They had just left the scanner running, so after the lockout time, it would get locked out again.
We moved them to a private network, and voila, everything works fine now.:)
People try to brute force so many various passwords, this seems like a really bad idea, unless your username is random also, and no one happens to know it. There's nothing like explaining to the boss that you couldn't hit a downed machine with the masterswitch because you were locked out, and it took 1 hour for someone to respond to the site just to reboot the machine.
Most users have no clue where their keys are. They hunt and peck.
Most of us are used to what we use. The first time I got on a Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard, the bottom row was (is) split in the wrong place for the way I type. I think it was the "B" key on the wrong side. I touch type, but aparently I don't do it in the absolutely correct Microsoft way.:)
I was looking at alternative keyboards a while back. It would be nice to have one that's "better" than a QWERTY keyboard, but really, I'm not going to carry a keyboard around to every machine I work on and plug it in, nor am I going to buy a keyboard for my home, office, and laptop.
If their product is so great, they should be bundling it with something else, and effectively giving them away to at least get into the market. People are resisitant to change, and won't just go spend $100 on the spiffy-keen new keyboard.
It would be nice if they had more details on how it types. I didn't search the entire site, but I browsed around, and besides lots of PR fluff, I don't see something that says "This is where the letters are". Where's the [ctrl]-[alt]-[delete] chord? How do I [alt]-[f1] through [alt]-[f6]? And, how much does it weigh? After holding it for 8 hours, are my arms going to be tired? Probably.
When my ex-wife was in college, she was in a computer class, and they had a typing test, which after the test it would show the result. I got 102WPM and 99% accuracy. It was annoying that it considered a backspace an error, so it took me a couple tries to remember not to correct errors.
A couple years ago, a coworker brought a commercial typing test in to work, which said I was up to 104WPM at 100% accuracy.
Not that it really helps me much with work, I bang out several lines of code, and consider what I'm going to write next.:)
Do you have suggestions on typing speed tests. I like to see where I am occasionally.
The keyboard looks spiffy, but that 50WPM isn't impressive. I already type at over 100.. Well, as fast as I think.:) If I have to stop and think about something, I stop typing. I wonder what my WPM could be on this. I blame my typing speed on years of playing the piano and sax. Oh ya, and writing on FidoNet.:)
Silly games. Don't tell me you balance your checkbook with that brain.
Men Hotel Boy 30 0 0 0 30 0 0 25 5 3 25 2
Men Hotel Boy 30 0 0 > Three men go to a hotel.. room (total 30 dollars) 0 30 0 > asks a boy to return 5 dollars to these men 0 25 5 > keep himself 2 dollars 3 25 2 > 27+2 = 29
Wrong. Don't think so hard. It's $-27 + $25 + $2, not $30 - $27 - $2.
I'm tempted now to go to the store in the morning and get one, just to figure out how to pick it.:)
I'm one of those people who likes to know how to do everything, even if I don't use it for the typical bad reasons. I've done lots of potentially 'illegal' things, at the request of legitimate owners, because people aren't perfect. Getting root on their machines (because they lost the root password), opening those cheap money boxes (20 seconds with a paperclip). One that I giggle about is the key-locks on Dells. Between 10 seconds and 90 seconds, depending on the machine, and I'll have it wide open.:) It took me a good 2 minutes to break into the garage at my current residence. I was being careful not to damage anything that was expensive. Masterlock padlocks are easy to cut off with a dremel and a cut-off blade. I could have had it in less than 10 seconds, if I had bolt cutters with me, or 15 seconds with a pry bar, leaving some damage.:)
It's kinda funny, I don't steal things. I just don't deal well with people saying "You can't do this." I've been told it's a problem with authority. Maybe that's why no 3 letter agencies will hire me.:)
I've been to Amsterdam once, for work, and was amazed at how many people were riding bikes. I can imagine that it makes it pretty easy to make a bike disappear, when everyone has one (or more).
The only thing that was weirder was, while standing near Centraal Station, looking across the canal, an old Chevy truck that I'd expect to see in backwoods America, went driving by..:) It was the only American vehicle I saw for the week that I was there.
Other than that truck, it was a beautiful city. They almost couldn't get me to go back to the US. My first morning there, I felt like I belonged there.
The first is what you're implying, using common tools like a lockpick set.
The other, which may be more likely in this case is the way I "encourage" doors open when some fool locks themselves out.
I'd be willing to bet that this lock sets itself when you slide the end of the cable in. Kinda like a door latch. It slides over the angled bolt, and once it's over it is trapped til you use the key.
If the pen was a common white bic, and you removed the tip, ink, and back, you'd have a thin plastic white tube. If you used the scissors to cut the tube in half, even for just an inch or two, you'd halve a half-pipe roughly the size of the cable. Slide that down between the cable and the lock, and it would push the lock's bolt out of the way, and allow the cable to come free.
It's a little harder to do with a common home or office door, but can be done with a credit card.:)
This doesn't work for dead bolts (obviously). It also don't work on most padlocks, because the space is too small to slide something in.
Personally, I believe locks to be a tool to make people feel safe, and to keep 'honest' people honest.
A locked office in most office buildings can be accessed through the drop ceilings, or with the "assistance" of the janitorial staff.
A locked door on a house can be circumvented by going through a window, locked or not.
But, seeing a lock on a laptop, or a locked door on a room or building, makes a person think twice. The next one they find may be that much easier. Why go for the one with the Kensington lock that takes 30 seconds to steal, when you can just pick up the next guy's laptop bag with everything in it when he's not looking? You could tie your laptop off with a length of rope and be just as secure.
Kinda like 802.11b encryption. It's easy enough to crack, but most people will move on to the unencrypted network.:)
But if you worry about silent data corruption, you should take it further. I think undetected errors are much more common in RAM than on disk. How do you protect against errors in RAM, cache, or CPU? I believe you have to consider secure multiparty computations. but how many people want to run a cluster of maybe 10 computers to protect against silent corruptions?
We do this for some of our web sites. There's one server the people work on, with a RAID5. It checks the data before sending it off to a second server (with a RAID1) for distribution (on a high-speed connection).
The second server again checks the data, and then distributes to 15 web servers (single drives).
If a single web server fails, we tell paging to ignore it til morning.:) It's something we know we should fix, but don't *NEED* to at the moment. It doesn't matter if a single web server has any sort of hardware or software failure. Even if the "master" machine with the RAID5 has a failure, the system simply won't distribute changes until we get it fixed.
I just did a RAID1 on a Linux machine a couple days ago./dev/hda and/dev/hdc are 20Gb drives.
I had a 6Gb drive on/dev/hdb, which was the old system drive.
I had a CDRom on/dev/hdd.
I've used various cards and external RAID arrays, and like the Linux software raid best. I can check the status any time by cat'ing/proc/mdstat
I have a machine with 3 drives doing a RAID5, that are all on the onboard controllers.
If you can live without a cdrom, you can do RAID10 or RAID01 with the onboard controllers. If you want the IDE CDRom(s), you can stick in a seperate controller for those. That's one card instead of two. They're just IDE controllers, not RAID controllers, so they're usually cheaper.
We built out two machines recently with 15 74G WD SE SATA drives, and set up three arrays for testing. RAID0 RAID5 and RAID50. There was a trivial difference between 0 and 50. They were both faster than RAID5. This was for a database machine. Normal users wouldn't need or notice the speed difference. I don't even know that we'll see the speed difference.
And what happens when you strip out the emitter from your microwave oven, and mount it on your outdated satellite dish (like a 15' dish)? You can knock out WiFi for miles. hehe
I always wondered if this could be used as a DDoS attack against satellites. With enough people blasting enough noise at a particular satellite, would it block the legitimate traffic?
Slashdot Mirror
Shhhh, there's no life on other planets. To believe there is undermines all human religions.
For some reason, I do really well with cheap keyboards. The computer store I worked in years ago sold Mitsumi keyboards, and they always worked well. Well, except for the fact that I learned to type on a mechanical typewritter, and would beat the shit out of the keys. The keyboards would survive for about a year. It wasn't really a big deal, we were selling them for $15/ea.
Here is one of the pages I had read before on the matter.
I did the Windows version, beacuse I was downstairs smoking (I don't smoke in the room my Linux machines are in), so I installed the one version behind Win32 compile. It showed WPM.
My CPM should be 5x higher. If I remember right, a "word" for WPM is 5 characters.
You sound like a man that needs a portable voice recorder.
My inspirations usually come to me at the wrong times, like when I'm sleeping, or driving somewhere.. I have to concentrate to keep the details til I can stop and write them down.
I used to make my assistant (now regional sr. admin) laugh, I'd have problems, and start just talking at him. not really with him, everything I'd say was going over his head, because if I have to talk through something, it's usually pretty complex. But, I'd talk at him for 5 minutes, explaining the problem, and then come up with the answer, and thank him.
I don't need a Dvorak keyboard. I just need to get really drunk and use a keyboard that the alignment dots (on the F and J) are worn down. :)
You said everything with your first words.. "According to current scientific knowledge". In future years, we'll realize how primitive we are now. Our elders see it. Ask someone who's 90 about life in their childhood.
There's so much we haven't learned yet, you can't say that the manipulation of electromagnetic radiation is the end-all of our technology. There's plenty more to come. Imagine going back 100 years, and telling people about microwave and satellite communication. They'd be like "Oh no, that can't happen"
In my words, what you see is just the beginning.
I think we're really looking in all the wrong places. We're putting human assumptions on alien life.
We assume they would be using radio communication, or that they'd bother with a high-power laser. What if their communication is completely different. Like, something we haven't even considered to be a possibility yet, even in SciFi.. In a transmission media we don't even realize, we may be receiving communications from them, but we simply don't have the equipment to hear it.. We can't even decipher what any other creature on this planet is trying to communicate, why should we even be so egotistical to thing that not only would we know how to receive their communication, but have the vaugest idea of what they're saying.
I thought the idea of SETI was that we'd pick up an omni-directional broadcast, with some alien saying "here we are, can anyone hear me" A laser would be directional. It would have to be intended for Earth, and would need to be tracking many years ahead of where we are. We aren't broadcasting the same signal, why would they? There could be many planets near by with the same idea of listening, but if no one's talking, there's no communcation.
Maybe pulsars aren't just some celestial event, maybe they're beacons, and when we're ready to go to them, we'll find more information. But for now (and the next hundred+ years), we won't be going anywhere near them. Like, we haven't even managed to get a person to the next planet yet. There isn't enough "push" to develop to the next level. Imagine if every country spent their military budget on developing space travel. we'd alerady have a flag on Pluto, along with a bunch of empty beer cans from tourists.
But no, we waste our resources blowing each other up, or making sure we're on the virge of it every day. Remember the cold war? Ya, 40 years of "I'm going to kill you all", just for it to fall apart, and both sides realize that those people we were so scared of for so long aren't really that bad.
I grew up knowing the Soviet Union was the evil Red Army, who had so many weapons pointed at us because they hate us so much. Now, thanks to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the Internet, I now frequently talk to a Russian, and really, he's a nice guy. I've seen some beautiful pictures around where he lives, where not too long ago I would have believed was a frozen wasteland.
If only all of our governments would give up on this nonsense and cooperate in things, or better yet, ditch the whole "This is ours, you can't play with it" mentality, we'd make a lot more progress.
[rant mode off]
Actually, I was reading up on this a while back.. They'd use the gravity of the star to tack. Well, kinda.
It seems like a good idea, if they want to send something away from Sol for a long duration in one direction. Not too much navigation necessary (or possible).
The one thing I don't see really mentioned is debris in space. You know, micrometeors, and the like. It should make for a nice shreaded solar sail by the time it gets to the edge of the solar system. Hopefully it didn't encounter enough debris hitting it to knock it off course, or stop it all together.
But hey, if they're just looking to find out how fast a solar sail will accelerate away from SOL at Earth's distance, cool. It'd probably make for a faster way to get from Earth to our neighboring (outward) planets, if they can point it in the right direction. 1 degree makes a big difference over a few million miles.
Wheee. That's
On the "English ktouch lecture lessons (ktlecten.typ), Lesson 15, I got 110.82wpm with 0.0% errors.
The short ones are too short to come up with a good number. Well, the numbers were too good. I was over 120wpm.
APC masterswitches do that. Well, it locks you out after x attempts for x minutes.
It became a pain in the ass when some winner started trying to password scan one of the masterswitches. A machine went down, and everyone was locked out from it. They had just left the scanner running, so after the lockout time, it would get locked out again.
We moved them to a private network, and voila, everything works fine now.
People try to brute force so many various passwords, this seems like a really bad idea, unless your username is random also, and no one happens to know it. There's nothing like explaining to the boss that you couldn't hit a downed machine with the masterswitch because you were locked out, and it took 1 hour for someone to respond to the site just to reboot the machine.
I used to see stuff like that back in the DOS/Win3.1 days.. You could get an odometer for your mouse too, to see how many miles you moved it.
I think you hit it with #1..
Most users have no clue where their keys are. They hunt and peck.
Most of us are used to what we use. The first time I got on a Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard, the bottom row was (is) split in the wrong place for the way I type. I think it was the "B" key on the wrong side. I touch type, but aparently I don't do it in the absolutely correct Microsoft way.
I was looking at alternative keyboards a while back. It would be nice to have one that's "better" than a QWERTY keyboard, but really, I'm not going to carry a keyboard around to every machine I work on and plug it in, nor am I going to buy a keyboard for my home, office, and laptop.
If their product is so great, they should be bundling it with something else, and effectively giving them away to at least get into the market. People are resisitant to change, and won't just go spend $100 on the spiffy-keen new keyboard.
It would be nice if they had more details on how it types. I didn't search the entire site, but I browsed around, and besides lots of PR fluff, I don't see something that says "This is where the letters are". Where's the [ctrl]-[alt]-[delete] chord? How do I [alt]-[f1] through [alt]-[f6]? And, how much does it weigh? After holding it for 8 hours, are my arms going to be tired? Probably.
In high school typing class I was at 96WPM.
:)
When my ex-wife was in college, she was in a computer class, and they had a typing test, which after the test it would show the result. I got 102WPM and 99% accuracy. It was annoying that it considered a backspace an error, so it took me a couple tries to remember not to correct errors.
A couple years ago, a coworker brought a commercial typing test in to work, which said I was up to 104WPM at 100% accuracy.
Not that it really helps me much with work, I bang out several lines of code, and consider what I'm going to write next.
Do you have suggestions on typing speed tests. I like to see where I am occasionally.
The keyboard looks spiffy, but that 50WPM isn't impressive. I already type at over 100.. Well, as fast as I think. :) If I have to stop and think about something, I stop typing. I wonder what my WPM could be on this. I blame my typing speed on years of playing the piano and sax. Oh ya, and writing on FidoNet. :)
Is FidoNet even still alive?
Silly games. Don't tell me you balance your checkbook with that brain.
.. room (total 30 dollars)
Men Hotel Boy
30 0 0
0 30 0
0 25 5
3 25 2
Men Hotel Boy
30 0 0
> Three men go to a hotel
0 30 0
> asks a boy to return 5 dollars to these men
0 25 5
> keep himself 2 dollars
3 25 2
> 27+2 = 29
Wrong. Don't think so hard. It's $-27 + $25 + $2, not $30 - $27 - $2.
Aw, there went one perfectly good guess.
:)
:) It took me a good 2 minutes to break into the garage at my current residence. I was being careful not to damage anything that was expensive. Masterlock padlocks are easy to cut off with a dremel and a cut-off blade. I could have had it in less than 10 seconds, if I had bolt cutters with me, or 15 seconds with a pry bar, leaving some damage. :)
:)
I'm tempted now to go to the store in the morning and get one, just to figure out how to pick it.
I'm one of those people who likes to know how to do everything, even if I don't use it for the typical bad reasons. I've done lots of potentially 'illegal' things, at the request of legitimate owners, because people aren't perfect. Getting root on their machines (because they lost the root password), opening those cheap money boxes (20 seconds with a paperclip). One that I giggle about is the key-locks on Dells. Between 10 seconds and 90 seconds, depending on the machine, and I'll have it wide open.
It's kinda funny, I don't steal things. I just don't deal well with people saying "You can't do this." I've been told it's a problem with authority. Maybe that's why no 3 letter agencies will hire me.
I don't need yours, that next one doesn't even have a lock on it.
I've been to Amsterdam once, for work, and was amazed at how many people were riding bikes. I can imagine that it makes it pretty easy to make a bike disappear, when everyone has one (or more).
The only thing that was weirder was, while standing near Centraal Station, looking across the canal, an old Chevy truck that I'd expect to see in backwoods America, went driving by..
Other than that truck, it was a beautiful city. They almost couldn't get me to go back to the US. My first morning there, I felt like I belonged there.
I have two ideas on it.
:)
:)
The first is what you're implying, using common tools like a lockpick set.
The other, which may be more likely in this case is the way I "encourage" doors open when some fool locks themselves out.
I'd be willing to bet that this lock sets itself when you slide the end of the cable in. Kinda like a door latch. It slides over the angled bolt, and once it's over it is trapped til you use the key.
If the pen was a common white bic, and you removed the tip, ink, and back, you'd have a thin plastic white tube. If you used the scissors to cut the tube in half, even for just an inch or two, you'd halve a half-pipe roughly the size of the cable. Slide that down between the cable and the lock, and it would push the lock's bolt out of the way, and allow the cable to come free.
It's a little harder to do with a common home or office door, but can be done with a credit card.
This doesn't work for dead bolts (obviously). It also don't work on most padlocks, because the space is too small to slide something in.
Personally, I believe locks to be a tool to make people feel safe, and to keep 'honest' people honest.
A locked office in most office buildings can be accessed through the drop ceilings, or with the "assistance" of the janitorial staff.
A locked door on a house can be circumvented by going through a window, locked or not.
But, seeing a lock on a laptop, or a locked door on a room or building, makes a person think twice. The next one they find may be that much easier. Why go for the one with the Kensington lock that takes 30 seconds to steal, when you can just pick up the next guy's laptop bag with everything in it when he's not looking? You could tie your laptop off with a length of rope and be just as secure.
Kinda like 802.11b encryption. It's easy enough to crack, but most people will move on to the unencrypted network.
Time to retune those microwave oven emitters.
We do this for some of our web sites. There's one server the people work on, with a RAID5. It checks the data before sending it off to a second server (with a RAID1) for distribution (on a high-speed connection).
The second server again checks the data, and then distributes to 15 web servers (single drives).
If a single web server fails, we tell paging to ignore it til morning.
Not really, it all depends on your application.
I just did a RAID1 on a Linux machine a couple days ago.
I had a 6Gb drive on
I had a CDRom on
I've used various cards and external RAID arrays, and like the Linux software raid best. I can check the status any time by cat'ing
I have a machine with 3 drives doing a RAID5, that are all on the onboard controllers.
If you can live without a cdrom, you can do RAID10 or RAID01 with the onboard controllers. If you want the IDE CDRom(s), you can stick in a seperate controller for those. That's one card instead of two. They're just IDE controllers, not RAID controllers, so they're usually cheaper.
We built out two machines recently with 15 74G WD SE SATA drives, and set up three arrays for testing. RAID0 RAID5 and RAID50. There was a trivial difference between 0 and 50. They were both faster than RAID5. This was for a database machine. Normal users wouldn't need or notice the speed difference. I don't even know that we'll see the speed difference.
And what happens when you strip out the emitter from your microwave oven, and mount it on your outdated satellite dish (like a 15' dish)? You can knock out WiFi for miles. hehe
I always wondered if this could be used as a DDoS attack against satellites. With enough people blasting enough noise at a particular satellite, would it block the legitimate traffic?