As you said, the treo 650 has built in bluetooth, and 320x320 resolution. I think I heard about somebody (probably shadowmite again) hacking in some sdio wifi drivers... *checks google* yes, here it is.
and to take the idea of harnessing hurricanes one step further, imagine putting a giant big-as-the-earth windmill in the great red spot (which is a giant fairly stable storm) of Jupiter:-)
How flexible is it? The article didn't say. The photo attached to the article didn't even show the screen flexing. It looks like an ordinary flat panel display. What kind of resolution and color depth does it have?
A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
'Good evening', it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, 'I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?'
It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.
'Something off the shoulder perhaps?' suggested the animal, 'Braised in a white wine sauce?'
'Er, your shoulder?' said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
'But naturallymy shoulder, sir,' mooed the animal contentedly, 'nobody else's is mine to offer.'
Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.
'Or the rump is very good,' murmured the animal. 'I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there.'
It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
'Or a casselore of me perhaps?' it added.
'You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?' whispered Trillian to Ford.
'Me?' said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, 'I don't mean anything.'
'That's absolutely horrible,' exclaimed Arthur, 'the most revolting thing I've ever heard.'
'What's the problem Earthman?' said Zaphod, now transfering his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
'I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to,' said Arthur, 'It's heartless.'
'Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten,' said Zaphod.
'That's not the point,' Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. 'Alright,' he said, 'maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er... I think I'll just have a green salad,' he muttered.
'May I urge you to consider my liver?' asked the animal, 'it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months.'
'A green salad,' said Arthur emphatically.
'A green salad?' said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
'Are you going to tell me,' said Arthur, 'that I shouldn't have green salad?'
'Well,' said the animal, 'I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whoile tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.'
It managed a very slight bow.
'Glass of water please,' said Arthur.
'Look,' said Zaphod, 'we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years.'
The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. 'A very wise coice, sir, if I may say so. Very good,' it said, 'I'll just nip off and shoot myself.'
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. 'Don't worry, sir,' he said, 'I'll be very humane.'
we have the carpeted tiles in my datacenter, and the reason is that they are supposedly less prone to generate static electricty. While this doesn't make sense to me, I must say that the tiles are not a pile-type carpet, rather like felt that is permanently bonded to the tile surface.
I loved calling up BBSes with my modem. I had a 2400, and I still remember when I got a 14.4... what a blazing fast speed! I did eventually get a 28.8 and a 56k, and they were great too, but by then I was starting to use them for internet (SLIP, btw) instead of just BBSing.
I mainly loved door games (trade wars 2002 and Land of Devastation were my favorites, but I also loved BRE, SRE, sysop wars, LORD, etc.) but I also spent a lot of time on file transfers. I used to use QWK and BlueWave offline readers, so I could spend most of my minutes playing door games, and still read the message boards.
I use zmodem myself all the time. For me the best reason is not the error correction/detection or the ability to resume transfers, but because it is end-to-end rather than host-to-host. For instance, where I work, there is a fairly complex firewall, and every site has their own firewall as well. So a typical session might be:
connect from my pc to the local telnet gateway connect from local telnet gateway to the telnet gateway of the remote site connect from the remote telnet gateway to the remote system that I want to work on.
keeping in mind that all these systems have their own passwords, etc. Transferring files from the remote system to my pc with ftp/scp is a major pain, because I have to basically do the same process, and it is sometimes not even possible (for instance if some of the intermediate systems don't have enough disk space).
So, I uze zmodem. The fact that it is end-to-end means that once I do get connected to a remote machine, regardless of the intervening systems or the transport type (DECnet, tcp/ip, serial links, etc.), I can still transfer files directly to my pc.
I was a computer science major, with minors in math and physics. I wrote a program to interface with a bunch of temperature controllers being used on one of the experimental setups in the physics department. They were having grad students sit up all night recording the temperature every half hour, and setting the controller's set points manually. I wrote an application that used a medium speed serial interface to connect to the controllers, poll them, and set them at certain times. The controllers used a completely arbitrary and proprietary protocol, but it was at least documented.
What I thought was the most interesting bit (and what I am sure the PhD in the physics dept. that I was working for didn't care about at all) was that all the communication was done using a PostgreSQL database. The master application would spawn children to connect to the controllers and poll them, and put the results in the results table. Control was done by a database client application (in php, but I also experiemented with using MS Access) that would insert commands into the database's command queue table, which the master program used some triggers and pl/pgsql code to watch for changes to. I used pgsql's LISTEN and NOTIFY syntax, which I thought (and still think) to be very useful. That way I didn't have to write a seperate server process, or worry about concurrency issues.
All in all, it took about 3 months, with about 10k lines of code (I know, not that impressive, but hey, I was proud of it). It was interesting because it was the largest project I had worked on, and even though I was the only developper, I still had to do essentially software engineering and management issues.
The point is that that shredder will only shred a few pages at a time (maybe 1-5), but the modified printer can shred hundreds of pages automatically. This might not be useful in a potentially malicious environment, such as the govt., in a small business case, where the stuff to be shredded is basically to protect your identity, etc. it would be useful.
yes, but X puts the keyboard in RAW mode, where the keys don't go to the vt driver. Secondly, I have seen X (especially on cheap video cards) trash the text mode consoles. You can, as other posters have mentioned, log in remotely and restart X, but your text modes are gone. I have in the past done Ctrl-Alt-F5 (or some vc that I know is unused) and blindly typed the commands to restart X. Lots of fun, since you can't see what you're typing, or if there is any effect. I usually do something like ls -R first, and watch the hard drive LED to make sure I'm at a command prompt. Then it's just a matter of typing the command to restart X (which in my case is/etc/init.d/gdm restart without making any tyops... great fun!:-/
well, you stumped me. I tried haskell, ocaml, python, forth, erlang (although I don't know enough about erl to see anything, even an error message), tcl, perl, bash, csh, and DCL, and none of them liked it.
Simmonds was not the only one to postulate using trees as rockets. Larry Niven wrote about rocket trees (called stage trees) in "World of Ptavvs" and "A Relic of the Empire", and Charles Stross used them in his story "Rogue Farm".
We have a completely locked down firewall where I work. The only external access is through an http proxy (ok, there is also DNS, but TCP/IP over dns, while it does actually exist, is not very convenient). I used to use SSHWebProxy, a java servlet that makes an ssh connection using only http requests, so it has no problem getting through a proxy. It was ok, but I have since switched to anytermwhich, while still using only http, manages to get pretty much a complete interactive terminal.
I realize this is slightly off topic, so to return to the issue of time, I agree with others that if you need a precise time source, just buy GPS or a WWVB based one, such as this one or a gps based one.
I had the opportunity of working with a 1tB raid configured basically as you said. Ultra SCSI 320 interface to the raid controller, and 16 Ultra SCSI 160 drives, 15 online in a raid 5 configuration, and one hot spare. When one of the drives fails, a light blinks, an alarm sounds (we were in the room wondering what that sound was) the software automatically brings the spare online, integrates it into the raid, and keeps the data online the whole time. Then, you take out the failed drive, and put in a new one that becomes the new hot spare. It was very nice!
I can vouch for webex. I am behind a completely restrictive firewall. The only traffic out is http through a proxy and email through a mail server. Oh, and DNS, but IP over DNS is pretty much a joke, even though it actually does exist.
One time I was having some problems with a vendor's computer and I called tech support. He set up a webex meeting for me to connect to and it worked beautifully. We were able to do desktop sharing in real time.
yes, but many (most?) routers allow the configuration of the external MAC address, so the router would merely appear to be the hardware that is supposed to be on that link. For instance, in my friend's college dorm room, they used to just plug in a hub and hook up multiple computers. Then management enabled "port security" where the first MAC address to connect to a port on the switch locks it so that only that MAC can connect in the future. What my friend did was to set up a linux box as a router, with two nics, and set the MAC address of the external nic to be the MAC address of the "authorized" computer. And this was in 1998 or so, I am sure the technology to change MAC addresses has only gotten easier.
I will say though, that having lived in Springfield, Missouri for 15 years, they don't necessarily say y'all there, they say you'ns. I'm not quite sure what the distinction is though.
My VOIP provider, packet8 has had optional 911 service for a while. The way that it works is that you provide them with an address (such as your home address) and they provide that information to the 911 service center. There is a standard disclaimer about their 911 service saying that the address given to emergency operators may not be the same as your physical location. I chose not to opt into their 911 service since I already have it on my cell phone though. I hope the FCC isn't going to make it mandatory, because I would be annoyed to pay extra fees for a service I would not use. On the other hand, 911 service would still be somewhat helpful even without location information.
I recently bought some hard drives from bestbargianpc.com for my company. Company policy is to log the serial numbers of all hardware, but I couldn't find the serial numbers. I called Maxtor (the drives were labeled as Maxtor drives) and after discussion with Maxtor tech support, including the Maxtor diagnostic software returning a blank serial number, and sending them photocopies of the label sides of the drives, they informed me that the drives were never manufactured by Maxtor and were completely counterfeit! They actually do show up as the correct size in BIOS, but I wouldn't trust them to actually store important data on.
Pattern Rcognition is a novel by William Gibson, basically set in the present day or very near future. Image based search plays a central role in the plot. It's a very good read.
the reason that the Acela ride is so much smoother than the regular train is the car-levelling system that they have. It automatically compensates for curves, etc. It's pretty cool. Trainweb's page about Acela has more info.
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As you said, the treo 650 has built in bluetooth, and 320x320 resolution. I think I heard about somebody (probably shadowmite again) hacking in some sdio wifi drivers... *checks google* yes, here it is.
and to take the idea of harnessing hurricanes one step further, imagine putting a giant big-as-the-earth windmill in the great red spot (which is a giant fairly stable storm) of Jupiter :-)
How flexible is it? The article didn't say. The photo attached to the article didn't even show the screen flexing. It looks like an ordinary flat panel display. What kind of resolution and color depth does it have?
A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
... er ... I think I'll just have a green salad,' he muttered.
'Good evening', it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, 'I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?'
It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.
'Something off the shoulder perhaps?' suggested the animal, 'Braised in a white wine sauce?'
'Er, your shoulder?' said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
'But naturallymy shoulder, sir,' mooed the animal contentedly, 'nobody else's is mine to offer.'
Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.
'Or the rump is very good,' murmured the animal. 'I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there.'
It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
'Or a casselore of me perhaps?' it added.
'You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?' whispered Trillian to Ford.
'Me?' said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, 'I don't mean anything.'
'That's absolutely horrible,' exclaimed Arthur, 'the most revolting thing I've ever heard.'
'What's the problem Earthman?' said Zaphod, now transfering his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
'I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to,' said Arthur, 'It's heartless.'
'Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten,' said Zaphod.
'That's not the point,' Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. 'Alright,' he said, 'maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just
'May I urge you to consider my liver?' asked the animal, 'it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months.'
'A green salad,' said Arthur emphatically.
'A green salad?' said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
'Are you going to tell me,' said Arthur, 'that I shouldn't have green salad?'
'Well,' said the animal, 'I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whoile tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of
saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.'
It managed a very slight bow.
'Glass of water please,' said Arthur.
'Look,' said Zaphod, 'we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years.'
The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. 'A very wise coice, sir, if I may say so. Very good,' it said, 'I'll just nip off and shoot myself.'
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. 'Don't worry, sir,' he said, 'I'll be very humane.'
It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen.
we have the carpeted tiles in my datacenter, and the reason is that they are supposedly less prone to generate static electricty. While this doesn't make sense to me, I must say that the tiles are not a pile-type carpet, rather like felt that is permanently bonded to the tile surface.
I loved calling up BBSes with my modem. I had a 2400, and I still remember when I got a 14.4... what a blazing fast speed! I did eventually get a 28.8 and a 56k, and they were great too, but by then I was starting to use them for internet (SLIP, btw) instead of just BBSing.
I mainly loved door games (trade wars 2002 and Land of Devastation were my favorites, but I also loved BRE, SRE, sysop wars, LORD, etc.) but I also spent a lot of time on file transfers. I used to use QWK and BlueWave offline readers, so I could spend most of my minutes playing door games, and still read the message boards.
I use zmodem myself all the time. For me the best reason is not the error correction/detection or the ability to resume transfers, but because it is end-to-end rather than host-to-host. For instance, where I work, there is a fairly complex firewall, and every site has their own firewall as well. So a typical session might be:
connect from my pc to the local telnet gateway
connect from local telnet gateway to the telnet gateway of the remote site
connect from the remote telnet gateway to the remote system that I want to work on.
keeping in mind that all these systems have their own passwords, etc. Transferring files from the remote system to my pc with ftp/scp is a major pain, because I have to basically do the same process, and it is sometimes not even possible (for instance if some of the intermediate systems don't have enough disk space).
So, I uze zmodem. The fact that it is end-to-end means that once I do get connected to a remote machine, regardless of the intervening systems or the transport type (DECnet, tcp/ip, serial links, etc.), I can still transfer files directly to my pc.
I was a computer science major, with minors in math and physics. I wrote a program to interface with a bunch of temperature controllers being used on one of the experimental setups in the physics department. They were having grad students sit up all night recording the temperature every half hour, and setting the controller's set points manually. I wrote an application that used a medium speed serial interface to connect to the controllers, poll them, and set them at certain times. The controllers used a completely arbitrary and proprietary protocol, but it was at least documented.
What I thought was the most interesting bit (and what I am sure the PhD in the physics dept. that I was working for didn't care about at all) was that all the communication was done using a PostgreSQL database. The master application would spawn children to connect to the controllers and poll them, and put the results in the results table. Control was done by a database client application (in php, but I also experiemented with using MS Access) that would insert commands into the database's command queue table, which the master program used some triggers and pl/pgsql code to watch for changes to. I used pgsql's LISTEN and NOTIFY syntax, which I thought (and still think) to be very useful. That way I didn't have to write a seperate server process, or worry about concurrency issues.
All in all, it took about 3 months, with about 10k lines of code (I know, not that impressive, but hey, I was proud of it). It was interesting because it was the largest project I had worked on, and even though I was the only developper, I still had to do essentially software engineering and management issues.
The point is that that shredder will only shred a few pages at a time (maybe 1-5), but the modified printer can shred hundreds of pages automatically. This might not be useful in a potentially malicious environment, such as the govt., in a small business case, where the stuff to be shredded is basically to protect your identity, etc. it would be useful.
yes, but X puts the keyboard in RAW mode, where the keys don't go to the vt driver. Secondly, I have seen X (especially on cheap video cards) trash the text mode consoles. You can, as other posters have mentioned, log in remotely and restart X, but your text modes are gone. I have in the past done Ctrl-Alt-F5 (or some vc that I know is unused) and blindly typed the commands to restart X. Lots of fun, since you can't see what you're typing, or if there is any effect. I usually do something like ls -R first, and watch the hard drive LED to make sure I'm at a command prompt. Then it's just a matter of typing the command to restart X (which in my case is /etc/init.d/gdm restart without making any tyops... great fun! :-/
well, you stumped me. I tried haskell, ocaml, python, forth, erlang (although I don't know enough about erl to see anything, even an error message), tcl, perl, bash, csh, and DCL, and none of them liked it.
Simmonds was not the only one to postulate using trees as rockets. Larry Niven wrote about rocket trees (called stage trees) in "World of Ptavvs" and "A Relic of the Empire", and Charles Stross used them in his story "Rogue Farm".
We have a completely locked down firewall where I work. The only external access is through an http proxy (ok, there is also DNS, but TCP/IP over dns, while it does actually exist, is not very convenient). I used to use SSHWebProxy, a java servlet that makes an ssh connection using only http requests, so it has no problem getting through a proxy. It was ok, but I have since switched to anytermwhich, while still using only http, manages to get pretty much a complete interactive terminal.
I realize this is slightly off topic, so to return to the issue of time, I agree with others that if you need a precise time source, just buy GPS or a WWVB based one, such as this one or a gps based one.
I had the opportunity of working with a 1tB raid configured basically as you said. Ultra SCSI 320 interface to the raid controller, and 16 Ultra SCSI 160 drives, 15 online in a raid 5 configuration, and one hot spare. When one of the drives fails, a light blinks, an alarm sounds (we were in the room wondering what that sound was) the software automatically brings the spare online, integrates it into the raid, and keeps the data online the whole time. Then, you take out the failed drive, and put in a new one that becomes the new hot spare. It was very nice!
I can vouch for webex. I am behind a completely restrictive firewall. The only traffic out is http through a proxy and email through a mail server. Oh, and DNS, but IP over DNS is pretty much a joke, even though it actually does exist.
One time I was having some problems with a vendor's computer and I called tech support. He set up a webex meeting for me to connect to and it worked beautifully. We were able to do desktop sharing in real time.
yes, but many (most?) routers allow the configuration of the external MAC address, so the router would merely appear to be the hardware that is supposed to be on that link. For instance, in my friend's college dorm room, they used to just plug in a hub and hook up multiple computers. Then management enabled "port security" where the first MAC address to connect to a port on the switch locks it so that only that MAC can connect in the future. What my friend did was to set up a linux box as a router, with two nics, and set the MAC address of the external nic to be the MAC address of the "authorized" computer. And this was in 1998 or so, I am sure the technology to change MAC addresses has only gotten easier.
An etherkiller? Where's the +1 Evil Genius mod?
I will say though, that having lived in Springfield, Missouri for 15 years, they don't necessarily say y'all there, they say you'ns. I'm not quite sure what the distinction is though.
"they" etc. are now completely accepted as gender-neutral singular forms, as well as the standard plural usage.
well, I of course meant to link to packet8.net. I wish slashcode would allow editing of one's own posts.
My VOIP provider, packet8 has had optional 911 service for a while. The way that it works is that you provide them with an address (such as your home address) and they provide that information to the 911 service center. There is a standard disclaimer about their 911 service saying that the address given to emergency operators may not be the same as your physical location. I chose not to opt into their 911 service since I already have it on my cell phone though. I hope the FCC isn't going to make it mandatory, because I would be annoyed to pay extra fees for a service I would not use. On the other hand, 911 service would still be somewhat helpful even without location information.
I recently bought some hard drives from bestbargianpc.com for my company.
Company policy is to log the serial numbers of all hardware, but I couldn't find the serial numbers. I called Maxtor (the drives were labeled as Maxtor drives) and after discussion with Maxtor tech support, including the Maxtor diagnostic software returning a blank serial number, and sending them photocopies of the label sides of the drives, they informed me that the drives were never manufactured by Maxtor and were completely counterfeit! They actually do show up as the correct size in BIOS, but I wouldn't trust them to actually store important data on.
Pattern Rcognition is a novel by William Gibson, basically set in the present day or very near future. Image based search plays a central role in the plot. It's a very good read.
the reason that the Acela ride is so much smoother than the regular train is the car-levelling system that they have. It automatically compensates for curves, etc. It's pretty cool. Trainweb's page about Acela has more info.
I ... fixed your door. It was sticking.