In my experiance, the best hardware for diagnosing PC hardware problems is another PC that you know works. Quite frankly, the built in diagnostic capabilities of PC hardware is extremely poor, the only reliable way to discover if a part if bad is to replace it with a known good part and see if that fixes the problem. Don't blindly trust new or especially refurbished parts either, they need to be tested and known good. With experiance you will know what parts to try first, but it is still important to verify that replacing the failed component with a new part fixes the problem.
I remember back at school where the tech support guys were ripping their hair out because a lot of the school issued PCs were coming back with random crashing problems. (I had a roommate who's machine would crash everytime the screensaver kicked in). They were replacing parts left and right and it never seemed to fix the problem. My roommate had everything replaced except the case at one part, and it still crashed on a vanilla Win3.1 install. It took them awhile to realize that most of the machines had bad memory, and the vendor supplied replacement memory for the systems was usually bad as well. I eventually loaned my roommate my memory sticks, and when his system didn't crash he went back to the PC guys and told them exactly what the problem was and made them continue swapping in RAM sticks until they finally found one that worked (apparently the RAM was OK in their hardware RAM tester, but failed once it was actually put in PCs. They suspected the same thing was happening at the vendors end. They would get bad memory, test it and not discover a problem, then ship it right back to the school.
Superman is a blood doner? I have to appreciate his civic enthusiasm, but it seems unlikely that his blood chemestry is even remotely similar to ours. He's probably going to give the lab guys fits when they try to determine his blood type. Given the way comic book physics work, the transfusion recipiant will probably end up with Superman's powers for a day (instead of merely being horribly posioned by the incompatable blood).
100 people downloading CDs nonstop for a year? How much data is that? Lets figure it out.
That appears to be 144,277,200,000,000 bytes or so. $216,000 doesn't seem too bad for the volume of data you're pushing, although $500 per Mbps seems a little high. Those 100 users can afford it since they obviously have EMC storage arrays attached to their computers.
Also you can repeaditly stream a text version of War and Peace or some other lengthy book, with a counter on the recieving end showing how many times you have downloaded it. Keep a copy of the print edition on the table to show them what is comming down as the counter ticks away.
Heck, why stream just one book? Why not stream the entire Library of Congress down the link and keep a counter of how many times you do it. Then you can give your link speed in a unit the management types are familiar with: Library of Congresses/second.
I recently heard something interesting. The recent explosion in short term (high interest) debt in the US may not be as bad as it first appears. Apparently this number is calculated in a method similar to credit reports. They grab the current amount of money on your credit card and compare that with various factors. However, in recent years many many Americans have taken to paying for most things with their credit card (to get the cash back/miles/etc...), and then paying off the credit card at the end of each month. In some ways this is smarter than using cash and checks. Unfortunatly banks can't seem to figure out how to account for this when figuring the amount of short term debt people actually have, and it's skewing the numbers.
The thing is, if someone can tamper with the image, they can tamper with the md5sum as well. In your solution, the md5sum is useless, it's the write only memory on the camera that is actually providing your security.
I don't know if my camera has a cheap filter or no filter at all, but it is more sensitive to infared than the naked eye. The easiest way to see this is to point a remote control at the camera, hold down a button and snap a picture. In the picture you can see the little bulb in the remote all lit up, even though it is invisble to the naked eye.
You must use different ATMs than I do. All of the ones I've seen are just 486s (or sometimes faster) running OS2 or NT with a giant cash dispensing peripheral attached. There isn't much redundancy in there (I guess the bank figures there's no need to buy expensive redundant equipment to save a few bucks on ATM fees.
Who in the world vacuums their house every day? Honestly, I've got a low end (cheap plastic) vacuum cleaner and it's lasted over 5 years now and shows no sign of wearing out anytime soon. I know that's anecdotal, but I havn't exactly heard a lot from people about having to replace their vacuum cleaners all the time either. Either you're abusing the heck out of yours or there's something else that's causing them to give up the ghost on you that fast.
If you want to look at it that way, we are _all_ sharing the internet bandwidth right now. Even the guys who hook directly into the backbones. The difference is that it is far more economical to run high bandwidth pipes to the CO than it is to run them to every cable modem customer's home. The Cable modem guys have to share a less bandwidth with more people in the end.
Also, (to draw an analogy), Cablemodem is like an hub, while DSL is like a switch.
And the cable modem user will still be laughing at you for paying a 10x markup to support a SLA that you don't even come close to needing. T1s are priced for business that depend on constant support and can afford to pay through the nose for bandwidth. For home users it doesn't make sense at all, but no phone company I've ever seen offers a T1 without the SLA (which should reduce the price significantly).
It would be easy. Just release a new version of IE that goes to search.msn.com when you type "google" into the address bar, in addition to making search.msn.com the default homepage. Microsoft knows that 70% of the people never change the defaults, so whoever controls the defaults wins.
I always thought that Nintendo made a dumb move by not making the SNES backwards compatable with the NES. Given the architectures, it shouldn't have been too difficult (there are even some design decisions that suggest that the system was intended to support old NES games, but the support was dropped partially through the development process). I was sure they were going to release a funky looking cartridge adaptor that just plugged into the top and emulated whatever parts of the system didn't match up exactly, especially considering the number dead cartridge connectors on those old NES boxes.
Well, you can stack any Playstation on top of a Playstation 2, assuming there is enough room over top of it to let the lid open.
Still, I probably wouldn't have bought the PS2 when I did if it didn't come with the PSx support. I was actually more interested in a few PSx games, but figured it was a dead end and went for the PS2 instead. Had there been no backwards compataiblity, I doubt I would have a PS2 at all now (especially since there hasn't been much on the PS2 that I would count as "buy the whold game system" worthy, at least not like Final Fantasy: Tactics on the PSx:)
I don't know if that is true. It might be easier to recover if you are small. I have seen some innovative yet simple designs that allow a small bot to flip over if needed (I gave a link somewhere around here). Besides, the loss of a few will matter less.
The risk is generally not flipping over (NASA is really careful with their rovers, they're not going to do wheelies with them), rather it's getting stuck in soft soil or hung up on a rock. This is where being small is a problem, as there are many more opportunities to get yourself stuck.
As for management, even if you allow your team to be a bit sloppier with the robots, there is still alot of management that you have to do with each one to keep them productive.
Plus, the extra redundancy comes at a cost. The cost is the extra redundancy. Every rovor is going to have to have some of the same basic parts (locomotion system, solar panels, computer, radio, navigation cameras, rad shielding, electronics heater, chassis, heat shielding, landing system, etc...), and duplicating those parts over many rovers means you will end up eating into your scientific payload weight just to launch the fifth or sixth redundant navigation camera (among other things).
That's a pretty big penalty for people running mailing lists, especially if they're running from a rarely noticed 486 sitting in the corner somewhere. Don't kid yourself either, there are many many specialized mailing lists on the internet that don't have major corporate sponsors (but may generate an enormous amount of (legitimate) traffic).
In theory it sounds like a good idea, but in practice you run into a lot of difficulties. Small robots are not as good at navigating rough terrain (like, say, Mars) as large robots. Also, you have to deal with the complexity of managing scores of robots (it takes a large team of people to manage the two rovers we have up there now). Plus, there are some parts of the design that do not scale down well, that ever robot will need, such as high gain antennas to talk back to Earth and the Solar Panels and whatnot. You could theoretically stick all of that on some basestation, but the basestation would end up only somewhat smaller than our current rovers... Basically, it's just not a feasable idea right now. The complexity is too high and the little rovers end up with too many limitations (and end up being too big) to be practical.
While I don't put a lot of stock in these sorts of rumors, doesn't the idea of an almost complete architecture change suggest that backwards compatability is going to be difficult, HDD or no?
Also, has there ever been a prerelease rumor about a game console that didn't claim it was going to be faster than any known computer in the universe, able to push more polygons than a high end Onyx, and so on and so forth?
According to the article (it's back up now), you're almost completely wrong. The author does make a good point, I have never _ever_ seen a case where they bother to tell you which screw is which. I (like pretty much every Slashdotter I'd bet) figured it out by just trying to thread each one and seeing which fit. I think I've got some floppy drive screws holding in some of my CD-ROMs because they were the only ones small enough to not bang on the sides of the card cage when i tried to put the drive in.
It depends. If you're on Fark, then yes, it is pretty easy to see if a picture has been modified. If a professional does the work, it is much much harder, probably even impossible.
That practice works if you're the only one doing it. Otherwise the book you want is invariably gone by the time you need it. I tried that one semester and vowed never to do it again. Fortunatly the Library had one copy left and my butt was saved for the mid-semester project.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experiance, the best hardware for diagnosing PC hardware problems is another PC that you know works. Quite frankly, the built in diagnostic capabilities of PC hardware is extremely poor, the only reliable way to discover if a part if bad is to replace it with a known good part and see if that fixes the problem. Don't blindly trust new or especially refurbished parts either, they need to be tested and known good. With experiance you will know what parts to try first, but it is still important to verify that replacing the failed component with a new part fixes the problem.
I remember back at school where the tech support guys were ripping their hair out because a lot of the school issued PCs were coming back with random crashing problems. (I had a roommate who's machine would crash everytime the screensaver kicked in). They were replacing parts left and right and it never seemed to fix the problem. My roommate had everything replaced except the case at one part, and it still crashed on a vanilla Win3.1 install. It took them awhile to realize that most of the machines had bad memory, and the vendor supplied replacement memory for the systems was usually bad as well. I eventually loaned my roommate my memory sticks, and when his system didn't crash he went back to the PC guys and told them exactly what the problem was and made them continue swapping in RAM sticks until they finally found one that worked (apparently the RAM was OK in their hardware RAM tester, but failed once it was actually put in PCs. They suspected the same thing was happening at the vendors end. They would get bad memory, test it and not discover a problem, then ship it right back to the school.
Superman is a blood doner? I have to appreciate his civic enthusiasm, but it seems unlikely that his blood chemestry is even remotely similar to ours. He's probably going to give the lab guys fits when they try to determine his blood type. Given the way comic book physics work, the transfusion recipiant will probably end up with Superman's powers for a day (instead of merely being horribly posioned by the incompatable blood).
100 people downloading CDs nonstop for a year? How much data is that? Lets figure it out.
That appears to be 144,277,200,000,000 bytes or so. $216,000 doesn't seem too bad for the volume of data you're pushing, although $500 per Mbps seems a little high. Those 100 users can afford it since they obviously have EMC storage arrays attached to their computers.
Damn, I can't tell if that's an actual overview of the paper or an exerpt from an episode of Star Trek.
I recently heard something interesting. The recent explosion in short term (high interest) debt in the US may not be as bad as it first appears. Apparently this number is calculated in a method similar to credit reports. They grab the current amount of money on your credit card and compare that with various factors. However, in recent years many many Americans have taken to paying for most things with their credit card (to get the cash back/miles/etc...), and then paying off the credit card at the end of each month. In some ways this is smarter than using cash and checks. Unfortunatly banks can't seem to figure out how to account for this when figuring the amount of short term debt people actually have, and it's skewing the numbers.
Geek...level...nine...and...rising...
The thing is, if someone can tamper with the image, they can tamper with the md5sum as well. In your solution, the md5sum is useless, it's the write only memory on the camera that is actually providing your security.
I don't know if my camera has a cheap filter or no filter at all, but it is more sensitive to infared than the naked eye. The easiest way to see this is to point a remote control at the camera, hold down a button and snap a picture. In the picture you can see the little bulb in the remote all lit up, even though it is invisble to the naked eye.
I hate when you're creeping up behind some camping punk and he uses the gun built into his backpack to snag you with a headshot.
You must use different ATMs than I do. All of the ones I've seen are just 486s (or sometimes faster) running OS2 or NT with a giant cash dispensing peripheral attached. There isn't much redundancy in there (I guess the bank figures there's no need to buy expensive redundant equipment to save a few bucks on ATM fees.
Who in the world vacuums their house every day? Honestly, I've got a low end (cheap plastic) vacuum cleaner and it's lasted over 5 years now and shows no sign of wearing out anytime soon. I know that's anecdotal, but I havn't exactly heard a lot from people about having to replace their vacuum cleaners all the time either. Either you're abusing the heck out of yours or there's something else that's causing them to give up the ghost on you that fast.
If you want to look at it that way, we are _all_ sharing the internet bandwidth right now. Even the guys who hook directly into the backbones. The difference is that it is far more economical to run high bandwidth pipes to the CO than it is to run them to every cable modem customer's home. The Cable modem guys have to share a less bandwidth with more people in the end.
Also, (to draw an analogy), Cablemodem is like an hub, while DSL is like a switch.
And the cable modem user will still be laughing at you for paying a 10x markup to support a SLA that you don't even come close to needing. T1s are priced for business that depend on constant support and can afford to pay through the nose for bandwidth. For home users it doesn't make sense at all, but no phone company I've ever seen offers a T1 without the SLA (which should reduce the price significantly).
It would be easy. Just release a new version of IE that goes to search.msn.com when you type "google" into the address bar, in addition to making search.msn.com the default homepage. Microsoft knows that 70% of the people never change the defaults, so whoever controls the defaults wins.
I always thought that Nintendo made a dumb move by not making the SNES backwards compatable with the NES. Given the architectures, it shouldn't have been too difficult (there are even some design decisions that suggest that the system was intended to support old NES games, but the support was dropped partially through the development process). I was sure they were going to release a funky looking cartridge adaptor that just plugged into the top and emulated whatever parts of the system didn't match up exactly, especially considering the number dead cartridge connectors on those old NES boxes.
Well, you can stack any Playstation on top of a Playstation 2, assuming there is enough room over top of it to let the lid open.
:)
Still, I probably wouldn't have bought the PS2 when I did if it didn't come with the PSx support. I was actually more interested in a few PSx games, but figured it was a dead end and went for the PS2 instead. Had there been no backwards compataiblity, I doubt I would have a PS2 at all now (especially since there hasn't been much on the PS2 that I would count as "buy the whold game system" worthy, at least not like Final Fantasy: Tactics on the PSx
As for management, even if you allow your team to be a bit sloppier with the robots, there is still alot of management that you have to do with each one to keep them productive.
Plus, the extra redundancy comes at a cost. The cost is the extra redundancy. Every rovor is going to have to have some of the same basic parts (locomotion system, solar panels, computer, radio, navigation cameras, rad shielding, electronics heater, chassis, heat shielding, landing system, etc...), and duplicating those parts over many rovers means you will end up eating into your scientific payload weight just to launch the fifth or sixth redundant navigation camera (among other things).
That's a pretty big penalty for people running mailing lists, especially if they're running from a rarely noticed 486 sitting in the corner somewhere. Don't kid yourself either, there are many many specialized mailing lists on the internet that don't have major corporate sponsors (but may generate an enormous amount of (legitimate) traffic).
In theory it sounds like a good idea, but in practice you run into a lot of difficulties. Small robots are not as good at navigating rough terrain (like, say, Mars) as large robots. Also, you have to deal with the complexity of managing scores of robots (it takes a large team of people to manage the two rovers we have up there now). Plus, there are some parts of the design that do not scale down well, that ever robot will need, such as high gain antennas to talk back to Earth and the Solar Panels and whatnot. You could theoretically stick all of that on some basestation, but the basestation would end up only somewhat smaller than our current rovers... Basically, it's just not a feasable idea right now. The complexity is too high and the little rovers end up with too many limitations (and end up being too big) to be practical.
While I don't put a lot of stock in these sorts of rumors, doesn't the idea of an almost complete architecture change suggest that backwards compatability is going to be difficult, HDD or no?
Also, has there ever been a prerelease rumor about a game console that didn't claim it was going to be faster than any known computer in the universe, able to push more polygons than a high end Onyx, and so on and so forth?
According to the article (it's back up now), you're almost completely wrong. The author does make a good point, I have never _ever_ seen a case where they bother to tell you which screw is which. I (like pretty much every Slashdotter I'd bet) figured it out by just trying to thread each one and seeing which fit. I think I've got some floppy drive screws holding in some of my CD-ROMs because they were the only ones small enough to not bang on the sides of the card cage when i tried to put the drive in.
It depends. If you're on Fark, then yes, it is pretty easy to see if a picture has been modified. If a professional does the work, it is much much harder, probably even impossible.
That practice works if you're the only one doing it. Otherwise the book you want is invariably gone by the time you need it. I tried that one semester and vowed never to do it again. Fortunatly the Library had one copy left and my butt was saved for the mid-semester project.