You'll also find the ABCD keys on telco test equipment. Some modems will produce those tones if you put the letters A, B, C & D in the dialing string. # and * also work. Try it, "ATTDABCD#*"
As a kid my job on family trips was to read the map and figure out where the next turn, gas station, etc. was. My father drove and my mother's eyesight wasn't good enough to read the maps well. I remember one trip when my father asked me how far to the next town (he was looking for a gas station). I checked and it was something like 8 miles. 8 miles passed and no town. Then 10 and still no town. My father got mad, said I wasn't doing a very good job of navigating , pulled the car over and ripped the map out of my hands. He studied it for a few minutes as we all sat in silence. Finally he said, "Either this damn cheap map is wrong or they moved the town." Years later I found out about the "markers" that mapmakers put in to insure that their works aren't copied.
When I moved to where I live now I was given a map of the area by my employer. I noticed one day that there was a street marked "PUD Drive." I thought that one was pretty funny at the time. Over the next few years I noticed it on a lot of maps from many different companies. One Saturday, with nothing to do, I drove over to PUD drive and found... NOTHING! It didn't exist!
Curious, I went to the city planner's office the next Monday and asked about it. With a sigh the secretary told me they get this all the time. PUD stood for "Planned Urban Development" and some idiot mapmaker years earlier had copied it as though it was the name of a street and it ended up on all succeeding maps thereafter.
Pud Drive was on Mapquest as recently as 2 years ago when I sent them an email telling them about it along with several other errors in their maps (like one-way streets going the wrong way and exits that no longer existed). I never heard back from them but I just went there now and noticed they have corrected their maps to implement (most of) the changes I sent them. In fact, I can't find a PUD on any city I try, and there used to be a lot of them on Mapquest.
Actually there's only 8 tones, 4 for the rows and 4 for the columns making 16 possible combinations.
There's a 4th column to the right labeled ABCD. Most phones don't have this column but telephone test equipment does.
As a side note, many Hayes compatible modems will produce the tones for the ABCD keys if you send one of these letters in the dialing string. (The dialing string "ATTD 1234567890#*ABCD" will produce all 16 tones)
Potential for future chip failures?
on
Glass-Eating Microbes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If they can eat glass, then it's possible they could eat silicon chips as well. In fact, they may already be doing it and we just haven't discovered them yet. Someone wrote a SF story years ago about geneticly engineered bacteria attacking silicon but it's too early in the mormning for me to remember much about it.
Gives a whole new meaning to "computer bug" though, doesn't it?
I just took the measurements off my firewall (HP Vectra VL2 4/66) and here's what I got.
While booting from the floppy, current peaked at 0.303 Amps. Line Voltage was measured at 121.3 Volts. W=EI so 121.3 * 0.303 = 36.75 Watts.
After booting it settled down to a steady 0.295 Amps which would be 35.78 Watts.
I checked my book-sized 486 and I was mistaken. It has a 45 Watt power supply and for those interested, it draws 0.348 Amps with a 1 Gig hard drive and a second NIC in its single slot. That's 42.21 Watts. I think I'll keep using the 486/66 as a firewall.;-)
I'm not saying that a PC firewall is best for everyone, just that it's an option to be considered. In my case, when I built mine over 2 years ago, dedicated routers weren't anywhere near the price range they are now. Compared to a free PC, free 10Mb NICs, a free hub and a few hours of my time (OK, a weekend), it was a no-brainer for me. All of the equipment to make my network except for the cabling were tossed out by my employer because they just HAD to have 100Mb Ethernet company-wide even though many of our locations were (and still are) only connected by T1s and T3's shared with the phone system. Their loss was my gain. And I got to learn a lot about routers, firewalls, routing tables, port forwarding, etc.
Of course if you just want a quick "set it and forget it" router/firewall, a dedicated router is the way to go. Prices have come down drasticly in the last 6 months and if I has to start from scratch (i.i. no PCs or NICs laying around) I'd probably just buy one as well. You should choose carefully, though. If it doesn't do everything you want, you can't really get inside and change it later.
On a side note, my company discovered today during a security check (prompted by the WTC attack) that 4 of our internal Cisco routers were not only visible to the outside world, but still had the default passwords. When I left today our SysAdmin was still yelling at the contractor who put them in over 6 months ago! Our new rule: Never trust a hired contractor/consultant to do the right thing.
Bear in mind those are MAXIMUM rated power consumption for the power supplies, not actual usage. Remove the hard drive, most of the cards and use a slow processor and I'll bet a PC compares much more favorably. When I get home tonight I'll get an actual power reading from mine. This whole discussion has me curious.
BTW, not all PC's have 250W power supplies. I picked up a 486DX4/100 at a hamfest for $10 that has a 35W rated power supply. It's about the size of a hardbound book, has built-in 10M Ethernet, 2M VGA video, keyboard, mouse, parallel amd 2 serial ports, 1 ISA slot, 2 SIMM sockets, 1 floppy and 1 hard drive. The power supply is only about 1&1/4 inches square by 5 inches long and neither it nor the processor has a fan. The only thing that seemed to be wrong with it was that the hard drive (250M) was full of bad sectors. Looks like it was last being used as an X11 terminal before I got it, which is probably what I'll use it for as well.
My 486-66 box running Freesco doesn't have a fan. It failed sometime back and I never noticed. No fan, no hard drive, no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse... NO PROBLEM!
Apparently only on the Illinois side. It's $1.69 on the Iowa side of the river although I passed 4 stations that were closed and out of gas tonight. Grocery store I stopped at tonight (Eagle's) had people there buying everything in sight. Damn fools. I just wanted to get in, buy a 6 pack and some toilet paper and get out. Seems like I was in line forever.
Structural design flaws or additional explosives involved? Of course a 757 is bigger than a 707.
Engineers shocked by
towers' collapse
BY BLAIR KAMIN
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO -- The World Trade Center, a
symbol of American economic might, survived
one terrorist attack in 1993. It was designed to
withstand the impact of a jet, but both its
towers collapsed this morning after planes
rammed them.
The structural engineer who designed the
towers said as recently as last week that their
steel columns could remain standing if they
were hit by a 707.
Les Robertson, the Trade Center's structural
engineer, spoke last week at a conference on
tall buildings in Frankfurt, Germany. He was
asked during a question-and-answer session
what he had done to protect the twin towers
from terrorist attacks, according to Joseph
Burns, a principal at the Chicago firm of
Thornton-Thomasetti Engineers.
Burns, who was present, said that Robertson
said of the center, ``I designed it for a 707 to
smash into it.''
Burns, whose firm did the structural engineering
for the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia --
the world's tallest buildings -- said Robertson
did not elaborate on the remark. Robertson
could not be reached early Tuesday.
Completed in 1972 and 1973, the 110-story
twin towers were the fifth and sixth tallest
buildings in the world. One World Trade
Center, finished in 1972, was briefly after its
construction the world's tallest building. The towers have been called
``a monumental gate to New York and the United States.''
They withstood the 1993 attack, when a bomb-laden van exploded,
killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.
Closely spaced steel columns that ringed their perimeter held up the
World Trade Center towers. Chicago's Aon Center (formerly the
Amoco Building), completed in 1973, uses a similar support system,
known to structural engineers as a ``tube.''
Shocked by the building's collapse, structural engineers pointed to fire
as the likely cause of the structural failure.
``Fire melts steel,'' Burns said. In addition, he said, the impact of the
plane could have severely damaged the building's sprinklers, allowing
the fire to rage, despite fireproofing supposed to protect steel columns
and beams.
``You never know in an explosion like that whether they (the
sprinklers) get cut off,'' Burns said.
Architects Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, in association with
Emery Roth & Sons, designed the World Trade Center.
The structural engineers were the firm of Skilling, Helle, Christiansen,
Robertson. The developer was The Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey.
Tuesday's attack marked the second time that a plane has crashed
into a New York City skyscraper, although the first incident was an
accident.
In 1945, a B-25 flying at 200 miles per hour slammed into the 78th
and 79th floors of the Empire State Building, gouging an
18-by-20-foot hole 913 feet above the streets of Manhattan. The
pilot, Lt. Col. William F. Smith Jr., had been heading from New
York's LaGuardia Airport to Newark, N.J., when he became
disoriented.
Fourteen people died in the crash and the fire that followed -- three
people in the plane and 11 in what was then the world's tallest
building.
Like the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, which also was struck
by a plane, provided a sizable and symbolic target.
The Pentagon is the world's largest office building, with a total of 6.5
million square feet, serves as headquarters for the world's most
powerful military. Sears Tower, by comparison, has about 3.5 million
square feet of office space.
Several news sources are reporting that a 911 call was made from the bathroom of the plane that went down in PA. The caller said they were being hijacked and that it was not a joke, then there was the sound of an explosion and the phone went dead.
Why didn't anyone see this coming? What are all our tax dollars being spent on if not to prevent incidents like this? I can see where ONE hijacked plane could slip by, but FOUR? This is inexcusable.
Sorry, but this just makes me so angry I can hardly contain myself.
To each his own I guess, but massive storage isn't what everyone is looking for. I mean, a semi can carry a lot more stuff but I'd hate to drive one to work every day and try to find a parking space for it. Bigger isn't always better.
Personally, I want one of these and would be willing to pay for it today. I've been using the 3 inch disks for over a year and I like their portability. I usually carry 2 or 3 of the mini disks around in my pocket at work. On them are software updates I have to apply to various machines, utilities I may need, floppy disk images, my favorite browser (Opera), and yes, Winzip and some MP3 files (something to listen to while setting up a machine).
If I'm judging the size of this unit right, I should be able to put the player, 3-5 mini disks and a set of earbud phones in my shirt pocket along with an extra set of rechargable batteries. Try that with a full size disk/player!
I'll sign up for the beta, but I'd buy one right now if I could.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll also find the ABCD keys on telco test equipment. Some modems will produce those tones if you put the letters A, B, C & D in the dialing string. # and * also work. Try it, "ATTDABCD#*"
As a kid my job on family trips was to read the map and figure out where the next turn, gas station, etc. was. My father drove and my mother's eyesight wasn't good enough to read the maps well. I remember one trip when my father asked me how far to the next town (he was looking for a gas station). I checked and it was something like 8 miles. 8 miles passed and no town. Then 10 and still no town. My father got mad, said I wasn't doing a very good job of navigating , pulled the car over and ripped the map out of my hands. He studied it for a few minutes as we all sat in silence. Finally he said, "Either this damn cheap map is wrong or they moved the town." Years later I found out about the "markers" that mapmakers put in to insure that their works aren't copied.
When I moved to where I live now I was given a map of the area by my employer. I noticed one day that there was a street marked "PUD Drive." I thought that one was pretty funny at the time. Over the next few years I noticed it on a lot of maps from many different companies. One Saturday, with nothing to do, I drove over to PUD drive and found... NOTHING! It didn't exist!
Curious, I went to the city planner's office the next Monday and asked about it. With a sigh the secretary told me they get this all the time. PUD stood for "Planned Urban Development" and some idiot mapmaker years earlier had copied it as though it was the name of a street and it ended up on all succeeding maps thereafter.
Pud Drive was on Mapquest as recently as 2 years ago when I sent them an email telling them about it along with several other errors in their maps (like one-way streets going the wrong way and exits that no longer existed). I never heard back from them but I just went there now and noticed they have corrected their maps to implement (most of) the changes I sent them. In fact, I can't find a PUD on any city I try, and there used to be a lot of them on Mapquest.
Actually there's only 8 tones, 4 for the rows and 4 for the columns making 16 possible combinations.
There's a 4th column to the right labeled ABCD. Most phones don't have this column but telephone test equipment does.
As a side note, many Hayes compatible modems will produce the tones for the ABCD keys if you send one of these letters in the dialing string. (The dialing string "ATTD 1234567890#*ABCD" will produce all 16 tones)
If they can eat glass, then it's possible they could eat silicon chips as well. In fact, they may already be doing it and we just haven't discovered them yet. Someone wrote a SF story years ago about geneticly engineered bacteria attacking silicon but it's too early in the mormning for me to remember much about it.
Gives a whole new meaning to "computer bug" though, doesn't it?
Best of all, we could bring our nerf toys in to work (and use them!). Four months later, the company went under.
Ever hear of "cause and effect?"
At least you had sand. WE had to make our own sand by grinding down the rocks with our own teeth!
And we liked it!
I just took the measurements off my firewall (HP Vectra VL2 4/66) and here's what I got.
;-)
While booting from the floppy, current peaked at 0.303 Amps. Line Voltage was measured at 121.3 Volts. W=EI so 121.3 * 0.303 = 36.75 Watts.
After booting it settled down to a steady 0.295 Amps which would be 35.78 Watts.
I checked my book-sized 486 and I was mistaken. It has a 45 Watt power supply and for those interested, it draws 0.348 Amps with a 1 Gig hard drive and a second NIC in its single slot. That's 42.21 Watts. I think I'll keep using the 486/66 as a firewall.
I'm not saying that a PC firewall is best for everyone, just that it's an option to be considered. In my case, when I built mine over 2 years ago, dedicated routers weren't anywhere near the price range they are now. Compared to a free PC, free 10Mb NICs, a free hub and a few hours of my time (OK, a weekend), it was a no-brainer for me. All of the equipment to make my network except for the cabling were tossed out by my employer because they just HAD to have 100Mb Ethernet company-wide even though many of our locations were (and still are) only connected by T1s and T3's shared with the phone system. Their loss was my gain. And I got to learn a lot about routers, firewalls, routing tables, port forwarding, etc.
Of course if you just want a quick "set it and forget it" router/firewall, a dedicated router is the way to go. Prices have come down drasticly in the last 6 months and if I has to start from scratch (i.i. no PCs or NICs laying around) I'd probably just buy one as well. You should choose carefully, though. If it doesn't do everything you want, you can't really get inside and change it later.
On a side note, my company discovered today during a security check (prompted by the WTC attack) that 4 of our internal Cisco routers were not only visible to the outside world, but still had the default passwords. When I left today our SysAdmin was still yelling at the contractor who put them in over 6 months ago! Our new rule: Never trust a hired contractor/consultant to do the right thing.
Bear in mind those are MAXIMUM rated power consumption for the power supplies, not actual usage.
Remove the hard drive, most of the cards and use a slow processor and I'll bet a PC compares much more favorably.
When I get home tonight I'll get an actual power reading from mine. This whole discussion has me curious.
BTW, not all PC's have 250W power supplies. I picked up a 486DX4/100 at a hamfest for $10 that has a 35W rated power supply. It's about the size of a hardbound book, has built-in 10M Ethernet, 2M VGA video, keyboard, mouse, parallel amd 2 serial ports, 1 ISA slot, 2 SIMM sockets, 1 floppy and 1 hard drive. The power supply is only about 1&1/4 inches square by 5 inches long and neither it nor the processor has a fan. The only thing that seemed to be wrong with it was that the hard drive (250M) was full of bad sectors. Looks like it was last being used as an X11 terminal before I got it, which is probably what I'll use it for as well.
The guy says he doesn't want a pc, then everyone recommends a pc.
No, he didn't say that anywhere. Learn to read without letting your personal prejudices interfere with your understanding.
He asked, "How should one choose a router for a home LAN?" and "Which one do you use?"
Try having someone read it to you again and this time pay attention.
The poster asks 2 questions. (They're the ones with the little squiggly symbol (?) after them.)
How should one choose a router for a home LAN?
and
Which one do you use?
Nowhere does he say he doesn't want to use a standalone machine.
I think you mean http://www.smoothwall.org
www.smoothwall.com is a real estate site.
My 486-66 box running Freesco doesn't have a fan. It failed sometime back and I never noticed. No fan, no hard drive, no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse... NO PROBLEM!
I use Freesco on a old 486-66. Easy to set up, easy to maintain.
I used to use LRP but it didn't like my new ethernet card so I switched to Freesco.
Apparently only on the Illinois side. It's $1.69 on the Iowa side of the river although I passed 4 stations that were closed and out of gas tonight. Grocery store I stopped at tonight (Eagle's) had people there buying everything in sight. Damn fools. I just wanted to get in, buy a 6 pack and some toilet paper and get out. Seems like I was in line forever.
Structural design flaws or additional explosives involved? Of course a 757 is bigger than a 707.
Engineers shocked by
towers' collapse
BY BLAIR KAMIN
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO -- The World Trade Center, a
symbol of American economic might, survived
one terrorist attack in 1993. It was designed to
withstand the impact of a jet, but both its
towers collapsed this morning after planes
rammed them.
The structural engineer who designed the
towers said as recently as last week that their
steel columns could remain standing if they
were hit by a 707.
Les Robertson, the Trade Center's structural
engineer, spoke last week at a conference on
tall buildings in Frankfurt, Germany. He was
asked during a question-and-answer session
what he had done to protect the twin towers
from terrorist attacks, according to Joseph
Burns, a principal at the Chicago firm of
Thornton-Thomasetti Engineers.
Burns, who was present, said that Robertson
said of the center, ``I designed it for a 707 to
smash into it.''
Burns, whose firm did the structural engineering
for the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia --
the world's tallest buildings -- said Robertson
did not elaborate on the remark. Robertson
could not be reached early Tuesday.
Completed in 1972 and 1973, the 110-story
twin towers were the fifth and sixth tallest
buildings in the world. One World Trade
Center, finished in 1972, was briefly after its
construction the world's tallest building. The towers have been called
``a monumental gate to New York and the United States.''
They withstood the 1993 attack, when a bomb-laden van exploded,
killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.
Closely spaced steel columns that ringed their perimeter held up the
World Trade Center towers. Chicago's Aon Center (formerly the
Amoco Building), completed in 1973, uses a similar support system,
known to structural engineers as a ``tube.''
Shocked by the building's collapse, structural engineers pointed to fire
as the likely cause of the structural failure.
``Fire melts steel,'' Burns said. In addition, he said, the impact of the
plane could have severely damaged the building's sprinklers, allowing
the fire to rage, despite fireproofing supposed to protect steel columns
and beams.
``You never know in an explosion like that whether they (the
sprinklers) get cut off,'' Burns said.
Architects Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, in association with
Emery Roth & Sons, designed the World Trade Center.
The structural engineers were the firm of Skilling, Helle, Christiansen,
Robertson. The developer was The Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey.
Tuesday's attack marked the second time that a plane has crashed
into a New York City skyscraper, although the first incident was an
accident.
In 1945, a B-25 flying at 200 miles per hour slammed into the 78th
and 79th floors of the Empire State Building, gouging an
18-by-20-foot hole 913 feet above the streets of Manhattan. The
pilot, Lt. Col. William F. Smith Jr., had been heading from New
York's LaGuardia Airport to Newark, N.J., when he became
disoriented.
Fourteen people died in the crash and the fire that followed -- three
people in the plane and 11 in what was then the world's tallest
building.
Like the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, which also was struck
by a plane, provided a sizable and symbolic target.
The Pentagon is the world's largest office building, with a total of 6.5
million square feet, serves as headquarters for the world's most
powerful military. Sears Tower, by comparison, has about 3.5 million
square feet of office space.
Several news sources are reporting that a 911 call was made from the bathroom of the plane that went down in PA. The caller said they were being hijacked and that it was not a joke, then there was the sound of an explosion and the phone went dead.
United Flight 175
Boston to Los Angeles
A Boeing 767 with 56 passengers, two pilots and seven flight attendants crashed, but United won't say where
Word is it crashed near Denver, no survivors. May not be related to the others.
Why didn't anyone see this coming? What are all our tax dollars being spent on if not to prevent incidents like this? I can see where ONE hijacked plane could slip by, but FOUR? This is inexcusable.
Sorry, but this just makes me so angry I can hardly contain myself.
This offer does not include rights to the name, ranking or image of the bot, therefore it cannot be entered into any future BattleBots competitions.
With restrictions like this, why would you want it? Just to sit in your garage and gather dust?
To each his own I guess, but massive storage isn't what everyone is looking for. I mean, a semi can carry a lot more stuff but I'd hate to drive one to work every day and try to find a parking space for it. Bigger isn't always better.
Personally, I want one of these and would be willing to pay for it today. I've been using the 3 inch disks for over a year and I like their portability. I usually carry 2 or 3 of the mini disks around in my pocket at work. On them are software updates I have to apply to various machines, utilities I may need, floppy disk images, my favorite browser (Opera), and yes, Winzip and some MP3 files (something to listen to while setting up a machine).
If I'm judging the size of this unit right, I should be able to put the player, 3-5 mini disks and a set of earbud phones in my shirt pocket along with an extra set of rechargable batteries. Try that with a full size disk/player!
I'll sign up for the beta, but I'd buy one right now if I could.