I am still waiting for them to share with the rest of the states their apparently endless knowledge of "substances known to the State of California to cause cancer."
For the past few months, I have been looking into starting up a radio station here [...] I know very little about the FCC's regulations, the costs of the equipment, and what equipment I would need
You've been looking into this for the past few months? And you still know nothing?
Much of what's already been said here is correct. Like most things on Slashdot, some has been exaggerated (1 million dollars? 50,000 watts?) and some is way oversimplified.
I have in the past been involved with a college station; based on that experience, most of which applied to commercial radio as well, here's I can think of that you need:
Site survey by an FCC licensed engineer.
License application. This will take a long time to process.
Construction permit from FCC.
Meet local zoning requirements.
Licensed engineer on-staff (part time is ok).
Get equipment including antenna.
Station license.
Operator license for anyone manning the station.
Station needs to be manned while in operation.
Secure rights to whatever material you're going to broadcast.
In short, this is not something that is going to happen on a whim. It could be done on the cheap if you're willing to put considerable time and legwork in yourself (which it already seems like you're not). It will still probably cost $20,000 for an absolutely minimum legal setup and this includes bargain shopping used equipment and getting some favors from a sympathetic engineer and officials. A transmitter in the range of 100 to 300 watts with a decent broadcast antenna will give you excellent range (about 15 miles depending on terrain)
If you're serious, I would put a call into the closest college station and see if you can arrange a time to talk to their engineer (who probably only works there an hour or two a week). They might or might not make time to talk to you, of course, but that probably depends on how you approach them and present yourself. But, if you can get a half-hour of their time, they can give you an excellent idea of how to start (read as: they can discourage you immediately). Radio is not a toy!
If you're not that serious, how about just buying an XM (satellite) radio?
Requires external power supply to power extra drives.
Additional cooling recommended.
Will operate in a DTivo but there is insufficent room to mount the additional harddrives.
I know from my own Tivo that heat is definately a problem in these things with only two drives.
What might fit the ticket a little better would be a firewire (or serial ATA ?) interface and external drives in a separate case, with separate power supply. Unfortunately, I calculate USB to be a bit too slow for simultaneous record/playback at high quality.
Or, even better, how about SCSI with external drives? Well, maybe it's not better, given the price differential on SCSI drives. Hmmm.
Re:Bad Idea 4 solar cells blocks UV
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Self-Cleaning Glass
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· Score: 3, Informative
Solar cells unfortunately need the UV light to fuction properly
That's not true. The spectra of radiation that can be converted to energy by a solar cell is directly related to the bandgap energy of the material the cell is made from, and there is an optimum (for efficiency) bandgap that corresponds to the visible spectrum of light. Most solar cells do not convert significant energy in the UV area of the spectrum
That's part of the reason that solar cells are quoted as being only 10-15% efficient. That's of the total solar spectrum. Most are better than 50% efficient within the relatively narrow part of the spectrum that they are tuned for.
For a little more information, see the ever popular How Stuff Works.
The biggest problem with this, to me, is all of the improper spelling (intentional or otherwise) on usenet and mailing lists. Although some will argue usenet is already useless anyway, whenever I have a question on something and I don't know where else to turn, I hit Google Groups and do a search. And I usually find a lot of great information after a little digging through the weeds.
However, as more and more people use 'creative' spelling, intentionally or not, more and more articles are going to become hard to find with a proper search term. Of course, you could argue that the search engines should be able to translate this on the fly, but really that's wasted effort on a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
I may be snobbish, but I feel that I am a somewhat better person because I am not too lazy to always (at least try to) use proper English, including spelling. Really, how lazy do you have to be to type "4" instead or "for" or "u" instead of "you"? Isn't sloth still a sin (for those who believe in sin, of course)?
Some Olicom token ring cards are well supported under FreeBSD. The support contains some binary code from Olicom, so it is not compiled in by default and resides in the contrib directory. But it's easy to enable and has been solid for me.
I'm not much of a token ring fan, but my printer (IBM Network Printer 17) came with a token ring card. Instead of buying an ethernet server for $150 (I only paid $300 for the printer) I got five Olicom PCI cards ($15 for all) and a twisted-pair token ring hub ($10) on eBay. Dropped one card into my server and set up routing. Handles lpr just great.
Re:Double Check Your Facts (When You Have Them)
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How to Test Your T1?
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· Score: 1
I find it amazing that you see this on all contracts from those companies, yet it doesn't appear anywhere on their web sites. Or virtually any other web site.
In fact that term appears on only one page (out of 2,469,940,685) in the entire Google database.
On the other hand, there are about 11,500 references to "committed information rate." The first few are very good definitions you should probably read.
So who needs to double check their facts? You're the one who threw out a made-up term that means nothing. Well, excepting a single ISP in Caracas, Venezuela.
Maybe I did'nt [sic] make this clear: I know what I'm talking about regardless of the fact that you claim you sell telecom services. Given your amazing product knowledge, I sure wouldn't buy from you.
And here's another hint about why someone might choose a T1 over DSL or cable: service level agreements. They're still better on T1s, particularly in regard to service restoration commitments.
All firewalls are just a piece of software running on a piece of hardware. There are no "hardware firewalls" i.e. where the firewall functionality is implemented in dedicated logic.
The fact that in this case the hardware is a PC doesn't in itself make it better or worse than other hardware. Many other products are built on PC hardware. Another firewall type product that is just PC hardware is the Nortel Contivity VPM/Firewall box.
What the hell does "wider pipe" mean. A T1 and DSL are both basically bit-serial interfaces, so each sends exactly one bit at a time. The amount of data you can push through is going to depend only on the bit rate, that is, how often you can send a bit. A 1.5M T1 is exactly the same bit rate as a 1.5M DSL. Neither is particularly faster.
If you want to get into fine details, other factors, such as error rate and latency can affect the practical throughput of a circuit, but on either a properly working T1 local loop or DSL, there will not be any significant difference.
(Yes, I know that DSL coding schemes actualy send more than one bit on the wire at a time. It still gets converted to a single bit serial stream when it goes into the ATM SAR. It's just a modulation trick.)
Certified Internet Rate? Ask him that and he'll laugh you out of the building.
The term you are looking for is "Committed Information Rate" and it only applies to frame relay service, not T1s. Even if the frame relay is delivered on a T1 access, CIRs only apply to PVCs (permanent virtual circuits) defined within the frame relay "cloud". The T1 access is pure TDM (time division multiplexing). One bit in, one bit out. Every time.
Also, each channel on a T1 is 64K (for normal clear channel circuits, else 56K), not 128K. Doesn't it bother you that you say 1.5M total but 128 x 64 = 3072?
As to your last comment, cable and DSL service are only available in a relatively small fraction of locations. Most central offices in the country are not equipped to provide DSL yet, and even for those that are, there are distance limitations. You can get a T1 provisioned to almost any location you can get phone service. Of course, the farther out you are, the more expensive
Actually, NASA paid $2.95 each for the pens they bought and paid none of the development costs. Fisher Pen paid all the costs of development. And Fisher Pen approached and offered it to NASA, not the other way around.
The story of this used to be on the Fisher Pen company web site but it got shorted very substantially sometime in the last couple of years.
The original story and some other background are at:
This is what Thawte certs are supposedly for. The company officials from Thawte physically visit your location to determine if you are a legitimate business with an honest operation. (note: I don't know if Enron ever got a Thawte cert)
No they don't. I've bought Thawte certificates for both a fortune-500 company I work for and also for my own one-man company and in both cases all I had to do was fax an authroization letter along with the corporate filing or articles of organization and supply a D&B number. Funny thing about that is I didn't even know my one-man company had a D&B number until I did this. They're apparently so easy to get it pretty much happens automatically after you're in business for a while.
Apache is not the fastest web server at all. Depending on how you define "one of" it's not even one of the fastest web servers. Any admins that think it is have not actually tried many other web servers.
That said, I do think most admins would agree that Apache may have the best balance of flexibility, stability, configurability, support, and performance among general-purpose web servers. That's why I use it for most things.
Oh yeah, the price is right, too.
If you want something really fast (at least for static content), look at thttpd, mathopd, or Zeus. For simplicity and performance alone, mathopd is hard to beat. Only 17KB executable (on my machine anyway).
Yes, they were designed to produce electricity. Modern diesel locomotives do not couple the diesel engines directly to the drive wheels, but rather use them to turn generators. The electricity produced is then used to run electric motors that power the drive wheels.
It may seem inefficient, but you've got to remember how powerful a locomotive is. Starting a train moving from a dead stop is just not practical using a conventional clutch and transmission. The motor and generator combination provides the same ability to start from a dead stop smoothly and transform torque/speed ratios with fewer moving parts, and much less wear on parts.
And in fact, the motor and generator are not much worse efficiency-wise than the friction losses in the transmission would be. These things are designed for efficiency.
Of course, they don't natively produce power compatable with the power grid, but as the article says, that's easy (and also pretty efficient) to convert with interters.
Why was Latin the language of educated men at the time?
Because most universities at the time were run by Christians.
It was only a matter of time before someone on this topic had to bring up filesharing and CD sales. It seems that is all that most people on Slashdot can relate anything to.
I came to that conclusion by calling Acura and asking them how I can get TSBs for my car. They didn't tell me to go down to my dealer, they said very clearly that I can't have them, that they are only available to and intended for their dealers (which is exactly what Alldata said). Among major automakers, only Honda and BMW have this policy, by the way.
Besides, lighten up. Just because you and some other owners have cooperative dealers (or inside contacts at dealers) and are willing to (probably) illegally distribute Honda's intellectual property, doesn't mean that there's something wrong with me. My dealer happens to suck and be very difficult to work with.
Did you not notice that the bottom of each TSB on the website you linked says "(c) 2000 American Honda Motor Co., Inc. - All Rights Reserved"? Did the website or those who posted these documents obtain permission from Honda first?
Just because it's possible to steal these doesn't make everything OK in my book with Honda's policy. It took me less than 3 minutes to get access online to every TSB for both my Saab 9-5 and my Toyota Tacoma. I shouldn't have to jerk around with schmoozing a dealer just to get the same from Honda.
I recently ran into something somewhat similar. I have an older Acura Legend that has had a couple of nagging problems I've been trying to track down. First is a ticking sound from somewhere within the mass of emissions-control components. The other was an occasional failure of the air conditioning to cool.
Anyway, I was doing some searching on Google and Google Groups, trying to see if someone had been down either of these paths before. I ended up, through an Acura enthusiasts site, at Alldata, a mechanics' and do-it-yourself'ers online technical reference subscription site.
Alldata had a list of Technical Service Belletins (TSBs) for my car -- these are notices sent from the manufacturer to dealers notifying them of, let's say "anomalies", in their product to be aware of. Sure enough, one was titled "BUZZING FROM EMISSIONS CONTROL BOX" and another was titled "A/C INTERMITTENTLY BLOWS WARM AIR". Jackpot!
All I had to do now was subscribe to Alldata for a (relatively) measly $25 a year to read the full text of the TSB. But wait! It turns out that of the world's car companies, Honda (who makes Acuras) and BMW (you know what they make) do not allow their TSBs to be distributed to the owners of their products.
I called Acura's toll-free number and complained, and sure enough, they said they only provide and authorize distribution of TSBs to dealers. Seems Honda likes to keep secret what they know is wrong with their cars, giving their dealers an advantage and making owners and independent mechanics suffer along rediscovering what's wrong with Honda's shoddy products.
Anyway, fortunately, I discovered an excellent service, Taylor Automotive Tech-Line which is a kind of a pay-per-incident tech support for mechanics and others. A simple web form and $20 later, and they emailed me TIFFs of the "secret" TSBs. Both of which were exactly what was wrong with my car!
Turns out the air conditioning problem was caused by a circuit board chock full of cold solder joints that had cracked. Ten minutes with a soldering iron and fresh solder corrected that manufacturing defect. The clicking sound was diagnosed in less than five minutes with the help of the TSB and fixed by replacing a $59 chunk of plastic (a "Constant Vacuum Control Valve").
Taylor Auto Tech's motto, by the way, is "We Fill In The Cracks On The Information Highway". Thankfully, someone is.
I was on Carnival's Imagination a couple of months ago.
No net access in cabins, but they had an Internet 'Lounge' that had about 24 machines running Internet Exporer kiosk-style (no menubar, buttons for BACK, RELOAD, etc., only).
Speed was quite good, at least comparable to the 1.5Mb/sec DSL I have at home. The browser did have Java enabled. I was able to successfully use SSH and VNC (both Java applets from my web server) to get into my FreeBSD box back at home. Didn't try much else except HTTP(S). Of course, once I got VNC open and KDE running in that, I could do anything that way.
Cost was 0.75 per minute, with discounts to something around $0.55 and $0.40 per minute for prepurchasing 100 and 250 minutes, respectively. I only tried it a couple of times, mostly out of curiosity, so I just used the per-minute plan.
There was a two-hour window the second night of the cruise when access was free so you could try it out. Access was only available the first full day through the last full day of the cruise (i.e. not on the first night or last morning)
Pretty much everything else mentioned here is great, right on the mark, so I won't repeat anythin already mentioned.
One I didn't see that I hate is those applications that assume they are the most important application in the world. You know, the ones that install icons in the Start menu, on the desktop, in the system tray, put themselves in the startup folder, and so on.
Either ask during the install if I really want all that crap, or only install into the start menu. Obviously, this is a mostly Windows-centric issue.
I don't understand the attitude about the copy protection. Half the people here seem to think that in a transaction, it's the right of the buyer to dictate terms. It not - the buyer and seller need to agree to terms. If you don't like what they're selling, then don't buy it. Buy something else, or don't buy at all, but respect their right to try to sell something, even if you don't think it's a good value.
I know people here are going to bitch about how it's a monopoly and the free market doesn't apply. That's crap. If you think this, you need to get down to your local independent record store and buy some titles from some independent bands before both of them disappear forever. It'll only be a monopoly if you allow it to be.
I have a friend who pirates stuff, both software and music, and I have debated with him many times why he shouldn't. His excuse it always that the stuff costs too much. So I always ask him, what if he goes into a 7-Eleven to buy a candy bar and in his opinion, it costs too much. So is he going to shoplift it? And he never gets it... "that's different" he says.
I hate to break it to the previous poster, but it may not be exactly what they need. Kerberos is good, but:
1. It doesn't work well with non IP-network situations, i.e. dumb-terminal applications, PPP dialup authentication, authentication over the phone (touch-tones)
2. As an extension to the above, it does not integrate well into legacy platforms and applications. Most things that can do user ID and password can do text challenge/response pretty easy. The CRYPTOcard can also be used as a OTP generator (in event-syncronous mode, with care), which eliminates the need for the challenge even.
3. Kerberos is token-based internally, in a way, but the authentication with the user is still passwords. You still need to deal with lost/compromised/*SHARED* password issues. The biggest advantage IMO of hard token systems is that the user cannot duplicate the key, even intentionally.
Kerberos is really an encrypted-password based single-singon system, not exacly token-based authentication. It does not solve all problems, especially when behind RADIUS, which is one of the poster's requirements.
They are the same if you stick to hex challenge/responses. Their decimal modes are different.
SecureNetKey uses A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6 (or is it A=0,..., I forget)
CRYPTOcard uses ABC=2, DEF=3
Of course, this is an easy mod to make.
One more thing -- the original poster mentioned DES/3DES. The CRYPTOcards only use DES and only use a 64-bit key (maybe only 56 bits internally, I don't know). There is a mode where two keys can be entered but they are XOR'ed internally to a single key (this is so you can key a token without any one person knowing the key).
This is completely adequate. There is not much point in using a longer key, because the challenge/responses are at most 64 bits. It's no harder to guess the key than the response itself.
The best mode to use these in anyway is with numeric-only challenges and responses. It's most convenient, since you don't have to key hex digits. Although it doesn't seem so at first, it actually helps security in a way by discarding some bits from the response in converting from 8-digit hex to 8-digit decimal (it does ABC = 2, DEF = 3, like a phone keypad).
This means that a hacker can brute-force a correct key from a past challenge/response pair, but it's only one out of a few million possibly correct keys that will generate that pair. Combine this with a five-wrong-attempts lockout, and it's pretty secure.
I have implemented a large-scale system based around the CRYPTOcard tokens, which I find nearly ideal. They use the FIPS 140 algorithm, which is well documented, last forever (replaceable batteries), are manually programmable without any hardware/software, and feature a neat event-syncronous mode that avoids the need for the user to key in the token, without significantly reducing security.
I did not use any CRYPTOcard software at all. We program the tokens manually from their keypad, which is easy enough. For the server end, we used the Radiator radius server, which is not free, but is reasonably priced, and great software (it's completely written in Perl!) It took about three days on-and-off to create a CRYPTOcard authentication module for it, completely in Perl (and I'm not a Perl guy). It's only about 25 lines altogether. The user data and keys are kept in a Postgresql database and it currently supports about 1,000 users.
The CRYPTOcard algorithm is simple (it's really just DES) and they even document their proprietary event-syncronous mode enough that I was able to completely support it. The manual programming options are also completely documented. I don't own the code I created, so I can't offer it, but it wouldn't be very difficult for someone to recreate it.
The tokens cost about $65 each, and they have a cool aluminum keychain fob token available, too (although we don't use those). These are as close to an open-source token as you'll get.
Feel free to contact me if you choose to go this route and need any help with the algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
I am still waiting for them to share with the rest of the states their apparently endless knowledge of "substances known to the State of California to cause cancer."
For the past few months, I have been looking into starting up a radio station here [...] I know very little about the FCC's regulations, the costs of the equipment, and what equipment I would need
You've been looking into this for the past few months? And you still know nothing?
Much of what's already been said here is correct. Like most things on Slashdot, some has been exaggerated (1 million dollars? 50,000 watts?) and some is way oversimplified.
I have in the past been involved with a college station; based on that experience, most of which applied to commercial radio as well, here's I can think of that you need:
In short, this is not something that is going to happen on a whim. It could be done on the cheap if you're willing to put considerable time and legwork in yourself (which it already seems like you're not). It will still probably cost $20,000 for an absolutely minimum legal setup and this includes bargain shopping used equipment and getting some favors from a sympathetic engineer and officials. A transmitter in the range of 100 to 300 watts with a decent broadcast antenna will give you excellent range (about 15 miles depending on terrain)
If you're serious, I would put a call into the closest college station and see if you can arrange a time to talk to their engineer (who probably only works there an hour or two a week). They might or might not make time to talk to you, of course, but that probably depends on how you approach them and present yourself. But, if you can get a half-hour of their time, they can give you an excellent idea of how to start (read as: they can discourage you immediately). Radio is not a toy!
If you're not that serious, how about just buying an XM (satellite) radio?
From one of the linked pages:
I know from my own Tivo that heat is definately a problem in these things with only two drives.
What might fit the ticket a little better would be a firewire (or serial ATA ?) interface and external drives in a separate case, with separate power supply. Unfortunately, I calculate USB to be a bit too slow for simultaneous record/playback at high quality.
Or, even better, how about SCSI with external drives? Well, maybe it's not better, given the price differential on SCSI drives. Hmmm.
Solar cells unfortunately need the UV light to fuction properly
That's not true. The spectra of radiation that can be converted to energy by a solar cell is directly related to the bandgap energy of the material the cell is made from, and there is an optimum (for efficiency) bandgap that corresponds to the visible spectrum of light. Most solar cells do not convert significant energy in the UV area of the spectrum
That's part of the reason that solar cells are quoted as being only 10-15% efficient. That's of the total solar spectrum. Most are better than 50% efficient within the relatively narrow part of the spectrum that they are tuned for.
For a little more information, see the ever popular How Stuff Works.
The biggest problem with this, to me, is all of the improper spelling (intentional or otherwise) on usenet and mailing lists. Although some will argue usenet is already useless anyway, whenever I have a question on something and I don't know where else to turn, I hit Google Groups and do a search. And I usually find a lot of great information after a little digging through the weeds.
However, as more and more people use 'creative' spelling, intentionally or not, more and more articles are going to become hard to find with a proper search term. Of course, you could argue that the search engines should be able to translate this on the fly, but really that's wasted effort on a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
I may be snobbish, but I feel that I am a somewhat better person because I am not too lazy to always (at least try to) use proper English, including spelling. Really, how lazy do you have to be to type "4" instead or "for" or "u" instead of "you"? Isn't sloth still a sin (for those who believe in sin, of course)?
Some Olicom token ring cards are well supported under FreeBSD. The support contains some binary code from Olicom, so it is not compiled in by default and resides in the contrib directory. But it's easy to enable and has been solid for me.
I'm not much of a token ring fan, but my printer (IBM Network Printer 17) came with a token ring card. Instead of buying an ethernet server for $150 (I only paid $300 for the printer) I got five Olicom PCI cards ($15 for all) and a twisted-pair token ring hub ($10) on eBay. Dropped one card into my server and set up routing. Handles lpr just great.
I find it amazing that you see this on all contracts from those companies, yet it doesn't appear anywhere on their web sites. Or virtually any other web site.
In fact that term appears on only one page (out of 2,469,940,685) in the entire Google database.
On the other hand, there are about 11,500 references to "committed information rate." The first few are very good definitions you should probably read.
So who needs to double check their facts? You're the one who threw out a made-up term that means nothing. Well, excepting a single ISP in Caracas, Venezuela.
Maybe I did'nt [sic] make this clear: I know what I'm talking about regardless of the fact that you claim you sell telecom services. Given your amazing product knowledge, I sure wouldn't buy from you.
And here's another hint about why someone might choose a T1 over DSL or cable: service level agreements. They're still better on T1s, particularly in regard to service restoration commitments.
All firewalls are just a piece of software running on a piece of hardware. There are no "hardware firewalls" i.e. where the firewall functionality is implemented in dedicated logic.
The fact that in this case the hardware is a PC doesn't in itself make it better or worse than other hardware. Many other products are built on PC hardware. Another firewall type product that is just PC hardware is the Nortel Contivity VPM/Firewall box.
What the hell does "wider pipe" mean. A T1 and DSL are both basically bit-serial interfaces, so each sends exactly one bit at a time. The amount of data you can push through is going to depend only on the bit rate, that is, how often you can send a bit. A 1.5M T1 is exactly the same bit rate as a 1.5M DSL. Neither is particularly faster.
If you want to get into fine details, other factors, such as error rate and latency can affect the practical throughput of a circuit, but on either a properly working T1 local loop or DSL, there will not be any significant difference.
(Yes, I know that DSL coding schemes actualy send more than one bit on the wire at a time. It still gets converted to a single bit serial stream when it goes into the ATM SAR. It's just a modulation trick.)
Certified Internet Rate? Ask him that and he'll laugh you out of the building.
The term you are looking for is "Committed Information Rate" and it only applies to frame relay service, not T1s. Even if the frame relay is delivered on a T1 access, CIRs only apply to PVCs (permanent virtual circuits) defined within the frame relay "cloud". The T1 access is pure TDM (time division multiplexing). One bit in, one bit out. Every time.
Also, each channel on a T1 is 64K (for normal clear channel circuits, else 56K), not 128K. Doesn't it bother you that you say 1.5M total but 128 x 64 = 3072?
As to your last comment, cable and DSL service are only available in a relatively small fraction of locations. Most central offices in the country are not equipped to provide DSL yet, and even for those that are, there are distance limitations. You can get a T1 provisioned to almost any location you can get phone service. Of course, the farther out you are, the more expensive
Actually, NASA paid $2.95 each for the pens they bought and paid none of the development costs. Fisher Pen paid all the costs of development. And Fisher Pen approached and offered it to NASA, not the other way around.
h tm
The story of this used to be on the Fisher Pen company web site but it got shorted very substantially sometime in the last couple of years.
The original story and some other background are at:
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.
No they don't. I've bought Thawte certificates for both a fortune-500 company I work for and also for my own one-man company and in both cases all I had to do was fax an authroization letter along with the corporate filing or articles of organization and supply a D&B number. Funny thing about that is I didn't even know my one-man company had a D&B number until I did this. They're apparently so easy to get it pretty much happens automatically after you're in business for a while.
Apache is not the fastest web server at all. Depending on how you define "one of" it's not even one of the fastest web servers. Any admins that think it is have not actually tried many other web servers.
That said, I do think most admins would agree that Apache may have the best balance of flexibility, stability, configurability, support, and performance among general-purpose web servers. That's why I use it for most things.
Oh yeah, the price is right, too.
If you want something really fast (at least for static content), look at thttpd, mathopd, or Zeus. For simplicity and performance alone, mathopd is hard to beat. Only 17KB executable (on my machine anyway).
Yes, they were designed to produce electricity. Modern diesel locomotives do not couple the diesel engines directly to the drive wheels, but rather use them to turn generators. The electricity produced is then used to run electric motors that power the drive wheels.
It may seem inefficient, but you've got to remember how powerful a locomotive is. Starting a train moving from a dead stop is just not practical using a conventional clutch and transmission. The motor and generator combination provides the same ability to start from a dead stop smoothly and transform torque/speed ratios with fewer moving parts, and much less wear on parts.
And in fact, the motor and generator are not much worse efficiency-wise than the friction losses in the transmission would be. These things are designed for efficiency.
Of course, they don't natively produce power compatable with the power grid, but as the article says, that's easy (and also pretty efficient) to convert with interters.
Why was Latin the language of educated men at the time?
Because most universities at the time were run by Christians.
It was only a matter of time before someone on this topic had to bring up filesharing and CD sales. It seems that is all that most people on Slashdot can relate anything to.
And what language is "E Pluribus Unum"?
Latin.
And by 1776, who were the only people really using Latin?
Christians.
I came to that conclusion by calling Acura and asking them how I can get TSBs for my car. They didn't tell me to go down to my dealer, they said very clearly that I can't have them, that they are only available to and intended for their dealers (which is exactly what Alldata said). Among major automakers, only Honda and BMW have this policy, by the way.
Besides, lighten up. Just because you and some other owners have cooperative dealers (or inside contacts at dealers) and are willing to (probably) illegally distribute Honda's intellectual property, doesn't mean that there's something wrong with me. My dealer happens to suck and be very difficult to work with.
Did you not notice that the bottom of each TSB on the website you linked says "(c) 2000 American Honda Motor Co., Inc. - All Rights Reserved"? Did the website or those who posted these documents obtain permission from Honda first?
Just because it's possible to steal these doesn't make everything OK in my book with Honda's policy. It took me less than 3 minutes to get access online to every TSB for both my Saab 9-5 and my Toyota Tacoma. I shouldn't have to jerk around with schmoozing a dealer just to get the same from Honda.
I recently ran into something somewhat similar. I have an older Acura Legend that has had a couple of nagging problems I've been trying to track down. First is a ticking sound from somewhere within the mass of emissions-control components. The other was an occasional failure of the air conditioning to cool.
Anyway, I was doing some searching on Google and Google Groups, trying to see if someone had been down either of these paths before. I ended up, through an Acura enthusiasts site, at Alldata, a mechanics' and do-it-yourself'ers online technical reference subscription site.
Alldata had a list of Technical Service Belletins (TSBs) for my car -- these are notices sent from the manufacturer to dealers notifying them of, let's say "anomalies", in their product to be aware of. Sure enough, one was titled "BUZZING FROM EMISSIONS CONTROL BOX" and another was titled "A/C INTERMITTENTLY BLOWS WARM AIR". Jackpot!
All I had to do now was subscribe to Alldata for a (relatively) measly $25 a year to read the full text of the TSB. But wait! It turns out that of the world's car companies, Honda (who makes Acuras) and BMW (you know what they make) do not allow their TSBs to be distributed to the owners of their products.
I called Acura's toll-free number and complained, and sure enough, they said they only provide and authorize distribution of TSBs to dealers. Seems Honda likes to keep secret what they know is wrong with their cars, giving their dealers an advantage and making owners and independent mechanics suffer along rediscovering what's wrong with Honda's shoddy products.
Anyway, fortunately, I discovered an excellent service, Taylor Automotive Tech-Line which is a kind of a pay-per-incident tech support for mechanics and others. A simple web form and $20 later, and they emailed me TIFFs of the "secret" TSBs. Both of which were exactly what was wrong with my car!
Turns out the air conditioning problem was caused by a circuit board chock full of cold solder joints that had cracked. Ten minutes with a soldering iron and fresh solder corrected that manufacturing defect. The clicking sound was diagnosed in less than five minutes with the help of the TSB and fixed by replacing a $59 chunk of plastic (a "Constant Vacuum Control Valve").
Taylor Auto Tech's motto, by the way, is "We Fill In The Cracks On The Information Highway". Thankfully, someone is.
No net access in cabins, but they had an Internet 'Lounge' that had about 24 machines running Internet Exporer kiosk-style (no menubar, buttons for BACK, RELOAD, etc., only).
Speed was quite good, at least comparable to the 1.5Mb/sec DSL I have at home. The browser did have Java enabled. I was able to successfully use SSH and VNC (both Java applets from my web server) to get into my FreeBSD box back at home. Didn't try much else except HTTP(S). Of course, once I got VNC open and KDE running in that, I could do anything that way.
Cost was 0.75 per minute, with discounts to something around $0.55 and $0.40 per minute for prepurchasing 100 and 250 minutes, respectively. I only tried it a couple of times, mostly out of curiosity, so I just used the per-minute plan.
There was a two-hour window the second night of the cruise when access was free so you could try it out. Access was only available the first full day through the last full day of the cruise (i.e. not on the first night or last morning)
Pretty much everything else mentioned here is great, right on the mark, so I won't repeat anythin already mentioned.
One I didn't see that I hate is those applications that assume they are the most important application in the world. You know, the ones that install icons in the Start menu, on the desktop, in the system tray, put themselves in the startup folder, and so on.
Either ask during the install if I really want all that crap, or only install into the start menu. Obviously, this is a mostly Windows-centric issue.
I don't understand the attitude about the copy protection. Half the people here seem to think that in a transaction, it's the right of the buyer to dictate terms. It not - the buyer and seller need to agree to terms. If you don't like what they're selling, then don't buy it. Buy something else, or don't buy at all, but respect their right to try to sell something, even if you don't think it's a good value.
I know people here are going to bitch about how it's a monopoly and the free market doesn't apply. That's crap. If you think this, you need to get down to your local independent record store and buy some titles from some independent bands before both of them disappear forever. It'll only be a monopoly if you allow it to be.
I have a friend who pirates stuff, both software and music, and I have debated with him many times why he shouldn't. His excuse it always that the stuff costs too much. So I always ask him, what if he goes into a 7-Eleven to buy a candy bar and in his opinion, it costs too much. So is he going to shoplift it? And he never gets it... "that's different" he says.
I hate to break it to the previous poster, but it may not be exactly what they need. Kerberos is good, but: 1. It doesn't work well with non IP-network situations, i.e. dumb-terminal applications, PPP dialup authentication, authentication over the phone (touch-tones) 2. As an extension to the above, it does not integrate well into legacy platforms and applications. Most things that can do user ID and password can do text challenge/response pretty easy. The CRYPTOcard can also be used as a OTP generator (in event-syncronous mode, with care), which eliminates the need for the challenge even. 3. Kerberos is token-based internally, in a way, but the authentication with the user is still passwords. You still need to deal with lost/compromised/*SHARED* password issues. The biggest advantage IMO of hard token systems is that the user cannot duplicate the key, even intentionally. Kerberos is really an encrypted-password based single-singon system, not exacly token-based authentication. It does not solve all problems, especially when behind RADIUS, which is one of the poster's requirements.
They are the same if you stick to hex challenge/responses. Their decimal modes are different. SecureNetKey uses A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6 (or is it A=0, ..., I forget)
CRYPTOcard uses ABC=2, DEF=3
Of course, this is an easy mod to make.
One more thing -- the original poster mentioned DES/3DES. The CRYPTOcards only use DES and only use a 64-bit key (maybe only 56 bits internally, I don't know). There is a mode where two keys can be entered but they are XOR'ed internally to a single key (this is so you can key a token without any one person knowing the key). This is completely adequate. There is not much point in using a longer key, because the challenge/responses are at most 64 bits. It's no harder to guess the key than the response itself. The best mode to use these in anyway is with numeric-only challenges and responses. It's most convenient, since you don't have to key hex digits. Although it doesn't seem so at first, it actually helps security in a way by discarding some bits from the response in converting from 8-digit hex to 8-digit decimal (it does ABC = 2, DEF = 3, like a phone keypad). This means that a hacker can brute-force a correct key from a past challenge/response pair, but it's only one out of a few million possibly correct keys that will generate that pair. Combine this with a five-wrong-attempts lockout, and it's pretty secure.
I have implemented a large-scale system based around the CRYPTOcard tokens, which I find nearly ideal. They use the FIPS 140 algorithm, which is well documented, last forever (replaceable batteries), are manually programmable without any hardware/software, and feature a neat event-syncronous mode that avoids the need for the user to key in the token, without significantly reducing security.
I did not use any CRYPTOcard software at all. We program the tokens manually from their keypad, which is easy enough. For the server end, we used the Radiator radius server, which is not free, but is reasonably priced, and great software (it's completely written in Perl!) It took about three days on-and-off to create a CRYPTOcard authentication module for it, completely in Perl (and I'm not a Perl guy). It's only about 25 lines altogether. The user data and keys are kept in a Postgresql database and it currently supports about 1,000 users.
The CRYPTOcard algorithm is simple (it's really just DES) and they even document their proprietary event-syncronous mode enough that I was able to completely support it. The manual programming options are also completely documented. I don't own the code I created, so I can't offer it, but it wouldn't be very difficult for someone to recreate it.
The tokens cost about $65 each, and they have a cool aluminum keychain fob token available, too (although we don't use those). These are as close to an open-source token as you'll get.
Feel free to contact me if you choose to go this route and need any help with the algorithms.