As well as looking really cool, it's also a really high quality
input device. I mostly use it for flight simulators; the difference
between it and my previous Logitech Wingman was like night and day.
The most notable difference is that the X52 uses optoelectronic
position sensors. These are stunningly accurate, never jitter,
and provide perfectly linear response.
I regularly try to browse using cellphones and stuff like my pocket Zaurus 6000SL.
Some sites, like news.bbc.co.uk, work perfectly. Most others give a blank page or
something about as useless.
The following python code will run a simple web server that lets you
browse your filesystem. Just open localhost:8000 in your browser,
assuming you started the program on the same machine that your
web browser is on:
import SimpleHTTPServer SimpleHTTPServer.test()
It's not hard to extend it to do more elaborate things, of course.
Actually, most of the startup draw in a TV is because of the
degaussing coil.
TV's use a thermistor arrangement that results in a coil wound
around the CRT sucking gobs of power for about a second on powerup.
It's there to give the shadow mask a quick demagnetizing.
You can often hear this as a brief hum that quickly fades away
on startup. If you then turn the TV off and quickly on again,
the heavy draw and hum won't happen, because the thermistor
is still hot.
No. The cancellation truly does reduce the sound amplitude
just as real as heavy earmuffs would do. Labs measure
the effectiveness of active noise cancelling headphones using
plain old SPL (sound pressure level) meters; these don't lie.
Airplanes are very loud, and noisy. There's chatter, certainly, but above it all
is the deafening roar of the atmosphere going past you at 900 km/hr. A category
five hurricane is only 250 km/hr.
The only solution is noise cancelling headphones. Pilots have awfully nice ones,
but you can buy acceptable ones for a hundred bucks. My modest ones
(Sennheiser PCX-250) block out the whole damned airplane so I can get some
rest, listen to tunes, whatever. I leave them on with no audio input at all
just to block out the noise while trying to sleep.
When I take them off to go to the lavatory I'm always surprised at how noisy
that flying airplane tube really is.
Not true; you can use an artificial horizon as long as conditions are reasonably calm.
Traditionally this is just an enclosed pool of mercury. It'll go as horizontal
as horizontal can be; then you just match up your celestial body with its
reflection and divide by two to get the true angle from the horizon.
Nixie tubes don't do hex. They do exactly the digits 0 through 9, and nothing else.
It's implemented by having 10 separate "filaments", one per digit, stacked over
each other. Because different digits are at different distances to your eye,
a whole line of nixie tubes looks a bit odd since some numbers are farther
away than others.
On the other hand, that's also why the digits look so nice. No nasty
8-segment displays here.
While it looks like a nifty idea at first glance, this kind of memory optimization
is ultimately pointless when you have a nifty demand-paged vmem kernel like Linux.
Consider: since my box has 1G of memory, I do want the X server to hang on
the all those pixmaps, because that makes firefax run fast. The hack would make it
waste CPU time re-uncompressing images, whether it's needed or not.
With the way Firefox works now, if memory does start to run short, well, that's
when the kernel will start paging things out based on its clever working set algorithms.
If a given pixmap area in the X server hasn't been accessed in quite a while, it'll
get swapped out to disk and the memory reclaimed. If the pixmap is accessed later,
it'll automatically page back in.
I don't know about your box, but mine (Athlon XP2000+) can decompress JPEGs
at a rate of around only 3MB per second. My disk drives, OTOH,
are a hell of a lot faster than that.
In other words, letting the OS do its job by tossing the images onto swap
when necessary strikes me as a much better strategy than constantly
sucking up CPU decompressing every image every time it's used just in case the
memory might be needed.
People worry too much about VMEM, IMHO. If I write a program that allocates 1G
of memory, but then spins around using only 10k for the next hour, it'll have
basically zero impact on the OS. Only ~10k if real RAM is actually getting used.
Resistive elements are 100% efficient. All the power dissipated by them
is as heat. If you don't agree, please explain what the power does turn
into. RF? Sound?
The specific heat of water is 4.186 J/g/degC. That means it takes 4186 Joules
to raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1 degree Celsius.
If you have incoming water at 5C, outgoing at 30C, and you use 1 litre every
ten seconds, that's 4186*25 Joules per second, or around 10kW.
Note that at 220VAC, you'd need some whopping 50A breakers to do this.
I can absolutely guarantee you that if you take a 5 ohm element
(which at 220VAC gives you 10kW), put it in a stream of water of 1 litre
per 10 seconds, then the water will be 25C hotter coming out than going in
once the system has stabilized.
The only difference with using a microwave system is that it won't take as
long for the system to stabilize: it'll take several seconds for the heating
element to reach its terminal temperature.
The phrase "Imminent death of usenet predicted" was a popular in-crowd joke
back as far as 1985, because people were incessantly predicting that Usenet was
going to die. And of course it still hasn't, and it won't.
Yeah, but only having the "previous" directory isn't good enough for me.
And I don't like the stack-like behaviour of pushd/popd.
Most of all I don't like having to remember long arbitrary paths.
Where's the web html directory on any given box? If I set $www in my.profile
on every box to be wherever the heck it is, then "rt www" gets me there.
And if I've downloaded some stuff into some random junk directory somewhere
and I now want to copy it to a directory called "new" in the web html place,
I would do:
mk x # remember the current directory in $x rt www/new # go to the "new" directory in the web space cp $x/*.html . # copy the stuff from $x, wherever that was, to here vi *.html # edit it rm -rf $x # get rid of the old x directory rt cgi # go to the cgi-bin directory and do something else
...etc. Not stack based, and you get short mnemonic names for locations.
which you can use as variables.
No, pushd and popd are a stack. You can only go back to where you just were.
With this business of "marking" a directory, you can jump around arbitrarily.
For example, you'd type "rt src" to go to your source directory, and then
"rt mp3" to go to your mp3 collection, and then "rt web" to your website
directory, and then "rt src" to go back to your src directory again.
In other words, there is no stack. I've never liked pushd/popd because
I hardly ever access directories in a stack-like fashion.
You type "mk" (as in "mark") and "rt" (as in "return") to mark a directory and
later go back to it.
Or you can give it a name: do "mk foo", and later on "rt foo" will move you back there.
But the Big Win? With the above, it gets set as a shell var: $foo is also set to the directory,
so you can do things like "cp $foo/*.baz." to good benefit. In addition, setting up
this system is just a trivial matter of setting environment variables in your.profile.
PS: Trivia: the "mk" and "rt" names were inspired by troff, where those commands were used to
keep mark and go back to vertical positions on a page... yeah I'm an oldie.
Imagine if Judge Jackson's original ruling had stood.
It said that MS had to be split into two wholly independent companies:
one for the OS, and another for all applications.
We would quite possibly have MSOffice (and all sorts of other apps)
for Linux today, because the apps division would only care about
selling their apps as widely as possible.
I just read the article, and i was thinking: If we can replace the extractor, then why bother creating an evil file with the same checksum? The extractor can do the "evil patch" at extraction.
TFA is indeed not clear. I'm assuming he meant that somebody publishes a) an extractor
and b) an archive, and with MD5's for them both.
People download, run, it all works great. Based on this trust, you download
them both and try them too. Their MD5's match what everyone says it should be.
Unfortunately, in the meanwhile the site owner has replaced the good archive with
the evil one. The MD5's are the same, but you will now get pwn3d.
But the fundamental problem here is really just that you are treating
the extractor as a trusted binary. The archive isn't an issue.
The extractor could instead have been coded to do something evil simply based
on today's date, your login name, or a random number. No MD5 fiddling needed.
Stick that in their stupid faces: If it won't
work with lynx, it ain't no good.
I really like that Act, not because I'm disabled,
but because it forces MORON web designers to
actually write web pages to be media-neutral,
which was the entire goddamned point of the
web to begin with.
I use Firefox, IE, Opera on my 640x480 Zaurus,
lynx when I'm ssh'ing, and on occasion I even
google via my cellphone. Sites like BBC
really shine there. Even slashdot works out
as long as you use the "light" rendering option.
Slashdot Mirror
As well as looking really cool, it's also a really high quality input device. I mostly use it for flight simulators; the difference between it and my previous Logitech Wingman was like night and day.
The most notable difference is that the X52 uses optoelectronic position sensors. These are stunningly accurate, never jitter, and provide perfectly linear response.
I regularly try to browse using cellphones and stuff like my pocket Zaurus 6000SL. Some sites, like news.bbc.co.uk, work perfectly. Most others give a blank page or something about as useless.
Dammit, it's not that hard!
Works fine on my Zaurus.
TV's use a thermistor arrangement that results in a coil wound around the CRT sucking gobs of power for about a second on powerup. It's there to give the shadow mask a quick demagnetizing.
You can often hear this as a brief hum that quickly fades away on startup. If you then turn the TV off and quickly on again, the heavy draw and hum won't happen, because the thermistor is still hot.
It's simple destructive interference. Maybe the active noise control FAQ will help. See section 2.5 in particular.
The only solution is noise cancelling headphones. Pilots have awfully nice ones, but you can buy acceptable ones for a hundred bucks. My modest ones (Sennheiser PCX-250) block out the whole damned airplane so I can get some rest, listen to tunes, whatever. I leave them on with no audio input at all just to block out the noise while trying to sleep.
When I take them off to go to the lavatory I'm always surprised at how noisy that flying airplane tube really is.
Get noise cancelling headphones.
Traditionally this is just an enclosed pool of mercury. It'll go as horizontal as horizontal can be; then you just match up your celestial body with its reflection and divide by two to get the true angle from the horizon.
Also, the tidal force actually also gives energy to the moon, so its orbit is slowly getting bigger. Only a few cm per year, but there it is.
So: does anybody have a video of it?
This is how the Linux 2.6 kernel does threads.
It's implemented by having 10 separate "filaments", one per digit, stacked over each other. Because different digits are at different distances to your eye, a whole line of nixie tubes looks a bit odd since some numbers are farther away than others.
On the other hand, that's also why the digits look so nice. No nasty 8-segment displays here.
Consider: since my box has 1G of memory, I do want the X server to hang on the all those pixmaps, because that makes firefax run fast. The hack would make it waste CPU time re-uncompressing images, whether it's needed or not.
With the way Firefox works now, if memory does start to run short, well, that's when the kernel will start paging things out based on its clever working set algorithms. If a given pixmap area in the X server hasn't been accessed in quite a while, it'll get swapped out to disk and the memory reclaimed. If the pixmap is accessed later, it'll automatically page back in.
I don't know about your box, but mine (Athlon XP2000+) can decompress JPEGs at a rate of around only 3MB per second. My disk drives, OTOH, are a hell of a lot faster than that.
In other words, letting the OS do its job by tossing the images onto swap when necessary strikes me as a much better strategy than constantly sucking up CPU decompressing every image every time it's used just in case the memory might be needed.
People worry too much about VMEM, IMHO. If I write a program that allocates 1G of memory, but then spins around using only 10k for the next hour, it'll have basically zero impact on the OS. Only ~10k if real RAM is actually getting used.
The specific heat of water is 4.186 J/g/degC. That means it takes 4186 Joules to raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1 degree Celsius.
If you have incoming water at 5C, outgoing at 30C, and you use 1 litre every ten seconds, that's 4186*25 Joules per second, or around 10kW. Note that at 220VAC, you'd need some whopping 50A breakers to do this.
I can absolutely guarantee you that if you take a 5 ohm element (which at 220VAC gives you 10kW), put it in a stream of water of 1 litre per 10 seconds, then the water will be 25C hotter coming out than going in once the system has stabilized.
The only difference with using a microwave system is that it won't take as long for the system to stabilize: it'll take several seconds for the heating element to reach its terminal temperature.
He's just following the advice of the article itself.
He didn't do a very good job, though. An expert would have used something more unrelated, like the "Patents" or "Handhelds" icon.
Unfortunately the oldest reference I could find on google was only from 1989, but it'll have to do. The fact that it's sigged should be a clue that the fearmongering was already a meme then.
Most of all I don't like having to remember long arbitrary paths. Where's the web html directory on any given box? If I set $www in my .profile
on every box to be wherever the heck it is, then "rt www" gets me there.
And if I've downloaded some stuff into some random junk directory somewhere
and I now want to copy it to a directory called "new" in the web html place,
I would do:
...etc. Not stack based, and you get short mnemonic names for locations. which you can use as variables.With this business of "marking" a directory, you can jump around arbitrarily. For example, you'd type "rt src" to go to your source directory, and then "rt mp3" to go to your mp3 collection, and then "rt web" to your website directory, and then "rt src" to go back to your src directory again.
In other words, there is no stack. I've never liked pushd/popd because I hardly ever access directories in a stack-like fashion.
You type "mk" (as in "mark") and "rt" (as in "return") to mark a directory and later go back to it.
Or you can give it a name: do "mk foo", and later on "rt foo" will move you back there.
But the Big Win? With the above, it gets set as a shell var: $foo is also set to the directory, so you can do things like "cp $foo/*.baz ." to good benefit. In addition, setting up
this system is just a trivial matter of setting environment variables in your .profile.
PS: Trivia: the "mk" and "rt" names were inspired by troff, where those commands were used to keep mark and go back to vertical positions on a page... yeah I'm an oldie.
We would quite possibly have MSOffice (and all sorts of other apps) for Linux today, because the apps division would only care about selling their apps as widely as possible.
Sigh.
TFA is indeed not clear. I'm assuming he meant that somebody publishes a) an extractor and b) an archive, and with MD5's for them both.
People download, run, it all works great. Based on this trust, you download them both and try them too. Their MD5's match what everyone says it should be.
Unfortunately, in the meanwhile the site owner has replaced the good archive with the evil one. The MD5's are the same, but you will now get pwn3d.
But the fundamental problem here is really just that you are treating the extractor as a trusted binary. The archive isn't an issue.
The extractor could instead have been coded to do something evil simply based on today's date, your login name, or a random number. No MD5 fiddling needed.
Is that so your remaining internal organs will be in transplantable condition when the medics eventually come to what's left of your house?
You'll also need the MIDI renderer timidity, which is likely already installed.
I really like that Act, not because I'm disabled, but because it forces MORON web designers to actually write web pages to be media-neutral, which was the entire goddamned point of the web to begin with.
I use Firefox, IE, Opera on my 640x480 Zaurus, lynx when I'm ssh'ing, and on occasion I even google via my cellphone. Sites like BBC really shine there. Even slashdot works out as long as you use the "light" rendering option.
A really, really long dipstick.