What is it with this place and the stupid high and mighty attitude people have?
"I don't use windows; I use linux so I'm not effected by the latest virus (but, I can't use hundreds of pieces of software, play the latest games, or have a box that most people can use)"
"I don't use the MSN network; I use AIM so I have no problems (but 90% of my friends use MSN, and don't want to bother installing another IM client because the one they have works, so I'll just not talk to them)"
"I don't use IE; I use Mozilla so I have no problems (but it takes more than 30 seconds to load on my system and won't load a lot of pages - I hear you say they aren't valid html, but that's how they are written, and I can't help that)"
"I don't use Office; I use some crap substandard package (but I can't open doc files and find it funny to post a message to mailing lists saying "How about plain text for us linux geeks?" every time someone uses the format)"
The point is, no one really cares what one up their own arse geek does - 90% of the world can't be arsed fucking around and take the easy option
These high speed DWDM systems talked about in this article aren't designed to be used for LANs or home internet connections - they are meant for high speed backbones that span huge distances (such as across the US or Australia).
They carry mutiple 10Gb/s or 40Gb/s channels on one fibre pair - and these individual channels can be added or removed as necessary, and can be treated independantly. Saying this, 10Gb/s is still a lot, and generally that needs to be broken down into more managable sections, such as gigabit copper ethernet or maybe even 100Mb/s.
It may seem like overkill, but at the core of most networks, there is a distinct lack of bandwidth. Maybe the VOD and video calling predicted 10 years back won't happen on these networks, but more applications are requiring these huge amounts of bandwidth.
An example of this sort of system being rolled out is the Marconi Solstis system in Australia. A very small part of that system was designed by me:)
What happens when you lose the GPS signal? Trees, buildings, clouds, rain, they all stop the signal getting through.
You'd have to otherwise set the speed to something low, or unrestrict it... dangerous to go slowly on a motorway, and if it went unrestricted with no signal, people would just shield the gps to go as fast as they wanted.
I may agree that speed limits are too low in some places and too high in others. But that SafeSpeed site has such a high and mighty attitude problem that it's no wonder that no one listens to them. Their site is all sarcasm and silly legal loopholes to get out of speeding fines and very little to actually help the cause.
One of the broadsheets had an article about speed limits and pasted the site for the same reasons, though I can't find any reference to it.
Saying this, after reading a pdf spec of the case, it does appear to be water. However, plain distilled water, in the tiny quantities involved with heat pipes shouldn't cause damage. Though being evaporated and condensed repeatedly on the inside of a copper tube with a wick may cause some impurities to get in there.
Heat pipes generally don't contain water but some other kind of solvent which is specific to the temperature range they want the pipe to work at. Generally it's not particularly conductive, but a bit flammable, not that there is enough heat to ignite it in a PC. Leaks would also tend to be slow and could be picked up by a rise in temperature.
This isn't as ridiculous as some make out. It may not be physically possible to install anything into a DWDM system, but it's certainly possible to control powers.
The system I worked on had 160 individual channels essentially multiplexed down to one. Their individual power was controlled using a OOB signal which spoke to the nodes on the system.
At each intermediate node, the EDFAs and raman pumps were also controlled using the OOB signalling. Algorithms were used to keep the system working as best as possible.
However, it wouldn't be outside of a hacker's capabilities to take control of the system, and say, pump of the power of the raman pumps (being easily the most powerful individual laser in the system). Also, increasing the powers of the individual channels (bearing in mind there are 160 here), and the EDFA pumps... well, you could cause some damage.
Of course, inside all the hardware, the fibre is carefully carried on plastic trays to keep well defined radii of turns, and at install, all the external fibres have connectors and trays to stop tight bends, but when some unskilled maintains the system, it could happen...
Re:No more car tinkering...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Hmm... 48V isn't that dangerous, you can play with it with wet hands and only feel a tingle.
I'd be more worried about not being able to use y toungue to detect voltage. With anything up to 15V, if I don't have a meter, I'll use my toungue and can tell if there is power, and it's approximate magnitude.
I used to also do it with phone lines in my phreaking days. It hurt a little bit, but not enough to stop me. I learnt my lesson however, when I had my toungue on a phone line and the line rang. the 90 ish V of AC was enough to hurt very much, and I briefly blacked out whilst on a high roof....
I completely agree with the fact that this isn't a proper commercial product, and as such it doesn't really matter, and they clearly don't write it as a "copy what I did cos it's cool" article.
But fluorescents can easily get as hot as a filament bulb, and are far more dangerous when they go wrong.
A filament bulb generally has only one mode of failure - the filament breaks. No more flow of current. I've seen the odd bulb where the insulation has broken down on the bayonet or screw and it has shorted, but this takes the breaker out straight off.
Fluorescents normally have a choke or ballast as well as a starting circuit and capacitor. It makes them a lot more complex that a filament bulb.
The energy saving bulbs that are fluorescent, as used in this project, can have some dodgy circuits in them. I've seen several of them which have melted, and one which went on fire. The number of strip lights I have seen burnt out (20+ years old) is huge. When they do go wrong, they can go very wrong.
ALso, putting it in a very small enclosed space will elevate the temperature of both the bulb and the AP, and one is likely to fail sooner because of this.
Oh fuck off you idiot. Why would you want to spend twice (or more) the money to own a laptop of similar specs to a desktop to use for a couple of days of the year? It's not a particularly good idea.
Why does nearly every article have a comment with some dumb maths formula in it? "n-5 days (where n is the length of time you have to return it)".... hmm.
Surely "Take it back a few days before you have to" is a better way of saying this.
It crops up, time and time again, people saying things like "n+5 x, where n is ? and x is ?". Most of the time it is easier saying something in words.
No please, tell me why it is a troll post? Look at the evidence. It's very true, there is a culture of unconditional hate towards Microsoft. It's almost the same as racism, and it makes me laugh at how wound up so many of you become by it.
Again, all the people come out of the woodwork, complaining how it's going to crash all the time, how it's going to be shit quality, how it's a monopoly (which, it isn't), etc. etc.
You want to know why there isn't an open source/linux/whatever you promote solution? Probably because it doesn't even compare in stability, support, reliability, or features. I watch movies under Windows, because it is easy. I don't have to fuck about for hours installing this and that, having the right hardware...
The movie goer does not care how the movie is projected, how it gets to the cinema, or whatever. The prices of tickets are unlikely to change much when it all goes digital, popcorn and drinks will still cost a fortune, only they won't have to courier huge reels of film about, or employ trained projectionists.
And at the end of the day, it has to be sold to the theatres. Any money, Microsoft went out and started trying to sell their product. Other people don't. That's why they are the ones in this position.
It re-inforces the pressure created by the brake pedal, rather than creates it by itself. It's perfectly possible to drive a car that has no servo. It's also possible to drive one with a broken servo, though the brakes are spongy and may lock on in certain situations, and if you have a direct acting servo, or one which acts on hydraulic fluid.
You could use a direct acting one, by sealing it, and having a port on it to allow atmospheric pressure in. It wouldn't allow for light braking or extremely heaving breaking, so you have lost a lot of control.
I used a small CNC miller to produce two complex alumnium plates that I used to produce a winch. It was complete overkill, but I was bored, and it did a very good job.
It had dodgy software and the sheet I was using was too large (X and Y) to use in the machine, so I had to make a jig using MDF and steel rod to locate the plate, so that it could be flipped, and the machine used to cut material much bigger than it was designed for.
The software and PC controlling it was updated last year, and now it can accurately profile 3D shapes. There are obvious restrictions, such as no undercutting (unless you use special bits, which is awkward). You can use opaque acrylic and etch photos onto it, with the darkness being converted into depth. By then holding it up to the light you see an image. Quite a neat idea.
I could see it being used for PCB production, but to be honest, it wouldn't be much use for anything small. It is very accurate, without a doubt moreso than the homebuilt one, but even with the smallest tips, I can't see SOIC outlines being milles with enough precision to be used. And most PCBS have some sort of surface mount components now.
I also see problems with raising the edges of the copper tracks slightly with milling. This would make surface mount components hard to get flat on the board.
Brakes, for one, could be operated off of a very small solenoid if you changed the brake power booster
What is a "brake power booster"? You mean a brake servo? They still need a fair amount of force to operate, bear in mind that a brake pedal is a lever, and amplifies the force somewhat anyway.
If you mean some new fangled thing in a more modern car, fair enough, but this was a 15 year old car that they modified, not a new one. It would only have a servo, and it is feasible that it didn't, but there have been few cars in the last 15 years without one.
Ah, now see, I was talking about the UK. Maybe my plans aren't so good for the US, especially Texas and other similar concealed weapon carrying being legal type places....:)
Ok, this guy has stuck a 5" LCD in his ATX case, connected it up to the composite video out, used VNC, and claimed all this amazing stuff.
Ok, this screen will be of little use except to vaguelly see what is going on, watching films, visualisations from winamp, etc. It's hardly a monitor replacement.
So he uses a bit of rolled over ribbon cable, some duct tape, and a tube for the surround... that smells to me of someone who couldn't really be bothered so hacked apart the nearest things to make it. Why not do something decent? It's not hard to get an acrylic surround cut and put in.
And it's another geek with the good old "it's ok to twist wires together and wrap tape round them". No, it isn't. Use terminal strip, crimp connectors, solder them and heatshrink them, but your method is a very poor and not very safe way of doing it. Muppet.
Last, as you will see in a later review, this LCD can make an excellent computer-powered, voice-controlled GPS Navigational system.
Yeah, right. I can believe that will work reliably and efficiently, with twisted together wires, some bodged together software, and a conventional desktop PC shoved under the seat.
We've seen screens like this before, and it's very easy to connect up an LCD to composite video. He hasn't even done anything nice to the case.
When I was in halls last year, I discovered this as a problem. The routers and switches on the halls networks were badly configured and secured.
It all started off with some fun with Ettercap, and it was clear that ARP spoofing worked.
You could then easily pretend to be the gateway on the network. All the traffic on the same switch as me was coming through my box. Ettercap was limited, so a bit of hacking and scripting later, a combination of arpoison, fragrouter, and tcpdump was working on the network.
Sniffing got a bit dull (porn, e-mail, p2p) until someone tried logging into one of the switches. They had been connected badly, using 10Mb/s upstreams to chain lots of switches together, rather than using the proper backplane, so I think it meant I could see any traffic destined for switches further along the chain.
From this I got the password (no username required). It was an easy job changing my port to 100Mb/s, which removed some of the bottleneck when I was forwarding traffic when pretending to be the gateway.
However, each switch and router trusted the next. The whole network was like this. Although I didn't get far with my experimentation, it should have been possible to re-route traffic.
Thing was, they had slow connections. Unless you went onto JANET or the uni systems. You could use the uni proxy to speed it up a bit, but only with web traffic. It would have been interesting to try getting all traffic to take a faster route, but I would have got busted.
Erm, I can't remember the film that well now, so he probably drank red wine whilst programming.
But yes, often I do. I find a small amount of alcohol, a little drum and bass, and my funny blue ikea light with feet help my programming a great deal.
Of course, this might explain why my left eye is so swollen I cannot see. Hmm
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the drug offences. He had to be smoking something for him to think this could possibly be a good idea.
What is it with this place and the stupid high and mighty attitude people have?
"I don't use windows; I use linux so I'm not effected by the latest virus (but, I can't use hundreds of pieces of software, play the latest games, or have a box that most people can use)"
"I don't use the MSN network; I use AIM so I have no problems (but 90% of my friends use MSN, and don't want to bother installing another IM client because the one they have works, so I'll just not talk to them)"
"I don't use IE; I use Mozilla so I have no problems (but it takes more than 30 seconds to load on my system and won't load a lot of pages - I hear you say they aren't valid html, but that's how they are written, and I can't help that)"
"I don't use Office; I use some crap substandard package (but I can't open doc files and find it funny to post a message to mailing lists saying "How about plain text for us linux geeks?" every time someone uses the format)"
The point is, no one really cares what one up their own arse geek does - 90% of the world can't be arsed fucking around and take the easy option
Yeah, it's got more power, but it's not the same car, it isn't exclusive, and above all, isn't as fast at the low end... let's look at the differences
These high speed DWDM systems talked about in this article aren't designed to be used for LANs or home internet connections - they are meant for high speed backbones that span huge distances (such as across the US or Australia).
They carry mutiple 10Gb/s or 40Gb/s channels on one fibre pair - and these individual channels can be added or removed as necessary, and can be treated independantly. Saying this, 10Gb/s is still a lot, and generally that needs to be broken down into more managable sections, such as gigabit copper ethernet or maybe even 100Mb/s.
It may seem like overkill, but at the core of most networks, there is a distinct lack of bandwidth. Maybe the VOD and video calling predicted 10 years back won't happen on these networks, but more applications are requiring these huge amounts of bandwidth.
An example of this sort of system being rolled out is the Marconi Solstis system in Australia. A very small part of that system was designed by me :)
Forget thinking about the logic behind it - just try saying "Tertiary Truth Tree" quickly...
What happens when you lose the GPS signal? Trees, buildings, clouds, rain, they all stop the signal getting through.
You'd have to otherwise set the speed to something low, or unrestrict it... dangerous to go slowly on a motorway, and if it went unrestricted with no signal, people would just shield the gps to go as fast as they wanted.
I may agree that speed limits are too low in some places and too high in others. But that SafeSpeed site has such a high and mighty attitude problem that it's no wonder that no one listens to them. Their site is all sarcasm and silly legal loopholes to get out of speeding fines and very little to actually help the cause.
One of the broadsheets had an article about speed limits and pasted the site for the same reasons, though I can't find any reference to it.
Saying this, after reading a pdf spec of the case, it does appear to be water. However, plain distilled water, in the tiny quantities involved with heat pipes shouldn't cause damage. Though being evaporated and condensed repeatedly on the inside of a copper tube with a wick may cause some impurities to get in there.
Heat pipes generally don't contain water but some other kind of solvent which is specific to the temperature range they want the pipe to work at. Generally it's not particularly conductive, but a bit flammable, not that there is enough heat to ignite it in a PC. Leaks would also tend to be slow and could be picked up by a rise in temperature.
This isn't as ridiculous as some make out. It may not be physically possible to install anything into a DWDM system, but it's certainly possible to control powers.
The system I worked on had 160 individual channels essentially multiplexed down to one. Their individual power was controlled using a OOB signal which spoke to the nodes on the system.
At each intermediate node, the EDFAs and raman pumps were also controlled using the OOB signalling. Algorithms were used to keep the system working as best as possible.
However, it wouldn't be outside of a hacker's capabilities to take control of the system, and say, pump of the power of the raman pumps (being easily the most powerful individual laser in the system). Also, increasing the powers of the individual channels (bearing in mind there are 160 here), and the EDFA pumps... well, you could cause some damage.
Of course, inside all the hardware, the fibre is carefully carried on plastic trays to keep well defined radii of turns, and at install, all the external fibres have connectors and trays to stop tight bends, but when some unskilled maintains the system, it could happen...
Hmm... 48V isn't that dangerous, you can play with it with wet hands and only feel a tingle.
I'd be more worried about not being able to use y toungue to detect voltage. With anything up to 15V, if I don't have a meter, I'll use my toungue and can tell if there is power, and it's approximate magnitude.
I used to also do it with phone lines in my phreaking days. It hurt a little bit, but not enough to stop me. I learnt my lesson however, when I had my toungue on a phone line and the line rang. the 90 ish V of AC was enough to hurt very much, and I briefly blacked out whilst on a high roof....
I completely agree with the fact that this isn't a proper commercial product, and as such it doesn't really matter, and they clearly don't write it as a "copy what I did cos it's cool" article.
But fluorescents can easily get as hot as a filament bulb, and are far more dangerous when they go wrong.
A filament bulb generally has only one mode of failure - the filament breaks. No more flow of current. I've seen the odd bulb where the insulation has broken down on the bayonet or screw and it has shorted, but this takes the breaker out straight off.
Fluorescents normally have a choke or ballast as well as a starting circuit and capacitor. It makes them a lot more complex that a filament bulb.
The energy saving bulbs that are fluorescent, as used in this project, can have some dodgy circuits in them. I've seen several of them which have melted, and one which went on fire. The number of strip lights I have seen burnt out (20+ years old) is huge. When they do go wrong, they can go very wrong.
ALso, putting it in a very small enclosed space will elevate the temperature of both the bulb and the AP, and one is likely to fail sooner because of this.
Oh fuck off you idiot. Why would you want to spend twice (or more) the money to own a laptop of similar specs to a desktop to use for a couple of days of the year? It's not a particularly good idea.
Why does nearly every article have a comment with some dumb maths formula in it? "n-5 days (where n is the length of time you have to return it)".... hmm.
Surely "Take it back a few days before you have to" is a better way of saying this.
It crops up, time and time again, people saying things like "n+5 x, where n is ? and x is ?". Most of the time it is easier saying something in words.
No please, tell me why it is a troll post? Look at the evidence. It's very true, there is a culture of unconditional hate towards Microsoft. It's almost the same as racism, and it makes me laugh at how wound up so many of you become by it.
Again, all the people come out of the woodwork, complaining how it's going to crash all the time, how it's going to be shit quality, how it's a monopoly (which, it isn't), etc. etc.
You want to know why there isn't an open source/linux/whatever you promote solution? Probably because it doesn't even compare in stability, support, reliability, or features. I watch movies under Windows, because it is easy. I don't have to fuck about for hours installing this and that, having the right hardware...
The movie goer does not care how the movie is projected, how it gets to the cinema, or whatever. The prices of tickets are unlikely to change much when it all goes digital, popcorn and drinks will still cost a fortune, only they won't have to courier huge reels of film about, or employ trained projectionists.
And at the end of the day, it has to be sold to the theatres. Any money, Microsoft went out and started trying to sell their product. Other people don't. That's why they are the ones in this position.
It's called a servo over here in the UK.
It re-inforces the pressure created by the brake pedal, rather than creates it by itself. It's perfectly possible to drive a car that has no servo. It's also possible to drive one with a broken servo, though the brakes are spongy and may lock on in certain situations, and if you have a direct acting servo, or one which acts on hydraulic fluid.
You could use a direct acting one, by sealing it, and having a port on it to allow atmospheric pressure in. It wouldn't allow for light braking or extremely heaving breaking, so you have lost a lot of control.
I used a small CNC miller to produce two complex alumnium plates that I used to produce a winch. It was complete overkill, but I was bored, and it did a very good job.
It had dodgy software and the sheet I was using was too large (X and Y) to use in the machine, so I had to make a jig using MDF and steel rod to locate the plate, so that it could be flipped, and the machine used to cut material much bigger than it was designed for.
The software and PC controlling it was updated last year, and now it can accurately profile 3D shapes. There are obvious restrictions, such as no undercutting (unless you use special bits, which is awkward). You can use opaque acrylic and etch photos onto it, with the darkness being converted into depth. By then holding it up to the light you see an image. Quite a neat idea.
I could see it being used for PCB production, but to be honest, it wouldn't be much use for anything small. It is very accurate, without a doubt moreso than the homebuilt one, but even with the smallest tips, I can't see SOIC outlines being milles with enough precision to be used. And most PCBS have some sort of surface mount components now.
I also see problems with raising the edges of the copper tracks slightly with milling. This would make surface mount components hard to get flat on the board.
Brakes, for one, could be operated off of a very small solenoid if you changed the brake power booster
What is a "brake power booster"? You mean a brake servo? They still need a fair amount of force to operate, bear in mind that a brake pedal is a lever, and amplifies the force somewhat anyway.
If you mean some new fangled thing in a more modern car, fair enough, but this was a 15 year old car that they modified, not a new one. It would only have a servo, and it is feasible that it didn't, but there have been few cars in the last 15 years without one.
Ah, now see, I was talking about the UK. Maybe my plans aren't so good for the US, especially Texas and other similar concealed weapon carrying being legal type places.... :)
Second comment I have made today with the same subject. Oh well. It's not funny really.
Ok, this guy has stuck a 5" LCD in his ATX case, connected it up to the composite video out, used VNC, and claimed all this amazing stuff.
Ok, this screen will be of little use except to vaguelly see what is going on, watching films, visualisations from winamp, etc. It's hardly a monitor replacement.
So he uses a bit of rolled over ribbon cable, some duct tape, and a tube for the surround... that smells to me of someone who couldn't really be bothered so hacked apart the nearest things to make it. Why not do something decent? It's not hard to get an acrylic surround cut and put in.
And it's another geek with the good old "it's ok to twist wires together and wrap tape round them". No, it isn't. Use terminal strip, crimp connectors, solder them and heatshrink them, but your method is a very poor and not very safe way of doing it. Muppet.
Last, as you will see in a later review, this LCD can make an excellent computer-powered, voice-controlled GPS Navigational system.
Yeah, right. I can believe that will work reliably and efficiently, with twisted together wires, some bodged together software, and a conventional desktop PC shoved under the seat.
We've seen screens like this before, and it's very easy to connect up an LCD to composite video. He hasn't even done anything nice to the case.
Waste of time.
See? Much better.
When I was in halls last year, I discovered this as a problem. The routers and switches on the halls networks were badly configured and secured.
It all started off with some fun with Ettercap, and it was clear that ARP spoofing worked.
You could then easily pretend to be the gateway on the network. All the traffic on the same switch as me was coming through my box. Ettercap was limited, so a bit of hacking and scripting later, a combination of arpoison, fragrouter, and tcpdump was working on the network.
Sniffing got a bit dull (porn, e-mail, p2p) until someone tried logging into one of the switches. They had been connected badly, using 10Mb/s upstreams to chain lots of switches together, rather than using the proper backplane, so I think it meant I could see any traffic destined for switches further along the chain.
From this I got the password (no username required). It was an easy job changing my port to 100Mb/s, which removed some of the bottleneck when I was forwarding traffic when pretending to be the gateway.
However, each switch and router trusted the next. The whole network was like this. Although I didn't get far with my experimentation, it should have been possible to re-route traffic.
Thing was, they had slow connections. Unless you went onto JANET or the uni systems. You could use the uni proxy to speed it up a bit, but only with web traffic. It would have been interesting to try getting all traffic to take a faster route, but I would have got busted.
Erm, I can't remember the film that well now, so he probably drank red wine whilst programming.
But yes, often I do. I find a small amount of alcohol, a little drum and bass, and my funny blue ikea light with feet help my programming a great deal.
Of course, this might explain why my left eye is so swollen I cannot see. Hmm