Think about how little angular motion it would require to make a HUGE difference in the aim of a laser shooting at something a thousand miles away. A 747 is ideal because it's BIG and STABLE.
I saw a show about this, they had a beam stabilizer assembly about the size of a VW beetle. And even then it didn't take much turbulance for it to go completely off target.
Who says that old computer is junk? The day may come when you can't buy a new computer without DRM and case screws with RFID tags that notify the manufacturer whenever you take the cover off. I guess I'll hang on to my old LaserJet III.
On the up side, maybe if this law becomes widespread, I won't get any more toner cartradge spam.
Similar to how Secure Digital memory works, since you can't alter the contents of the ROM portion of the disc. It could contain secure hashes, or even codecs or other encryption/communication code. You buy a stack of the discs and burn songs onto them at the music store, then they only let you play them x number of times, a la SD. Or maybe you buy music CDs with the music already in the ROM part, but the R/W part is updated each time you play it. Or the R/W part must be encoded with some kind of machine specific ID so you can't play the disc in other players.
I know I know I'm being totally paranoid. There are a million and one potential NON DRM uses for this idea.
The noise (hum) In a conventional transformer Is due to core magnetostriction, which is a very small deformation of the core iron under the influence of the magnetic field induced by the AC primary current.
Ever walk down a street on a quiet evening, and you suddenly hear the deep thrum of 60 cycle hum? The noises you're hearing may be eminating directly from the coils inside your CRT. This sounds cool but actually I doubt thats what it is.
I know the sounds you're talking about. I've noticed them to a greater or lesser degree on lots of different computers, beginning with my Apple IIgs. Not having a fan, it was totally silent when there was no disc access. You could always hear faint little noises when it was doing stuff.
The problem is simply corrolated noise. All the little bitznbytez on your motherboard throw off lots of electromagnetic energy when they're doing their thing. The sound card/pc speaker amplifier, being imperfect, picks up and amplifies some components of that noise. The sound card/pc speaker also picks some up directly from the PCI bus, and also generates some of it's own. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that while you may have taken away your multimedia speakers, you forgot about your PC speaker...
Anything that you make/buy is going to essentially be performing the same task as an inverter and the normal PSU, which create a DC-DC converter when connected in series. There's no way around the fact that you need a DC-DC converter, and I HIGHLY doubt you'll find a DC-DC converter with all the proper output voltages thats cheaper than an inverter and a normal PSU.
Depending on your car, the 12v system MAY be reasonably clean, but it needs SOME filtering. Almost all 12v systems carry alternator whine. Also, during starting, there can be some nasty transient voltages. ALSO the voltage level can vary from as much as 15v in some vehicles to as little as 11v on a weak battery. ALSO most computers require NEGATIVE voltages. That's the real PITA. So forget about just hooking it up with a couple of regulators or something.
If you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT use an inverter, then you're best bet is to go with an embedded mobo, rather than an ATX. Linux Devices has a pretty comprehensive list of single board computers, many of which would be much easier to run off 12v than any normal board. Of course you're not going to get as much computer for your money, but that's the way it goes.
Your cheapest option by far is to just use an inverter.
I LOVE APRS. Bob was a real visionary to come up with it when he did and make it so popular. We all owe him a debt.
I have some problems with APRS though. Bob is the sole copyright holder. The protocol hasn't gotten much attention lately. There isn't much free APRS software (other than XASTIR which rules), and Bob maintains DosAPRS as the reference implementation (ugh dos).
I would like to begin supporting OpenTRAC. I currently run an APRS digipeater in Randolph Vermont. So has anybody written a libax25 based OpenTRAC repeater yet? If not it's something I may find time to do someday. If OpenTRAC is to get off the ground, it needs to receive a groundswell of support. Otherwise it's likely to wind up on the isle of misfit protocols.
The real problem is that APRS, with all of it's shortcomings, is now FIRMLY entrenched in the amateur community. I know hams that refuse to operate anything but morse code on a separate vacuum tube transmitter and receiver. Nothing EVER goes away in ham radio. This is why it's so hard to get anything NEW going in hamming, everyone is always so stuck in a rut. I swear the only thing that's ever gone away in ham radio is spark-gap transmitters and that was only because you could get killed for operating one. Shit, nobody operates packet over 1200 baud. How backward is that? Are we going to STILL be using 1200/2400hz FSK in 10 years? Probably. God damn it... */rant*
There are several radios and TNCs on the market with built-in APRS support. There are APRS applications for nearly every modern OS. There is a world-wide network of APRS digipeaters, backbones, and internet gateways. At a minimum, OpenTRAC will have to be able to operate on the same channel as APRS without confusing existing APRS equipment. If we show enough support for it, we can cajole the manufacturers into supporting it.
That's assuming it's worth supporting. I haven't read the spec yet. But I will. And if it looks good, I'll support it.
And how did Boston feel about you traversing their class B airspace?
Well I wasn't launching the balloons, and I had no affiliation with the school that was doing the launch. I just heard that it would be happening and figured it would be fun to test my APRS setup in the field:) But I understand that they did notify the FAA and such... They certainly hadn't expected the balloon to go so far; they had recieved a grant for the electronics and had been planning to repeat the program every year. If you root through the log, you'll find this line:
KA1GJU>APRS,N1RCA-11:WA1KAT:SRY OM looks like a H2O landing...{1
Thats "Sorry, old man, looks like a water landing..." for you non-hams;) I think that pretty much sums it up.
Now what they SHOULD have done was to implement a "cut" signal, like the guy in this article did, to abort the flight. That would have saved the day.
Actually there's a standard procedure for notifying the FAA of a weather balloon release. In fact the author talks about it. Next time read the article, or at least skim over it.
Amateur ballooning can be quite a bit of fun. There is a small but active ballooning sub-hobby within the ham radio hobby. Ham radio is an ideal medium for transmitting telemetry from balloons, since we have access to cheap high quality (and high power) equipment.
The launch was from Hopkinton NH. The first launch went well, and we received good signals from the balloon all the way out into the Atlantic ocean. This was quite a bit farther than they expected the baloon to travel, they had planned on recovering and reusing it:o It was still cool IMHO. Check out this kick ass map of the balloon's track.
The second launch was also a success, and the baloon only traveled about 50 miles before touchdown. Map is here.
The third launch went up with the GPS receiver turned off:/ At last check, it was at 00.000N 000.00W. They didn't launch any more balloons that day.
Liquid hydrogen does, but that is an extraordinarily difficult material to handle, considering that it is only a liquid near absolute zero. Hence it's not used in any mainstream applications that I am aware of.
Uh, firewire already uses SCSI. This replaces Firewire. Well not realy since firewire is a lot faster than 10mb ethernet and a lot cheaper than gigabit. But in this case, Ethernet is doing the same thing that Firewire does now.
Then we can ALL seem cutting edge! I bet NCR has a patent that covers this...
"Some nasty reflection attacks were discovered on iSCSI's use of CHAP" I wonder how many more security holes are waiting to be discovered? I would be very careful about how I use this untill it's been tested by fire.
Still the idea is really pretty fucking cool. Ethernet is cheap and fast (especially gigabit) and doesn't have any of the limitations that traditional SCSI or IDE have as far as devices on a chain. This could be a good replacement for Samba in some situations. The standards document is pretty daunting, so I can't tell if iSCSI will allow multiple connections to a single volume, but even if it doesn't there are many single user Samba applications that could be handled better by iSCSI.
I was going to say something about Mr. Fusion, but everybody else alredy has.
Seriously, this is a great advance in fuel cell technology. A lot of people think fuel cells are gods gift and don't realize that most fuel cells run on hydrocarbons (IE fossile fuel) or hydrogen. A fuel cell is probably the cleanest and most efficient way to burn hydrocarbons, but YOU'RE STILL BURNING HYDROCARBONS. You're still sucking dead dinosaurs out of the ground and pumping TONS of CO2 into the air that has been trapped under the ground for millions of years for a damn good reason. And hydrogen as a fuel has been stupid because it's costly to produce and has a super low energy density in a gasious form and is hard to store in a liquid form. The hydrogen fuel cell cars in the Tour de Sol a few years back didn't have back seats, instead they had giant carbon fiber hydrogen tanks.
So these guys found a way to produce the hydrogen IN the fuel cell, thus effectively eliminating the problems in producing, storing and transporting the hydrogen. Ingenious. I hope this is the direction society moves in, becoming more self sufficient and reducing waste. This device is a double whammy, it cuts back on household waste AND produces clean electricity.
I can't tell if the Centrino logo looks like a pink triangle or a broken heart.
There is a huge market for slower chips. Slower == less power. Less power is great for mobile computing where the foremost concern is battery life. The XScale is a good example of where slower is better. Why don't they just shrink 400mhz Pentiums and cram them into pocket pc's? Because the XScale uses a tiny fraction of the power that any Pentium uses.
Don't forget also that cooling is becoming a limiting factor in CPU design. Not everybody wants their computer to sound like a jet turbine or have water running through it. As "embedded" CPUs like the ARM and XScale get faster, you may start to see them in more traditionally "desktop" applications. Electricity is expensive and low power computers can save money.
And I still don't understand why everyone equates CLOCK RATE with SPEED. Do people think high frequency EM waves travel faster than slower ones, or something? There are have been MANY examples over the last 10 years of CPUs that get more done at a lower clock rate.
Wasn't there just a whole huge discussion about RFID tags in tires and how they could be used to RELIABLY AND CHEAPLY record every car passing by, even on a 12 lane highway where everyone is doing 100mph? And how they COULD do the same thing with OCR but RFIDs would be superior in almost every way? So why isn't London doing that?
This from the same country that banned vegetable oil fuel because there is no pollution tax paid on it, even though it pollutes far less than fossil fuels.
Half of all programers are below average. And here the average is pretty low. Its amazing how I can barely pass calculus while the guy next to me gets an A, and yet I get an A+ in an OOP class where the average is a C
"The Big Picture" is something that hasn't been covered at all in my computer engineering bachelors program. Hell, they don't even teach us how to use CVS! How the hell can you work on a large project with more than one developer without using CVS (or some other source control software) religiously? Teamwork is discouraged througout the curriculum. Shit, you can get kicked out of school just for collaborating with another student on a homework asignment. Now for the first time in my last semester after 5 years they're trying to force us to work on teams to do our senior projects. I told them exactly where to stick it. Frankly I don't WANT to work with any of my classmates, not because I'm not a team player. I would LOVE some help on my project. Rather I know them well enough to know none of them would be very helpful. They were never taught the big picture, and were either non smart or not dedicted enough to pick it up on their own.
I really doubt that Congress, who won't listen to the majority of its citizens, will bother to listen to a collection of scientists that don't provide any money to their campaign coffers.
In the words of Mayor Quimby, the majority of US citizens are nothing but a bunch of pickled mush-heads. Congress is far more likely to consider the opinion of the IEEE than of Joe Schmoe who's too busy watching Joe Millionare to even write his congressperson anyway.
SMB3 rules. It's quite playable on PocketNES too:) First game I tried. Too bad the pocket PC controlls make it pretty uncomfortable to play. Zelda is a bit more tolerable...
Well you uncheck decoding of all the protocols you DON'T care about (which is pretty much all of them) and then you turn on real time updating and auto scrolling and you create a filter to filterout all of the traffic thats on non aim ports. Thats it in a nutshell. If you need more specific info, RTFM.
Re:I've heard this story before.
on
Baked Apple
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YOU IDIOT! READ THE URL! Oh wait _I AM_ that idiot./me quietly goes away
I've heard this story before.
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
I used IM and EMail regularly throughout the day to communicate with my teachers and fellow students. My productivity would take a big dump without either technology. If I lost both, well fuck I might have to use a telephone! Hey everybody lets ban all forms of communication other than written mail! Wake up.
Using AIM during a lecture is a totally different problem and shouldn't require BANNING it from the lab. IMNSHO it's no different from using a CELL PHONE during a lecture and the teacher should deal with the problem accordingly. And if it's a lab where people are typing anyway and the teacher can't tell that the student is IMing then who cares? Students aren't robots and you can't FORCE them to learn no matter how hard you try. If they can IM in lab and still pass then more power to 'em. If they fail then too damn bad, it's their own damn fault.
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Think about how little angular motion it would require to make a HUGE difference in the aim of a laser shooting at something a thousand miles away. A 747 is ideal because it's BIG and STABLE.
I saw a show about this, they had a beam stabilizer assembly about the size of a VW beetle. And even then it didn't take much turbulance for it to go completely off target.
I'd hit up all your up and coming local bands for cheap rights. They'll usually do anything for exposure, maybe even let you use their stuff for free.
Who says that old computer is junk? The day may come when you can't buy a new computer without DRM and case screws with RFID tags that notify the manufacturer whenever you take the cover off. I guess I'll hang on to my old LaserJet III.
On the up side, maybe if this law becomes widespread, I won't get any more toner cartradge spam.
Similar to how Secure Digital memory works, since you can't alter the contents of the ROM portion of the disc. It could contain secure hashes, or even codecs or other encryption/communication code. You buy a stack of the discs and burn songs onto them at the music store, then they only let you play them x number of times, a la SD. Or maybe you buy music CDs with the music already in the ROM part, but the R/W part is updated each time you play it. Or the R/W part must be encoded with some kind of machine specific ID so you can't play the disc in other players.
I know I know I'm being totally paranoid. There are a million and one potential NON DRM uses for this idea.
Ever walk down a street on a quiet evening, and you suddenly hear the deep thrum of 60 cycle hum? The noises you're hearing may be eminating directly from the coils inside your CRT. This sounds cool but actually I doubt thats what it is.
I know the sounds you're talking about. I've noticed them to a greater or lesser degree on lots of different computers, beginning with my Apple IIgs. Not having a fan, it was totally silent when there was no disc access. You could always hear faint little noises when it was doing stuff.
The problem is simply corrolated noise. All the little bitznbytez on your motherboard throw off lots of electromagnetic energy when they're doing their thing. The sound card/pc speaker amplifier, being imperfect, picks up and amplifies some components of that noise. The sound card/pc speaker also picks some up directly from the PCI bus, and also generates some of it's own. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that while you may have taken away your multimedia speakers, you forgot about your PC speaker...
Anything that you make/buy is going to essentially be performing the same task as an inverter and the normal PSU, which create a DC-DC converter when connected in series. There's no way around the fact that you need a DC-DC converter, and I HIGHLY doubt you'll find a DC-DC converter with all the proper output voltages thats cheaper than an inverter and a normal PSU.
Depending on your car, the 12v system MAY be reasonably clean, but it needs SOME filtering. Almost all 12v systems carry alternator whine. Also, during starting, there can be some nasty transient voltages. ALSO the voltage level can vary from as much as 15v in some vehicles to as little as 11v on a weak battery. ALSO most computers require NEGATIVE voltages. That's the real PITA. So forget about just hooking it up with a couple of regulators or something.
If you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT use an inverter, then you're best bet is to go with an embedded mobo, rather than an ATX. Linux Devices has a pretty comprehensive list of single board computers, many of which would be much easier to run off 12v than any normal board. Of course you're not going to get as much computer for your money, but that's the way it goes.
Your cheapest option by far is to just use an inverter.
I LOVE APRS. Bob was a real visionary to come up with it when he did and make it so popular. We all owe him a debt.
I have some problems with APRS though. Bob is the sole copyright holder. The protocol hasn't gotten much attention lately. There isn't much free APRS software (other than XASTIR which rules), and Bob maintains DosAPRS as the reference implementation (ugh dos).
I would like to begin supporting OpenTRAC. I currently run an APRS digipeater in Randolph Vermont. So has anybody written a libax25 based OpenTRAC repeater yet? If not it's something I may find time to do someday. If OpenTRAC is to get off the ground, it needs to receive a groundswell of support. Otherwise it's likely to wind up on the isle of misfit protocols.
The real problem is that APRS, with all of it's shortcomings, is now FIRMLY entrenched in the amateur community. I know hams that refuse to operate anything but morse code on a separate vacuum tube transmitter and receiver. Nothing EVER goes away in ham radio. This is why it's so hard to get anything NEW going in hamming, everyone is always so stuck in a rut. I swear the only thing that's ever gone away in ham radio is spark-gap transmitters and that was only because you could get killed for operating one. Shit, nobody operates packet over 1200 baud. How backward is that? Are we going to STILL be using 1200/2400hz FSK in 10 years? Probably. God damn it... */rant*
There are several radios and TNCs on the market with built-in APRS support. There are APRS applications for nearly every modern OS. There is a world-wide network of APRS digipeaters, backbones, and internet gateways. At a minimum, OpenTRAC will have to be able to operate on the same channel as APRS without confusing existing APRS equipment. If we show enough support for it, we can cajole the manufacturers into supporting it.
That's assuming it's worth supporting. I haven't read the spec yet. But I will. And if it looks good, I'll support it.
Well I wasn't launching the balloons, and I had no affiliation with the school that was doing the launch. I just heard that it would be happening and figured it would be fun to test my APRS setup in the field
Now what they SHOULD have done was to implement a "cut" signal, like the guy in this article did, to abort the flight. That would have saved the day.
Actually there's a standard procedure for notifying the FAA of a weather balloon release. In fact the author talks about it. Next time read the article, or at least skim over it.
Amateur ballooning can be quite a bit of fun. There is a small but active ballooning sub-hobby within the ham radio hobby. Ham radio is an ideal medium for transmitting telemetry from balloons, since we have access to cheap high quality (and high power) equipment.
:o It was still cool IMHO. Check out this kick ass map of the balloon's track.
:/ At last check, it was at 00.000N 000.00W. They didn't launch any more balloons that day.
I participated in a balloon tracking experiment not too long ago. The students of Timberlane Regional High School of Plaistow NH launched several high-altitude balloons carrying APRS transmitters, as a part of their CAPSAT (Coordinated Algebra (II) & Physics Simulated Satellite) project. I was able to track two of them. The balloons carried GPS receivers and ham radio Automatic Position Reporting System transmitters.
The launch was from Hopkinton NH. The first launch went well, and we received good signals from the balloon all the way out into the Atlantic ocean. This was quite a bit farther than they expected the baloon to travel, they had planned on recovering and reusing it
The second launch was also a success, and the baloon only traveled about 50 miles before touchdown. Map is here.
The third launch went up with the GPS receiver turned off
My tracking station consisted of a Kenwood TH-D7 radio and a PowerMac 7500 604e-180 running XASTIR on Yellow Dog Linux. The full results of the day (and APRS logs for the entire hamfest) are here.
Liquid hydrogen does, but that is an extraordinarily difficult material to handle, considering that it is only a liquid near absolute zero. Hence it's not used in any mainstream applications that I am aware of.
Uh, firewire already uses SCSI. This replaces Firewire. Well not realy since firewire is a lot faster than 10mb ethernet and a lot cheaper than gigabit. But in this case, Ethernet is doing the same thing that Firewire does now.
Then we can ALL seem cutting edge!
I bet NCR has a patent that covers this...
"Some nasty reflection attacks were discovered on iSCSI's use of CHAP" I wonder how many more security holes are waiting to be discovered? I would be very careful about how I use this untill it's been tested by fire.
Still the idea is really pretty fucking cool. Ethernet is cheap and fast (especially gigabit) and doesn't have any of the limitations that traditional SCSI or IDE have as far as devices on a chain. This could be a good replacement for Samba in some situations. The standards document is pretty daunting, so I can't tell if iSCSI will allow multiple connections to a single volume, but even if it doesn't there are many single user Samba applications that could be handled better by iSCSI.
I was going to say something about Mr. Fusion, but everybody else alredy has.
Seriously, this is a great advance in fuel cell technology. A lot of people think fuel cells are gods gift and don't realize that most fuel cells run on hydrocarbons (IE fossile fuel) or hydrogen. A fuel cell is probably the cleanest and most efficient way to burn hydrocarbons, but YOU'RE STILL BURNING HYDROCARBONS. You're still sucking dead dinosaurs out of the ground and pumping TONS of CO2 into the air that has been trapped under the ground for millions of years for a damn good reason. And hydrogen as a fuel has been stupid because it's costly to produce and has a super low energy density in a gasious form and is hard to store in a liquid form. The hydrogen fuel cell cars in the Tour de Sol a few years back didn't have back seats, instead they had giant carbon fiber hydrogen tanks.
So these guys found a way to produce the hydrogen IN the fuel cell, thus effectively eliminating the problems in producing, storing and transporting the hydrogen. Ingenious. I hope this is the direction society moves in, becoming more self sufficient and reducing waste. This device is a double whammy, it cuts back on household waste AND produces clean electricity.
I can't tell if the Centrino logo looks like a pink triangle or a broken heart.
There is a huge market for slower chips. Slower == less power. Less power is great for mobile computing where the foremost concern is battery life. The XScale is a good example of where slower is better. Why don't they just shrink 400mhz Pentiums and cram them into pocket pc's? Because the XScale uses a tiny fraction of the power that any Pentium uses.
Don't forget also that cooling is becoming a limiting factor in CPU design. Not everybody wants their computer to sound like a jet turbine or have water running through it. As "embedded" CPUs like the ARM and XScale get faster, you may start to see them in more traditionally "desktop" applications. Electricity is expensive and low power computers can save money.
And I still don't understand why everyone equates CLOCK RATE with SPEED. Do people think high frequency EM waves travel faster than slower ones, or something? There are have been MANY examples over the last 10 years of CPUs that get more done at a lower clock rate.
Wasn't there just a whole huge discussion about RFID tags in tires and how they could be used to RELIABLY AND CHEAPLY record every car passing by, even on a 12 lane highway where everyone is doing 100mph? And how they COULD do the same thing with OCR but RFIDs would be superior in almost every way? So why isn't London doing that?
This from the same country that banned vegetable oil fuel because there is no pollution tax paid on it, even though it pollutes far less than fossil fuels.
At least untill the day the day society crumbles, and then guess who will be first against the wall?
Half of all programers are below average. And here the average is pretty low. Its amazing how I can barely pass calculus while the guy next to me gets an A, and yet I get an A+ in an OOP class where the average is a C
"The Big Picture" is something that hasn't been covered at all in my computer engineering bachelors program. Hell, they don't even teach us how to use CVS! How the hell can you work on a large project with more than one developer without using CVS (or some other source control software) religiously? Teamwork is discouraged througout the curriculum. Shit, you can get kicked out of school just for collaborating with another student on a homework asignment. Now for the first time in my last semester after 5 years they're trying to force us to work on teams to do our senior projects. I told them exactly where to stick it. Frankly I don't WANT to work with any of my classmates, not because I'm not a team player. I would LOVE some help on my project. Rather I know them well enough to know none of them would be very helpful. They were never taught the big picture, and were either non smart or not dedicted enough to pick it up on their own.
I'm rambling.
In the words of Mayor Quimby, the majority of US citizens are nothing but a bunch of pickled mush-heads. Congress is far more likely to consider the opinion of the IEEE than of Joe Schmoe who's too busy watching Joe Millionare to even write his congressperson anyway.
SMB3 rules. It's quite playable on PocketNES too :) First game I tried. Too bad the pocket PC controlls make it pretty uncomfortable to play. Zelda is a bit more tolerable...
Belive it or don't, I did not once observe cybersex. I think it's a myth.
Well you uncheck decoding of all the protocols you DON'T care about (which is pretty much all of them) and then you turn on real time updating and auto scrolling and you create a filter to filterout all of the traffic thats on non aim ports. Thats it in a nutshell. If you need more specific info, RTFM.
YOU IDIOT! READ THE URL! Oh wait _I AM_ that idiot. /me quietly goes away
http://homepage.mac.com/aaronsteele/PhotoAlbum6.ht ml
Are you the same individual who took those pictures, or a worthless ripoff?
Sure lets block email too! Email costs productivity!
I used IM and EMail regularly throughout the day to communicate with my teachers and fellow students. My productivity would take a big dump without either technology. If I lost both, well fuck I might have to use a telephone! Hey everybody lets ban all forms of communication other than written mail! Wake up.
Using AIM during a lecture is a totally different problem and shouldn't require BANNING it from the lab. IMNSHO it's no different from using a CELL PHONE during a lecture and the teacher should deal with the problem accordingly. And if it's a lab where people are typing anyway and the teacher can't tell that the student is IMing then who cares? Students aren't robots and you can't FORCE them to learn no matter how hard you try. If they can IM in lab and still pass then more power to 'em. If they fail then too damn bad, it's their own damn fault.