... lots of smaller devices (PDAs, older laptops) draw under 20 watts. The wall-wart for the Vadem Clio (sitting right here) only puts out 11 watts, and that's enough to apply a mild charge to the batteries while running the device.
Around the time HPNA powerline ethernet came out, I waited eagerly for a laptop maker to announce an AC adapter which would also bridge the machine to the network. No such device ever emerged. I'd love to be able to curl up on the couch with a network-connected device and not worry about the battery. I'd be happy to drop an RJ45 outlet in the corner. Will someone make a device that'll use both signals from the same cable?
Being low-voltage, you don't need to call an electrician to move network cable around. Thank goodness. There are murmurs within the electrical industry of trying to legislate a change to this, be watchful and let your representatives know that low-voltage wiring is not hazardous and should remain unregulated.
One problem with PoE is deciding which device gives and which receives. Right now, the cable modem, the router/firewall, and the 8-port switch all have wall warts. With PoE this could be reduced to one, but which one? For a simple star layout, it's simple. I fear the mess of adapters isn't going to get much cleaner, however.
Cameras and APs are the obvious early beneficiaries of this. Another poster mentioned doorstrikes and cardreaders. How about motion detectors, thermostats, and other environmental sensors?
If the HVAC system is plugged into the ethernet anyway (Or just running back to the same wiring closet, even if it's on separate hardware) then let's toss the duct dampers and other controls onto the same system. Wire the whole building with one type of wire, run it all back to one place, and have flexibility later.
And since we're replacing all the building's auxilliary systems with PoE connections, how about overhead music / paging systems? Individually addressible bidirectional speakers would enable all sorts of talk-and-listen applications, as well as point control of which programs go where.
13 watts is also enough for things like cash register scales, receipt printers, barcode scanners, and the like. A lot of that stuff runs on USB now, which is great. I can see applications where remote scales might take advantage of ethernet's distance capability. Also consider that powering down the USB host takes all the devices with it, but with ethernet-attached devices, the network can still "see" the RFID scanner if the register takes a crap for some reason.
Things like JetDirect print servers would also benefit from wallwartlessness. Yes, decent printers have a slot they sit in and receive power from, but there seems to be no shortage of standalone ethernet print servers.
How about postage scales that print "electronic postage" from a company's central account? They're great, they never need recharging, but they still need a network connection/and/ a wall-wart.
And, dare I say it, credit card terminals? We'll just make the manufacturers promise not to transmit the card stripe data in cleartext. (ATMs use some serious encryption, why can't Lowe's?)
Umm no, the voltage is still 48 when it reaches your house, if the line is open-circuit. When you take a phone off-hook, its resistance combined with the resistance of the line causes the voltage measured across the phone to drop. The resistance placed across the line is everything.
If Americans could refrain from buying shit they don't need, they wouldn't be in such debt.
Answer me honestly: How many of the "gifts" you're buying this season are honestly useful and needed? How much of that unnecessary spending goes onto a credit card?
Americans by and large aren't in need of philanthropy. They're in need of common fiscal sense. There are definitely people, at home and abroad, who need help. Try that instead of buying uncle Jim another tie he'll never wear.
Seriously! Where do you think the DVD-CCA gets their funding? From that LOTR box set you had to have! If you think what happened to Jon was wrong, stop throwing money at the machine that made it happen. Is hollywood's entertainment worth the society it creates?
This is why I've never purchased a DVD with CCS or region coding, and don't plan to ever do so. (They're a great way to store data.) If you can't kick the DVD habit, at least give a few bucks to the EFF each time you indulge.
How about the RIAA? Find some indie bands who don't feed the monster. I've discovered that small concerts (under 500 people are so) are not only more fun than 10,000 idiots in a sports arena, but the small venues generally have better acoustics.
Maybe your niece really wants the latest teen pop CD for x-mas. Fine, but bundle it with some weird cool music. You never know what might happen.
As for Clear Channel, what radio stations do you listen to? They sell your ear-time. Stop buying from their advertisers if you can help it. Discover the kickass late-night program on the local station.
As for the BSA and Microsoft, I'm sure we all understand the basics here, but seriously consider it. Are you supporting the noncommercial projects you value? Have your contributions this year outweighed that XP license your uncle bought?
Oil viscosity is the most important factor here. The machine will be fine in steady-state operation, but if it's turned off for more than a few minutes, a cold start will be very difficult.
Cold-starts outdoors will require use of a heater. Blowing a hair-dryer (on low heat!) into the case for a few minutes prior to startup should warm the drives enough to spin freely, but consider this: During the warming period, the hard drive platters are stationary, and may heat asymmetrically. This means their thermal expansion will be uneven, throwing the spindle off balance and making it nearly impossible for the heads to track a cylinder. Depending on how the drive case is built and how the heat is applied, this may not be a concern. (Heat for 5 minutes, let sit for 1 minute, then power on?)
Of course, bringing it back indoors for startup would be an even worse idea, as moisture would condense on the cold metal. Whenever you bring hardware in from the cold, put it in a tightly closed plastic bag first, and leave it in the bag until it comes completely up to temperature. The relative humidity inside the bag will drop as it warms up, avoiding condensation concerns.
Fans are a bigger concern, as they don't generate much of their own heat like drives do. While it's likely that you won't need much cooling, a CPU fan is almost guaranteed to still be necessary. Look into tip-magnetic-driven (TMD) fans, whose design gives them more torque to overcome stiction at startup. Find one with ball bearings and replace the lube with a light machine oil.
I don't think dust is such a big concern, if the case provides air filtration, as any server case should. Just get the thing off the floor, out of dust-bunny territory. If the power supply fan is thermostatically controlled, airflow should be kept to a minimum and dust entry will be negligible. It still never hurts to pop the case off every few weeks and check. The poster might even have an air compressor in the garage!:)
Optical drives might be tricky, as they don't spin constantly. Luckily their motors are amazingly torquey and should have no problem spinning up even with cold bearings. If you can position the hard drive directly below the optical drive for heat sharing, so much the better.
These suggestions should keep you running to below freezing. If you get much below that, electrical characteristics of components start changing significantly, and you might have all sorts of weird problems. Look at the temperature-versus-value curves of various passives, and you'll see what I mean. Even clock crystals resonate faster because they've physically shrunk.
This hasn't addressed the first pressing question: Why? Except for acoustic noise, I can think of no reason to put a machine outside during winter. Consider that every watt of electricity you use gets turned straight into heat. Putting your electric heater outside simply means the energy gets wasted, rather than heating your house and lightening the load on your furnace. If you're paying for the energy anyway, why not keep it inside where it does some good?
Neon lamps and an "alarm cutoff" switch to silence the audible alarms, while leaving the visual indicators lit, so you can hear yourself think while replacing the failed board.
For extra points, the Lamp Test switch should be located at elbow level, so you can nudge it while walking through with the regional manager.
LEDs are fine, but they can't be blue. Anything with blue LEDs is probably still in diapers.
Seriously, failure isolation is a big thing. The best test would be to get a bunch of failed boards from the factory and install them in various combinations, to see if the system can puzzle it out. The manufacturer isn't likely to assist you with this test, however.
How does it handle spares? Are important parts protected 1+1 or n+1? How long can it operate with a fan unit removed for replacement? Do the air filter trays like to come unlatched and snag cabinet doors as they close?
Also, since my definition of "big iron" means "equipment which justifies employment of a Floor Space Planner", let's talk about cabinets and connections. Some of the better gear I've worked on uses fiber links between pieces, letting you locate them on different floors of a building if that suits you. And since all the links are redundant, you can move and replace link cables without taking a hit.
That same equipment, by the way, had a slight bug in the interface. If one sent too many commands over an administrative link in a short period of time, it would reboot. Oops. There's supposed to be a graceful rejection process when the buffer's full, and they must've forgotten to QA that part. (As far as I know, the bug is still in current versions of the software, because nobody runs up against it but me.)
Reiterating that this is not my field of specialty, here's my logic:
In the few hours since my last post, I ended up dicking with some dead 5000-series hardware. On that supervisor card are some very nice FPGA's, and I'm not sure what Cisco does with them, but I'm damn sure IOS doesn't let you load custom designs into them.
I'm assuming that some interface cards were also easier to produce with FPGA's on board, and program them later. This means that again, IOS is blowing features into the hardware at init time.
The way I see it, running your own OS would let you define the modules that get loaded into the FPGA's. If the stock functionality was sufficient, you could rip these from an IOS image (licensed to you, of course) just like is sometimes done with drivers. (think winmodems, wireless cards) Or, if someone on the project was skilled in the art of logic design and had the requisite specs for the board, the code could be tweaked or rewritten to accomplish things not deemed important by Cisco.
At this point, the CPU is still doing its old function, babysitting the modules. It's just not reading the same old storybooks to them.;) This might all be easier simply by hacking an IOS image, but what do I know? I'm just postulating.
Of course, all this is predicated on the (probably mistaken) belief that there's a fair amount of programmable packet pushing power on each board. Or, that someone would say "wow, this chassis and backplane are really well designed, let's make plug-compatible boards that run kickass firmware". Likely? Probably not, because the bus isn't an open standard. But possible? Sure, if they saw income potential and opened the spec. PCI worked for Intel.
But the version in my head was slightly different.
The same idea, diversely located sensors with precise clocks, listen for a sharp sound and communicate by radio to determine arrival times and triangulate the source.
My version used GPS for timing and positioning, and allowed the sensors to be mobile. When a shot was detected, the relative location would be shown on the helmet-mounted display(s) of security officers who could then neutralize the shooter.
Friendly guns could chirp RF "don't-detect-me" messages, allowing the alert to only trigger for guns not enrolled in the system.
As I was saying to myself, "If they'd had this in Dallas in 1963, the secret service could've taken Oswald out while he reloaded after his first shot."
Of course, humans are already decent at figuring the direction a sound came from. Perhaps this would be better suited to a surveillance role, where no friendly forces are avilable.
How long until they come up with a version that automatically shoots back? (With ink, hopefully.)
I'm not in the business, so I can't say personally whether I'd trust the platform. I'd like to learn more about the CPCI chassis and power options, and how they handle redundancy. Still, it looks like decent gear.
I agree that keeping the traffic at the ASIC level is important. There was talk some time ago of running Linux on Cisco hardware, which would (imho) combine the serious hardware platform with a highly tinkerable software layer. It still puts Cisco in the spot of hardware designer, though.
With FPGA prices doing a Moore's plummet, I think we'll see high-speed interfaces mated to user-definable hardware, to keep the traffic on a real switch matrix rather than a system bus. Thoughts?
Agreed! Ripping is labor-intensive, and metadata is even more so. Getting the FLAC tags right the first time will make everything easier down the road.
Some time ago, I proposed a way to handle metadata externally, by simply giving each file a name like [cddb-disc-id][tracknumber].extension and then tagging each target format from the local cddb cache.
How do you handle it if a metadata error is found later? Is there an easy way to regenerate the tags for all the formats when someone edits the master?
The hybrid Humvee project I heard about was not so much to reduce fuel consumption, though that was a side benefit. The main goal was to generate lots of electricity without having to tow a generator trailer.
It was also done with a different engine, and didn't include so many differences from the regular chassis. The one described in this article is by far a more advanced concept, and it looks like it's almost production ready.
It's too bad the civilian Hummer is just a Suburban now. I'd like to see one of these bad boys on the dealer's lot! (I'd imagine the local Ham radio survivalist types could build a whole comm station into one.)
You should pick up a Catweasel. It's a universal floppy controller for old media which can read Commodore, Amiga, Mac 800k, and other formats directly with modern floppy drives.
The new Catweasel apparently also includes joystick/paddle ports and HardSID functionality. Yesss!:)
As far as beating bitrot by multiplying the data: You can also use software FEC encoding to add check blocks to the data, growing it by less than an integer multiple. Repairing the errored bits is automatic, whereas storing multiple copies of the file still gives you no easy way to tell which copy is correct.
Periodically rewriting the data and correcting for small errors that occur will prevent the accumulation of errors too large to be corrected. In RAM this is known as memory scrubbing and is used on some high-end servers to counteract cosmic rays and bit-rot.
It's also a good way to detect impending media failure. Your drives should have SMART enabled, so you know when they're covering up a growing problem, and can get your data out of harm's way. This only protects against gradual deterioration however, and is no substitute for a backup in case of catastrophic drive failure.
These questions are dealt with all the time by serious archivists. Storing metadata to provide context is important too. Historians of the future will probably have a thousand copies of "Driller.d64" but will they know what the original floppy label looked like?
GUI: anything row/column oriented rather than line-oriented. Midnight commander falls into this.
Bitmapped display: A subtype of GUI where individual pixels are addressible rather than whole character blocks.
CLI: Anything line-oriented, where the actual geometry of the display isn't a concern. CLI output is easy to log and replay, whereas GUI output is not.
Full-screen editors are technically GUI. (Compare EDLIN.)
I've been doing this for a while with my cellphone and laptop. I was half of a traveling crew some time back, and the job took us to all sorts of towns that were just big enough to have a Wal-mart but not big enough to have wifi at the motel, nor a local dialin to any big ISPs.
I have the all-you-can-eat data plan on my Nextel, so sharing that connection over wifi meant we could both get online without having to share a laptop or toss the phone back and forth. Nextel's great firewall is horrid (NAT up the wazoo, no UDP, mangles JPEGs on the way in), and the latency makes SSH excruciating, but it's better than nothing.
The amusing bit was watching people associate. I set the SSID to something like "MySlowPhoneBeNice" and figured anyone who finds it deserves it. It's funny being the only WISP in hickville and finding the only wardriver.
As far as I can remember, Nextel's AUP only prohibits reselling service, so I was even in the clear for sharing it with a coworker. (The resulting throughput is its own penalty, I guess.)
I wish like anything that Ricochet was still up, I'd love to have a serious upstream for these antics. I guess WiMax will come someday, but without a unified back-end it'll still be a comedy of overlapping signals and non-roaming. Ugh.
Most hardware makers sell their products internationally, and have some method of enabling only the legal channels for the area where the device is sold. In some cases, this is a jumper or rom setting on the board, which the firmware reads and configures the radio appropriately.
In other cases though, simply loading a different firmware version onto the device will change the available channels. Manufacturers may refer to this as ETSI firmware or European firmware.
Using channels above 11 in the US is illegal, because those frequencies are not allocated for unlicensed use, and if you interfere with the authorized user of those frequencies, you're in deep, deep shit. I believe the fine for knowingly transmitting outside your allocation is $5000/day.
I don't know who has the allocation just above the 2.4GHz part-15 band, but you might want to find out and weigh your options carefully before deciding to interfere with them. Honestly a 100mw AP isn't likely to piss anyone off, but then who would've thought a handful of cordless phones would be so problematic either?
First: I'd guess that some of the interference is coming from other 802.11b/g gear, not necessarily cordless phones. It all defaults to channel 6 from the factory, so try 1 or 11. Or load the ETSI firmware and use 14, and just don't tell the FCC.
Second: Try some FHSS gear, it seems tougher in noisy environments than DSSS. The old Proxim RangeLan equipment is cheap.
Third: Get out of 2.4GHz entirely. Go go 5GHz with 802.11a, or 900MHz with older Aironet gear.
Fourth: It's a dorm room, and worse than that, it's an MSU dorm room. What is it, 4x8 feet? Stick with wired. Get a real patch cord that uses stranded conductors, as the solid stuff is too stiff and will stress the connectors.
Agreed! But how much AC power do you need, and how much surgery are you willing to do? In this application, since the house's furnace fan is no longer a concern, it seems to me that running the fridge and one PC is probably plenty. Use a laptop and don't open the freezer often.
Adding a higher output ("ambulance") alternator is an easy step if you just need another KW or so, and you could tack on an autothrottle to keep the engine speed up in the alternator's useful range. (Some don't produce much output at idle.)
If you're really interested in getting lots of power from the engine, look into hybrids. Putting a big motor-generator right on the crankshaft is the best way to avoid the efficiency losses of a belt-driven alternator. It's also way more involved than most folks want to get.
I don't know anything about 4WD/AWD vehicles, but it seems to me that you could grab the transaxle and transfer case from one of them, and stick it in you FWD-only car, and use the rear driveshaft as a PTO to power a large generator mounted below. Knocking the transmission into overdrive would be a good way to produce the 3600rpm that most generators want while keeping your engine revs in a sane, quiet range.
If you're talking about a stationary conversion, "you should be able to build a big generator", then the sky's the limit. I was talking about minor mods to a daily driver that would make it into an auxilliary power source in an emergency, without impairing its regular function as a grocery-getter. If you're going to build a stand for a smallblock and toss a big generator on the end, why not get a real gen-set with a matched engine and be done with it?
Your car is a self-contained habitation module. Given a supply of dead dinosaurs, it'll produce plenty of heat and electricity. Here's how to get them out of the car and into your house. I haven't actually set this up yet but I've been considering it for a long time. Give a think to this plan:
The electricity is pretty simple. Your stock alternator produces 14 volts DC at somewhere between 50 and 100 amps. After derating for alternator heating, and inverter losses, figure about 500 watts of useful continuous power, with momentary surge capacity of at least 2kW. Inverters that produce more than 100 watts or so should be wired straight in.
For the heat, you'll need a way to circulate the engine's coolant into the house and back. Pick up a "radiator flush" kit at the auto store. It's a set of tee fittings that install inline with the radiator hoses, and have threads for garden hoses to screw on. Pick up a radiator from the junkyard, and a bunch of hose that can handle the temperature and pressure involved. Plumb your new radiator in parallel with the existing one.
After filling the whole mess with coolant, doublecheck all your hoseclamps and start 'er up. As the engine heats up, the thermostat will open and both radiators should get warm. If you need to divert more flow to the external one, try pinching or adding a valve to one of the hoses. Put a small fan on your in-house radiator and voila!
Now the only problem is that Murphy's law guarantees a power failure will happen when your tank is almost empty. Diesel keeps well, but gasoline turns to varnish after a few months in storage, so if you're going to keep a few gallons in a spare can, change it out regularly.
(Please note: Make damn sure all your hoses and fittings can handle the temperatures and pressures involved. Check the coolant level after the bubbles work out. Keep an eye on engine temp if you choose to restrict the hose, and pay special attention if the engine's radiator fan comes on, which probably indicates inadequate coolant flow. Provide adequate airflow over the inverter's heatsink. Don't touch wiring with your hands covered in coolant. I'm not responsible if you blow yourself up.)
The PDL has a ton of RAID-related resources, but their site hasn't been updated in a few years. I'd love to see the math redone with modern hardware specs and modern RAM prices.
There's nothing wrong with the freenet code. It implements the routing algorithm quite nicely. It's the algorithm that's wrong, which is a much harder problem.
It's reasonably safe to assume that Freenet is under constant attack. Any information minister worth his salt should be spending a little budget to hobble Freenet's development, because it threatens to undermine all sorts of nasty regimes.
Tweaking a routing implementation when you can't even get a clean test network isn't easy. I don't think a rewrite would do much, except maybe insert more hooks for measuring and qualifying performance bottlenecks and routing hiccups. The network could use a new set of ideas, but I don't think throwing code at the problem will help until the concepts are straight.
There are a few ways to go about this. First, it should be trivial to get Windows to act as a dialup server. (Cpanel, Add/Remove, windows components..) Typing RING on the other end of the serial line should do the trick.
If the stock dialup server doesn't do the trick, try Cygwin and run a real getty process. Installing bash will also get you a real shell on the main box.
Put a pair of real modems between the ends and exceed the 50' distance limit of RS232. Better yet, snag a pair of Ricochet modems from eBay and go 2,000' on the stock antennae. That's sure to impress the hell out of the neighborhood WLAN kids with their puny milliwatt gear.
Assuming the serial port is too slow for anything practical, you should look into the Xircom PE3 series of "pocket ethernet" adapters. They work on any type of parallel port, though bidirectional ports offer higher throughput. I have both the 10base-2 and 10base-T version, and I'd be happy to see either one go to a good home, if you're serious about resurrecting that machine.
If networking is out, a functional machine of that vintage is still useful as a standalone box. Someone else mentioned mapping software, but I've found that DeLorme Street Atlas will drag a 300MHz machine to a crawl. Maybe the NatGeo stuff is faster? Most non-mapping GPS apps are pretty lightweight, and even a tiny drive is plenty for most data acquisition and logging tasks. Does the battery hold a charge?
If it has sound capability, something like MidiNotate might be worth a look. Your neighborhood band student can open the machine sideways like a book. It'll listen to them play the music, and turn the "pages" for them as they get through the piece. I was unable to find any hardware requirements, so CPU might be a limiting factor there, but considering that Voice Blaster ran on a 486, you should be fine.
If all else fails, get one of those big-font programs for DOS and let the kids use it as a messageboard for communicating with other vehicles on roadtrips.
I hope this gives you some ideas not mentioned in TFA, which was admittedly a bit narrow in focus. Also please keep in mind that fluorescent backlight tubes contain mercury and there might be a Ni-Cd battery on the motherboard, so laptops should be recycled whenever possible.
Actually I think times are changing. Being a geek was a bad, bad thing when I was a kid. Computers were rare and nobody even knew what they were good for, much less appreciated the people who made them work.
I remember when I noticed it starting to change. There was an ad on the radio, and it used a modem negotiation tone as part of the suggestion that the product being hawked was high-tech. I'd never heard that noise outside of my own explorations, and I was well aware that the general public was ignorant of it.
Within a year, the word "e-mail" started appearing in newspapers, and all hell broke loose. Computers in movies were more than word processors. Pretty soon there were even movies about hackers, not homemade stuff but real hollywood flicks. The romanticism reserved for spies in decades past has shifted to technologists.
I think that kids growing up now, who we'd identify as fledgling geeks, won't experience the same ostracization we did. Some of the attraction of technology is probably due to Asperger's syndrome in a lot of us, so the social ineptitude is here to stay. Still, these kids will find more acceptance of their talents, and understanding of their interests, than we did.
Jump-starting a youngster's interest in technology, or furthering their comfort with exploring the inner workings of a machine, is nothing to be ashamed of.
Of course, the Freenet routing protocol is a bit iffy right now, but when it works, it's pretty cool.
The idea of streaming across Freenet's infrastructure has been done before. Who needs a grassroots TV network when you can have a grassroots, anonymous, encrypted TV network?
The other side-effect of Freenet's architecture is that popular data persists. You might be able to retrieve a show from days or weeks ago, if enough nodes watched it in the first place.
For the moment, performance limits it to audio streams, but video might be workable in the near future. The dev team can always use more bright minds. Are you free?
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... lots of smaller devices (PDAs, older laptops) draw under 20 watts. The wall-wart for the Vadem Clio (sitting right here) only puts out 11 watts, and that's enough to apply a mild charge to the batteries while running the device.
/and/ a wall-wart.
Around the time HPNA powerline ethernet came out, I waited eagerly for a laptop maker to announce an AC adapter which would also bridge the machine to the network. No such device ever emerged. I'd love to be able to curl up on the couch with a network-connected device and not worry about the battery. I'd be happy to drop an RJ45 outlet in the corner. Will someone make a device that'll use both signals from the same cable?
Being low-voltage, you don't need to call an electrician to move network cable around. Thank goodness. There are murmurs within the electrical industry of trying to legislate a change to this, be watchful and let your representatives know that low-voltage wiring is not hazardous and should remain unregulated.
One problem with PoE is deciding which device gives and which receives. Right now, the cable modem, the router/firewall, and the 8-port switch all have wall warts. With PoE this could be reduced to one, but which one? For a simple star layout, it's simple. I fear the mess of adapters isn't going to get much cleaner, however.
Cameras and APs are the obvious early beneficiaries of this. Another poster mentioned doorstrikes and cardreaders. How about motion detectors, thermostats, and other environmental sensors?
If the HVAC system is plugged into the ethernet anyway (Or just running back to the same wiring closet, even if it's on separate hardware) then let's toss the duct dampers and other controls onto the same system. Wire the whole building with one type of wire, run it all back to one place, and have flexibility later.
And since we're replacing all the building's auxilliary systems with PoE connections, how about overhead music / paging systems? Individually addressible bidirectional speakers would enable all sorts of talk-and-listen applications, as well as point control of which programs go where.
13 watts is also enough for things like cash register scales, receipt printers, barcode scanners, and the like. A lot of that stuff runs on USB now, which is great. I can see applications where remote scales might take advantage of ethernet's distance capability. Also consider that powering down the USB host takes all the devices with it, but with ethernet-attached devices, the network can still "see" the RFID scanner if the register takes a crap for some reason.
Things like JetDirect print servers would also benefit from wallwartlessness. Yes, decent printers have a slot they sit in and receive power from, but there seems to be no shortage of standalone ethernet print servers.
How about postage scales that print "electronic postage" from a company's central account? They're great, they never need recharging, but they still need a network connection
And, dare I say it, credit card terminals? We'll just make the manufacturers promise not to transmit the card stripe data in cleartext. (ATMs use some serious encryption, why can't Lowe's?)
Umm no, the voltage is still 48 when it reaches your house, if the line is open-circuit. When you take a phone off-hook, its resistance combined with the resistance of the line causes the voltage measured across the phone to drop. The resistance placed across the line is everything.
If Americans could refrain from buying shit they don't need, they wouldn't be in such debt.
Answer me honestly: How many of the "gifts" you're buying this season are honestly useful and needed? How much of that unnecessary spending goes onto a credit card?
Americans by and large aren't in need of philanthropy. They're in need of common fiscal sense. There are definitely people, at home and abroad, who need help. Try that instead of buying uncle Jim another tie he'll never wear.
Seriously! Where do you think the DVD-CCA gets their funding? From that LOTR box set you had to have! If you think what happened to Jon was wrong, stop throwing money at the machine that made it happen. Is hollywood's entertainment worth the society it creates?
This is why I've never purchased a DVD with CCS or region coding, and don't plan to ever do so. (They're a great way to store data.) If you can't kick the DVD habit, at least give a few bucks to the EFF each time you indulge.
How about the RIAA? Find some indie bands who don't feed the monster. I've discovered that small concerts (under 500 people are so) are not only more fun than 10,000 idiots in a sports arena, but the small venues generally have better acoustics.
Maybe your niece really wants the latest teen pop CD for x-mas. Fine, but bundle it with some weird cool music. You never know what might happen.
As for Clear Channel, what radio stations do you listen to? They sell your ear-time. Stop buying from their advertisers if you can help it. Discover the kickass late-night program on the local station.
As for the BSA and Microsoft, I'm sure we all understand the basics here, but seriously consider it. Are you supporting the noncommercial projects you value? Have your contributions this year outweighed that XP license your uncle bought?
Oil viscosity is the most important factor here. The machine will be fine in steady-state operation, but if it's turned off for more than a few minutes, a cold start will be very difficult.
:)
Cold-starts outdoors will require use of a heater. Blowing a hair-dryer (on low heat!) into the case for a few minutes prior to startup should warm the drives enough to spin freely, but consider this: During the warming period, the hard drive platters are stationary, and may heat asymmetrically. This means their thermal expansion will be uneven, throwing the spindle off balance and making it nearly impossible for the heads to track a cylinder. Depending on how the drive case is built and how the heat is applied, this may not be a concern. (Heat for 5 minutes, let sit for 1 minute, then power on?)
Of course, bringing it back indoors for startup would be an even worse idea, as moisture would condense on the cold metal. Whenever you bring hardware in from the cold, put it in a tightly closed plastic bag first, and leave it in the bag until it comes completely up to temperature. The relative humidity inside the bag will drop as it warms up, avoiding condensation concerns.
Fans are a bigger concern, as they don't generate much of their own heat like drives do. While it's likely that you won't need much cooling, a CPU fan is almost guaranteed to still be necessary. Look into tip-magnetic-driven (TMD) fans, whose design gives them more torque to overcome stiction at startup. Find one with ball bearings and replace the lube with a light machine oil.
I don't think dust is such a big concern, if the case provides air filtration, as any server case should. Just get the thing off the floor, out of dust-bunny territory. If the power supply fan is thermostatically controlled, airflow should be kept to a minimum and dust entry will be negligible. It still never hurts to pop the case off every few weeks and check. The poster might even have an air compressor in the garage!
Optical drives might be tricky, as they don't spin constantly. Luckily their motors are amazingly torquey and should have no problem spinning up even with cold bearings. If you can position the hard drive directly below the optical drive for heat sharing, so much the better.
These suggestions should keep you running to below freezing. If you get much below that, electrical characteristics of components start changing significantly, and you might have all sorts of weird problems. Look at the temperature-versus-value curves of various passives, and you'll see what I mean. Even clock crystals resonate faster because they've physically shrunk.
This hasn't addressed the first pressing question: Why? Except for acoustic noise, I can think of no reason to put a machine outside during winter. Consider that every watt of electricity you use gets turned straight into heat. Putting your electric heater outside simply means the energy gets wasted, rather than heating your house and lightening the load on your furnace. If you're paying for the energy anyway, why not keep it inside where it does some good?
Neon lamps and an "alarm cutoff" switch to silence the audible alarms, while leaving the visual indicators lit, so you can hear yourself think while replacing the failed board.
For extra points, the Lamp Test switch should be located at elbow level, so you can nudge it while walking through with the regional manager.
LEDs are fine, but they can't be blue. Anything with blue LEDs is probably still in diapers.
Seriously, failure isolation is a big thing. The best test would be to get a bunch of failed boards from the factory and install them in various combinations, to see if the system can puzzle it out. The manufacturer isn't likely to assist you with this test, however.
How does it handle spares? Are important parts protected 1+1 or n+1? How long can it operate with a fan unit removed for replacement? Do the air filter trays like to come unlatched and snag cabinet doors as they close?
Also, since my definition of "big iron" means "equipment which justifies employment of a Floor Space Planner", let's talk about cabinets and connections. Some of the better gear I've worked on uses fiber links between pieces, letting you locate them on different floors of a building if that suits you. And since all the links are redundant, you can move and replace link cables without taking a hit.
That same equipment, by the way, had a slight bug in the interface. If one sent too many commands over an administrative link in a short period of time, it would reboot. Oops. There's supposed to be a graceful rejection process when the buffer's full, and they must've forgotten to QA that part. (As far as I know, the bug is still in current versions of the software, because nobody runs up against it but me.)
Reiterating that this is not my field of specialty, here's my logic:
;) This might all be easier simply by hacking an IOS image, but what do I know? I'm just postulating.
In the few hours since my last post, I ended up dicking with some dead 5000-series hardware. On that supervisor card are some very nice FPGA's, and I'm not sure what Cisco does with them, but I'm damn sure IOS doesn't let you load custom designs into them.
I'm assuming that some interface cards were also easier to produce with FPGA's on board, and program them later. This means that again, IOS is blowing features into the hardware at init time.
The way I see it, running your own OS would let you define the modules that get loaded into the FPGA's. If the stock functionality was sufficient, you could rip these from an IOS image (licensed to you, of course) just like is sometimes done with drivers. (think winmodems, wireless cards) Or, if someone on the project was skilled in the art of logic design and had the requisite specs for the board, the code could be tweaked or rewritten to accomplish things not deemed important by Cisco.
At this point, the CPU is still doing its old function, babysitting the modules. It's just not reading the same old storybooks to them.
Of course, all this is predicated on the (probably mistaken) belief that there's a fair amount of programmable packet pushing power on each board. Or, that someone would say "wow, this chassis and backplane are really well designed, let's make plug-compatible boards that run kickass firmware". Likely? Probably not, because the bus isn't an open standard. But possible? Sure, if they saw income potential and opened the spec. PCI worked for Intel.
But the version in my head was slightly different.
The same idea, diversely located sensors with precise clocks, listen for a sharp sound and communicate by radio to determine arrival times and triangulate the source.
My version used GPS for timing and positioning, and allowed the sensors to be mobile. When a shot was detected, the relative location would be shown on the helmet-mounted display(s) of security officers who could then neutralize the shooter.
Friendly guns could chirp RF "don't-detect-me" messages, allowing the alert to only trigger for guns not enrolled in the system.
As I was saying to myself, "If they'd had this in Dallas in 1963, the secret service could've taken Oswald out while he reloaded after his first shot."
Of course, humans are already decent at figuring the direction a sound came from. Perhaps this would be better suited to a surveillance role, where no friendly forces are avilable.
How long until they come up with a version that automatically shoots back? (With ink, hopefully.)
I've been intrigued by some of the other interface hardware for PCI and CPCI buses I've been seeing.
I'm not in the business, so I can't say personally whether I'd trust the platform. I'd like to learn more about the CPCI chassis and power options, and how they handle redundancy. Still, it looks like decent gear.
I agree that keeping the traffic at the ASIC level is important. There was talk some time ago of running Linux on Cisco hardware, which would (imho) combine the serious hardware platform with a highly tinkerable software layer. It still puts Cisco in the spot of hardware designer, though.
With FPGA prices doing a Moore's plummet, I think we'll see high-speed interfaces mated to user-definable hardware, to keep the traffic on a real switch matrix rather than a system bus. Thoughts?
Agreed! Ripping is labor-intensive, and metadata is even more so. Getting the FLAC tags right the first time will make everything easier down the road.
Some time ago, I proposed a way to handle metadata externally, by simply giving each file a name like [cddb-disc-id][tracknumber].extension and then tagging each target format from the local cddb cache.
How do you handle it if a metadata error is found later? Is there an easy way to regenerate the tags for all the formats when someone edits the master?
The hybrid Humvee project I heard about was not so much to reduce fuel consumption, though that was a side benefit. The main goal was to generate lots of electricity without having to tow a generator trailer.
It was also done with a different engine, and didn't include so many differences from the regular chassis. The one described in this article is by far a more advanced concept, and it looks like it's almost production ready.
It's too bad the civilian Hummer is just a Suburban now. I'd like to see one of these bad boys on the dealer's lot! (I'd imagine the local Ham radio survivalist types could build a whole comm station into one.)
Oh yes, I should point out that Mike's Electric Stuff is an awesome place to check out old valves and other interesting, well, stuff.
The page on Nixie tubes is still my visual favorite. That glow has never been equalled.
You should pick up a Catweasel. It's a universal floppy controller for old media which can read Commodore, Amiga, Mac 800k, and other formats directly with modern floppy drives.
:)
The new Catweasel apparently also includes joystick/paddle ports and HardSID functionality. Yesss!
As far as beating bitrot by multiplying the data: You can also use software FEC encoding to add check blocks to the data, growing it by less than an integer multiple. Repairing the errored bits is automatic, whereas storing multiple copies of the file still gives you no easy way to tell which copy is correct.
Periodically rewriting the data and correcting for small errors that occur will prevent the accumulation of errors too large to be corrected. In RAM this is known as memory scrubbing and is used on some high-end servers to counteract cosmic rays and bit-rot.
It's also a good way to detect impending media failure. Your drives should have SMART enabled, so you know when they're covering up a growing problem, and can get your data out of harm's way. This only protects against gradual deterioration however, and is no substitute for a backup in case of catastrophic drive failure.
These questions are dealt with all the time by serious archivists. Storing metadata to provide context is important too. Historians of the future will probably have a thousand copies of "Driller.d64" but will they know what the original floppy label looked like?
The way I understand it:
GUI: anything row/column oriented rather than line-oriented. Midnight commander falls into this.
Bitmapped display: A subtype of GUI where individual pixels are addressible rather than whole character blocks.
CLI: Anything line-oriented, where the actual geometry of the display isn't a concern. CLI output is easy to log and replay, whereas GUI output is not.
Full-screen editors are technically GUI. (Compare EDLIN.)
This would be great as an add-on dataset for NASA's 3d Earth explorer.
:)
I'll be happier when I can actually visit.
I've been doing this for a while with my cellphone and laptop. I was half of a traveling crew some time back, and the job took us to all sorts of towns that were just big enough to have a Wal-mart but not big enough to have wifi at the motel, nor a local dialin to any big ISPs.
I have the all-you-can-eat data plan on my Nextel, so sharing that connection over wifi meant we could both get online without having to share a laptop or toss the phone back and forth. Nextel's great firewall is horrid (NAT up the wazoo, no UDP, mangles JPEGs on the way in), and the latency makes SSH excruciating, but it's better than nothing.
The amusing bit was watching people associate. I set the SSID to something like "MySlowPhoneBeNice" and figured anyone who finds it deserves it. It's funny being the only WISP in hickville and finding the only wardriver.
As far as I can remember, Nextel's AUP only prohibits reselling service, so I was even in the clear for sharing it with a coworker. (The resulting throughput is its own penalty, I guess.)
I wish like anything that Ricochet was still up, I'd love to have a serious upstream for these antics. I guess WiMax will come someday, but without a unified back-end it'll still be a comedy of overlapping signals and non-roaming. Ugh.
In the 802.11b spec, 14 channels are defined, the first 11 of which fall within the FCC for unlicensed use in the US. (Industry Canada uses essentially the same frequency allocation as the FCC.) If you're in ETSI jurisdiction, channels 1-13 are allowed, and in Japan all 14 are available. I misspoke earlier by saying ETSI allowed 14.
Most hardware makers sell their products internationally, and have some method of enabling only the legal channels for the area where the device is sold. In some cases, this is a jumper or rom setting on the board, which the firmware reads and configures the radio appropriately.
In other cases though, simply loading a different firmware version onto the device will change the available channels. Manufacturers may refer to this as ETSI firmware or European firmware.
Using channels above 11 in the US is illegal, because those frequencies are not allocated for unlicensed use, and if you interfere with the authorized user of those frequencies, you're in deep, deep shit. I believe the fine for knowingly transmitting outside your allocation is $5000/day.
I don't know who has the allocation just above the 2.4GHz part-15 band, but you might want to find out and weigh your options carefully before deciding to interfere with them. Honestly a 100mw AP isn't likely to piss anyone off, but then who would've thought a handful of cordless phones would be so problematic either?
First: I'd guess that some of the interference is coming from other 802.11b/g gear, not necessarily cordless phones. It all defaults to channel 6 from the factory, so try 1 or 11. Or load the ETSI firmware and use 14, and just don't tell the FCC.
Second: Try some FHSS gear, it seems tougher in noisy environments than DSSS. The old Proxim RangeLan equipment is cheap.
Third: Get out of 2.4GHz entirely. Go go 5GHz with 802.11a, or 900MHz with older Aironet gear.
Fourth: It's a dorm room, and worse than that, it's an MSU dorm room. What is it, 4x8 feet? Stick with wired. Get a real patch cord that uses stranded conductors, as the solid stuff is too stiff and will stress the connectors.
Agreed! But how much AC power do you need, and how much surgery are you willing to do? In this application, since the house's furnace fan is no longer a concern, it seems to me that running the fridge and one PC is probably plenty. Use a laptop and don't open the freezer often.
Adding a higher output ("ambulance") alternator is an easy step if you just need another KW or so, and you could tack on an autothrottle to keep the engine speed up in the alternator's useful range. (Some don't produce much output at idle.)
If you're really interested in getting lots of power from the engine, look into hybrids. Putting a big motor-generator right on the crankshaft is the best way to avoid the efficiency losses of a belt-driven alternator. It's also way more involved than most folks want to get.
I don't know anything about 4WD/AWD vehicles, but it seems to me that you could grab the transaxle and transfer case from one of them, and stick it in you FWD-only car, and use the rear driveshaft as a PTO to power a large generator mounted below. Knocking the transmission into overdrive would be a good way to produce the 3600rpm that most generators want while keeping your engine revs in a sane, quiet range.
If you're talking about a stationary conversion, "you should be able to build a big generator", then the sky's the limit. I was talking about minor mods to a daily driver that would make it into an auxilliary power source in an emergency, without impairing its regular function as a grocery-getter. If you're going to build a stand for a smallblock and toss a big generator on the end, why not get a real gen-set with a matched engine and be done with it?
Your car is a self-contained habitation module. Given a supply of dead dinosaurs, it'll produce plenty of heat and electricity. Here's how to get them out of the car and into your house. I haven't actually set this up yet but I've been considering it for a long time. Give a think to this plan:
The electricity is pretty simple. Your stock alternator produces 14 volts DC at somewhere between 50 and 100 amps. After derating for alternator heating, and inverter losses, figure about 500 watts of useful continuous power, with momentary surge capacity of at least 2kW. Inverters that produce more than 100 watts or so should be wired straight in.
For the heat, you'll need a way to circulate the engine's coolant into the house and back. Pick up a "radiator flush" kit at the auto store. It's a set of tee fittings that install inline with the radiator hoses, and have threads for garden hoses to screw on. Pick up a radiator from the junkyard, and a bunch of hose that can handle the temperature and pressure involved. Plumb your new radiator in parallel with the existing one.
After filling the whole mess with coolant, doublecheck all your hoseclamps and start 'er up. As the engine heats up, the thermostat will open and both radiators should get warm. If you need to divert more flow to the external one, try pinching or adding a valve to one of the hoses. Put a small fan on your in-house radiator and voila!
Now the only problem is that Murphy's law guarantees a power failure will happen when your tank is almost empty. Diesel keeps well, but gasoline turns to varnish after a few months in storage, so if you're going to keep a few gallons in a spare can, change it out regularly.
(Please note: Make damn sure all your hoses and fittings can handle the temperatures and pressures involved. Check the coolant level after the bubbles work out. Keep an eye on engine temp if you choose to restrict the hose, and pay special attention if the engine's radiator fan comes on, which probably indicates inadequate coolant flow. Provide adequate airflow over the inverter's heatsink. Don't touch wiring with your hands covered in coolant. I'm not responsible if you blow yourself up.)
The parallel data lab at Carnegie Mellon has a fascinating paper on Power and reliability benefits from arrays of 1" disks in laptops instead of a single 2.5" disk.
The PDL has a ton of RAID-related resources, but their site hasn't been updated in a few years. I'd love to see the math redone with modern hardware specs and modern RAM prices.
There's nothing wrong with the freenet code. It implements the routing algorithm quite nicely. It's the algorithm that's wrong, which is a much harder problem.
It's reasonably safe to assume that Freenet is under constant attack. Any information minister worth his salt should be spending a little budget to hobble Freenet's development, because it threatens to undermine all sorts of nasty regimes.
Tweaking a routing implementation when you can't even get a clean test network isn't easy. I don't think a rewrite would do much, except maybe insert more hooks for measuring and qualifying performance bottlenecks and routing hiccups. The network could use a new set of ideas, but I don't think throwing code at the problem will help until the concepts are straight.
There are a few ways to go about this. First, it should be trivial to get Windows to act as a dialup server. (Cpanel, Add/Remove, windows components..) Typing RING on the other end of the serial line should do the trick.
If the stock dialup server doesn't do the trick, try Cygwin and run a real getty process. Installing bash will also get you a real shell on the main box.
Put a pair of real modems between the ends and exceed the 50' distance limit of RS232. Better yet, snag a pair of Ricochet modems from eBay and go 2,000' on the stock antennae. That's sure to impress the hell out of the neighborhood WLAN kids with their puny milliwatt gear.
Assuming the serial port is too slow for anything practical, you should look into the Xircom PE3 series of "pocket ethernet" adapters. They work on any type of parallel port, though bidirectional ports offer higher throughput. I have both the 10base-2 and 10base-T version, and I'd be happy to see either one go to a good home, if you're serious about resurrecting that machine.
If networking is out, a functional machine of that vintage is still useful as a standalone box. Someone else mentioned mapping software, but I've found that DeLorme Street Atlas will drag a 300MHz machine to a crawl. Maybe the NatGeo stuff is faster? Most non-mapping GPS apps are pretty lightweight, and even a tiny drive is plenty for most data acquisition and logging tasks. Does the battery hold a charge?
If it has sound capability, something like MidiNotate might be worth a look. Your neighborhood band student can open the machine sideways like a book. It'll listen to them play the music, and turn the "pages" for them as they get through the piece. I was unable to find any hardware requirements, so CPU might be a limiting factor there, but considering that Voice Blaster ran on a 486, you should be fine.
If all else fails, get one of those big-font programs for DOS and let the kids use it as a messageboard for communicating with other vehicles on roadtrips.
I hope this gives you some ideas not mentioned in TFA, which was admittedly a bit narrow in focus. Also please keep in mind that fluorescent backlight tubes contain mercury and there might be a Ni-Cd battery on the motherboard, so laptops should be recycled whenever possible.
Actually I think times are changing. Being a geek was a bad, bad thing when I was a kid. Computers were rare and nobody even knew what they were good for, much less appreciated the people who made them work.
I remember when I noticed it starting to change. There was an ad on the radio, and it used a modem negotiation tone as part of the suggestion that the product being hawked was high-tech. I'd never heard that noise outside of my own explorations, and I was well aware that the general public was ignorant of it.
Within a year, the word "e-mail" started appearing in newspapers, and all hell broke loose. Computers in movies were more than word processors. Pretty soon there were even movies about hackers, not homemade stuff but real hollywood flicks. The romanticism reserved for spies in decades past has shifted to technologists.
I think that kids growing up now, who we'd identify as fledgling geeks, won't experience the same ostracization we did. Some of the attraction of technology is probably due to Asperger's syndrome in a lot of us, so the social ineptitude is here to stay. Still, these kids will find more acceptance of their talents, and understanding of their interests, than we did.
Jump-starting a youngster's interest in technology, or furthering their comfort with exploring the inner workings of a machine, is nothing to be ashamed of.
(Score: 4, Off-Topic)
Of course, the Freenet routing protocol is a bit iffy right now, but when it works, it's pretty cool.
The idea of streaming across Freenet's infrastructure has been done before. Who needs a grassroots TV network when you can have a grassroots, anonymous, encrypted TV network?
The other side-effect of Freenet's architecture is that popular data persists. You might be able to retrieve a show from days or weeks ago, if enough nodes watched it in the first place.
For the moment, performance limits it to audio streams, but video might be workable in the near future. The dev team can always use more bright minds. Are you free?