I always love BG Micro's weird catalog. Don't let the yellow background throw you, it's a mimic of the colored paper they print the dead-tree version on. It's significantly less annoying in that form. Don't count on them for production quantities unless they say so, but some of the small lots of surplus stuff are super cool.
American Science and Surplus, formerly known as Jerryco carries a broader spectrum of stuff, including plastic replicas of human organs, glow-in-the-dark everything, millitary surplus and yes, a variety of electrical and electronic weirdness. If the Edmund Scientific catalog is too highbrow for you, Jerryco is sure to amuse.
There have been lots of sources for hobbyist LCDs for some time now. They can be purchased in low volume, the interfacing is fairly easy, and the physical mounting is taken care of.
Why haven't OLEDs made it to this market yet? The superior contrast ratio would seem to make them ideal for all sorts of homebrew applications.
I suggested this to the SATA forum a few months back, I wonder when they started working on it. The crux of the problem is this:
Existing flash memory formats aren't fast enough, small enough, or standard enough. CF is fast and standard but the connector is bulky. XD is fast and small but nobody has XD slots on their desktop. SD is small but not too fast or standard. And of course the 44-pin laptop hard drive connector is downright huge compared to modern pocket devices. The advantage of all these memory formats is driverlessness.
USB, USB2, and Firewire suffer an opposite problem: The interfaces are standard and fast, and the connectors are small, and include a power supply. Trouble is, there's no physical form factor standard for USB keychain memory. You can't build a camera that'll securely nestle a USB keychain inside, because none of them are shaped the same. Teaching a portable device to control a USB mass storage device is also nontrivial, because being a USB host is a pain in the ass.
SATA could fill this gap, by defining a physical size and shape for devices to fit into. The devices are "dumb" in that they require no drivers, the interface is plenty fast enough for any portable device, and here's the key, so to speak: Desktops are already starting to include SATA ports up front, for external drive attachment. Being able to plug your portable's memory cartridge straight into your desktop, or your laptop, would be great.
Sony was one step away from this with the Memory Stick format, in that all their laptops started including MS slots soon after its release. They betamaxed the proprietary format for too long though, and it never gained wide adoption. Desktops don't have MS slots, and it's only Sony devices that use them anyway.
If I worked for a digital camera maker right now, I'd sidestep the whole mess by releasing my own line of USB memory keychains, perhaps in a marketing deal with Lexar or Sandisk. They'd be functionally identical to current designs, but physically shaped to fit into a recess in the camera. (Even better, I'd build my camera to accept the PQI IntelligentStick as native memory, and capitalize on the existing market base.)
It's small, it's fast, it provides power, and PQI is already selling the media. Desktops and laptops already include the port, so there are no readers to mess with. The physical size standard is all that's missing.
So how about it, manufacturers? Sign a deal with PQI that says they won't change the physical shape of their stick. Start building music players and cameras to take the format. (Ooh, good thing I looked it up before hitting Submit. PQI has this on their site: "Our I-Stick can go straight from your digital still camera, PDA, or MP3 player directly into the USB port on your laptop or workstation CPU.".... really? I'm not aware of any such devices that currently accomodate the stick. What am I missing?
I was introduced to gaffer's tape by a theater geek. This stuff makes ordinary tape look like tissue paper. It's stronger than duct tape, sticks better to coarse surfaces, handles temperature and moisture well, peels off cleanly, and it's normally found in a matte black cloth color. It's also expensive, $10 for a big roll is about normal.
Trimming electrical tape with scissors is trivial, to fit the exact shape of the LED you're covering. Until I unplugged the bulb, it was the only thing keeping me sane when my car's "passenger seat belt" light would blink constantly -- because I had a book on the seat and it thought 14 ounces was enough to count as a passenger.
Lighter fluid tends to do unpredictable things on various surfaces. I've found that De-Solv-It citrus adhesive remover works miracles, and it doesn't even irritate the skin.
Sounds like you want an Archos. Popping the cover off and replacing the internal AA's is easy when they don't hold a charge anymore. The drives are big, the format is standard, and the screens are respectable, especially with the video-capable units. You'll have to keep wishing in the FM radio department.
I totally agree, by the way, about carrying my whole collection with me. Right now my laptop is my primary music player, and with a 40 gig drive, it happily holds everything I could want to audition for someone. It supports all formats, and the screen is generous, and touch-sensitive. The only thing it's missing is battery life, but for listening on the jobsite I can usually find an outlet.
You're absolutely right that Sony's engineers could wipe the floor with the competition if turned loose. I've never used a Sony product that didn't feel handsome and light. Their screens are the brightest and clearest, and their firmware is usually well designed.
In picking critical technologies though, Sony sticks to those which are proprietary, dead, or both. Storage is either MiniDisc (1992 called, they want their format back) or Memory Stick, which I won't even dignify with a rant. Eww. Nevermind that "mp3" is so popular it signifies a societal phenomenon even to non-techies, Sony clings to ATRAC (see 1992, above) and wonders why the NetMD doesn't sell.
Sony also makes horrid Windows-bound software for a lot of their products, where a standard interface would serve everyone better, including Windows users. Who wants to load a custom driver which will never be bugfixed or updated? Ugh.
Sony's cameras could also be second-to-none, if it weren't for MemorySuck and the proprietary battery pack. Their CCD and LCD leadership really shines in cameras, along with excellent optics and all the buttons placed just right.
Do they really think they're making money selling a few memorysticks to suckers gullible enough to lock themselves into Sony products? If they'd recognize the role of standards in the marketplace, they'd be kings. In the meantime, the waste of engineering talent remains a crying shame.
(My camera takes CF cards and AA batteries. My music player handles mp3 and Vorbis. My money goes where the standards are.)
Oh, and I almost forgot, they frequently take a standard connection and make their own plug for it, requiring the user to carry around a special cable. I wish reviewers would figure those cables into the weight of the product. Grrrr.
El Torito is still a black voodoo kludge if you ask me. It's a miracle bootable CDs work at all.
I've heard quite a lot played through the internal speaker, there was a program called "pianoman" which included a large library of tunes. Find it in the Simtel archive.
Hint: You didn't need your OS to include BASICA / GWBASIC if you had a real IBM, since it was in ROM and would start if no bootable media were found. Others who ripped IBM's boot code but couldn't steal BASIC because of copyright would fail with the message "NO ROM BASIC".
Ahh, Bitchin100 earned a bookmark:) I use mine for more than editing text though, it's a handy little serial terminal for all sorts of tasks. (I seem to have lost the picture of mine plugged into the console port of an oc-192 terminal with the config prompt up.)
Look for an older, larger laptop with option bays that'll accept batteries. Consider that the machine load-shares between them, so the demand from each individual battery is lower, which makes them more efficient. (Two batteries, each of which runs the machine for 2 hours when used alone, will probably give you 5 hours when used together.)
In folks who're allergic to shellfish, which part is it that triggers the reaction? Peanut and shellfish allergies never seem to be mild, and while this is a wonderful lifesaving development, I wonder whether other methods should be kept handy in case this particular one would kill a particular person.
I've never seen "USB" as an option in the "A, C, CDROM" selections in any BIOS setup program I've ever touched. Is it handled somewhere else, or is it just very rare among ~1-year-old hardware?
Carrying along a bootable CD and a USB storage device sort of defeats the purpose.
Aha, I found it! I had been googling for the phrase "trout haddock flounder perch" but it turns out that the words had gotten jumbled in my head somewhere along the last 14 years.
Trout, Salmon, flounder, perch,
I'll ride my minibike into church. Dace, tuna, haddock, trout, Wait'll you hear the minister shout!
Psyching oneself up to eat a fried worm, of course, takes some work.:) As for any reasons this book would be banned, I'm drawing a blank. I think it's probably still on my little sister's bookshelf, I might have to go dust it off and give it to a neighbor kid.
From my reading of the question, it looks like the "other device" is a USB slave device, and the author wants to make a USB host to connect to it. If you can find me a USB host device that lets me speak RS232 to a USB-only slave, please, speak up!
On a somewhat related note, Delkin and Macally have USB bridges which play host to two devices simultaneously, shuffling files back and forth.
The IBM WorkPad z50 and Vadem Clio (also sold as the Sharp Mobilon Tripad) are clamshell-style PDAs with full keyboards. They both get excellent (7 or 8 hours) battery life and are comfortable to type on, though the Clio's curved keyboard takes a little getting used to.
I've mentioned these devices before in a different context.
Connect the machines using PPP over a pair of Ricochet modems, available on eBay for a song. They include a neat little command for developers:
AT~I13 -- WAN Simulation Command and Information Display This command enables the Ricochet modem's WAN simulation feature. Syntax: AT~I13 You can use this function to test various transport protocols in the presence of network delay and packet loss. This simulation only affects the modem's transport modes, i.e., LIGHT/PPP/SLIP/STREAM. If you are going to reset the WAN simulation values, then you should reboot the modem because it is not built to reset and process incoming packets at the same time. WAN simulation affects the processing of received packet, therefore, when testing the simulation needs to be set at both ends of the connection.
The incoming packets are processed in the following order. First, the drop percentage value is checked and the modem drops that N% immediately. Second, the base delay is added to a random percentage of the variable delay. Then the packet is inserted on a time ordered delivery queue. If the variable delay component is great enough, a large number of incoming packets will be reordered.
Note: In WAN simulation, there are fewer (Time to Live) TTL expirations than in an real network because packets ending up on the delivery queue is not expiring based on the TTL value.
I call bull too. After changing my monitor's orientation, the colors are skewed, until I hit the degauss button. Problem solved. Turning it umop apisdn causes the same problem, until I hit the degauss button.
In the past, monitors weren't large enough to be affected much by shadow mask magnification, so they didn't include their own degaussing coils. It was easy to screw one up with a magnetic field back then, and it might take the user a while to find someone with the tool to fix it. (Video arcades usually have hand-held degaussers, that they might let you borrow.)
There may have been a difference in the past, but I assure you there's none now.
Yeah, the "we'll upgrade you any day now" will probably continue as long as gmail keeps the "beta" tag.
Consider this: Gmail's huge storage space raised the bar for all the webmail providers. Yahoo and Hotmail are probably spending gajillions on storage hardware right now. Gmail forced the competition to engage in huge expenditures. Once their bottom lines are suitably drenched in red, Gmail can evaporate, lauging all the way. "We told you it was just a beta!"
Consider as well that Gmail's userbase is limited, whereas Hotmail and Yahoo allow anyone to sign up. I don't know the numbers of active accounts on each service, but the difference is probably orders of magnitude.
Isn't this the same sort of hyperconsumerist thinking that drove:DigitalConvergence into the ditch too? The makers of the:CueCat also had a cable, which connected one's TV audio output to one's soundcard input, and software to recognize "cues" in the audio, which would then pull up the appropriate page on the computer.
People won't flock to a technology because it infests their computer with all the same advertising they see on TV. People will run screaming the other way, but grab the nifty hardware on the way out.
The way I see it, phones now have 3 main functions. First is placing and receiving voice phone calls, which my Nextel handset does quite handly. It has a vibrate motor and a headset jack, both essential for me. Second is acting as a modem, supplying my laptop with a pipe to the internet. The hardware is great at this, but the unlimited plan is an arm and a leg. The fact that my current phone can act as an RS232 modem without any drivers is great, I just wish USB support were better. The third function is "Everything else", all the fun toys that the Japanese enjoy for years before American providers make a big deal out of. Cameras and web browsers in the phone, voice recorders and reasonable calculators and games and all that. This category is where my Nextel sucks donkey parts. The java environment is miniscule, the screen is bad, the web browser is prehistoric and easily confused.
The Hiptop/Sidekick turns this completely upside down. The little sucker was made to be third-category toy, with a great keyboard and screen, plenty of cool software, and an environment to make more. All it needs is a camera. It also appears adequate for voice calling, despite awkward earpiece placement. Where T-mobile drops the ball is that they don't allow the Sidekick to also act as a tethered modem. I'd have one tomorrow if it could replace my Nextel's functionality, but it can't.
The obvious argument is something along the lines of "well, the browser in the phone can only eat so much data per day, so that's why the unlimited data plan is so cheap. If it ran tethered, they wouldn't make any money on data." Okay, but as far as I know, T-mobile does offer the same data plan on other handsets, which do pass it out the serial port and act as modems.
The Sidekick has a USB port and IrDA hardware. It's poised to be the best, most useful handset in all 3 categories, if only T-mobile would support its use as such. Any ideas why they won't?
Amen! Tracy Kidder's insider story of the action at Data General is engrossing, and just as relevant now as ever. It's not a short book but the pages fly by; I couldn't wait to finish it.
Hinsdale burned in 1988. Cellular phones were not common enough to be a big concern. Getting the fiber transport and landline switching back up were the orders of the day. (btw, most Bell offices still have no extinguishers, the idea being prevention rather than correction. All the competition has huge halon tanks and analasers.)
There have been switches installed in semis for decades, and trailer-mounted cell sites for years. One of the unique bits about CDMA is that it's extremely timing-dependent, each site requires not only precise synchronization (derived from Navstar GPS signals) but also knowledge of its distance to other sites, for delay computations. Deploying a CDMA site in a hurry is more than just raising the mast and aligning the backhaul link.
Backhaul is the other point often ignored here. That microwave dish has to point somewhere, to another transceiver that eventually brings the circuit back to the MTSO. Using licensed frequencies, these things can run a lot of wattage, but terrain and distance still figure in. If there's no easy route back to civilization, the disaster area might be s.o.l. until a portable microwave repeater can be parked on a mountaintop somewhere.
Sure, it'd be easy to give Iridium phones to disaster workers, but I wonder if there's been any thought given to satellite-based backhaul. Why not use existing cellphones for the last mile, then ship the trunks up to orbit to get them back to the MTSO?
I've heard there's a 12v car cord for the IC3 charger, which would be tempting if the thing weren't so expensive to begin with. As it turns out, running a regular desktop charger from an inverter isn't too horribly inefficient.
The problem is that some of the quick-chargers, like the one that came with my camera, do a fast-start and don't even bother measuring the cells until 5 minutes later. If their AC input is constantly cycling on and off, this destroys batteries. I'd probably do fine with a deltaV unit running off an inverter.
At the moment I've got enough AA's that I can charge them at home and only rarely need to charge them in the car anyway.
...technology exists which allows the light paths in a fibre to be continuously altered in much the same way that band switching (rapidly switching transmissions across multiple frequencies) is already used by the military to evade listening. A military installation is not only likely to make use of this technology but would implement it across multiple fibres.
I certainly hope they'd use multiple fibers. Defeating wavelength hopping in a single fiber would be as simple as using a wideband receiver, which is the standard except in DWDM networks where narrowly selective transmitters and receivers are needed.
While you make a valid point that tapping multiple fibers would be a pain in the ass, I don't believe the additional hassle would provide any measurable gain in security. At the worst case, a linear increase in fiber number means a linear increase in time required to make the taps. In most cases I'd imagine the cost to implement such a system would exceed to cost to defeat it. Why would they resort to this when crypto works, it's relatively cheap, and it doesn't necessarily reveal its existence until the enemy has already made the tap.
I hate to break it to you, but it's trivial to tap fiber. There are handheld meters that gently curve a fiber, and use the light leaking out of the curve to detect which direction the light is going. (helpful to sort out the TX from the RX fiber in a crowded panel)
Feed that leakage into an EDFA and you might have enough signal to recover the data. If not, a tiny nick in the edge of the fiber and a drop of index-matching fluid are all it takes to get more light from the fiber. Most receivers are pretty flexible and most networks have plenty of headroom, so siphoning off a few dB of light won't even interrupt the circuit being tapped. This style of tap is more likely to be noticed because it causes a sudden quantifiable drop in signal strength.
The intruder is helped, however, by the fact that the signal levels in fiber optic systems vary continuously. Something as simple as the aerial cable swinging in the breeze can cause fluctuations, so a tap performed during stormy weather is more likely to go unnoticed.
You're right however that copper cables are easier to detect, like with a metal detector. Since fiber isn't inductive, it can go unnoticed if buried well. (Of course, as any backhoe driver can tell you, this makes it easier to claim ignorance after slicing through a major fiber route.)
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I always love BG Micro's weird catalog. Don't let the yellow background throw you, it's a mimic of the colored paper they print the dead-tree version on. It's significantly less annoying in that form. Don't count on them for production quantities unless they say so, but some of the small lots of surplus stuff are super cool.
American Science and Surplus, formerly known as Jerryco carries a broader spectrum of stuff, including plastic replicas of human organs, glow-in-the-dark everything, millitary surplus and yes, a variety of electrical and electronic weirdness. If the Edmund Scientific catalog is too highbrow for you, Jerryco is sure to amuse.
There are some hardware hackers over at Green Bay Professional Packet Radio whose projects you might enjoy.
I'm also going to suggest del.icio.us as a good way to collectively manage bookmarks like these. Just go play with it.
There have been lots of sources for hobbyist LCDs for some time now. They can be purchased in low volume, the interfacing is fairly easy, and the physical mounting is taken care of.
Why haven't OLEDs made it to this market yet? The superior contrast ratio would seem to make them ideal for all sorts of homebrew applications.
I suggested this to the SATA forum a few months back, I wonder when they started working on it. The crux of the problem is this:
Existing flash memory formats aren't fast enough, small enough, or standard enough. CF is fast and standard but the connector is bulky. XD is fast and small but nobody has XD slots on their desktop. SD is small but not too fast or standard. And of course the 44-pin laptop hard drive connector is downright huge compared to modern pocket devices. The advantage of all these memory formats is driverlessness.
USB, USB2, and Firewire suffer an opposite problem: The interfaces are standard and fast, and the connectors are small, and include a power supply. Trouble is, there's no physical form factor standard for USB keychain memory. You can't build a camera that'll securely nestle a USB keychain inside, because none of them are shaped the same. Teaching a portable device to control a USB mass storage device is also nontrivial, because being a USB host is a pain in the ass.
SATA could fill this gap, by defining a physical size and shape for devices to fit into. The devices are "dumb" in that they require no drivers, the interface is plenty fast enough for any portable device, and here's the key, so to speak: Desktops are already starting to include SATA ports up front, for external drive attachment. Being able to plug your portable's memory cartridge straight into your desktop, or your laptop, would be great.
Sony was one step away from this with the Memory Stick format, in that all their laptops started including MS slots soon after its release. They betamaxed the proprietary format for too long though, and it never gained wide adoption. Desktops don't have MS slots, and it's only Sony devices that use them anyway.
If I worked for a digital camera maker right now, I'd sidestep the whole mess by releasing my own line of USB memory keychains, perhaps in a marketing deal with Lexar or Sandisk. They'd be functionally identical to current designs, but physically shaped to fit into a recess in the camera. (Even better, I'd build my camera to accept the PQI IntelligentStick as native memory, and capitalize on the existing market base.)
It's small, it's fast, it provides power, and PQI is already selling the media. Desktops and laptops already include the port, so there are no readers to mess with. The physical size standard is all that's missing.
So how about it, manufacturers? Sign a deal with PQI that says they won't change the physical shape of their stick. Start building music players and cameras to take the format. (Ooh, good thing I looked it up before hitting Submit. PQI has this on their site: "Our I-Stick can go straight from your digital still camera, PDA, or MP3 player directly into the USB port on your laptop or workstation CPU.".... really? I'm not aware of any such devices that currently accomodate the stick. What am I missing?
You're speaking of Looking for Madam Tetrachromat.
I was introduced to gaffer's tape by a theater geek. This stuff makes ordinary tape look like tissue paper. It's stronger than duct tape, sticks better to coarse surfaces, handles temperature and moisture well, peels off cleanly, and it's normally found in a matte black cloth color. It's also expensive, $10 for a big roll is about normal.
Trimming electrical tape with scissors is trivial, to fit the exact shape of the LED you're covering. Until I unplugged the bulb, it was the only thing keeping me sane when my car's "passenger seat belt" light would blink constantly -- because I had a book on the seat and it thought 14 ounces was enough to count as a passenger.
Lighter fluid tends to do unpredictable things on various surfaces. I've found that De-Solv-It citrus adhesive remover works miracles, and it doesn't even irritate the skin.
Sounds like you want an Archos. Popping the cover off and replacing the internal AA's is easy when they don't hold a charge anymore. The drives are big, the format is standard, and the screens are respectable, especially with the video-capable units. You'll have to keep wishing in the FM radio department.
I totally agree, by the way, about carrying my whole collection with me. Right now my laptop is my primary music player, and with a 40 gig drive, it happily holds everything I could want to audition for someone. It supports all formats, and the screen is generous, and touch-sensitive. The only thing it's missing is battery life, but for listening on the jobsite I can usually find an outlet.
You're absolutely right that Sony's engineers could wipe the floor with the competition if turned loose. I've never used a Sony product that didn't feel handsome and light. Their screens are the brightest and clearest, and their firmware is usually well designed.
In picking critical technologies though, Sony sticks to those which are proprietary, dead, or both. Storage is either MiniDisc (1992 called, they want their format back) or Memory Stick, which I won't even dignify with a rant. Eww. Nevermind that "mp3" is so popular it signifies a societal phenomenon even to non-techies, Sony clings to ATRAC (see 1992, above) and wonders why the NetMD doesn't sell.
Sony also makes horrid Windows-bound software for a lot of their products, where a standard interface would serve everyone better, including Windows users. Who wants to load a custom driver which will never be bugfixed or updated? Ugh.
Sony's cameras could also be second-to-none, if it weren't for MemorySuck and the proprietary battery pack. Their CCD and LCD leadership really shines in cameras, along with excellent optics and all the buttons placed just right.
Do they really think they're making money selling a few memorysticks to suckers gullible enough to lock themselves into Sony products? If they'd recognize the role of standards in the marketplace, they'd be kings. In the meantime, the waste of engineering talent remains a crying shame.
(My camera takes CF cards and AA batteries. My music player handles mp3 and Vorbis. My money goes where the standards are.)
Oh, and I almost forgot, they frequently take a standard connection and make their own plug for it, requiring the user to carry around a special cable. I wish reviewers would figure those cables into the weight of the product. Grrrr.
El Torito is still a black voodoo kludge if you ask me. It's a miracle bootable CDs work at all.
:)
I've heard quite a lot played through the internal speaker, there was a program called "pianoman" which included a large library of tunes. Find it in the Simtel archive.
Hint: You didn't need your OS to include BASICA / GWBASIC if you had a real IBM, since it was in ROM and would start if no bootable media were found. Others who ripped IBM's boot code but couldn't steal BASIC because of copyright would fail with the message "NO ROM BASIC".
Geek points if you know what the GW stands for.
Ahh, Bitchin100 earned a bookmark :) I use mine for more than editing text though, it's a handy little serial terminal for all sorts of tasks. (I seem to have lost the picture of mine plugged into the console port of an oc-192 terminal with the config prompt up.)
Look for an older, larger laptop with option bays that'll accept batteries. Consider that the machine load-shares between them, so the demand from each individual battery is lower, which makes them more efficient. (Two batteries, each of which runs the machine for 2 hours when used alone, will probably give you 5 hours when used together.)
In folks who're allergic to shellfish, which part is it that triggers the reaction? Peanut and shellfish allergies never seem to be mild, and while this is a wonderful lifesaving development, I wonder whether other methods should be kept handy in case this particular one would kill a particular person.
I've never seen "USB" as an option in the "A, C, CDROM" selections in any BIOS setup program I've ever touched. Is it handled somewhere else, or is it just very rare among ~1-year-old hardware?
Carrying along a bootable CD and a USB storage device sort of defeats the purpose.
Loadlin would be a natural for this thing...
From my reading of the question, it looks like the "other device" is a USB slave device, and the author wants to make a USB host to connect to it. If you can find me a USB host device that lets me speak RS232 to a USB-only slave, please, speak up!
On a somewhat related note, Delkin and Macally have USB bridges which play host to two devices simultaneously, shuffling files back and forth.
The IBM WorkPad z50 and Vadem Clio (also sold as the Sharp Mobilon Tripad) are clamshell-style PDAs with full keyboards. They both get excellent (7 or 8 hours) battery life and are comfortable to type on, though the Clio's curved keyboard takes a little getting used to.
I've mentioned these devices before in a different context.
Connect the machines using PPP over a pair of Ricochet modems, available on eBay for a song. They include a neat little command for developers:
AT~I13 -- WAN Simulation Command and Information Display
This command enables the Ricochet modem's WAN simulation feature.
Syntax:
AT~I13
You can use this function to test various transport protocols in the presence of network delay and packet loss. This simulation only affects the modem's transport modes, i.e., LIGHT/PPP/SLIP/STREAM. If you are going to reset the WAN simulation values, then you should reboot the modem because it is not built to reset and process incoming packets at the same time. WAN simulation affects the processing of received packet, therefore, when testing the simulation needs to be set at both ends of the connection.
The incoming packets are processed in the following order. First, the drop percentage value is checked and the modem drops that N% immediately. Second, the base delay is added to a random percentage of the variable delay. Then the packet is inserted on a time ordered delivery queue. If the variable delay component is great enough, a large number of incoming packets will be reordered.
Note:
In WAN simulation, there are fewer (Time to Live) TTL expirations than in an real network because packets ending up on the delivery queue is not expiring based on the TTL value.
I call bull too. After changing my monitor's orientation, the colors are skewed, until I hit the degauss button. Problem solved. Turning it umop apisdn causes the same problem, until I hit the degauss button.
In the past, monitors weren't large enough to be affected much by shadow mask magnification, so they didn't include their own degaussing coils. It was easy to screw one up with a magnetic field back then, and it might take the user a while to find someone with the tool to fix it. (Video arcades usually have hand-held degaussers, that they might let you borrow.)
There may have been a difference in the past, but I assure you there's none now.
Yeah, the "we'll upgrade you any day now" will probably continue as long as gmail keeps the "beta" tag.
Consider this: Gmail's huge storage space raised the bar for all the webmail providers. Yahoo and Hotmail are probably spending gajillions on storage hardware right now. Gmail forced the competition to engage in huge expenditures. Once their bottom lines are suitably drenched in red, Gmail can evaporate, lauging all the way. "We told you it was just a beta!"
Consider as well that Gmail's userbase is limited, whereas Hotmail and Yahoo allow anyone to sign up. I don't know the numbers of active accounts on each service, but the difference is probably orders of magnitude.
Isn't this the same sort of hyperconsumerist thinking that drove :DigitalConvergence into the ditch too? The makers of the :CueCat also had a cable, which connected one's TV audio output to one's soundcard input, and software to recognize "cues" in the audio, which would then pull up the appropriate page on the computer.
People won't flock to a technology because it infests their computer with all the same advertising they see on TV. People will run screaming the other way, but grab the nifty hardware on the way out.
tidal wave
n.
The swell or crest of surface ocean water created by the tides.
tsunami
n.
A very large ocean wave caused by an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption.
*ahem*
May I rant for a moment? Thank you.
The way I see it, phones now have 3 main functions. First is placing and receiving voice phone calls, which my Nextel handset does quite handly. It has a vibrate motor and a headset jack, both essential for me. Second is acting as a modem, supplying my laptop with a pipe to the internet. The hardware is great at this, but the unlimited plan is an arm and a leg. The fact that my current phone can act as an RS232 modem without any drivers is great, I just wish USB support were better. The third function is "Everything else", all the fun toys that the Japanese enjoy for years before American providers make a big deal out of. Cameras and web browsers in the
phone, voice recorders and reasonable calculators and games and all that. This category is where my Nextel sucks donkey parts. The java environment is miniscule, the screen is bad, the web browser is prehistoric and easily confused.
The Hiptop/Sidekick turns this completely upside down. The little sucker was made to be third-category toy, with a great keyboard and screen, plenty of cool software, and an environment to make more. All it needs is a camera. It also appears adequate for voice calling, despite awkward earpiece placement. Where T-mobile drops the ball is that they don't allow the Sidekick to also act as a tethered modem. I'd have one tomorrow if it could replace my Nextel's functionality, but it can't.
The obvious argument is something along the lines of "well, the browser in the phone can only eat so much data per day, so that's why the unlimited data plan is so cheap. If it ran tethered, they wouldn't make any money on data." Okay, but as far as I know, T-mobile does offer the same data plan on other handsets, which do pass it out the serial port and act as modems.
The Sidekick has a USB port and IrDA hardware. It's poised to be the best, most useful handset in all 3 categories, if only T-mobile would support its use as such. Any ideas why they won't?
Amen! Tracy Kidder's insider story of the action at Data General is engrossing, and just as relevant now as ever. It's not a short book but the pages fly by; I couldn't wait to finish it.
I just added Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age to my collection, and I'm not as impressed. It's more of a "who did what" chronicle, whereas TSoaNM is more about "why and how this group did what they did".
One of these days, I'm going to start reading my borrowed copy of ENIAC.
Hinsdale burned in 1988. Cellular phones were not common enough to be a big concern. Getting the fiber transport and landline switching back up were the orders of the day. (btw, most Bell offices still have no extinguishers, the idea being prevention rather than correction. All the competition has huge halon tanks and analasers.)
There have been switches installed in semis for decades, and trailer-mounted cell sites for years. One of the unique bits about CDMA is that it's extremely timing-dependent, each site requires not only precise synchronization (derived from Navstar GPS signals) but also knowledge of its distance to other sites, for delay computations. Deploying a CDMA site in a hurry is more than just raising the mast and aligning the backhaul link.
Backhaul is the other point often ignored here. That microwave dish has to point somewhere, to another transceiver that eventually brings the circuit back to the MTSO. Using licensed frequencies, these things can run a lot of wattage, but terrain and distance still figure in. If there's no easy route back to civilization, the disaster area might be s.o.l. until a portable microwave repeater can be parked on a mountaintop somewhere.
Sure, it'd be easy to give Iridium phones to disaster workers, but I wonder if there's been any thought given to satellite-based backhaul. Why not use existing cellphones for the last mile, then ship the trunks up to orbit to get them back to the MTSO?
I've heard there's a 12v car cord for the IC3 charger, which would be tempting if the thing weren't so expensive to begin with. As it turns out, running a regular desktop charger from an inverter isn't too horribly inefficient.
The problem is that some of the quick-chargers, like the one that came with my camera, do a fast-start and don't even bother measuring the cells until 5 minutes later. If their AC input is constantly cycling on and off, this destroys batteries. I'd probably do fine with a deltaV unit running off an inverter.
At the moment I've got enough AA's that I can charge them at home and only rarely need to charge them in the car anyway.
I certainly hope they'd use multiple fibers. Defeating wavelength hopping in a single fiber would be as simple as using a wideband receiver, which is the standard except in DWDM networks where narrowly selective transmitters and receivers are needed.
While you make a valid point that tapping multiple fibers would be a pain in the ass, I don't believe the additional hassle would provide any measurable gain in security. At the worst case, a linear increase in fiber number means a linear increase in time required to make the taps. In most cases I'd imagine the cost to implement such a system would exceed to cost to defeat it. Why would they resort to this when crypto works, it's relatively cheap, and it doesn't necessarily reveal its existence until the enemy has already made the tap.
I hate to break it to you, but it's trivial to tap fiber. There are handheld meters that gently curve a fiber, and use the light leaking out of the curve to detect which direction the light is going. (helpful to sort out the TX from the RX fiber in a crowded panel)
Feed that leakage into an EDFA and you might have enough signal to recover the data. If not, a tiny nick in the edge of the fiber and a drop of index-matching fluid are all it takes to get more light from the fiber. Most receivers are pretty flexible and most networks have plenty of headroom, so siphoning off a few dB of light won't even interrupt the circuit being tapped. This style of tap is more likely to be noticed because it causes a sudden quantifiable drop in signal strength.
The intruder is helped, however, by the fact that the signal levels in fiber optic systems vary continuously. Something as simple as the aerial cable swinging in the breeze can cause fluctuations, so a tap performed during stormy weather is more likely to go unnoticed.
You're right however that copper cables are easier to detect, like with a metal detector. Since fiber isn't inductive, it can go unnoticed if buried well. (Of course, as any backhoe driver can tell you, this makes it easier to claim ignorance after slicing through a major fiber route.)