Ahh, did you read the article? Copper sheets are old tech, and that's what you'd want to make an RF shielded room. The product being developed is essentially a band-cut filter, it blocks a specific range of wavelengths while letting others through. The idea being that you can still listen to the radio while foiling wardrivers.
Which means of course that to compromise the 'secure' environment, you need only drop a device inside that communicates with the outside over unblocked frequencies.
I have a feeling the field strength in your home from nearby TV and radio transmitters, not to mention hydrogen-alpha radiation from the universe at large, is much higher than a WLAN would be. Do you live in a shielded box?
While you're right that it's the transmitter's responsibility not to cause interference, I still think it's dangerously irresponsible to keep old machines in service that've proven themselves unreliable in the face of common interference.
You make an excellent point that the WLANs used in hospitals are very low power. Yes, they put APs every few yards down the hallways, so that the portable devices never have to step up their transmit power to reach one.
The solution to the cell phone problem in hospitals is to put base station equipment IN the hospital and run Radiax down the hallways. Alternately, just put cell sites as close to the building as possible. When the phones can reach a tower easily, they'll limit their output power accordingly.
This is also the counterintuitive solution to the weenies who protest when a cellphone company wants to put a tower near the high school. (This frequently happens when an athletic field is getting new lights.) Compare a cordless phone to a moonbounce transmission, which requires more power?
The first mobile phones weren't cellular, there was a single base station in the center of town. The powers used were on the order of 50 watts, so it's a good thing the vehicle-mounted antenna was several feet from the handset. When cellular was developed, it meant you were always within a mile or two of a tower, so the power levels decreased drastically. Phones reduce their output power in response to requests from the tower, because it's easier for the tower to "hear" the faint phones if the near phones aren't screaming.
Shielding the place into an RF hole is counterproductive. In the event that someone forgets to turn their phone off, it'll sit there chirping out its maximum transmit power every once in a while, searching for a tower it can't find. Worse yet, it'll maintain contact with a tower it can just barely hear, only if it really blasts out the RF. This helps nobody.
Just try saturating your cable modem's bandwidth solid for a month or two, and see how the provider likes it. Most DSL providers frown on this too, despite their infrastructure being much better equipped to handle it.
Cable might burst 100x faster than dialup, but it's certainly not capable of sustaining that.
I've never found a dialup ISP who cared one way or the other about usage. Back in the day they might've gotten antsy about connect time, but that's moot now too.
Dialup ISPs also don't care what services you run or what ports you open.
The reason TV sucks is that there's a clear division between broadcaster and viewer. The internet was supposed to change all that, so that anyone can publish, every node is equal to every other node except maybe for speed. Peer to peer is what makes the network so cool. By preventing you from running servers, the cable ISPs (who are mostly owned by big media companies) are turning the internet into TV all over again.
Personally I think it should be illegal to call something "internet access" if it restricts what ports you can open or what services you can run. That's not the real internet.
Using old machines as APs is all well and good, if you have plenty of power and a clean environment. PCs have cooling fans which suck in dust, moisture, and small critters. They also consume a good bit of power, which is an issue if you're running from generators or simply over a very long chain of extension cords.
You're reinventing the wheel here. Building your own kernel with all the features needed to become an AP is simply replicating all the effort expended by the AP vendors. There are also prebuilt configurations (third-party firmwares) for a lot of APs.
Purpose-built APs are smaller and lighter, which makes them easy to nail into trees or whatever for mounting. They're easy to stuff into ziplock bags for weather resistance, because they don't need much cooling. The software is already built.
If you're still interested in building your own equipment, look into hardware from Soekris Engineering and Mikrotik. Hardware that's designed for embedded operation has nice things like serial configuration (ComBIOS), onboard CF slots, simple power supply requirements, and low heat generation. Most such boards also have general purpose I/O lines that you can use for things like door sensors, thermal management, status lights, etc.
Ahh, if you're powering them over ethernet, you don't need a mesh! The advantage of having mesh firmware is that you can power them locally without a wired uplink.
And I was just about to make a post suggesting that we optimize communications to make the bandwidth consumption of these projects easier to manage.
Most folks try to live near their jobs, or at least in the same state. If one spare cycle is the same as another spare cycle, why not have everyone in a particular geographic area work on the project whose servers are in that area? Then if a new project pops up, or if a grid computing task comes along, nearby resources could simply be reassigned.
A universal client, which would run whatever cycle-sucker was appropriate, could make this easy.
I should point out that I didn't even consider uploading anything indecent until I was warned against doing so. What the hell can be indecent about a face? Then I thought about it for a minute. Hey, what celebrity does my ass most resemble? A bit more thinking, and I realized that I could get instantly matched to Darl McBride by uploading a pic of my schlong.
On a more general note, non-face-specific image recognition software would be handy to have for a lot of reasons. I'm envisioning an object recognizer, where you take a picture or scan of, say, a circuit board. It could spit back something like "That's a SB16 ISA PNP, drivers are www.some.where and compatibility info is www.over.there"
Such a system would need a distributed database, I don't think it would make sense to centralize it. With the right moderation system, you might even be able to keep every circuit board from matching a porn site.;)
Not into a chamber, since containing Little Boy in the back of a rocket would be a bit tricky. Simply firing the material into space behind the rocket should be fine. The trick is firing it accurately enough to actually get a supercritical mass back there.
Imagine Archimedes directing the soldiers to each focus the reflection from his shield on the ship far offshore. Now imagine that they're all holding superaccurate machine guns, each loaded with a belt of refined uranium ammunition. When good ol' Archie gives the order to fire, streams of uranium cruise toward a point. Since the soldiers have impeccable aim, the first few rounds all spend an instant very close to each other. Neutrons do their thing, fission starts, and a few microseconds later, you have Hiroshima in midair.
Now, our intrepid soldiers are somehow able to keep their aim steady despite the flash and shockwave, and the rounds fly straight and true despite the blast. The soldiers keep the triggers held down, each gun dutifully hurling its belt full of fuel into the center of the nuclear fire.
The reaction continues and instead of a single shockwave, the area is subjected to a steady, sustained force comparable to the instantaneous pressure at ground zero during a regular blast.
Now, arrange all these soldiers in a ring around the back of a rocket and have them fire into space. Wave hi to the Alpha Centaurians as you whiz past.
I'd like to see more orbiting telescopes. Hubble's a great tool and yes it should be fixed, but more instruments could only mean more science. Maintaining and upgrading Hubble safely should be a top priority, but developing its replacement should be up there too.
For bonus points, make sure the new one doesn't require corrective lenses upon installation, and make its onboard computers accept input in english and metric units.;)
Also, how about communications upgrades for the Deep Space Network? We've got so many probes out now, the data downlink schedule is pretty crowded. I wonder if a repeater, in fairly distant orbit, could capture some of those weak signals and retransmit them down to Earth in a stronger, narrower signal? That would open the door to more information from the existing equipment.
At this point, having no better place to write it down, I should mention a weird little idea that my brother and I came up with a while back. It might even be possible with current technology.
One of the most cumbersome parts of Orion was the shock absorption springs and blast plates to smooth out the explosions happening underneath. Nuclear propulsion would be much easier if it could be made continuous.
Is it possible to make a critical mass of fissionable material while it's in vapor state? Consider a set of nozzles aimed at a common point, squirting out a stream of uranium vapor at phenomenal pressure. If the central point gets dense enough, it'll start fission and keep going as long as the gas supply and pressure keep up.
If handling high temperature vapors proves difficult, consider using dust or pellets instead. It would be a bit tricky to propel the particles without suspending them in another gas, but magnetic containment might make it easier. Either way, blasting the fissionable material into the reaction as a continuous stream would make the propulsion smoother and easier to handle. The thrust from such a system would be unbelievably powerful, far beyond even Orion's pulsed output.
Sure, it's well outside anything we've done yet. But I don't see anything here that's considered impossble, simply "absurdly diffcult". Be the first in your star system with a nuclear afterburner!
A few issues ago, the letters section in 2600 included a peculiar missive from some schoolchildren, attacking 2600 for running an IRC server. They apparently learned in that class that IRC is the tool that perverts use to meet young girls. (Please mod down the idiot who'll take this opportunity to make allegations about Emmanuel.)
Anyway, the editorial response was fairly dry, but the reader reactions in the next issue pretty much said what's being said here on/. today. There's no excuse for this kind of "journalism" and worse yet, it's being taught in schools as well. What can we do to fight back?
The z50 has integrated 10-bit "business audio". It has a built-in mic, and 1/8" jacks for headphones and mic input. There's a button you can push while the lid is closed and it'll beep back indicating that it's recording, which it will continue to do as long as the button is held down. Next time you open the lid, the OS will flip to the audio recording tool, so you can review your recent notes.
I know the Clio has audio capability but I don't know the specifics. I'm sure you can look them up online. I don't know whether/dev/dsp works under NetBSD on either device.
Both devices have PCMCIA slots and are capable of running any 16-bit (non-cardbus) card for which you can find drivers. Hermes and Prism-2 based wireless cards are both well supported under WinCE and NetBSD. Beware that most 802.11-other-than-B cards are CardBus because they can exceed the speed of a 16-bit PCMCIA bus. If you're connecting to a recently deployed wlan, make sure it supports.11b fallback.
The hardware serial ports make it easy to connect a GPS unit, if the long battery life inspires you to make a warwalking setup.
The z50 can accomodate a type-III PCMCIA card, if you want to throw a rotating hard drive in there. Expect a corresponding drop in battery life. The Clio's slot will only take a type-II PCMCIA card. Both devices will fit a type-II CF card, if microdrives are your thing. I don't know if CF wireless cards are supported, but even if so, only the z50 would be able to run them because the Clio's CF slot is internal (under the battery cover).
Both the z50 and the Clio can run while plugged in. The z50's adapter resembles a small laptop brick, while the Clio's adapter is a miniscule wall-wart, the size of half an altoids tin. Charging times from a flat battery to 90% are about 2 hours, somewhat longer if running while charging.
Technically the IBM Workpad Z50 and Vadem Clio (Sharp Mobilon Tripad) are PDAs, but they're clamshell notebook style. The Clio/Tripad has a flip-over screen that turns it into a tablet, but otherwise the specs are quite similar: 131MHz vr141 MIPS CPU, 16 or 32 meg internal storage, CF slot, PCMCIA slot, RS232 port, internal modem.
You'll have to put up with the lack of a USB port, but RS232 works well for small transfers, and flipping CF cards is fast when you want to move a lot of data.
Both the z50 and the Clio/Tripad have big screens with excellent contrast. They share great battery life, about 8 hours on the stock battery if you're not running a power-hungry PCMCIA card. (wireless) Optional double-capacity battery packs are available for the z50 that really do achieve 16 hours. Both can run the hpcmips port of NetBSD quite capably, but for reading text you might as well keep the stock WinCE.
Personally, I'd use the Clio because of the flippable screen. Holding it by the hinge side is very comfortable, and the touchscreen allows easy page-turning even while in tablet mode. The z50 is stuck in a clamshell shape and uses a pointing nipple.
Did I mention that both can be had on eBay for under $200?
That never stopped VLB! Or for that matter, long ISA cards. The original carved-from-stone PC/XT case won't let a full-length ISA card mount in the rightmost slot. Many 8-bit ISA cards from before the 16-bit slot was common actually have an overhang that prevents them from fitting in 16-bit slots. There are also "tall" ISA boards that require a certain amount of clearance above the top of the slot bracket, preventing their use in some cases.
Yes, portable and compact cases present an additional challenge. Most lunchbox machines won't accomodate full-length cards in all their slots, if at all. Many regular desktop cases have trouble with large heatsinks and/or tall RAM modules. The occasional incompatibility is the system builder's problem, and if a manufacturer can make a better product at the expense of a few percent of their users who have an unusually tight case, I hope they do it.
Leaving a PCI slot empty next to the AGP slot is a terrible solution to a problem that would've been solved by simlply turning the AGP board "right side up". Why would you pay for a slot you can't use, instead of just moving the hot component to where it can be cooled more effectively?
One of the problems is that PCI and AGP boards are "upside down" compared to ISA boards. Think component-side versus solder-side. In the case of ISA and PCI boards, it's important not to exceed a certain width because of adjacent slots, but since the AGP slot is always the first one, an AGP board could extend pretty far in the other direction.
Why don't they simply mount the GPU to the other side of the board to allow a much larger heatsink? I think this is either a design tradition or a limitation of the pick-and-place assembly machines, because there's no technical reason not to. I suppose if taken to an extreme, it could lead to physical fit problems in certain cases, but let's not go that far.
Fascinating! I'd always noticed that pattern of perfect teeth in "ethnically obvious" folks, and the ethnicity didn't matter as long as it was strong. Finally having it explained is cool.
I always thought the wisdom teeth were spares, from a time before modern dentistry, when having a few lopsided molars was better than none. The mismatched genes make sense too.
So like everything else in my life, I have my parents to blame for this.;)
How exactly do they plan to deliver "persistent" ads adjacent to the browser without invasive software? Check out the freefi site, their claim of "no adware" is the most amazing piece of doublethink I've seen outside the legislature.
The sample on their site looks like it's IE-specific and probably easily filtered with Proxomitron. If not, then it's a software wedge a la Netzero, and non-Windows users will be screwed.
The question is, does it interfere with non-port-80 traffic? As long as I can still ssh, there's no problem.
Humans already have a first and second dentition, why not simply encourage a third with hormones or something? You'd have baby teeth, teenage teeth, and over-the-hill teeth. When your third set started coming in, it would officially be time to go buy that Corvette and get a blonde bimbo for the passenger seat.
On the subject of teeth: Dental care is good enough lately that people don't lose enough teeth to make room in the jaw for the rear molars, the "wisdom" teeth that come in later. It seems obvious to me, that we could tell in the early teens whether an individual's wisdom teeth will be in the way, and then simply prevent their growth with a squirt of botox. It would eliminate their costly and painful removal later.
B.G. Micro is sort of like All Electronics in that they carry a ton of surplus electronic junk, download both catalogs and enjoy! Also try American Science and Surplus for a wider variety of tech stuff, toys, labware, and millitary goods.
I've stopped using Pricewatch, their listings have become crammed with keyword spam and are all but useless. The "price including shipping" column was a good idea, but the quality of the listings has been terrible lately.
All the CCDs I've dealt with have significant thermal noise, so exposures must be kept short unless the device is kept very cold. Since the point of a pinhole camera is to have the smallest aperture possible, wouldn't you need fairly long exposures to get enough light onto the sensor?
There are tools like Pixelzap that do darkfield subtraction which can help with the pixels that are always noisy, but since thermal noise is random, there's always some to contend with. How would a digital pinhole camera deal with this?
Star Control 2 tops my list. The first game was just a shootemup with a little empire-building (think SRE in 3D), but the second one was a moving story played out with a wide cast of characters, intermingled with plenty of action and a vast puzzle.
The storyline starts out simply enough: As one of the descendents of a lost human expedition, marooned on a distant planet for generations, your return home is a shock for both sides. Earth along with dozens of other planets has been enslaved by an advancing alien empire bent on galactic domination. They're clever, powerful, and allied with all the right (or wrong) folks.
Thrown into the mix is a third player, the subjugated workers of the master alien race, who spun off and are now committed to simple extermination. Their story is compelling, a tragic tale of conquest, psychic enslavement, triumph, and resolution: Races other than their own cannot be trusted, and must be 'cleansed'.
In the twenty thousand years of our Mission we have heard more pleas for mercy than you can possibly imagine. Civilizations which saw their doom before them called upon their geniuses to calm us, to no avail.... You are not our enemy. We have NO enemy beyond the Kzer-Za, our partners in the eternal conflict. You are simply... a spore, a seed. Today you are nothing... insignificant. But if allowed to bloom and grow someday... someday, you might represent a threat to our freedom and security. So we cleanse.
Some of the other races are positively fascinating, particularly the pyrophilic fungus with the capability to consciously modify its genetic makeup.
I have chosen my offsprings' memories carefully from my set of remembrances, the sweet and warm times of my existence and those of my parents' parents' parents, the bits of a million lifetimes coalesced into a birth gift of complete awareness.
As the story progresses, you learn of the interdimensional meddlings of a mysterious race that has apparently had occasional contact with humans for thousands of years. They are aloof but benevolent, referring to themselves as being from "above", and warn you about dealing with the other interdimensionals from "below". But guess whose participation is necessary to win the game!
There are even occasional encounters with space probes, misprogrammed so that they identify every object as a potential source of raw material for replication. This includes you and your ship, so prepare to be broken down into your component elements. Combat is fast-paced and easy to learn, but every ship has its strengths and weaknesses.
The music in the game plays a part in making it so enjoyable, too. While most games of the time were using cheesy FM synthesized music with occasional wave effects, Star Control 2's soundtrack is 4-channel MOD files, written by a variety of composers from around the world. This bloated the game onto a massive 4 floppies, but anyone who's played it will tell you the few minutes spent copying the files to the hard drive was well worth the effort. Each race has its own music that comes up during a conversation, and the pieces are incredibly well chosen. Trusty allies sound noble, despicable foes sound menacing. The weird fungus music is eerie but pleasant to listen to, and downright funky in parts.
There are moments of hilarity, sex, confusion, negotiation, sympathy, and plenty of downright evil. All in all, Star Control 2 has far and away the most engaging and moving storyline of any game I've played. I think that might be because it was designed by two incredibly dedicated guys who wouldn't settle for anything less than excellence. When management wanted to release the game as a shootemup with a bit of storyline, Fred and Paul took an unauthorized jaunt to Alaska and returned with a nearly finished version of the game we now know and love.
The best part is that while the name "star control" is s
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Ahh, did you read the article? Copper sheets are old tech, and that's what you'd want to make an RF shielded room. The product being developed is essentially a band-cut filter, it blocks a specific range of wavelengths while letting others through. The idea being that you can still listen to the radio while foiling wardrivers.
Which means of course that to compromise the 'secure' environment, you need only drop a device inside that communicates with the outside over unblocked frequencies.
I have a feeling the field strength in your home from nearby TV and radio transmitters, not to mention hydrogen-alpha radiation from the universe at large, is much higher than a WLAN would be. Do you live in a shielded box?
While you're right that it's the transmitter's responsibility not to cause interference, I still think it's dangerously irresponsible to keep old machines in service that've proven themselves unreliable in the face of common interference.
You make an excellent point that the WLANs used in hospitals are very low power. Yes, they put APs every few yards down the hallways, so that the portable devices never have to step up their transmit power to reach one.
The solution to the cell phone problem in hospitals is to put base station equipment IN the hospital and run Radiax down the hallways. Alternately, just put cell sites as close to the building as possible. When the phones can reach a tower easily, they'll limit their output power accordingly.
This is also the counterintuitive solution to the weenies who protest when a cellphone company wants to put a tower near the high school. (This frequently happens when an athletic field is getting new lights.) Compare a cordless phone to a moonbounce transmission, which requires more power?
The first mobile phones weren't cellular, there was a single base station in the center of town. The powers used were on the order of 50 watts, so it's a good thing the vehicle-mounted antenna was several feet from the handset. When cellular was developed, it meant you were always within a mile or two of a tower, so the power levels decreased drastically. Phones reduce their output power in response to requests from the tower, because it's easier for the tower to "hear" the faint phones if the near phones aren't screaming.
Shielding the place into an RF hole is counterproductive. In the event that someone forgets to turn their phone off, it'll sit there chirping out its maximum transmit power every once in a while, searching for a tower it can't find. Worse yet, it'll maintain contact with a tower it can just barely hear, only if it really blasts out the RF. This helps nobody.
Just try saturating your cable modem's bandwidth solid for a month or two, and see how the provider likes it. Most DSL providers frown on this too, despite their infrastructure being much better equipped to handle it.
Cable might burst 100x faster than dialup, but it's certainly not capable of sustaining that.
I've never found a dialup ISP who cared one way or the other about usage. Back in the day they might've gotten antsy about connect time, but that's moot now too.
Dialup ISPs also don't care what services you run or what ports you open.
The reason TV sucks is that there's a clear division between broadcaster and viewer. The internet was supposed to change all that, so that anyone can publish, every node is equal to every other node except maybe for speed. Peer to peer is what makes the network so cool. By preventing you from running servers, the cable ISPs (who are mostly owned by big media companies) are turning the internet into TV all over again.
Personally I think it should be illegal to call something "internet access" if it restricts what ports you can open or what services you can run. That's not the real internet.
Using old machines as APs is all well and good, if you have plenty of power and a clean environment. PCs have cooling fans which suck in dust, moisture, and small critters. They also consume a good bit of power, which is an issue if you're running from generators or simply over a very long chain of extension cords.
You're reinventing the wheel here. Building your own kernel with all the features needed to become an AP is simply replicating all the effort expended by the AP vendors. There are also prebuilt configurations (third-party firmwares) for a lot of APs.
Purpose-built APs are smaller and lighter, which makes them easy to nail into trees or whatever for mounting. They're easy to stuff into ziplock bags for weather resistance, because they don't need much cooling. The software is already built.
If you're still interested in building your own equipment, look into hardware from Soekris Engineering and Mikrotik. Hardware that's designed for embedded operation has nice things like serial configuration (ComBIOS), onboard CF slots, simple power supply requirements, and low heat generation. Most such boards also have general purpose I/O lines that you can use for things like door sensors, thermal management, status lights, etc.
Ahh, if you're powering them over ethernet, you don't need a mesh! The advantage of having mesh firmware is that you can power them locally without a wired uplink.
And I was just about to make a post suggesting that we optimize communications to make the bandwidth consumption of these projects easier to manage.
Most folks try to live near their jobs, or at least in the same state. If one spare cycle is the same as another spare cycle, why not have everyone in a particular geographic area work on the project whose servers are in that area? Then if a new project pops up, or if a grid computing task comes along, nearby resources could simply be reassigned.
A universal client, which would run whatever cycle-sucker was appropriate, could make this easy.
I should point out that I didn't even consider uploading anything indecent until I was warned against doing so. What the hell can be indecent about a face? Then I thought about it for a minute. Hey, what celebrity does my ass most resemble? A bit more thinking, and I realized that I could get instantly matched to Darl McBride by uploading a pic of my schlong.
;)
On a more general note, non-face-specific image recognition software would be handy to have for a lot of reasons. I'm envisioning an object recognizer, where you take a picture or scan of, say, a circuit board. It could spit back something like "That's a SB16 ISA PNP, drivers are www.some.where and compatibility info is www.over.there"
Such a system would need a distributed database, I don't think it would make sense to centralize it. With the right moderation system, you might even be able to keep every circuit board from matching a porn site.
...to get my license ;)
:)
On that note, hams and electronics geeks in the midwest should note that it's time for Dayton Hamvention this weekend!
Holy shit, this is cool even if it's very suborbital. I wonder how many years it'll be until the amsat launches are truly amateur-done
Not into a chamber, since containing Little Boy in the back of a rocket would be a bit tricky. Simply firing the material into space behind the rocket should be fine. The trick is firing it accurately enough to actually get a supercritical mass back there.
Imagine Archimedes directing the soldiers to each focus the reflection from his shield on the ship far offshore. Now imagine that they're all holding superaccurate machine guns, each loaded with a belt of refined uranium ammunition. When good ol' Archie gives the order to fire, streams of uranium cruise toward a point. Since the soldiers have impeccable aim, the first few rounds all spend an instant very close to each other. Neutrons do their thing, fission starts, and a few microseconds later, you have Hiroshima in midair.
Now, our intrepid soldiers are somehow able to keep their aim steady despite the flash and shockwave, and the rounds fly straight and true despite the blast. The soldiers keep the triggers held down, each gun dutifully hurling its belt full of fuel into the center of the nuclear fire.
The reaction continues and instead of a single shockwave, the area is subjected to a steady, sustained force comparable to the instantaneous pressure at ground zero during a regular blast.
Now, arrange all these soldiers in a ring around the back of a rocket and have them fire into space. Wave hi to the Alpha Centaurians as you whiz past.
I'd like to see more orbiting telescopes. Hubble's a great tool and yes it should be fixed, but more instruments could only mean more science. Maintaining and upgrading Hubble safely should be a top priority, but developing its replacement should be up there too.
;)
For bonus points, make sure the new one doesn't require corrective lenses upon installation, and make its onboard computers accept input in english and metric units.
Also, how about communications upgrades for the Deep Space Network? We've got so many probes out now, the data downlink schedule is pretty crowded. I wonder if a repeater, in fairly distant orbit, could capture some of those weak signals and retransmit them down to Earth in a stronger, narrower signal? That would open the door to more information from the existing equipment.
At this point, having no better place to write it down, I should mention a weird little idea that my brother and I came up with a while back. It might even be possible with current technology.
One of the most cumbersome parts of Orion was the shock absorption springs and blast plates to smooth out the explosions happening underneath. Nuclear propulsion would be much easier if it could be made continuous.
Is it possible to make a critical mass of fissionable material while it's in vapor state? Consider a set of nozzles aimed at a common point, squirting out a stream of uranium vapor at phenomenal pressure. If the central point gets dense enough, it'll start fission and keep going as long as the gas supply and pressure keep up.
If handling high temperature vapors proves difficult, consider using dust or pellets instead. It would be a bit tricky to propel the particles without suspending them in another gas, but magnetic containment might make it easier. Either way, blasting the fissionable material into the reaction as a continuous stream would make the propulsion smoother and easier to handle. The thrust from such a system would be unbelievably powerful, far beyond even Orion's pulsed output.
Sure, it's well outside anything we've done yet. But I don't see anything here that's considered impossble, simply "absurdly diffcult". Be the first in your star system with a nuclear afterburner!
Oh man. If these guys think Leisure Suit Larry is a "realistic portrayal of sex", I think this joke about the gaming community just makes itself.
A few issues ago, the letters section in 2600 included a peculiar missive from some schoolchildren, attacking 2600 for running an IRC server. They apparently learned in that class that IRC is the tool that perverts use to meet young girls. (Please mod down the idiot who'll take this opportunity to make allegations about Emmanuel.)
/. today. There's no excuse for this kind of "journalism" and worse yet, it's being taught in schools as well. What can we do to fight back?
Anyway, the editorial response was fairly dry, but the reader reactions in the next issue pretty much said what's being said here on
The z50 has integrated 10-bit "business audio". It has a built-in mic, and 1/8" jacks for headphones and mic input. There's a button you can push while the lid is closed and it'll beep back indicating that it's recording, which it will continue to do as long as the button is held down. Next time you open the lid, the OS will flip to the audio recording tool, so you can review your recent notes.
/dev/dsp works under NetBSD on either device.
.11b fallback.
I know the Clio has audio capability but I don't know the specifics. I'm sure you can look them up online. I don't know whether
Both devices have PCMCIA slots and are capable of running any 16-bit (non-cardbus) card for which you can find drivers. Hermes and Prism-2 based wireless cards are both well supported under WinCE and NetBSD. Beware that most 802.11-other-than-B cards are CardBus because they can exceed the speed of a 16-bit PCMCIA bus. If you're connecting to a recently deployed wlan, make sure it supports
The hardware serial ports make it easy to connect a GPS unit, if the long battery life inspires you to make a warwalking setup.
The z50 can accomodate a type-III PCMCIA card, if you want to throw a rotating hard drive in there. Expect a corresponding drop in battery life. The Clio's slot will only take a type-II PCMCIA card. Both devices will fit a type-II CF card, if microdrives are your thing. I don't know if CF wireless cards are supported, but even if so, only the z50 would be able to run them because the Clio's CF slot is internal (under the battery cover).
Both the z50 and the Clio can run while plugged in. The z50's adapter resembles a small laptop brick, while the Clio's adapter is a miniscule wall-wart, the size of half an altoids tin. Charging times from a flat battery to 90% are about 2 hours, somewhat longer if running while charging.
Technically the IBM Workpad Z50 and Vadem Clio (Sharp Mobilon Tripad) are PDAs, but they're clamshell notebook style. The Clio/Tripad has a flip-over screen that turns it into a tablet, but otherwise the specs are quite similar: 131MHz vr141 MIPS CPU, 16 or 32 meg internal storage, CF slot, PCMCIA slot, RS232 port, internal modem.
You'll have to put up with the lack of a USB port, but RS232 works well for small transfers, and flipping CF cards is fast when you want to move a lot of data.
Both the z50 and the Clio/Tripad have big screens with excellent contrast. They share great battery life, about 8 hours on the stock battery if you're not running a power-hungry PCMCIA card. (wireless) Optional double-capacity battery packs are available for the z50 that really do achieve 16 hours. Both can run the hpcmips port of NetBSD quite capably, but for reading text you might as well keep the stock WinCE.
Personally, I'd use the Clio because of the flippable screen. Holding it by the hinge side is very comfortable, and the touchscreen allows easy page-turning even while in tablet mode. The z50 is stuck in a clamshell shape and uses a pointing nipple.
Did I mention that both can be had on eBay for under $200?
That never stopped VLB! Or for that matter, long ISA cards. The original carved-from-stone PC/XT case won't let a full-length ISA card mount in the rightmost slot. Many 8-bit ISA cards from before the 16-bit slot was common actually have an overhang that prevents them from fitting in 16-bit slots. There are also "tall" ISA boards that require a certain amount of clearance above the top of the slot bracket, preventing their use in some cases.
Yes, portable and compact cases present an additional challenge. Most lunchbox machines won't accomodate full-length cards in all their slots, if at all. Many regular desktop cases have trouble with large heatsinks and/or tall RAM modules. The occasional incompatibility is the system builder's problem, and if a manufacturer can make a better product at the expense of a few percent of their users who have an unusually tight case, I hope they do it.
Leaving a PCI slot empty next to the AGP slot is a terrible solution to a problem that would've been solved by simlply turning the AGP board "right side up". Why would you pay for a slot you can't use, instead of just moving the hot component to where it can be cooled more effectively?
One of the problems is that PCI and AGP boards are "upside down" compared to ISA boards. Think component-side versus solder-side. In the case of ISA and PCI boards, it's important not to exceed a certain width because of adjacent slots, but since the AGP slot is always the first one, an AGP board could extend pretty far in the other direction.
Why don't they simply mount the GPU to the other side of the board to allow a much larger heatsink? I think this is either a design tradition or a limitation of the pick-and-place assembly machines, because there's no technical reason not to. I suppose if taken to an extreme, it could lead to physical fit problems in certain cases, but let's not go that far.
Fascinating! I'd always noticed that pattern of perfect teeth in "ethnically obvious" folks, and the ethnicity didn't matter as long as it was strong. Finally having it explained is cool.
;)
I always thought the wisdom teeth were spares, from a time before modern dentistry, when having a few lopsided molars was better than none. The mismatched genes make sense too.
So like everything else in my life, I have my parents to blame for this.
How exactly do they plan to deliver "persistent" ads adjacent to the browser without invasive software? Check out the freefi site, their claim of "no adware" is the most amazing piece of doublethink I've seen outside the legislature.
The sample on their site looks like it's IE-specific and probably easily filtered with Proxomitron. If not, then it's a software wedge a la Netzero, and non-Windows users will be screwed.
The question is, does it interfere with non-port-80 traffic? As long as I can still ssh, there's no problem.
Humans already have a first and second dentition, why not simply encourage a third with hormones or something? You'd have baby teeth, teenage teeth, and over-the-hill teeth. When your third set started coming in, it would officially be time to go buy that Corvette and get a blonde bimbo for the passenger seat.
On the subject of teeth: Dental care is good enough lately that people don't lose enough teeth to make room in the jaw for the rear molars, the "wisdom" teeth that come in later. It seems obvious to me, that we could tell in the early teens whether an individual's wisdom teeth will be in the way, and then simply prevent their growth with a squirt of botox. It would eliminate their costly and painful removal later.
B.G. Micro is sort of like All Electronics in that they carry a ton of surplus electronic junk, download both catalogs and enjoy! Also try American Science and Surplus for a wider variety of tech stuff, toys, labware, and millitary goods.
I've been using for a while now. When a site pulls a coupon code or something, Ben usually updates the listing, and the discussions following each posting are a helpful way to share results. "I had to put in a California ZIP code to view the item, but then I was able to order it shipped to my Michigan address." or "Make sure the CompUSA is within 4 miles of the Best Buy or they won't honor the pricematch. Get a friendly CSR and you should be golden!"
I've stopped using Pricewatch, their listings have become crammed with keyword spam and are all but useless. The "price including shipping" column was a good idea, but the quality of the listings has been terrible lately.
All the CCDs I've dealt with have significant thermal noise, so exposures must be kept short unless the device is kept very cold. Since the point of a pinhole camera is to have the smallest aperture possible, wouldn't you need fairly long exposures to get enough light onto the sensor?
There are tools like Pixelzap that do darkfield subtraction which can help with the pixels that are always noisy, but since thermal noise is random, there's always some to contend with. How would a digital pinhole camera deal with this?
The storyline starts out simply enough: As one of the descendents of a lost human expedition, marooned on a distant planet for generations, your return home is a shock for both sides. Earth along with dozens of other planets has been enslaved by an advancing alien empire bent on galactic domination. They're clever, powerful, and allied with all the right (or wrong) folks.
Thrown into the mix is a third player, the subjugated workers of the master alien race, who spun off and are now committed to simple extermination. Their story is compelling, a tragic tale of conquest, psychic enslavement, triumph, and resolution: Races other than their own cannot be trusted, and must be 'cleansed'.
Some of the other races are positively fascinating, particularly the pyrophilic fungus with the capability to consciously modify its genetic makeup.
As the story progresses, you learn of the interdimensional meddlings of a mysterious race that has apparently had occasional contact with humans for thousands of years. They are aloof but benevolent, referring to themselves as being from "above", and warn you about dealing with the other interdimensionals from "below". But guess whose participation is necessary to win the game!
There are even occasional encounters with space probes, misprogrammed so that they identify every object as a potential source of raw material for replication. This includes you and your ship, so prepare to be broken down into your component elements. Combat is fast-paced and easy to learn, but every ship has its strengths and weaknesses.
The music in the game plays a part in making it so enjoyable, too. While most games of the time were using cheesy FM synthesized music with occasional wave effects, Star Control 2's soundtrack is 4-channel MOD files, written by a variety of composers from around the world. This bloated the game onto a massive 4 floppies, but anyone who's played it will tell you the few minutes spent copying the files to the hard drive was well worth the effort. Each race has its own music that comes up during a conversation, and the pieces are incredibly well chosen. Trusty allies sound noble, despicable foes sound menacing. The weird fungus music is eerie but pleasant to listen to, and downright funky in parts.
There are moments of hilarity, sex, confusion, negotiation, sympathy, and plenty of downright evil. All in all, Star Control 2 has far and away the most engaging and moving storyline of any game I've played. I think that might be because it was designed by two incredibly dedicated guys who wouldn't settle for anything less than excellence. When management wanted to release the game as a shootemup with a bit of storyline, Fred and Paul took an unauthorized jaunt to Alaska and returned with a nearly finished version of the game we now know and love.
The best part is that while the name "star control" is s
Did you mean "as you slow down from v=c to v=0"? Don't get me wrong, v=infinity would be cool, but last I checked, c was finite. :)
And why weren't you at Notacon?