Cell towers have batteries, they just don't last more than a few hours. They don't have generators, because there are simply too many sites to equip. Landline phones all collect into just a few wire centers, which have serious backup power. They'll last most of a day on battery until the generators start, where they have several days of fuel in underground tanks. Unless something prevents the fuel truck from showing up, landline phones are powered essentially forever. (and if the office did go down, the restart process would be tremendous.)
2: not many, you need fairly long unshielded traces to accumulate any decent voltage. Anything connected to the AC power lines would likely be fried, but your average household UPS should protect against most of that. Things with reasonably large antennae would be in sad shape, but your game boy would be fine.
I've heard that some companies are in the habit of equipping their cellular equipment with EMP protectors, but I have no substantial information to back up that claim.
The parent poster is absolutely right. If these people are paying for an absurdly fast link, they'll probably be absurdly pissed when it goes down.
Try to intersperse speed "gee-whiz" moments with tidbits about the reliable infrastructure. Talk about how their whole business rides on this link and you know how important it is. Serve a few gigs of content to 100 clients simultaneously. Show a diagram of the backup power systems that support every piece of equipment involved in the link. Make a remote backup of a big important database. Show how reliability is enhanced by the redundant fiber routes you chose, so there's no single point of failure. Do something that utterly flattens their current connection, and show how it doesn't even faze the new one. Then yank a card while it's running and show how 1:1 failover works.
If you've got a similarly absurd amount of CPU to throw behind this link, set up a cluster of Freenet nodes and watch it all slow to a crawl.;)
The last time I did much in the way of gaming, it was Quake I on a 486. It claimed to require a Pentium, but no speed minimum was given. My 40MHz 486 had a full speed bus, whereas all the Pentia were clock-multiplied. Hence, bandwidth to the VLB video card was faster than any Pentium you could find. The game ran perfectly.
A few months ago I was going through some old backups, and I found an installation of Checkit from that very 486, which had the benchmarks saved. I ran them on my K6-2/300 with a PCI video card and sure enough, the raw characters per second into the video buffer was lower than the 486's score. When I put the AGP card back in, of course, it was no contest.
That same 486 with 8 meg also ran X11 with fvwm95 without hesitation, contrary to popular dire predictions. At best, "system requirements" are a very rough guess, but I think most of them are totally random. If you've got 386-enhanced mode, pretty much everything else is extra.
Sig Requirements: this message must be processed on a turing-complete machine.
That's funny, 3 years ago when I bought a DigitaOS-equipped camera, I found programs that would let me connect an NMEA0183-compliant GPS receiver to the camera's serial port, and embed the coordinates in the JPEG's EXIF header. The concept certainly isn't new.
The problem with Flashpoint is that their SDK is expensive for personal use, and downright absurd for commercial use. The dev kit shouldn't exceed the cost of the device it's for, IMHO. I'd love to see an open OS for a prosumer-grade digital camera.
I bought a Connectix Color Quickcam 2, back before Logitech bought the product line, when such things cost a week's wages. I quickly discovered that the ball could be opened with a paperclip, and after unscrewing the lens housing, the infrared filter could be removed. This gave the unit phenomenal "night vision", and soon I added an IR LED to the camera's housing, powered from the 5v lead in the cable. (Those who attended Rubi-Con 1 probably remember this.)
That's just the beginning of the fun. After opening the Quickcam case, you'll find that the lens barrel unscrews completely, exposing the bare CCD. This makes it easy to mount in all sorts of optical projects. Mount it in your favorite telescope for astral or terrestrial viewing. Some folks have even placed negatives and microfilm directly against the CCD for contact imaging. I haven't personally played with a microscope application but it should work just fine for that too.
A bit of quick Googling will turn up plenty of Quickcam modification links. But, why are webcams an option if you need Composite or S-video output?
Realnetworks may be trying to change their spots, but I think it's too late, most of us already hate them too much.
Now, if we all pressure them to add a beowulf cluster of ogg vorbis streaming petrified penis-birds, nah... nevermind.
Antenna mounting and other roadtrip advice.
on
802.11 for Vehicles?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
First, the connector on the Lucent/Avaya/Orinoco/Proxim equipment is known as "MC" or MC-Card". Cisco and others use MMCX, which is just a hair bigger and slightly differently shaped. IIRC, the Senao card uses MMCX, and you should consider it for your trip because it has higher output power and better receive sensitivity than any of the others.
Second, yeah the card's integrated antenna is crap. Anything external that's even close to the right band will do better. I disagree that external mounting is a big deal. For stumbling, an omnidirectional antenna is good because you just mount it and leave it. But for using hotspots at truck stops and such, you can manually position a higher gain antenna for best signal. The directionality will help a lot if you're at the edge of the parking lot, or if you decide to surf from the Flying J while parked at the TravelAmerica. Obviously, it's easier to aim an antenna if it's inside the vehicle with you. This also helps minimize losses from long antenna cables. I'm not worried about metallic window tint on your Vanagon interfering with the signal.:)
For antenna designs, the cylindrical waveguide cantenna can't be beat for simplicity, but it's never wise to point weird-looking tubes out the window of a vehicle, moving or otherwise. (Print out a copy of this Ask Slashdot posting, or something else to indicate that you're nonmalicious in the event that you get questioned.) I can't emphasize this enough, our society is pretty paranoid already, but the police are trained to recognize potential threats, and a scruffy dude pointing a metal tube at things is pretty high on the grab-your-gun index.
Trevor Marshall's Bi-Quad antenna design is absurdly compact, reasonably directional, and very easy to build. Marty's instructions clarify a lot of the things Trevor didn't show in detail. If you have an old double-wide jewel case around, you can build the little biquad into it for a totally nonthreatening appearance.
As for extended roadtrip suggestions: Consider a battery isolator and dual-battery setup, if it's within your budget. I was in the market for such a unit recently, and Hellroaring seems to have the best-designed product with a ton of helpful app notes and install guides.
If most of your portable gear runs from AA's like mine does, you might be pleased to know that many of the recent NiMh chargers run from a wall-wart, instead of building the entire power supply into the charger unit. Presumably, this makes the UL listing process easier by moving the mains supply out of the unit, to a transformer that can be separately listed and doesn't need to be re-qualified each time the charger gets revised. It benefits you, because the wall-wart steps down to 12 volts and the charger takes it from there. Ergo, it's dirt simple to make a car cord for such a charger, and it's more efficient than running through an inverter.
While on the subject of vehicle DC wiring, check out the Powerpole connector. It's become the standard in the amateur radio community for 12 volt supplies, because lighter sockets suck. Powerpoles are genderless, polarized, and very reliable if crimped correctly in the first place. Crimp+solder is even better.
If you're the paranoid/prepared type, ghost your laptop's basic setup onto a spare drive and keep it (wrapped in antistatic foam) elsewhere in the vehicle. You don't want to be stuck 1800 miles from home with a crashed drive in one hand, freshly reinstalled laptop in the other, trying to figure out how to download the drivers for your wireless card when said card is your only means of internet access.
Good luck, have fun, drive safe, and post some pictures from your trip!
What a fascinating idea. I used to set my SSID to something odd while driving around just on the off chance that someone would notice it.
Serve DHCP, intercept all HTTP requests, and have fun. Maybe an IRC server too, along with an instant Java client for the visitors who don't have one installed already.
On more than one occasion, I've used my laptop and Nextel Packetstream data service to provide a local 802.11b hotspot where none existed. It's dialup speed, but adequate for my friends to check their email or whatever. Who needs an AP when ad-hoc mode works so well?
...must have something up their sleeve. Everything Real has ever done has been user-hostile, with the express aim of taking control of your computer away from you.
Without some absurdly good justification (a new board of directors with Mother Theresa as chairperson?), I can't believe that Real would do anything "open" without an ulterior motive.
I came across this format years ago and had to do some digging to find it again, it seems revolutionary but obscure:
One of the main technologies behind
DjVu is the ability to separate an image into a background layer (i.e., paper texture and pictures) and foreground layer (text and line drawings). Traditional image compression techniques are fine for simple photographs, but they drastically degrade sharp color transitions between adjacent highly contrasted areas - which is why they render type so poorly. By separating the text from the backgrounds, DjVu can keep the text at high resolution (thereby preserving the sharp edges and maximizing legibility), while at the same time compressing the backgrounds and pictures at lower resolution with a wavelet-based compression technique.
As much as many geeks like to claim form follows function, a lot of us are closet artists. Sure, that extra fan keeps your machine cooler, but admit it, the window was just for show!
The first gaming center I ever visited was Dig' Ops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They're located downstairs in one of those little hole-in-the-wall spaces you find in an old city. It was less than brightly lit inside, which seems camp now, but it honestly added to the atmosphere then. You see, the dim lighting made it just a bit hard to discern the strange shapes of the black metal cube that dominated the center of the room.
The cube had people sitting in it. Four on the bottom, and four mostly on top. The design supported stairs, monitors, keyboards, mouse shelves, and the most interesting seats I've ever experienced. Down the central column were the computers and all the wiring for the audio comm system. The whole thing was made of black iron pipe, and it just exuded an intense feel of industrial tech.
I've never been much of a gamer, but I'd go there just because it had such an amazingly cool atmosphere. I ended up playing more than my share of Action Quake because of it. The midnight-to-whenever time block, which had to be specially reserved, was my usual excuse to indulge in way too much caffeine.
At some point, D. Ops decided to dismantle the cube and replace it with much more mundane seating arrangements based on aluminum channel frames. The games were still fun but I couldn't find an excuse just to show up and play. I haven't been back in a year or two so I don't know what they've been up to lately.
Lately, I've been visiting LanLords in Howell, Michigan. They've also got an odd sort of interior design, with the seating "cubicles" made of ribbed steel sheet material. The machines are well equipped, and Sennheiser headsets make for an immensely comfortable gaming experience. I'm mostly there for the people rather than the games, though. The geek running the show picks the muzak, which is quiet enough that it's not distracting once you have the headphones on, but it keeps things interesting if you're just hanging out.
Digital Ops started out with an isolated network, but they added an internet connection before too long. Lanlords has had a fast pipe from day one, but some games still run locally to keep the pings absurdly low. Once in a while, the two centers will hold us-vs-them games across the internet, and the sense of local comradery is intense. If you're in the area, I highly encourage you to stop in.
Both places do a number of things right: Keep a fridge well stocked with various caffeinated and unleaded beverages. Let newcomers wander around for a while and watch before trying to turn them into customers. Wait for a break in the action before trying to organize a collective pizza order. Strictly enforce the no nose-picking rule.
The biggest factor that will keep people coming back to your center is the hardest one to control: If the "regular" gang is friendly, or if it's hostile to newbies, how do you encourage or change that behavior?
Vipower makes a ton of products that look like they might suit your needs. Keeping the drives in the little "mobile rack" caddies is probably a good idea, since exposed circuit boards left laying around the office are just asking for Ms. Mohair Sweater to come touch them.
As has been pointed out, it's possible to stop IDE devices and disconnect them with the machine on, but this is like playing Russian Roulette. In a spec designed for hot swap, the ground and power connections mate first and disconnect last, to keep the signal connections from carrying any initial current surges. IDE/ATA has no such provision, and hot matings/removals might damage your drive and/or controller. (The same goes for PS/2 keyboards and mice! Just because it works the first 100 times doesn't mean you won't fry your motherboard the 101st time, when the connector goes in a bit sideways.)
Serial ATA on the other hand, does allow for hot swapping, and USB is obviously designed for it. If you can get away with using exclusively SATA drives, check out some of the Supermicro drive racks. If you're building your own RAID system, these things are the way to go. I got a Supermicro server case second-hand and have been extremely impressed with the thoughtfulness of the design. Well-engineered products are rare and special, especially in this cheaper-sooner-cheaper industry.
With a WD 120 gig drive in an ADSTech external USB2 case (based on the Cypress ISD-300A chipset), connected to 98se, I've experienced the same issues.
Every once in a while, the drive will spin down most of the way then spin back up, down and up, click click, down and up, and the system will complain that I removed the volume while it was in use. This sometimes happens almost continuously, and sometimes it'll behave perfectly for hours without a problem.
Then something even weirder happened: Before formatting my desktop drive, I backed up all my important stuff to the external 120 gig. After reinstalling the OS and drivers from ADStech.com, it wouldn't see the external drive. The device was connected, but it was seen as a 48 gig drive with no partition table. Connected to my dad's desktop, it was 120 gig and all my data was on it. Go figure.
So, I connected the 120 gig drive straight to the controller on a motherboard recent enough to recognize it, and it shows up as having no partition table. But, popping it back into the external case, dad's machine still recognized it perfectly. Wtf?
So far, USB storage has failed to impress me.
All this mess with sockets and chipsets is silly.
on
AMD's Roadmap revealed
·
· Score: 1
Since motherboards and CPUs upgrade in lock-step anyway, there's no point in leaving them as separate components. What we need is a simple passive backplane design.
ATX was a huge step backwards in that it integrated the serial, parallel, PS/2, and other ports onto the motherboard, making all these connectors and their associated controllers "disposable" with every motherboard upgrade.
Put the CPU, caches, memory controller, and RAM sockets on a simple card that plugs into the backplane. This will be the only piece you upgrade regularly.
Then put the drive controllers, USB controllers, system health monitoring, and other miscellany on a "super i/o" card, covered with connectors. This piece won't get thrown out when you change processors.
What do we end up with? Getting a new CPU will result in replacing only those components that need replacing, keeping a pound of other components out of the landfill.
Manufacturers could still charge the regular amount for a CPU/carrierboard, because that's what people are used to paying. It would involve less design and debugging, because all the perhipheral crap is on a separate board. It would mean more choice for consumers, because you could get whatever CPU you want, coupled with whatever I/O board you want.
It's too bad the Panasonic W2 isn't technically part of the Toughbook line. Yes it's a little more durable than the average craptop but it's not going to stop bullets like the more rugged machines.
I don't understand why people pay a bunch of money for a delicate little machine, then act surprised when it breaks. You wouldn't buy a wristwatch that wasn't built to take a little abuse, would you? You wouldn't drive a car that couldn't handle rain, would you? So why buy a portable computer that isn't durable enough to leave the house?
I'm more than willing to sacrifice a bit of power for a lot of durability. I don't do anything on my laptop that would need a gigahertz chip anyway. Now if they could just improve the battery life a little, I'd gladly carry a few extra pounds if the thing would run as long between charges as my cell phone. Most laptops are junk.
The SMC91C92 controller chip is fairly common, and googling for it found several references to cards based on it. Does "Focus EtherLAN II" mean anything to you? Take a look at this post from 1996 as a starting point.
The datasheet for the SMC91cXXX family is here in case that helps at all.
The barrier to entry kept the riff-raff out...
on
Best BBS Memories?
·
· Score: 1
That's a great way to put it, and boy could the internet use some de-riff-raffing. I remember the first time I heard a modem connect tone on a radio advertisement. My jaw dropped, and my train of thought went something like this:
"Wtf? Do they expect their listeners to know what that sound means?"
"Hmm, maybe this is getting big enough that they do."
"Oh well. There goes the neighborhood."
BBS parties were great! All my friends' parents thought I was the "good kid", so they wouldn't get to go to parties unless I was going too. Oh man...
Upgrading from 2400 to 14400 was like trading in the Schwinn for a Ferrari. I waited 'til the proprietary 19.2's came out, so the prices on the 14.4's dropped into my range.
Zmodem was my god, and Bluewave came in a close second. HSLink came on the scene too late to be useful, but chatting with the sysop while uploading a file earned me better-than-average access on at least one board that I can remember.
RIPscrip' was for weenies that couldn't handle a text interface. I still feel that way about Flash.
The YDKJ series includes special features for all sorts of holidays and anniversaries. It also checks the system clock, and will greet you with things like "weeeeelcome to the insomniac edition of you don't know jack!"
It doesn't draw too much power, it's just too cute to bulk itself up with a battery compartment. The lithium polymer design is squishy and can squeeze in almost anywhere. If they'd made it run on AA's like everything else in the world, it wouldn't have looked the same.
The iPod idea sucks, and I've avoided buying one because of it. You mean when it's drained, I have to plug it in for several hours? I can't just swap in some charged batteries and keep going? Screw that!
The AA is the dominant power standard and will remain so for the forseeable future. Most of my gear runs from AA's and I like it that way. I keep a charger and a spare set in my car, and I'm never without power. This includes my camera, GPS unit, radios, flashlights, and other stuff. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Cell phone makers should be shot for not building their products around AA's like every other portable device in the world. Sure, they make extra money from selling batteries, and the markup on them is astronomical. I'd gladly pay extra for a phone if it used the same AA's that I already run my life on, because it's not about money, it's about versatility. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap in a new pair and keep going?
I wish there were a good solution for laptops. They draw too much power for NiMh AA cells, I mean do you really want to plunk 20 of them into the compartment? The 18650 lithium-ion cell is overwhelmingly standard in the industry, and if you look at a dozen different laptop batteries you can see how they're all designed around the same size of cylindrical cell. Because lithium is so touchy though, they must always be kept behind a protection circuit. There's an excellent book called Batteries in a Portable World that goes into a lot detail. (it's free online after giving your email addy)
It'd still be nice to see standard batteries for laptops. Again, I'd pay extra for a laptop if I knew there'd always be abundant replacements for it instead of having to hunt down the exact replacement several years later. Ideas?
Keep in mind, there are two "families" of rack mounting, each with its own history and traditions.
The telco industry has been mounting equipment in "relay racks" for almost a century. You don't find many relays in them now, but back when the Western Electric Company (WECo) was making all the equipment, most of what they made were relays. Telco racks are 23 inches wide and built open, so the rack channels stand vertically and you can reach around them on all sides. They have screw holes on 1-inch centers, tapped for 12-24 screws.
Equipment mounted in "telco" racks is almost always middle-mounted. The mounting ears or flanges are located about halfway back on the chassis, meaning that the center of gravity is almost in the same plane as the rack face. This means the only force on the screws is shear load, against which they're tremendously strong. You can stand on telco gear when it's rack-mounted.
Some time after the telco industry had all this worked out, the wheel got reinvented. Deejays like to mount their mixers and effects processors in racks to manage the mess, and despite a lot of commonality between old telco gear*, they settled on racks that were 19 inches wide instead of 23. Along came the EIA to standardize this, specifying a screw thread of 10-32 and a staggered hole spacing of 1 1/4" alternating with 1/2". This gives us the "1U" size of 1 3/4". Many EIA racks don't even have threaded holes, instead they have square punchings into which you insert a "cage nut", which is easily replaced if you manage to strip the threads.
(* Many patch panels used in audio production are set up with the "longframe" or "bantam" plugs, which originated as WECo plugs on switchboards and are still used today in DS-1 patching applications.)
Mounting 19" equipment in a 23" rack would be simple enough with adapter ears. They can even compensate for the fact that most 19" equipment expects EIA hole spacing, and 23" racks invariably have WECo hole spacing. The damning difference is mid-mounting versus flush-mounting. Deejays want all their buttons and knobs to form one seamless control panel, so all their equipment has mounting ears right up at the front, with the face of the equipment. This works really well for audio gear, which is usually fairly light and doesn't stick more than a few inches behind the face of the rack.
When you try to mount a server or a UPS flush with the face of the rack, you quickly discover the mechanical limits of the screws. Because most co-lo outfits charge per vertical unit of rack space, there's a lot of pressure to make your equipment as flat as possible. This moves the center of gravity farther and farther back, while shortening the amount of rack flange over which the force will be distributed. If you get that UPS to hang there, don't even breathe on it, much less use the back edge as a stepstool while climbing into the cable tray superstructure.
When the option is available, flush-mounted equipment should always have a rear support too. This is the case with many rackmount servers, which include sliding rails for mounting. The back end of the rail must be screwed into a second rack flange, which means your cabinet needs two sets of upright channels.
For mounting deejay equipment, 19" flushmount makes sense. For mounting huge switching equipment, 23" midmount is clearly a better idea. For anything in between, it mostly depends on what options your equipment gives you. I vastly prefer mid-mounting when it's available, because it makes for a much stronger setup when all is said and done.
There are plenty of other differences between telco equipment and datacomm equipment, despite the superficial similarities. I won't get into the details of DC power, grounding, redundancy and reliability, heat dissipation, alarming, or any of the myriad "requirements" that equipment must satisfy before being located in a telco office. Suffice it to say: Datacomm equipment is happy on a desk but sometimes gets bolted into a rack. Telco equipment was designed for it.
Although, next year we might have to add an Xbox to the suite of hardware being shot at during our Independence Day celebrations.
Last year, we decided to find out just how tough a Toughbook is. Turns out they'll stop small handgun rounds with no problem. A.22 just leaves a dent, and the 9mm rounds went through the first layer of the screen casing but not the rest of the machine. The.410 shotgun left some cool marks in the paint. Anything larger went right through.
The question is, did the hard drive in the Xbox survive?
Phone lines are twisted, so they don't tend to radiate much of the radio energy that's poured into them. HomePNA kicks out some noise but it's nothing compared to BPL.
Power lines are widely spaced, unevenly spaced, and not twisted. From the perspective of a radio signal, power lines are not transmission lines: they're antennae! BPL also works over much longer distances than HomePNA, meaning that the power levels involved are much larger. Dumping tons of RF onto the power grid will simply turn it into a massive radio jammer.
John Q. Public should be worried. In times of civic emergency, ham radio operators need all the spectrum they can get. Find a local amateur radio club and attend a meeting -- you'd be surprised how much stuff goes on behind the scenes. Hams are hobbyists, refining their equipment and honing their skills "for fun", but then swinging into action during emergencies to maintain communications when other methods fail.
Destroying a large chunk of the radio spectrum will not help anyone. BPL is technically inferior to cable and DSL, and it's only being hyped by those who see opporunity for profit without regard for technical or civic responsibilities.
I've suggested this idea before, even submitted it as an Ask Rejectiondot. I'm glad to see others have had the same thought.
The important thing is to generate responses that waste their time: Tie up their customer service lines. Place and cancel orders. Check your bill carefully and do chargebacks for anything that's not cancelled. If they get too many chargebacks, their merchant accounts won't last long.
For spam that simply gathers names that get forwarded to "reputable" businesses (who swear none of their agents are spammers), fair is fair. A barrage of time-wasting calls will encourage them to be more careful about who they accept leads from in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, Notacon is also taking place in Ohio next month, and for some reason, it got stuck on developers instead of the front page.
Does Slashdot need a section for this stuff?
Cell towers have batteries, they just don't last more than a few hours. They don't have generators, because there are simply too many sites to equip. Landline phones all collect into just a few wire centers, which have serious backup power. They'll last most of a day on battery until the generators start, where they have several days of fuel in underground tanks. Unless something prevents the fuel truck from showing up, landline phones are powered essentially forever. (and if the office did go down, the restart process would be tremendous.)
2: not many, you need fairly long unshielded traces to accumulate any decent voltage. Anything connected to the AC power lines would likely be fried, but your average household UPS should protect against most of that. Things with reasonably large antennae would be in sad shape, but your game boy would be fine.
I've heard that some companies are in the habit of equipping their cellular equipment with EMP protectors, but I have no substantial information to back up that claim.
Pr---e isn't called that anymore, he's just:
O(+>
So maybe Lin---s needs to change their name to a glyph to avoid all this mess. How about this:
`._____
`.L_|_|
`.L_|_|
The parent poster is absolutely right. If these people are paying for an absurdly fast link, they'll probably be absurdly pissed when it goes down.
;)
Try to intersperse speed "gee-whiz" moments with tidbits about the reliable infrastructure. Talk about how their whole business rides on this link and you know how important it is. Serve a few gigs of content to 100 clients simultaneously. Show a diagram of the backup power systems that support every piece of equipment involved in the link. Make a remote backup of a big important database. Show how reliability is enhanced by the redundant fiber routes you chose, so there's no single point of failure. Do something that utterly flattens their current connection, and show how it doesn't even faze the new one. Then yank a card while it's running and show how 1:1 failover works.
If you've got a similarly absurd amount of CPU to throw behind this link, set up a cluster of Freenet nodes and watch it all slow to a crawl.
The last time I did much in the way of gaming, it was Quake I on a 486. It claimed to require a Pentium, but no speed minimum was given. My 40MHz 486 had a full speed bus, whereas all the Pentia were clock-multiplied. Hence, bandwidth to the VLB video card was faster than any Pentium you could find. The game ran perfectly.
A few months ago I was going through some old backups, and I found an installation of Checkit from that very 486, which had the benchmarks saved. I ran them on my K6-2/300 with a PCI video card and sure enough, the raw characters per second into the video buffer was lower than the 486's score. When I put the AGP card back in, of course, it was no contest.
That same 486 with 8 meg also ran X11 with fvwm95 without hesitation, contrary to popular dire predictions. At best, "system requirements" are a very rough guess, but I think most of them are totally random. If you've got 386-enhanced mode, pretty much everything else is extra.
Sig Requirements: this message must be processed on a turing-complete machine.
That's funny, 3 years ago when I bought a DigitaOS-equipped camera, I found programs that would let me connect an NMEA0183-compliant GPS receiver to the camera's serial port, and embed the coordinates in the JPEG's EXIF header. The concept certainly isn't new.
The problem with Flashpoint is that their SDK is expensive for personal use, and downright absurd for commercial use. The dev kit shouldn't exceed the cost of the device it's for, IMHO. I'd love to see an open OS for a prosumer-grade digital camera.
I bought a Connectix Color Quickcam 2, back before Logitech bought the product line, when such things cost a week's wages. I quickly discovered that the ball could be opened with a paperclip, and after unscrewing the lens housing, the infrared filter could be removed. This gave the unit phenomenal "night vision", and soon I added an IR LED to the camera's housing, powered from the 5v lead in the cable. (Those who attended Rubi-Con 1 probably remember this.)
That's just the beginning of the fun. After opening the Quickcam case, you'll find that the lens barrel unscrews completely, exposing the bare CCD. This makes it easy to mount in all sorts of optical projects. Mount it in your favorite telescope for astral or terrestrial viewing. Some folks have even placed negatives and microfilm directly against the CCD for contact imaging. I haven't personally played with a microscope application but it should work just fine for that too.
A bit of quick Googling will turn up plenty of Quickcam modification links. But, why are webcams an option if you need Composite or S-video output?
Realnetworks may be trying to change their spots, but I think it's too late, most of us already hate them too much.
Now, if we all pressure them to add a beowulf cluster of ogg vorbis streaming petrified penis-birds, nah... nevermind.
First, the connector on the Lucent/Avaya/Orinoco/Proxim equipment is known as "MC" or MC-Card". Cisco and others use MMCX, which is just a hair bigger and slightly differently shaped. IIRC, the Senao card uses MMCX, and you should consider it for your trip because it has higher output power and better receive sensitivity than any of the others.
:)
Second, yeah the card's integrated antenna is crap. Anything external that's even close to the right band will do better. I disagree that external mounting is a big deal. For stumbling, an omnidirectional antenna is good because you just mount it and leave it. But for using hotspots at truck stops and such, you can manually position a higher gain antenna for best signal. The directionality will help a lot if you're at the edge of the parking lot, or if you decide to surf from the Flying J while parked at the TravelAmerica. Obviously, it's easier to aim an antenna if it's inside the vehicle with you. This also helps minimize losses from long antenna cables. I'm not worried about metallic window tint on your Vanagon interfering with the signal.
For antenna designs, the cylindrical waveguide cantenna can't be beat for simplicity, but it's never wise to point weird-looking tubes out the window of a vehicle, moving or otherwise. (Print out a copy of this Ask Slashdot posting, or something else to indicate that you're nonmalicious in the event that you get questioned.) I can't emphasize this enough, our society is pretty paranoid already, but the police are trained to recognize potential threats, and a scruffy dude pointing a metal tube at things is pretty high on the grab-your-gun index.
Trevor Marshall's Bi-Quad antenna design is absurdly compact, reasonably directional, and very easy to build. Marty's instructions clarify a lot of the things Trevor didn't show in detail. If you have an old double-wide jewel case around, you can build the little biquad into it for a totally nonthreatening appearance.
As for extended roadtrip suggestions: Consider a battery isolator and dual-battery setup, if it's within your budget. I was in the market for such a unit recently, and Hellroaring seems to have the best-designed product with a ton of helpful app notes and install guides.
If most of your portable gear runs from AA's like mine does, you might be pleased to know that many of the recent NiMh chargers run from a wall-wart, instead of building the entire power supply into the charger unit. Presumably, this makes the UL listing process easier by moving the mains supply out of the unit, to a transformer that can be separately listed and doesn't need to be re-qualified each time the charger gets revised. It benefits you, because the wall-wart steps down to 12 volts and the charger takes it from there. Ergo, it's dirt simple to make a car cord for such a charger, and it's more efficient than running through an inverter.
While on the subject of vehicle DC wiring, check out the Powerpole connector. It's become the standard in the amateur radio community for 12 volt supplies, because lighter sockets suck. Powerpoles are genderless, polarized, and very reliable if crimped correctly in the first place. Crimp+solder is even better.
If you're the paranoid/prepared type, ghost your laptop's basic setup onto a spare drive and keep it (wrapped in antistatic foam) elsewhere in the vehicle. You don't want to be stuck 1800 miles from home with a crashed drive in one hand, freshly reinstalled laptop in the other, trying to figure out how to download the drivers for your wireless card when said card is your only means of internet access.
Good luck, have fun, drive safe, and post some pictures from your trip!
What a fascinating idea. I used to set my SSID to something odd while driving around just on the off chance that someone would notice it.
Serve DHCP, intercept all HTTP requests, and have fun. Maybe an IRC server too, along with an instant Java client for the visitors who don't have one installed already.
On more than one occasion, I've used my laptop and Nextel Packetstream data service to provide a local 802.11b hotspot where none existed. It's dialup speed, but adequate for my friends to check their email or whatever. Who needs an AP when ad-hoc mode works so well?
...must have something up their sleeve. Everything Real has ever done has been user-hostile, with the express aim of taking control of your computer away from you.
Without some absurdly good justification (a new board of directors with Mother Theresa as chairperson?), I can't believe that Real would do anything "open" without an ulterior motive.
As much as many geeks like to claim form follows function, a lot of us are closet artists. Sure, that extra fan keeps your machine cooler, but admit it, the window was just for show!
The first gaming center I ever visited was Dig' Ops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They're located downstairs in one of those little hole-in-the-wall spaces you find in an old city. It was less than brightly lit inside, which seems camp now, but it honestly added to the atmosphere then. You see, the dim lighting made it just a bit hard to discern the strange shapes of the black metal cube that dominated the center of the room.
The cube had people sitting in it. Four on the bottom, and four mostly on top. The design supported stairs, monitors, keyboards, mouse shelves, and the most interesting seats I've ever experienced. Down the central column were the computers and all the wiring for the audio comm system. The whole thing was made of black iron pipe, and it just exuded an intense feel of industrial tech.
I've never been much of a gamer, but I'd go there just because it had such an amazingly cool atmosphere. I ended up playing more than my share of Action Quake because of it. The midnight-to-whenever time block, which had to be specially reserved, was my usual excuse to indulge in way too much caffeine.
At some point, D. Ops decided to dismantle the cube and replace it with much more mundane seating arrangements based on aluminum channel frames. The games were still fun but I couldn't find an excuse just to show up and play. I haven't been back in a year or two so I don't know what they've been up to lately.
Lately, I've been visiting LanLords in Howell, Michigan. They've also got an odd sort of interior design, with the seating "cubicles" made of ribbed steel sheet material. The machines are well equipped, and Sennheiser headsets make for an immensely comfortable gaming experience. I'm mostly there for the people rather than the games, though. The geek running the show picks the muzak, which is quiet enough that it's not distracting once you have the headphones on, but it keeps things interesting if you're just hanging out.
Digital Ops started out with an isolated network, but they added an internet connection before too long. Lanlords has had a fast pipe from day one, but some games still run locally to keep the pings absurdly low. Once in a while, the two centers will hold us-vs-them games across the internet, and the sense of local comradery is intense. If you're in the area, I highly encourage you to stop in.
Both places do a number of things right: Keep a fridge well stocked with various caffeinated and unleaded beverages. Let newcomers wander around for a while and watch before trying to turn them into customers. Wait for a break in the action before trying to organize a collective pizza order. Strictly enforce the no nose-picking rule.
The biggest factor that will keep people coming back to your center is the hardest one to control: If the "regular" gang is friendly, or if it's hostile to newbies, how do you encourage or change that behavior?
Good luck!
Vipower makes a ton of products that look like they might suit your needs. Keeping the drives in the little "mobile rack" caddies is probably a good idea, since exposed circuit boards left laying around the office are just asking for Ms. Mohair Sweater to come touch them.
As has been pointed out, it's possible to stop IDE devices and disconnect them with the machine on, but this is like playing Russian Roulette. In a spec designed for hot swap, the ground and power connections mate first and disconnect last, to keep the signal connections from carrying any initial current surges. IDE/ATA has no such provision, and hot matings/removals might damage your drive and/or controller. (The same goes for PS/2 keyboards and mice! Just because it works the first 100 times doesn't mean you won't fry your motherboard the 101st time, when the connector goes in a bit sideways.)
Serial ATA on the other hand, does allow for hot swapping, and USB is obviously designed for it. If you can get away with using exclusively SATA drives, check out some of the Supermicro drive racks. If you're building your own RAID system, these things are the way to go. I got a Supermicro server case second-hand and have been extremely impressed with the thoughtfulness of the design. Well-engineered products are rare and special, especially in this cheaper-sooner-cheaper industry.
With a WD 120 gig drive in an ADSTech external USB2 case (based on the Cypress ISD-300A chipset), connected to 98se, I've experienced the same issues.
Every once in a while, the drive will spin down most of the way then spin back up, down and up, click click, down and up, and the system will complain that I removed the volume while it was in use. This sometimes happens almost continuously, and sometimes it'll behave perfectly for hours without a problem.
Then something even weirder happened: Before formatting my desktop drive, I backed up all my important stuff to the external 120 gig. After reinstalling the OS and drivers from ADStech.com, it wouldn't see the external drive. The device was connected, but it was seen as a 48 gig drive with no partition table. Connected to my dad's desktop, it was 120 gig and all my data was on it. Go figure.
So, I connected the 120 gig drive straight to the controller on a motherboard recent enough to recognize it, and it shows up as having no partition table. But, popping it back into the external case, dad's machine still recognized it perfectly. Wtf?
So far, USB storage has failed to impress me.
Since motherboards and CPUs upgrade in lock-step anyway, there's no point in leaving them as separate components. What we need is a simple passive backplane design.
ATX was a huge step backwards in that it integrated the serial, parallel, PS/2, and other ports onto the motherboard, making all these connectors and their associated controllers "disposable" with every motherboard upgrade.
Put the CPU, caches, memory controller, and RAM sockets on a simple card that plugs into the backplane. This will be the only piece you upgrade regularly.
Then put the drive controllers, USB controllers, system health monitoring, and other miscellany on a "super i/o" card, covered with connectors. This piece won't get thrown out when you change processors.
What do we end up with? Getting a new CPU will result in replacing only those components that need replacing, keeping a pound of other components out of the landfill.
Manufacturers could still charge the regular amount for a CPU/carrierboard, because that's what people are used to paying. It would involve less design and debugging, because all the perhipheral crap is on a separate board. It would mean more choice for consumers, because you could get whatever CPU you want, coupled with whatever I/O board you want.
What's wrong with this?
It's too bad the Panasonic W2 isn't technically part of the Toughbook line. Yes it's a little more durable than the average craptop but it's not going to stop bullets like the more rugged machines.
I don't understand why people pay a bunch of money for a delicate little machine, then act surprised when it breaks. You wouldn't buy a wristwatch that wasn't built to take a little abuse, would you? You wouldn't drive a car that couldn't handle rain, would you? So why buy a portable computer that isn't durable enough to leave the house?
I'm more than willing to sacrifice a bit of power for a lot of durability. I don't do anything on my laptop that would need a gigahertz chip anyway. Now if they could just improve the battery life a little, I'd gladly carry a few extra pounds if the thing would run as long between charges as my cell phone. Most laptops are junk.
The SMC91C92 controller chip is fairly common, and googling for it found several references to cards based on it. Does "Focus EtherLAN II" mean anything to you? Take a look at this post from 1996 as a starting point.
:)
The datasheet for the SMC91cXXX family is here in case that helps at all.
P.S. I've never opened up a Mac.
P.P.S. Unless gravitationally-induced acceleration counts.
That's a great way to put it, and boy could the internet use some de-riff-raffing. I remember the first time I heard a modem connect tone on a radio advertisement. My jaw dropped, and my train of thought went something like this:
"Wtf? Do they expect their listeners to know what that sound means?"
"Hmm, maybe this is getting big enough that they do."
"Oh well. There goes the neighborhood."
BBS parties were great! All my friends' parents thought I was the "good kid", so they wouldn't get to go to parties unless I was going too. Oh man...
Upgrading from 2400 to 14400 was like trading in the Schwinn for a Ferrari. I waited 'til the proprietary 19.2's came out, so the prices on the 14.4's dropped into my range.
Zmodem was my god, and Bluewave came in a close second. HSLink came on the scene too late to be useful, but chatting with the sysop while uploading a file earned me better-than-average access on at least one board that I can remember.
RIPscrip' was for weenies that couldn't handle a text interface. I still feel that way about Flash.
The YDKJ series includes special features for all sorts of holidays and anniversaries. It also checks the system clock, and will greet you with things like "weeeeelcome to the insomniac edition of you don't know jack!"
It doesn't draw too much power, it's just too cute to bulk itself up with a battery compartment. The lithium polymer design is squishy and can squeeze in almost anywhere. If they'd made it run on AA's like everything else in the world, it wouldn't have looked the same.
The iPod idea sucks, and I've avoided buying one because of it. You mean when it's drained, I have to plug it in for several hours? I can't just swap in some charged batteries and keep going? Screw that!
The AA is the dominant power standard and will remain so for the forseeable future. Most of my gear runs from AA's and I like it that way. I keep a charger and a spare set in my car, and I'm never without power. This includes my camera, GPS unit, radios, flashlights, and other stuff. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Cell phone makers should be shot for not building their products around AA's like every other portable device in the world. Sure, they make extra money from selling batteries, and the markup on them is astronomical. I'd gladly pay extra for a phone if it used the same AA's that I already run my life on, because it's not about money, it's about versatility. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap in a new pair and keep going?
I wish there were a good solution for laptops. They draw too much power for NiMh AA cells, I mean do you really want to plunk 20 of them into the compartment? The 18650 lithium-ion cell is overwhelmingly standard in the industry, and if you look at a dozen different laptop batteries you can see how they're all designed around the same size of cylindrical cell. Because lithium is so touchy though, they must always be kept behind a protection circuit. There's an excellent book called Batteries in a Portable World that goes into a lot detail. (it's free online after giving your email addy)
It'd still be nice to see standard batteries for laptops. Again, I'd pay extra for a laptop if I knew there'd always be abundant replacements for it instead of having to hunt down the exact replacement several years later. Ideas?
Batteries suck. I can't wait for Mr. Fusion!
Keep in mind, there are two "families" of rack mounting, each with its own history and traditions.
The telco industry has been mounting equipment in "relay racks" for almost a century. You don't find many relays in them now, but back when the Western Electric Company (WECo) was making all the equipment, most of what they made were relays. Telco racks are 23 inches wide and built open, so the rack channels stand vertically and you can reach around them on all sides. They have screw holes on 1-inch centers, tapped for 12-24 screws.
Equipment mounted in "telco" racks is almost always middle-mounted. The mounting ears or flanges are located about halfway back on the chassis, meaning that the center of gravity is almost in the same plane as the rack face. This means the only force on the screws is shear load, against which they're tremendously strong. You can stand on telco gear when it's rack-mounted.
Some time after the telco industry had all this worked out, the wheel got reinvented. Deejays like to mount their mixers and effects processors in racks to manage the mess, and despite a lot of commonality between old telco gear*, they settled on racks that were 19 inches wide instead of 23. Along came the EIA to standardize this, specifying a screw thread of 10-32 and a staggered hole spacing of 1 1/4" alternating with 1/2". This gives us the "1U" size of 1 3/4". Many EIA racks don't even have threaded holes, instead they have square punchings into which you insert a "cage nut", which is easily replaced if you manage to strip the threads.
(* Many patch panels used in audio production are set up with the "longframe" or "bantam" plugs, which originated as WECo plugs on switchboards and are still used today in DS-1 patching applications.)
Mounting 19" equipment in a 23" rack would be simple enough with adapter ears. They can even compensate for the fact that most 19" equipment expects EIA hole spacing, and 23" racks invariably have WECo hole spacing. The damning difference is mid-mounting versus flush-mounting. Deejays want all their buttons and knobs to form one seamless control panel, so all their equipment has mounting ears right up at the front, with the face of the equipment. This works really well for audio gear, which is usually fairly light and doesn't stick more than a few inches behind the face of the rack.
When you try to mount a server or a UPS flush with the face of the rack, you quickly discover the mechanical limits of the screws. Because most co-lo outfits charge per vertical unit of rack space, there's a lot of pressure to make your equipment as flat as possible. This moves the center of gravity farther and farther back, while shortening the amount of rack flange over which the force will be distributed. If you get that UPS to hang there, don't even breathe on it, much less use the back edge as a stepstool while climbing into the cable tray superstructure.
When the option is available, flush-mounted equipment should always have a rear support too. This is the case with many rackmount servers, which include sliding rails for mounting. The back end of the rail must be screwed into a second rack flange, which means your cabinet needs two sets of upright channels.
For mounting deejay equipment, 19" flushmount makes sense. For mounting huge switching equipment, 23" midmount is clearly a better idea. For anything in between, it mostly depends on what options your equipment gives you. I vastly prefer mid-mounting when it's available, because it makes for a much stronger setup when all is said and done.
There are plenty of other differences between telco equipment and datacomm equipment, despite the superficial similarities. I won't get into the details of DC power, grounding, redundancy and reliability, heat dissipation, alarming, or any of the myriad "requirements" that equipment must satisfy before being located in a telco office. Suffice it to say: Datacomm equipment is happy on a desk but sometimes gets bolted into a rack. Telco equipment was designed for it.
Although, next year we might have to add an Xbox to the suite of hardware being shot at during our Independence Day celebrations.
.22 just leaves a dent, and the 9mm rounds went through the first layer of the screen casing but not the rest of the machine. The .410 shotgun left some cool marks in the paint. Anything larger went right through.
Last year, we decided to find out just how tough a Toughbook is. Turns out they'll stop small handgun rounds with no problem. A
The question is, did the hard drive in the Xbox survive?
Phone lines are twisted, so they don't tend to radiate much of the radio energy that's poured into them. HomePNA kicks out some noise but it's nothing compared to BPL.
Power lines are widely spaced, unevenly spaced, and not twisted. From the perspective of a radio signal, power lines are not transmission lines: they're antennae! BPL also works over much longer distances than HomePNA, meaning that the power levels involved are much larger. Dumping tons of RF onto the power grid will simply turn it into a massive radio jammer.
John Q. Public should be worried. In times of civic emergency, ham radio operators need all the spectrum they can get. Find a local amateur radio club and attend a meeting -- you'd be surprised how much stuff goes on behind the scenes. Hams are hobbyists, refining their equipment and honing their skills "for fun", but then swinging into action during emergencies to maintain communications when other methods fail.
Destroying a large chunk of the radio spectrum will not help anyone. BPL is technically inferior to cable and DSL, and it's only being hyped by those who see opporunity for profit without regard for technical or civic responsibilities.
I've suggested this idea before, even submitted it as an Ask Rejectiondot. I'm glad to see others have had the same thought.
The important thing is to generate responses that waste their time: Tie up their customer service lines. Place and cancel orders. Check your bill carefully and do chargebacks for anything that's not cancelled. If they get too many chargebacks, their merchant accounts won't last long.
For spam that simply gathers names that get forwarded to "reputable" businesses (who swear none of their agents are spammers), fair is fair. A barrage of time-wasting calls will encourage them to be more careful about who they accept leads from in the future.
I'm game. The war on spammers starts now.