I've never understood how "fit on standard bookshelves" was a feature of DVD cases. They're bulkier than jewel cases, which fit just fine on bookshelves and in a variety of other places that DVD cases do NOT.
I'm not trying to defend jewel cases here, they're obnoxiously brittle and the little disc-hub latches don't work very well. But when people talk about DVD cases fitting on bookshelves like it's something new, I want to smack them.
I've done some basic tinkering with Akeni LAN Messenger and I think it fits your needs pretty well. It operates on the local segment only, not across the internet, and provides basic messaging / file transfer functionality. There's a linux version too.
Is CO2 the best choice for closed-environment?
on
Droids on the ISS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Is it just me, or is releasing even more CO2 into the station atmosphere not very helpful? They should use plain compressed air, so as not to alter the gas balance when they're active.
I understand CO2 is more compressible, but refining it from plain air in order to recharge the little suckers is just extra work. Give 'em big batteries and onboard compressors, and the problem goes away.
Ragchewing on the road is what 11-meter is for. Cheaper radios, no licensing costs, and you're reasonably likely to talk to other people on the same road who can advise you of traffic problems, emergency vehicles, road conditions, and the occasional overzealous ticketwriter.
Of course it's also stocked with an alarming population of idiots. If the ham community took some of that RDF experience and tracked down a few of those echo-mic-wielding morons with the kilowatt amps, the band would be a lot more useful for everyone. Just imagine, a foxhunt with a purpose! Which is why it'll never happen...
Seriously though, the reason most geeks aren't interested in ham radio is that we can't run crypto. The regulation makes sense to make it easy to enforce the noncommercial requirements, but seriously. Here's a communications medium that's vastly more capable in many respects than what you've been playing with, except you can't do the really important stuff on it. Oops!
Ahh, why do I always find the good ones when the thread's days old?
For a server that gets slashdotted and pushes 400Mbps of traffic, the implication is that it's doing about 400Mbps outbound, and maybe 20Mbps inbound (ACK packets, requests, etc.).
How would a pair of full duplex 100Mbps links help with that? You've got 200Mbps out and 200Mbps in.
Data weenies are being misleading bastards when they count both directions. Nobody claims a 33.6k modem is actually pushing 67.2k because it's symmetric. Oh look, my car's engine is spinning 16,000 RPM! (Yes, 8,000 clockwise viewed from one side, and 8,000 counterclockwise viewed from the other side!)
Re:I really want the reverse: VGA - IN for laptops
on
Portables as Servers?
·
· Score: 1
Okay, so I'm a few days late with this, but take a look at MaxiVista. It's Windows payware but it does exactly what you're talking about, and if you're not trying to squeeze everything across a 12Mbps USB1.1 network adapter, it's pretty snappy. (Real 100Mbps cardbus is quite nice. Gigabit even more so!)
Replying to my own post here... Don Herbert even inspired his own spoof, the Dinosaurs' Mr. Lizard, who seemed to have an endless supply of eager young assistants named Timmy.
Although not fictional, Don Herbert (Mr. Wizard) remains one of my all-time favorite scientists in the public view. He, along with Carl Sagan, did more to inspire and educate than I think I can put into words.
As for fiction, the entire cast of Real Genius gets my vote. Between the college nuts, the shy freshmen, the stressed grad students, the selfish prick, the government's fingers in research, and the utter creativity for its own sake, this movie nailed almost everything it attempted. A few sloppy bits don't ruin the premise for me, and it remains a favorite. (Right up there with Sneakers. Accept the mulligan and enjoy the rest of the plot.)
...except it did it across any nearby FM radio. After a little training I could tell the difference, by ear, between an idle loop, high-memory access, general processing, and the periodic comport interrupt servicing that accompanied modem transfers. Handy for telling when the machine was just busy, or had locked up.
It came in strong enough to slightly distort the station the radio was tuned to, so if I had a long download to run, I'd turn off the monitor, kick back in the recliner, and relax to some music until the sound changed. Ditto with long Fractint runs.
Point being, it's a thoroughly useful way to monitor the behavior of even modern computers. As for analyzing the data from a radio telescope, maybe not so much, but humans are appallingly good at spotting patterns in data that computers would call noise. Can't hurt to try.
V-8 is a great replacement for a soda. Only trouble is, it tastes awful when it's warm. Hope your cube's near the office fridge. Anyway, I've been trying to shape up my diet lately, and I'm amazed at how much better I feel, despite the occasional pangs when I drive past a Rally's. Here's a typical day:
Breakfast: Fried egg on whole-grain toast with Trader Joe's red pepper sauce. V-8 cut 50/50 with water. (Otherwise it's too thick for a first-thing-in-the-morning drink.)
Mid-morning snack: Banana, fruit cup, or applesauce. Random juice if necessary.
Lunch: Subway club or whatever, with spinach instead of lettuce. (If they try to upcharge you for putting spinach on a sandwich, tell the manager you won't be back, and find a different store. Only about 10% of them do this.) Use pickles or peppers for flavor instead of dressing. Gatorade or more juice.
Afternoon snack: Carrots and V-8. Bonus: Most folks won't steal these from the office fridge.
Dinner: Whole-wheat spaghetti, random sandwich, or baked potato. Skip the butter and sour cream on the spud, use ketchup instead. It's zero-fat, and face it, potatoes and ketchup were made for each other. Steamed broccoli, green beans, or something of that ilk. Fruit juice or home-made lemonade.
Midnight snack / handy meal: Chef Boyardee low-fat ravioli. Bonus: You can eat the low-fat version when it's cold, and you won't get that slimy film on the roof of your mouth that you'd expect from the regular stuff.
Try this for a week and see how you feel. It's essentially zero fat, except for traces in the lunchmeat and pepper sauce. You can avoid high fructose corn syrup entirely by opting for 100% fruit juice, by mixing your own lemonade with cane or beet sugar (or honey), and by choosing Gatorade over Powerade. I like to keep a box of Capri Sun or similar in the car for convenience (they don't explode when they freeze), but all the pouch drinks seem to be sweetened with HFCS. Use sparingly, I suppose. Opting for peppers instead of dressing is an incredibly simple way to cut your fat intake. Try biting the bottom off a Salonika pepper and dribbling the juice over your next Greek salad, in lieu of the usual dressing. I've been using that Trader Joe's red pepper sauce in place of mayo on sandwiches, and my only regret is that I didn't discover it years ago. It's very mild, but adds a welcome richness of flavor.
I've been following this diet, more or less, since September. I'm back into my high-school jeans!
It required lots of horizontal scrolling on my 800x600 screen, and because the text had no contrast until my modem sucked down the background images, I was forced to wait on every page-turn. Eww. That being said, some of the incidental pictures were amusing, if somewhat unsettling.
What pissed me right off was the non-article page in the middle of it. I went back and made sure I'd clicked "next" twice, before clicking "next" again and finding the next page of the article. Infuriating!
Neat content! Absolutely fascinating. I wish this thing had seen the light of day, because some of the technology (room descriptions change based on what you're wearing?) sounds incredibly cool. Maybe the code is still out there somewhere.
What baffles me is how he could've "invented" anything. A barcode reader with an integrated keyboard wedge is hardly novel, and had been done for at least a decade prior to the:ObnoxiouslyNamed:CueCat coming on the scene.
Besides the cost, I see this being a huge benefit to reducing power load on the grid. I suppose the real question is, why don't power companies do this further up the pipe, at the generating stations?
Take a look at the various peak shaving technologies available.
In various ways, this is already done. But as another poster pointed out, doing it upstream requires that the distribution grid also be upsized to handle the peak loads, whereas doing it in a more distributed fashion also time-spreads the load on the grid.
Greenies have had this choice for a while.
on
Store Your Own Juice
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Anyone running a grid-intertied home power system[PDF] (typically photovoltaic, but wind and hydro also apply) with battery storage has had this ability for years. If they're not producing enough of their own power to meet demand, they buy from the grid. Since the process of rectifying, storing, retrieving, and reinverting the power has some efficiency losses, buying power at off-peak times isn't always a no-brainer, but it's frequently economical to do so.
And of course, even if you don't have a battery-based storage system, scheduling your laundry to run in the middle of the night is smart. You get cheaper electricity (assuming your utility meters it that way), and you ease the burden on the wastewater treatment system by not dumping your effluent into it during peak demand periods.
Runner up: "Managed to get a Power Mac G5 smuggled in from eBay"
Yeah, that line drew quite the chuckle from the audience too. You should've been there, his talk was pretty cool.
Seriously, getting the simplest of gear over there sounds like quite a challenge, but persuading an eBay seller to mislabel the contents of a package is probably much easier than the government requisition channels of a similar but "official" operation. The independent ISP always has a role, and you can generalize this to municipal wifi efforts too. When the government controls the pipes, what sites do they block?
What sort of fun projects could a home experimenter with a pile of hardware dive into? It sounds like all these machines are used for a fairly narrow set of scientific applications. Anything a non-academic would find interesting?
Timing problems is really something that occurs in a synchronous design as you have a limited window of time (between clock edges) where your combinatorial circuit must stabilize. This is not the case in asynchronous design. You have all the time in the world to stabilize your stages of logic.
And if you can optimize one frequently-used part of the chip to go really fast, you don't have to make the rest of the chip go equally fast to realize the optimizations.
This, I think, is the interesting bit. You could have a microcoded section that operates internally with a clock like a traditional CPU, whenever it's called upon to perform work, but would shut itself down the rest of the time. Then offload only the commonest tasks to self-clocked circuits, so you get the benefits of go-fast logic in most instructions, but a minimum of reengineering for the oddball stuff.
But these covers don't completely block RF, they just attenuate it a few dB. Introducing loss between the handset and the tower simply means the handset will crank up its transmit power to achieve reliable communication. You'll see less standby time, less talk time, more dropped calls, and more out-of-service time.
Now, if your phone-sock is completely symmetrical, this'll mean your personal RF exposure is essentially unchanged, because the phone will adjust until the tower reports an adequate signal:noise ratio. But if your sock isn't perfect, perhaps attenuating the signal in the phone-tower direction more than in the phone-body direction, then the overall effect will be that your body is exposed to *more* RF.
The same broken logic crops up around those "antenna booster" products: "It's like having a four-foot antenna on your cellphone!" Sure. Because a four-foot antenna resonates perfectly at cellular frequencies, right? Morons. Some of those products *do* cause your phone to display more "bars" of signal strength. This is just like putting your head in a trashcan makes your voice louder. Doesn't make it any easier to talk to other people!
Seriously, cellphone makers love to advertise their inflated standby time and talk-time numbers. An inefficient RF stage wastes power, so it's in their interest to make the most efficient transceiver and antenna possible, thus allowing them to list longer standby and talk times, and reducing complaints of dropped calls. If putting a sticker on the battery really made your phone work better, wouldn't it ship that way from the factory?
Free speech is great, and a skeptical reader is more informed because of it. The trouble with this tendency is that it blurs the line between personal speech and advertising. As many others have pointed out, traditional media outlets have parroted press releases for many years.
This conflicts with all the recent trumpeting of blogs as a great independent media watchdog and personal voice, much of which has been done by traditional media outlets perhaps uncomfortable with their mouthpiece position. Kinda blows that out of the water, doesn't it?
Here's a wicked idea: Automated plagiarism detection systems are commonplace in academia now. What if some of the larger blogging services started highlighting sentences or phrases that appeared on someone else's blog earlier? A shared database between LJ and Blogspot and the rest, with feeds from a few dozen top tech websites, would simplify the whole mess. Resource-intensive? Yes, but not nearly so much as every user running their own crawler-comparator.:)
Woo, mod parent up! Open-source routers have been around since the late eighties transition of the BSD codebase away from its license-encumbered AT&T history.
Any posix-compliant geek can and will shove a few NICs into a box with BSD or Linux on it, and turn it into a router. "Sure", you say, "but what about the user interface?", a valid point! XORP has been working on this for http://www.xorp.org/">years, and as far back as 2004, XORP was seen to be making some trouble for Cisco.
Imagestream has been touting their Rebel routers for a few years too, and they, like Digium, have an impressive array of interface hardware to support your box's position within the network. It's a fine market position to be in, and it's certainly not news. That being said, perhaps poking it back into people's brains is a good idea, and anything that helps dilute Cisco's software monoculture in the enterprise routing market can only be a good thing.
I was under the impression that it was slightly conductive, but their site claims it's an insulator and I can't find any direct evidence to the contrary. I guess it's worth a shot!
As far as conductive epoxy goes, I saw a half-ounce set at MicroCenter for ~$20 the other day.
Pack the USB connector with wax or clay in advance, then melt or wash it out when you're done. That should let you get careless with the epoxy or whatever you're using, and have more fun with the casing.
I'd suggest heat-shrink tubing, personally. It's pretty durable, and easily replaced if you don't like it. Not the most waterproof, but you could shellac the board first if you want that.
If you go the epoxy route, don't use JB-weld or anything else conductive. Look up "potting compound" for details. Try something a bit flexible, like silicone caulk or RTV, in a small mold. You want a squishy thumbdrive, don't you?
You shouldn't have to wait for the drives to come out. Laptop drive controllers can address a master and a slave, they just don't have a slave drive connected in normal usage. I was just looking for an adapter to let me put a pair of CF cards in place of a 2.5" hard drive. (I can only find the single-card version in a 2.5" form factor, all the dual-card ones are for 3.5" mounting.) I figure, put a solid-state card in one slot and a microdrive in the other, and I've got a hybrid-drive laptop, right?
I just got rid of an old toughbook cf-25 that would've been perfect for this, as the drive mounting is gel and would easily accomodate an oddly shaped adapter instead of a regular drive. Or for the truly insane, a CF card piggybacked on a regular 2.5" drive! All I need is the ability to home-brew those little flex cables, and I'd be in business.
In telco battery rooms, the cells are all 2 volts each, the size of garbage cans. Higher voltages are made by stringing them together, so the differential across any given case top is only 2 volts or so. I found some pictures of telco battery plants with a quick google.
And who said anything about distances? The longest I've ever seen a 48-volt run was between floors in a central office. Nobody's sending it down the street except in the case of the talk-battery on your phone line, which is capped at a few dozen mA. All the big power feeds are fused too, the usual rating is 400A per side for powerboards. I did see one 15,000A fuse supplying busbars that ran between floors, but that was extremely rare (the only one of its kind in the state.) and has since been replaced with a more modest, modular distribution system.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood how "fit on standard bookshelves" was a feature of DVD cases. They're bulkier than jewel cases, which fit just fine on bookshelves and in a variety of other places that DVD cases do NOT.
I'm not trying to defend jewel cases here, they're obnoxiously brittle and the little disc-hub latches don't work very well. But when people talk about DVD cases fitting on bookshelves like it's something new, I want to smack them.
I've done some basic tinkering with Akeni LAN Messenger and I think it fits your needs pretty well. It operates on the local segment only, not across the internet, and provides basic messaging / file transfer functionality. There's a linux version too.
Is it just me, or is releasing even more CO2 into the station atmosphere not very helpful? They should use plain compressed air, so as not to alter the gas balance when they're active.
I understand CO2 is more compressible, but refining it from plain air in order to recharge the little suckers is just extra work. Give 'em big batteries and onboard compressors, and the problem goes away.
Ragchewing on the road is what 11-meter is for. Cheaper radios, no licensing costs, and you're reasonably likely to talk to other people on the same road who can advise you of traffic problems, emergency vehicles, road conditions, and the occasional overzealous ticketwriter.
Of course it's also stocked with an alarming population of idiots. If the ham community took some of that RDF experience and tracked down a few of those echo-mic-wielding morons with the kilowatt amps, the band would be a lot more useful for everyone. Just imagine, a foxhunt with a purpose! Which is why it'll never happen...
Seriously though, the reason most geeks aren't interested in ham radio is that we can't run crypto. The regulation makes sense to make it easy to enforce the noncommercial requirements, but seriously. Here's a communications medium that's vastly more capable in many respects than what you've been playing with, except you can't do the really important stuff on it. Oops!
Ahh, why do I always find the good ones when the thread's days old?
For a server that gets slashdotted and pushes 400Mbps of traffic, the implication is that it's doing about 400Mbps outbound, and maybe 20Mbps inbound (ACK packets, requests, etc.).
How would a pair of full duplex 100Mbps links help with that? You've got 200Mbps out and 200Mbps in.
Data weenies are being misleading bastards when they count both directions. Nobody claims a 33.6k modem is actually pushing 67.2k because it's symmetric. Oh look, my car's engine is spinning 16,000 RPM! (Yes, 8,000 clockwise viewed from one side, and 8,000 counterclockwise viewed from the other side!)
Okay, so I'm a few days late with this, but take a look at MaxiVista. It's Windows payware but it does exactly what you're talking about, and if you're not trying to squeeze everything across a 12Mbps USB1.1 network adapter, it's pretty snappy. (Real 100Mbps cardbus is quite nice. Gigabit even more so!)
Replying to my own post here... Don Herbert even inspired his own spoof, the Dinosaurs' Mr. Lizard, who seemed to have an endless supply of eager young assistants named Timmy.
*sniff* Jim Henson, we miss you.
Although not fictional, Don Herbert (Mr. Wizard) remains one of my all-time favorite scientists in the public view. He, along with Carl Sagan, did more to inspire and educate than I think I can put into words.
As for fiction, the entire cast of Real Genius gets my vote. Between the college nuts, the shy freshmen, the stressed grad students, the selfish prick, the government's fingers in research, and the utter creativity for its own sake, this movie nailed almost everything it attempted. A few sloppy bits don't ruin the premise for me, and it remains a favorite. (Right up there with Sneakers. Accept the mulligan and enjoy the rest of the plot.)
...except it did it across any nearby FM radio. After a little training I could tell the difference, by ear, between an idle loop, high-memory access, general processing, and the periodic comport interrupt servicing that accompanied modem transfers. Handy for telling when the machine was just busy, or had locked up.
It came in strong enough to slightly distort the station the radio was tuned to, so if I had a long download to run, I'd turn off the monitor, kick back in the recliner, and relax to some music until the sound changed. Ditto with long Fractint runs.
Point being, it's a thoroughly useful way to monitor the behavior of even modern computers. As for analyzing the data from a radio telescope, maybe not so much, but humans are appallingly good at spotting patterns in data that computers would call noise. Can't hurt to try.
V-8 is a great replacement for a soda. Only trouble is, it tastes awful when it's warm. Hope your cube's near the office fridge. Anyway, I've been trying to shape up my diet lately, and I'm amazed at how much better I feel, despite the occasional pangs when I drive past a Rally's. Here's a typical day:
Breakfast: Fried egg on whole-grain toast with Trader Joe's red pepper sauce. V-8 cut 50/50 with water. (Otherwise it's too thick for a first-thing-in-the-morning drink.)
Mid-morning snack: Banana, fruit cup, or applesauce. Random juice if necessary.
Lunch: Subway club or whatever, with spinach instead of lettuce. (If they try to upcharge you for putting spinach on a sandwich, tell the manager you won't be back, and find a different store. Only about 10% of them do this.) Use pickles or peppers for flavor instead of dressing. Gatorade or more juice.
Afternoon snack: Carrots and V-8. Bonus: Most folks won't steal these from the office fridge.
Dinner: Whole-wheat spaghetti, random sandwich, or baked potato. Skip the butter and sour cream on the spud, use ketchup instead. It's zero-fat, and face it, potatoes and ketchup were made for each other. Steamed broccoli, green beans, or something of that ilk. Fruit juice or home-made lemonade.
Midnight snack / handy meal: Chef Boyardee low-fat ravioli. Bonus: You can eat the low-fat version when it's cold, and you won't get that slimy film on the roof of your mouth that you'd expect from the regular stuff.
Try this for a week and see how you feel. It's essentially zero fat, except for traces in the lunchmeat and pepper sauce. You can avoid high fructose corn syrup entirely by opting for 100% fruit juice, by mixing your own lemonade with cane or beet sugar (or honey), and by choosing Gatorade over Powerade. I like to keep a box of Capri Sun or similar in the car for convenience (they don't explode when they freeze), but all the pouch drinks seem to be sweetened with HFCS. Use sparingly, I suppose. Opting for peppers instead of dressing is an incredibly simple way to cut your fat intake. Try biting the bottom off a Salonika pepper and dribbling the juice over your next Greek salad, in lieu of the usual dressing. I've been using that Trader Joe's red pepper sauce in place of mayo on sandwiches, and my only regret is that I didn't discover it years ago. It's very mild, but adds a welcome richness of flavor.
I've been following this diet, more or less, since September. I'm back into my high-school jeans!
It required lots of horizontal scrolling on my 800x600 screen, and because the text had no contrast until my modem sucked down the background images, I was forced to wait on every page-turn. Eww. That being said, some of the incidental pictures were amusing, if somewhat unsettling.
What pissed me right off was the non-article page in the middle of it. I went back and made sure I'd clicked "next" twice, before clicking "next" again and finding the next page of the article. Infuriating!
Neat content! Absolutely fascinating. I wish this thing had seen the light of day, because some of the technology (room descriptions change based on what you're wearing?) sounds incredibly cool. Maybe the code is still out there somewhere.
What baffles me is how he could've "invented" anything. A barcode reader with an integrated keyboard wedge is hardly novel, and had been done for at least a decade prior to the :ObnoxiouslyNamed :CueCat coming on the scene.
In various ways, this is already done. But as another poster pointed out, doing it upstream requires that the distribution grid also be upsized to handle the peak loads, whereas doing it in a more distributed fashion also time-spreads the load on the grid.
Anyone running a grid-intertied home power system[PDF] (typically photovoltaic, but wind and hydro also apply) with battery storage has had this ability for years. If they're not producing enough of their own power to meet demand, they buy from the grid. Since the process of rectifying, storing, retrieving, and reinverting the power has some efficiency losses, buying power at off-peak times isn't always a no-brainer, but it's frequently economical to do so.
And of course, even if you don't have a battery-based storage system, scheduling your laundry to run in the middle of the night is smart. You get cheaper electricity (assuming your utility meters it that way), and you ease the burden on the wastewater treatment system by not dumping your effluent into it during peak demand periods.
Silentway's guide to computer audio interfaces
Covers USB, firewire, and PCI interfaces, for getting audio in and out of your machine. Two or twenty tracks at a time, in qualitites of your choice.
Seriously, getting the simplest of gear over there sounds like quite a challenge, but persuading an eBay seller to mislabel the contents of a package is probably much easier than the government requisition channels of a similar but "official" operation. The independent ISP always has a role, and you can generalize this to municipal wifi efforts too. When the government controls the pipes, what sites do they block?
What sort of fun projects could a home experimenter with a pile of hardware dive into? It sounds like all these machines are used for a fairly narrow set of scientific applications. Anything a non-academic would find interesting?
This, I think, is the interesting bit. You could have a microcoded section that operates internally with a clock like a traditional CPU, whenever it's called upon to perform work, but would shut itself down the rest of the time. Then offload only the commonest tasks to self-clocked circuits, so you get the benefits of go-fast logic in most instructions, but a minimum of reengineering for the oddball stuff.
But these covers don't completely block RF, they just attenuate it a few dB. Introducing loss between the handset and the tower simply means the handset will crank up its transmit power to achieve reliable communication. You'll see less standby time, less talk time, more dropped calls, and more out-of-service time.
Now, if your phone-sock is completely symmetrical, this'll mean your personal RF exposure is essentially unchanged, because the phone will adjust until the tower reports an adequate signal:noise ratio. But if your sock isn't perfect, perhaps attenuating the signal in the phone-tower direction more than in the phone-body direction, then the overall effect will be that your body is exposed to *more* RF.
The same broken logic crops up around those "antenna booster" products: "It's like having a four-foot antenna on your cellphone!" Sure. Because a four-foot antenna resonates perfectly at cellular frequencies, right? Morons. Some of those products *do* cause your phone to display more "bars" of signal strength. This is just like putting your head in a trashcan makes your voice louder. Doesn't make it any easier to talk to other people!
Seriously, cellphone makers love to advertise their inflated standby time and talk-time numbers. An inefficient RF stage wastes power, so it's in their interest to make the most efficient transceiver and antenna possible, thus allowing them to list longer standby and talk times, and reducing complaints of dropped calls. If putting a sticker on the battery really made your phone work better, wouldn't it ship that way from the factory?
Free speech is great, and a skeptical reader is more informed because of it. The trouble with this tendency is that it blurs the line between personal speech and advertising. As many others have pointed out, traditional media outlets have parroted press releases for many years.
:)
This conflicts with all the recent trumpeting of blogs as a great independent media watchdog and personal voice, much of which has been done by traditional media outlets perhaps uncomfortable with their mouthpiece position. Kinda blows that out of the water, doesn't it?
Here's a wicked idea: Automated plagiarism detection systems are commonplace in academia now. What if some of the larger blogging services started highlighting sentences or phrases that appeared on someone else's blog earlier? A shared database between LJ and Blogspot and the rest, with feeds from a few dozen top tech websites, would simplify the whole mess. Resource-intensive? Yes, but not nearly so much as every user running their own crawler-comparator.
Woo, mod parent up! Open-source routers have been around since the late eighties transition of the BSD codebase away from its license-encumbered AT&T history.
Any posix-compliant geek can and will shove a few NICs into a box with BSD or Linux on it, and turn it into a router. "Sure", you say, "but what about the user interface?", a valid point! XORP has been working on this for http://www.xorp.org/">years, and as far back as 2004, XORP was seen to be making some trouble for Cisco.
Imagestream has been touting their Rebel routers for a few years too, and they, like Digium, have an impressive array of interface hardware to support your box's position within the network. It's a fine market position to be in, and it's certainly not news. That being said, perhaps poking it back into people's brains is a good idea, and anything that helps dilute Cisco's software monoculture in the enterprise routing market can only be a good thing.
I was under the impression that it was slightly conductive, but their site claims it's an insulator and I can't find any direct evidence to the contrary. I guess it's worth a shot!
As far as conductive epoxy goes, I saw a half-ounce set at MicroCenter for ~$20 the other day.
Pack the USB connector with wax or clay in advance, then melt or wash it out when you're done. That should let you get careless with the epoxy or whatever you're using, and have more fun with the casing.
I'd suggest heat-shrink tubing, personally. It's pretty durable, and easily replaced if you don't like it. Not the most waterproof, but you could shellac the board first if you want that.
If you go the epoxy route, don't use JB-weld or anything else conductive. Look up "potting compound" for details. Try something a bit flexible, like silicone caulk or RTV, in a small mold. You want a squishy thumbdrive, don't you?
You shouldn't have to wait for the drives to come out. Laptop drive controllers can address a master and a slave, they just don't have a slave drive connected in normal usage. I was just looking for an adapter to let me put a pair of CF cards in place of a 2.5" hard drive. (I can only find the single-card version in a 2.5" form factor, all the dual-card ones are for 3.5" mounting.) I figure, put a solid-state card in one slot and a microdrive in the other, and I've got a hybrid-drive laptop, right?
I just got rid of an old toughbook cf-25 that would've been perfect for this, as the drive mounting is gel and would easily accomodate an oddly shaped adapter instead of a regular drive. Or for the truly insane, a CF card piggybacked on a regular 2.5" drive! All I need is the ability to home-brew those little flex cables, and I'd be in business.
In telco battery rooms, the cells are all 2 volts each, the size of garbage cans. Higher voltages are made by stringing them together, so the differential across any given case top is only 2 volts or so. I found some pictures of telco battery plants with a quick google.
And who said anything about distances? The longest I've ever seen a 48-volt run was between floors in a central office. Nobody's sending it down the street except in the case of the talk-battery on your phone line, which is capped at a few dozen mA. All the big power feeds are fused too, the usual rating is 400A per side for powerboards. I did see one 15,000A fuse supplying busbars that ran between floors, but that was extremely rare (the only one of its kind in the state.) and has since been replaced with a more modest, modular distribution system.