However, these typically would only be found on test sets and AUTOVON (US Military) phone systems.
They're also found on most ham radios with DTMF capability, like most 2-meter HT's. The extra tones are often used to control repeater features like autopatch without interfering with the actual numbers being dialed.
You can now say that linux officially works on Centrino laptops.
This is absolutely true. Just recently, the combination of kernel power management (ACPI) and CPU throttling (SpeedStep), and the wireless drivers have become mature enough for things to work: ACPI is much more mature--in the older 2.4.x and even 2.6.7 kernels I had used, things Oops'ed left and right, locked up my system, and worse, and now everything just works. CPU throttling is supported through the kernel, which now has "ondemand", a policy to automatically raise the CPU speed when required, that can replace userspace daemons like speedfreqd for simple policies (I still prefer speedfreq). Lastly, the Intel PRO Wireless 2200 driver has now progressed from "adding essential features" (for example, 0.2 didn't have transmit or receive functionality) to "feature freeze and debugging mode". It's now at version 0.21. The 2100 driver is already past 1.0, and supports rfmon, which is in the queue of things for 2200 after it is relatively debugged.
Basically all the parts have come together, and my Asus M2400Ne now works like a real laptop. It actually works a little better than under Windows. I really can't blame Intel from withholding the brand name from Linux until today, since my first forays into the Centrino features were wildly unsuccessful, and did give me a bad taste in my mouth about it. Luckily, they've found some non-profit-destroying way to share wireless specs (basically someone writes a new firmware for the driver team, who then writes drivers... the result is that they have a very tight integration of software, firmware, and hardware and can easily add features.) All in all, I'm really happy with how it works.
...Technorati crawls the whole blogosphere almost real-time. How they do that is a trick I would probably get sued to tell you, so figure it out yourself.:)
Um, don't a lot of these sites get pings from blogging systems? And can't you just run in a large loop checking RSS feeds one at a time (with If-Newer-Then or whatever so it doesn't require a reply unless there's an update)? This doesn't seem that amazing. Besides, the blogosphere is much smaller than the whole web, and easier for tools to parse since there are things like RSS.
...turn off this central DNS server and in a few days everything is gone, right?
Wrong! The DNS server is a hack. Normal bittorrent links lead directly to a tracker. Kenosis bittorrent links lead to HASH.their.server.name. BitTorrent-Kenosis clients will recognize this and use the network. The purpose of the DNS (and the reason it's not btkn://HASH or something) is that legacy clients going there will be given the IP of any Kenosis client that can act as a tracker for it. Killing that DNS would kill legacy clients but not the enhanced P2P ones.
(Some moderator modded parent Troll, I metamodded that mod Unfair--it's a wonderfully well-written post that invites constructive debate, not flames [although 90% of posts on Slashdot evoke flames, Troll or not])
My opinion on the matter is that they should do a lot more testing to see what kind of effects BPL would have on radio service. It's pretty much true that if you run a radio signal through a wire it will radiate a signal. It's a matter of what service (most probably ham radio) will get stomped on by these signals.
I think the FCC needs to look extremely critically at this and evaluate it as consumer electronics are--BPL should come with a sticker that says "1. This device must not cause harmful interference and 2. This device must accept any interference received, including any that might cause undesirable operation." (or whatever the label says.) Basically someone should realize that they would never accept that kind of interference-prone design in a consumer product--they would require shielding--and the fact that it's not sold to the consumer but installed by utilities is not an excuse.
This year FIRST has really placed the emphasis on software. They've given us an easy-to-build chassis and gearbox, a game that requires at most one manipulator (for moving tetras), and a boatload of awesome tools. We get a CMUcam2, which lets our robot track things using a camera. (This also offers some interesting possibilities for funny things, like making a cart that follows a student around as they scout teams or something... we're planning on building both the FIRST drivetrain/chassis and our own, and using the FIRST one as a testbed... I want to convert it into a human-following robot cart once we're done using it;-) They've also apparently written lots of software modules to make it easier to use gyros, position encoders, and the like, and combined them to make a plain-text-scriptable autonomous mode thing, that allows you to write the robot instructions for what to do. (This gives teams with "intelligent" robots an advantage, as more people will take the dead-reckoning route if it's easy and reliable, so smarter bots will face less competition.) Personally I'm a programmer, and our job was usually neglected in previous years, so I look forward a great deal to a season where programming becomes a major portion of our robot, and not some little detail to be filled in at the end.
Dean Kamen started an organization called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) because he felt that students were not being inspired to pursue science and engineering. His usual analogy is that while we have immense respect for athletes, celebrities, and entertainers, we don't recognize engineers and scientists in the same way, and he wants to change that.
The practical implementation of this is the FIRST Robotics Competition. Each January, the kickoff from Manchester, NH is broadcast to teams across the country (and world) on NASA TV, and they find out about a new game. They also receive a kit of parts, and they then have six to seven weeks to design, build, program, practice driving, and ship a robot to play that game.
This year's game, as many are, is just complex enough that I will not try to explain it fully. Essentially, you earn points by stacking small tetrahedrons ("tetras") on the large tetra-shaped goals. There are 9 of these in a grid. You get 3 points for each tetra of your color stacked (upright) on top of a goal, and 1 point for each that is inside the goal but not stacked. Then you get 10 points for each row of 3 goals where your color is on top, and you get 10 points at the end if all three robots in your alliance (there are two alliances, red and blue, with three teams each) are in your end zone. You also receive bonus tetras (placed directly on top of the goals on your end of the field) for certain actions during autonomous mode: placing vision tetras (these have a green stripe for the camera to track) on the goals in the middle (1 bonus tetra for putting it on the side goals, 2 for the middle) and knocking down the tetras magnetically hung from the goals on your side (1 bonus tetra, and the knocked-down one stays in play; it otherwise would be removed).
The structure of the match is 15 seconds of autonomous mode, where the robots can't (electronically) receive communications, and must navigate on their own. This is made much more interesting this year by them throwing a CMUcam2 (a small serially-controllable robot vision system--quite cool!) into our bag of sensors. Then the remaining 1:45 of the match is human-controlled. Scoring is probably another "coopertition"-style deal where the winner gets 2x the loser's score or something similar to keep good teams from kicking bad teams' asses completely.
I'm kind of disappointed as a programmer since it's all going to come down to lack of mechanical failures and driver skill.
What are you talking about? You have a robot vision system to program! You should be excited!
For years FIRST has left software to be a last-minute glued-on part of the robot, programmed in PBASIC for lack of an alternative. We now have PIC micros, and they're giving us vision systems and lots of fun sensors to play with. This is going to make it a lot more fun.
One thing I would like to see in future years is a longer autonomous period. Fifteen seconds is great, but it still has the problem that it's not long enough to put your robot in the place of making a decision--most robots just execute a predetermined "dance" of motions, sometimes with IR beacons, vision sensors, or other stuff as aids. What I wanna see is a little decision-making, i.e. should I go for that vision tetra or is an alliance partner there? Can I block that opponent from putting that tetra on, etc...
They've really kicked it up a notch, technologically. A lot of time in previous years would be spent brainstorming, designing, and building extremely specialized mechanisms, and our team would have to spend our whole kickoff weekend picking a strategy so we could pick how the robot looks. This time, however, they have created a game that requires specialized software rather than hardware, and they have also included in the kit of parts a ready-to-assemble chassis and gearbox. The end result is that we will have a robot to work with in a week, instead of four, and the programming team can start hacking at that while the drivetrain team finishes our "real" robot with a better drivetrain.
Um... isn't this how most security holes work? When's the last time Microsoft fixed a hole before you heard about it? Sure, it's nice not to have people trying exploits at all, but sometimes knowing about the hole in a timely fashion is more important than having a fix.
If their job is to fight "cybercrime" (i.e. stuff that's illegal anyway but sounds more glamourous when done with a computer involved) then their job is to work with computers! They can be considered stupid if they try to do a job they are not trained for, without either trying to learn more or realizing they can't do it.
No, that's like saying if a cop doesn't know what kiddie porn is or about the kinds of illegal drugs that he can't stop them. This is a matter of the cop having familiarity with something, not knowing how it works.
It is horribly simple. You can find the spec for the barcodes online and, given a proper number, generate the barcode. I once wrote a barcode generator for my TI-89, but unfortunately never got to test it.
I have a friend who has an Inspiron 600m with both battery packs, and he runs Gentoo as well. If you give me your email address or IM name(s) I will give it to him to see if he can help.
So you really get 8.5 hours of battery life? That's amazing! Once you get SpeedStep working in Linux, it really works like a charm... my laptop (Asus M2400Ne, only supports one battery) got 1.5-2 hours of battery life before I set up speedstep, and it now gets 4-5 with it.
I'm running Gentoo Linux with a (unrelatedly) patched kernel. There are drivers for SpeedStep in the kernel; they're open-source.
If you go into Power Management options > CPU Frequency scaling, you will find lotsa options. You need at least one governor. I would compile all of them as modules. Then you pick "Intel Enhanced SpeedStep", and "Use ACPI tables..." beneath it. Then do "make" and "make modules_install", and try loading the new modules. You then need either cpufreqd or speedfreqd (or another similar utility) to monitor CPU usage and change speed. The kernel also has a module called "ondemand" that does what speedfreqd does (it is equivalent to the "dynamic" policy). I haven't tried it, but it's probably more responsive and efficient since it's in kernel-space.
If you have any more questions, email me at slashdot.thinkinginbinary@spamgourmet.org or IM me (AIM: thinkinginbinary/Jabber: name is thinkinginbinary, domain is jabber.org, with the usual character in between)
If you are running a modern, ACPI-enabled OS, processor speed is fully controllable by the OS. My Pentium M sits at 600 MHz all the time, unless I need it, and then it throttles up to 1700 MHz as needed. My guess is that you are running Windows, since Linux uses the highest clock speed unless you install a throttling daemon (I use speedfreqd.)
I do know, however, that the Pentium 4-M throttles down a ton, because its power management features are less efficient and the battery life would be less than an hour. As it is, most only get 1 to 2 hours.
Grub is quite nice. It is easier to set up than LILO (the LILO config file always felt a little klunky) and has many more options. I used to use LILO with Slackware but now I use Grub with Gentoo. Dual-booting was also much easier to figure out.
Should mozilla know what to do if a usb mouse fails or is removed unexpectedly? Of course not, the mozilla developers expect that this will be taken care of.
Of course not... the point is not that each layer (peripheral, BIOS, kernel, application) can handle errors in all other layers. The point is that Mozilla should be designed to be able to recover from crashes without help from the kernel, BIOS, or anything else. Likewise, if a USB mouse somehow gets "confused" (protocol-wise) it should take the initiative to re-register itself with the system; if the BIOS notices that the system is frozen (through a watchdog), it should reboot it; if the kernel notices that some part of the BIOS has stopped responding (e.g. IDE bus won't work) it should reboot. The idea is for every layer to be able to recover from errors that spring from its own responsibilities--in other words, MySQL is responsible for keeping a database, so it should be able to do that relatively robustly, but if the underlying media is corrupted, it should not take it upon itself to rebuild the RAID array!
I run Gentoo, so my copy of Firefox was downloaded in source form from a Portage mirror, had its MD5 sum checked against a signed list, built from source, and installed.
Attempting to steal credit cards electronically (and failing) is worse than robbing a bank? By what value system are you making this judgement?
If you rob a bank, you get only the (comparatively) small amount of cash presently held in the register of the teller you rob, and perhaps others. If you steal credit card numbers, however, you can steal much more money. Also, while robbing a bank simply lowers the bank's bottom line, and affects a large group of people only slightly, stealing someone's credit card info affects them personally, since all the money you take comes out of their account. Lastly, stealing their credit card info and other identity-related information makes it possible to assume their identity and cause much more damage.
Who was saying [that free software is impervious to exploits]?
Um, that's been one of the primary reasons people switch to Firefox. Remember this article (CERT Recommends Mozilla, Firefox)? Well Firefox has bugs too. There are still other reasons to use it--thousands!--like real XHTML/CSS/W3CDOM that works, and it looks prettier. And bugs are fixed faster, and they are usually much less dangerous due to it being a web browser, not 1/2 an operating system (coughiecough)
Good, I never liked those in the first place. It's one thing to put up an ad, but another thing altogether to fill the page with extra junk to embed half your website in the ad.
Try writing XHTML-, CSS-, and W3CDOM-compliant code and then see which browsers it works in.
I worked for a start up that used Ontology based searching, trying to understand the text and match it to search criteria. It kinda worked sometimes which isn't nearly good enough.
What was their name, and did they use "brown bear" as a test search? I think my Data Structures & Algorithms teacher might have worked there too.
Slashdot Mirror
They're also found on most ham radios with DTMF capability, like most 2-meter HT's. The extra tones are often used to control repeater features like autopatch without interfering with the actual numbers being dialed.
This is absolutely true. Just recently, the combination of kernel power management (ACPI) and CPU throttling (SpeedStep), and the wireless drivers have become mature enough for things to work: ACPI is much more mature--in the older 2.4.x and even 2.6.7 kernels I had used, things Oops'ed left and right, locked up my system, and worse, and now everything just works. CPU throttling is supported through the kernel, which now has "ondemand", a policy to automatically raise the CPU speed when required, that can replace userspace daemons like speedfreqd for simple policies (I still prefer speedfreq). Lastly, the Intel PRO Wireless 2200 driver has now progressed from "adding essential features" (for example, 0.2 didn't have transmit or receive functionality) to "feature freeze and debugging mode". It's now at version 0.21. The 2100 driver is already past 1.0, and supports rfmon, which is in the queue of things for 2200 after it is relatively debugged.
Basically all the parts have come together, and my Asus M2400Ne now works like a real laptop. It actually works a little better than under Windows. I really can't blame Intel from withholding the brand name from Linux until today, since my first forays into the Centrino features were wildly unsuccessful, and did give me a bad taste in my mouth about it. Luckily, they've found some non-profit-destroying way to share wireless specs (basically someone writes a new firmware for the driver team, who then writes drivers... the result is that they have a very tight integration of software, firmware, and hardware and can easily add features.) All in all, I'm really happy with how it works.
Um, don't a lot of these sites get pings from blogging systems? And can't you just run in a large loop checking RSS feeds one at a time (with If-Newer-Then or whatever so it doesn't require a reply unless there's an update)? This doesn't seem that amazing. Besides, the blogosphere is much smaller than the whole web, and easier for tools to parse since there are things like RSS.
Wrong! The DNS server is a hack. Normal bittorrent links lead directly to a tracker. Kenosis bittorrent links lead to HASH.their.server.name. BitTorrent-Kenosis clients will recognize this and use the network. The purpose of the DNS (and the reason it's not btkn://HASH or something) is that legacy clients going there will be given the IP of any Kenosis client that can act as a tracker for it. Killing that DNS would kill legacy clients but not the enhanced P2P ones.
(Some moderator modded parent Troll, I metamodded that mod Unfair--it's a wonderfully well-written post that invites constructive debate, not flames [although 90% of posts on Slashdot evoke flames, Troll or not])
My opinion on the matter is that they should do a lot more testing to see what kind of effects BPL would have on radio service. It's pretty much true that if you run a radio signal through a wire it will radiate a signal. It's a matter of what service (most probably ham radio) will get stomped on by these signals.
I think the FCC needs to look extremely critically at this and evaluate it as consumer electronics are--BPL should come with a sticker that says "1. This device must not cause harmful interference and 2. This device must accept any interference received, including any that might cause undesirable operation." (or whatever the label says.) Basically someone should realize that they would never accept that kind of interference-prone design in a consumer product--they would require shielding--and the fact that it's not sold to the consumer but installed by utilities is not an excuse.
Mine's called Ansible. I guess that makes a bit of a promise about lag, or lack thereof. (It's open...)
This year FIRST has really placed the emphasis on software. They've given us an easy-to-build chassis and gearbox, a game that requires at most one manipulator (for moving tetras), and a boatload of awesome tools. We get a CMUcam2, which lets our robot track things using a camera. (This also offers some interesting possibilities for funny things, like making a cart that follows a student around as they scout teams or something... we're planning on building both the FIRST drivetrain/chassis and our own, and using the FIRST one as a testbed... I want to convert it into a human-following robot cart once we're done using it ;-) They've also apparently written lots of software modules to make it easier to use gyros, position encoders, and the like, and combined them to make a plain-text-scriptable autonomous mode thing, that allows you to write the robot instructions for what to do. (This gives teams with "intelligent" robots an advantage, as more people will take the dead-reckoning route if it's easy and reliable, so smarter bots will face less competition.) Personally I'm a programmer, and our job was usually neglected in previous years, so I look forward a great deal to a season where programming becomes a major portion of our robot, and not some little detail to be filled in at the end.
For those who aren't familiar with the US FIRST Robotics Competiton, here's a quick summary.
Dean Kamen started an organization called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) because he felt that students were not being inspired to pursue science and engineering. His usual analogy is that while we have immense respect for athletes, celebrities, and entertainers, we don't recognize engineers and scientists in the same way, and he wants to change that.
The practical implementation of this is the FIRST Robotics Competition. Each January, the kickoff from Manchester, NH is broadcast to teams across the country (and world) on NASA TV, and they find out about a new game. They also receive a kit of parts, and they then have six to seven weeks to design, build, program, practice driving, and ship a robot to play that game.
This year's game, as many are, is just complex enough that I will not try to explain it fully. Essentially, you earn points by stacking small tetrahedrons ("tetras") on the large tetra-shaped goals. There are 9 of these in a grid. You get 3 points for each tetra of your color stacked (upright) on top of a goal, and 1 point for each that is inside the goal but not stacked. Then you get 10 points for each row of 3 goals where your color is on top, and you get 10 points at the end if all three robots in your alliance (there are two alliances, red and blue, with three teams each) are in your end zone. You also receive bonus tetras (placed directly on top of the goals on your end of the field) for certain actions during autonomous mode: placing vision tetras (these have a green stripe for the camera to track) on the goals in the middle (1 bonus tetra for putting it on the side goals, 2 for the middle) and knocking down the tetras magnetically hung from the goals on your side (1 bonus tetra, and the knocked-down one stays in play; it otherwise would be removed).
The structure of the match is 15 seconds of autonomous mode, where the robots can't (electronically) receive communications, and must navigate on their own. This is made much more interesting this year by them throwing a CMUcam2 (a small serially-controllable robot vision system--quite cool!) into our bag of sensors. Then the remaining 1:45 of the match is human-controlled. Scoring is probably another "coopertition"-style deal where the winner gets 2x the loser's score or something similar to keep good teams from kicking bad teams' asses completely.
What are you talking about? You have a robot vision system to program! You should be excited! For years FIRST has left software to be a last-minute glued-on part of the robot, programmed in PBASIC for lack of an alternative. We now have PIC micros, and they're giving us vision systems and lots of fun sensors to play with. This is going to make it a lot more fun.
One thing I would like to see in future years is a longer autonomous period. Fifteen seconds is great, but it still has the problem that it's not long enough to put your robot in the place of making a decision--most robots just execute a predetermined "dance" of motions, sometimes with IR beacons, vision sensors, or other stuff as aids. What I wanna see is a little decision-making, i.e. should I go for that vision tetra or is an alliance partner there? Can I block that opponent from putting that tetra on, etc...
They've really kicked it up a notch, technologically. A lot of time in previous years would be spent brainstorming, designing, and building extremely specialized mechanisms, and our team would have to spend our whole kickoff weekend picking a strategy so we could pick how the robot looks. This time, however, they have created a game that requires specialized software rather than hardware, and they have also included in the kit of parts a ready-to-assemble chassis and gearbox. The end result is that we will have a robot to work with in a week, instead of four, and the programming team can start hacking at that while the drivetrain team finishes our "real" robot with a better drivetrain.
Um... isn't this how most security holes work? When's the last time Microsoft fixed a hole before you heard about it? Sure, it's nice not to have people trying exploits at all, but sometimes knowing about the hole in a timely fashion is more important than having a fix.
If their job is to fight "cybercrime" (i.e. stuff that's illegal anyway but sounds more glamourous when done with a computer involved) then their job is to work with computers! They can be considered stupid if they try to do a job they are not trained for, without either trying to learn more or realizing they can't do it.
No, that's like saying if a cop doesn't know what kiddie porn is or about the kinds of illegal drugs that he can't stop them. This is a matter of the cop having familiarity with something, not knowing how it works.
It is horribly simple. You can find the spec for the barcodes online and, given a proper number, generate the barcode. I once wrote a barcode generator for my TI-89, but unfortunately never got to test it.
Sorry for the second message.
I have a friend who has an Inspiron 600m with both battery packs, and he runs Gentoo as well. If you give me your email address or IM name(s) I will give it to him to see if he can help.
So you really get 8.5 hours of battery life? That's amazing! Once you get SpeedStep working in Linux, it really works like a charm... my laptop (Asus M2400Ne, only supports one battery) got 1.5-2 hours of battery life before I set up speedstep, and it now gets 4-5 with it.
I'm running Gentoo Linux with a (unrelatedly) patched kernel. There are drivers for SpeedStep in the kernel; they're open-source.
If you go into Power Management options > CPU Frequency scaling, you will find lotsa options. You need at least one governor. I would compile all of them as modules. Then you pick "Intel Enhanced SpeedStep", and "Use ACPI tables..." beneath it. Then do "make" and "make modules_install", and try loading the new modules. You then need either cpufreqd or speedfreqd (or another similar utility) to monitor CPU usage and change speed. The kernel also has a module called "ondemand" that does what speedfreqd does (it is equivalent to the "dynamic" policy). I haven't tried it, but it's probably more responsive and efficient since it's in kernel-space.
If you have any more questions, email me at slashdot.thinkinginbinary@spamgourmet.org or IM me (AIM: thinkinginbinary/Jabber: name is thinkinginbinary, domain is jabber.org, with the usual character in between)
That's totally bogus.
If you are running a modern, ACPI-enabled OS, processor speed is fully controllable by the OS. My Pentium M sits at 600 MHz all the time, unless I need it, and then it throttles up to 1700 MHz as needed. My guess is that you are running Windows, since Linux uses the highest clock speed unless you install a throttling daemon (I use speedfreqd.)
I do know, however, that the Pentium 4-M throttles down a ton, because its power management features are less efficient and the battery life would be less than an hour. As it is, most only get 1 to 2 hours.
What OS are you running, anyway?
Grub is quite nice. It is easier to set up than LILO (the LILO config file always felt a little klunky) and has many more options. I used to use LILO with Slackware but now I use Grub with Gentoo. Dual-booting was also much easier to figure out.
Of course not... the point is not that each layer (peripheral, BIOS, kernel, application) can handle errors in all other layers. The point is that Mozilla should be designed to be able to recover from crashes without help from the kernel, BIOS, or anything else. Likewise, if a USB mouse somehow gets "confused" (protocol-wise) it should take the initiative to re-register itself with the system; if the BIOS notices that the system is frozen (through a watchdog), it should reboot it; if the kernel notices that some part of the BIOS has stopped responding (e.g. IDE bus won't work) it should reboot. The idea is for every layer to be able to recover from errors that spring from its own responsibilities--in other words, MySQL is responsible for keeping a database, so it should be able to do that relatively robustly, but if the underlying media is corrupted, it should not take it upon itself to rebuild the RAID array!
I run Gentoo, so my copy of Firefox was downloaded in source form from a Portage mirror, had its MD5 sum checked against a signed list, built from source, and installed.
Why? If WiFi is safe, WiFi is safe, even if it's used for VoIP!
If you rob a bank, you get only the (comparatively) small amount of cash presently held in the register of the teller you rob, and perhaps others. If you steal credit card numbers, however, you can steal much more money. Also, while robbing a bank simply lowers the bank's bottom line, and affects a large group of people only slightly, stealing someone's credit card info affects them personally, since all the money you take comes out of their account. Lastly, stealing their credit card info and other identity-related information makes it possible to assume their identity and cause much more damage.
Um, that's been one of the primary reasons people switch to Firefox. Remember this article (CERT Recommends Mozilla, Firefox)? Well Firefox has bugs too. There are still other reasons to use it--thousands!--like real XHTML/CSS/W3CDOM that works, and it looks prettier. And bugs are fixed faster, and they are usually much less dangerous due to it being a web browser, not 1/2 an operating system (coughiecough)
Good, I never liked those in the first place. It's one thing to put up an ad, but another thing altogether to fill the page with extra junk to embed half your website in the ad.
Try writing XHTML-, CSS-, and W3CDOM-compliant code and then see which browsers it works in.
What was their name, and did they use "brown bear" as a test search? I think my Data Structures & Algorithms teacher might have worked there too.