I don't think that one of your points, that USB is only useful when run at high speed, is necessarily valid.
I didn't mean to say that USB was only useful at high speed (although I can see where you take that meaning). I wanted to make two points: One) that Firewire would have been a much better choice when USB came out (in fact is still a better choice) and could have done everything USB could. Sure, mice and keyboards can run on something as god awful slow as usb 1.1 just fine, but there was no valid reason to build something that slow when firewire already existed. If USB had not been shoved down our throats and firewire used in it's place we would have firewire mice, keyboards, scanners and the rest. "Easy" is also just an issue because the USB drivers are pre-bundeled, if the better choice of firewire had been made then all of those devices would still work the same way for firewire. And Firewire is hot pluggable, the last benefit you attribute to USB. One thing that I don't think firewire offers in it's current form is the power supplying capability of USB, but a firewire based system with power also on the connector could certainly have been made, which would have given us one unified system.
Point Two): was that the choice of USB1.1 was clearly short sighted. The day I saw it I asked people "who ordered this" and within days I saw promise of a faster version coming in the future. But that didn't stop the spread of USB 1.1, with it's slow speed limitations. My notebook is less than a year old, not inexpensive, yet only USB 1.1 support was available in that product line. A lot of people spent a lot of money for USB 1.1 hubs and other devices that are going to start gathering dust soon (if not already) as they migrate to USB2, just to get close to where firewire was when USB came out.
Sure it has vendor support, but Microsoft is far from irrelevant there. We could speculate on why they did it to us, but such speculation can always be argued against. The point is this stuff originally came from Microsoft and Intel and there were better solutions at the time, only Microsoft's market presure made USB 1.1 what the vendors supported. And there is better technology than wusb, but Bill will give you wusb and tell you that it's good enough for you, likely while promising to give you wusb3 some day soon to fix the limitations of wusb.
By the way, there are not always better solutions for the applications I mentioned. Sure, I have my hard drives on an IDE interface on my desktop (and have used SCSI and other inferface technology as well), but when you want to add 120 gigs to a notebook with no external docking connector (or the ability to carry that much data on a hard drive to another location), you need something that can plug into a notebook or another computer. That isn't USB 1.1. While USB 2 is now about the same speed as firewire (actually slightly faster), it doesn't do the job that firewire does in allocating bandwidth on the bus. And just having multiple standards makes it much harder to find mating equipment and more expensive (anyone know where I can get a PCMCIA card with WiFi, USB2 and firewire on it, or even just both USB2 and firewire on the same PCMCIA card for an honest price?)
802.11x can't give us this easily... you need a whole system in there to handle the file access from the network. Yes, you can put in an ARM9 and have a server...
But what do you think is in that USB external hard drive case now? Do you think it's just the USB wires hooked right to the hard drive? Look again, there's some kind of "whole system" in there already. In some cases it might even be an ARM processor or something very similar. It's not really very different to have an external drive like that connect through a wireless USB connection or a wireless 802.11 type connection, except that in running as a seperate 802.11 server you would have some additional utility that you will not get with wusb. But either way you'll end up with a "whole system" on a chip running the device.
And you really think that it's reasonable to power a hard disk drive off of batteries in your back pocket? I see three issues right away, power drain (battery life), security, and hard drive life when used in this way (the ipod aside, the back pocket isn't the best place for a spinning hard drive).
By the way, most computers I've seen in public places lately have USB ports on the front. But if you've ever tried to attach a USB hard drive or USB flash drive as I have, you may find that some of the software they put on these systems to "keep them safe" in a public place stops you from being able to write to these devices. Until I can walk up and use my pen drive or USB hard drive at such locations, I'm not buying the argument that support for wusb devices will let me access my own drive.
You're missing the point. USB should never have happened either. Firewire already existed, was better, faster, and UBS didn't address anything that firewire didn't do at least as well. (And for many things, Ethernet might have been a better choice than USB too). But we got USB shoved down our throats. Of course, many of use still needed firewire adapters, and the USB built into my expensive notebook is pretty much worthless since it's USB 1.1 (too slow to talk to many devices like external hard drives or DVD/CD writers at a reasonable speed). No one but Microsoft and Intel wanted USB 1.1, but we got it. No reasonable person wants wireless USB (bluetooth and the 802.11x protocols each do better in their own areas and we certainly don't need WUSB interfearing with them), but you're going to get it.
It's a shame that this is being done with Earthlink, the company that cranks DSL and cable "inlimited users" news feed connection down to next to nothing if you dare use more that 1 gigabyte in a month.
since how can code under a nonexpired patent ever count as "free"?
Given the insanity of many patents lately, with people who clearly didn't have an original idea but somehow got the PTO to give them a patent on prior art or clearly obvious "inventions", a patent might also be looked at as much as protection from someone coming around and later patenting your code as the evil it has become lately. If some good soul patents something and makes that patent available freely to the open source community, they would seem to be doing a good thing, in protecting all of us from some idiot who might otherwise patent the same thing and claim ownership unless someone with deep pockets can beat him in court (and there's always a chance that a jury is too dumb to understand the issues). If free use for a patent is given, why would that have to be a bad thing? A patent says I own it. Just as I might be the author and copyright holder of code that I can make available to the open source community, why should someone not be able to do the same thing with a patent?
I've enjoyed arcades since penny arcades where some items were rally only a penny and pinballs were still a nickel. I played almost all of the pre-pacman games including putting a fortune into pong and computer space and numerous others, Here's my take on what's happened:
1) Greed. On the part of almost everyone involved. 50 cents to play an old pacman is an obvious example. You can write all the crap about floor space costing more that you want, but the truth is that these machines sit idle more now because the price is higher. The price has gone over the peak of the price curve, and the industry is hurting itself in trying to justify this greed on a game that is many times over paid for. The greed doesn't stop at the operators, however. The manufacturers certainly have hurt themselves. These things are electronics, damnit! Look at the thousands of bucks you had to pay for a 286 or 386 computer, barely supported with a tiny mono monitor and mono graphics card, minimal memory and an tiny hard drive. Now look at what you can get in the hundreds of dollars price range. While video games are not as mass produced as home PCs, they can take advantage of much of the same technology and reduction in prices. There is simply no justification other than greed that a game console should have go up so much in price when all of the electronics in it has improved so much and come down in price. And many of the game makers have paid the price, they got some fast money, then went out of business as they priced themselves out of business. One more factor that should also be mentioned is the heart of greed itself, government. Rather than let game operators make an income and pay income taxes on it, many states came out with excessive annual licenses for each and every machine. At $75 to $100 or more for machine, it's hard for an operator to justify putting an older machine on location and take a chance that his share of the take will not even pay the license and other fixed costs. Games that could be put on location instead end up in a warehouse somewhere, and the government makes no license fee and no income tax on them. This is the logical end result of taxing a game operator more than other businesses.
Stupidity certainly takes it's toll. The games I see letely tend to be in locations that almost assure that they will no be played. Almost every WalMart around here, for example, has several games in an area between the entrance and exit doors. I have never ever seen anyone playing any of these games, and I never even go look at what is there. Yet they will still be in these awful locations next time I'm in the store. I'm not going to try to make a case that WalMart should have video games in it, but if they are going to bother at all then they should be put in a location where they would get some play, not in an area that gaurantees they will not. And plenty of other playable games get similar bad locations that make them sit idle. The fact that these games are idle so much does not justify a higher price for those who would play them.
Downright lazyness on the part of the operators is certainly another issue. While this is worse on pinball, where even if you can find a pinball game you usually can't find a fully functional one, it is often a problem with bad buttons, controls, and monitors on a video game too. People have gotten turned off from the whole experience and customers have been lost, likely permanently.
Great reference, thanks. This isn't where I saw it, but it looks like the same information as best as I can remember it. It does end up with a CD that boot windows and runs from the CD. I do think the information was available even before 1999, but I would be hard pressed to come up with an exact date.
Of course, pre-Win95, Booting Win 3.0 would have been even simpler (no registery to deal with), but back then computers couldn't boot from the CD (and few people had CD writers).
First of all, lets understand you're talking about Windows in general and not WinXP eight years ago. Well, the answer is you could. I saw a number of write-ups on how to make a CD that would win Win95 right from the CD. Let me add that, because of the driver issues and such you did have to build it for the system you were configuring for (at least if you wanted to use anything other than the minimal VGA drivers) and you might have to ignore a few error message that it spit out while it booted, but it could be done. You wouldn't be able to make a CD you could carry anywhere, but some people were making CD"s that could boot like Knoppix for a classroom environment (without the obvious "cheat" of just installing from CD to hard drive and then running from hard drive). Finding the information is proving a bit tricky, but I should have it somewhere. When and if I find it, if someone doesn't beat me to it, I'll post what I have or a link to same.
What's the difference between an
booting an Apple II and a Knoppix PC? Hardware notwithstanding, you can store a similar amount of software on each,
Who modded this up as insightful? While Knoppix does by default open the hard drives as read-only (to protect them from an accident from a newbiee), it's easy enough to issue a remount command and have full access to the hard drive if you want it. So a Knoppix CD comes with about 2 Gig of good software on it (in a compressed format that it can run the software from) and can write to all the FAT volumes you have available, as well as to any external drive (such as a pen drive). In what way is this even remotely like the limitations of an Apple II?
Don't forget to grab an inexpensive USB memory toy and you have it all!
And don't forget to make it look for that inexpensive USB memory by default, so you don't have to type in the "cheat code" every time you book, like you do on the regular Knoppix release.
Yea, the hard drives were really awful. Used to beat themselves to death against a track zero stop rather than just sense when the drive was at thack zero, all would go out of alignment in short order. Mush more useful than a cable that would let you hook up an old 1541 to a PC would be a program that let a PC store everything on it's hard drive and serve files to the C64 over the serial cable protocol. Of course, they would have to emulate a lot of the 1541 subroutines too, and give you ways to run the fancy loaders some software installed in the drive to speed up a drive that could take several minutes to load a program into a computer with only 64k of memory (as well as to deal with much of the awful "copy protection" many of the orginal disks have).
I do see on the GEOS site they have a Wraptor program that they claim is the first step - but they give you no way to get Wraptor to a real C64 either. They seem to think you are only going to run this stiff on a c64 emulator, not a real C64.
Actually, there are a number of programmable temperature sensors available that allow you to set a threshold and retain it, then will toggle an output when that threshold is reached. So this type of a device can be made with 1 chip.
I actually made a number of them for computers at a job about ten years ago. We put a small pizo alarm in ours, but used the blinking a spare LED concept for a more advanced version that actually drove the project. We had some mission critical systems for an automated control system that on rare occasions (we didn't use windows) would crash and need rebooted. To allow the system to operate without someone coming to reboot it, we decided to build hardware watchdog timers for it. I started drawing out a circuit that would use a few timers and gates, amd then realized it would be easier and chaeper to do if I just used an entire computer instead! So we grabbed some PIC chips, threw together some code, and built a watchdog timer that could be attached to the PC reset button and got some input from the PC speaker line. As long as our application kept pulsing the speaker line at a known rate, all was well. If the pulses ever stopped, the system would reboot. Activity on the line at the wrong rate (such as a tone to the PC speaker) wouldn't fool the PIC computer, but could be routed to the actual speaker on another output pin. And we threw in one of the temperature sensing chips as well, except that since we had a PIC available rather than just set an alarm threshold, we programmed the PIC to let us interact with it. We had one manual control (the computer reset button) which we rerouted to the PIC. By tapping in codes we could ask what the temperature was (which read back as LED flashes) or raise or lower the alarm threshold. You could still reset the system, if desired, by pressing and holding the reset button for a couple of seconds. And the guy who programmed it all still had so much memory left in the smallest PIC chip available that he added an input code that would play an Elvis song on the speaker.
Oh come on! This guy builds a "monitor" that looks like a hunk of crap and that needs special software running in the computer, and some geeks think it's cool because he came up with an unintended use for a cheap inaccurate indicator?
First of all, if you're going to run special monitoring software, which this thing needs, then you don't really need a kluge of external components mounted on a breadboard. You can display the results on the screen where they belong, and with far greater accuracy than this kluge does. And if you do want an external display for some strange reason, there would be ways to do it more accurately with an inexpensive analog or digital meter display rather than this hack. It's not like the Duracel indicator is the only hardware he uses, he is already spending a few bucks for other parts (and even includes an external power supply!) At that point it makes more sense to do it with an inexpensive and reliable component than this hack.
I would have been much more impressed if he had just cut the heat sensitive indicator off the battery and super glued it to a spot on a notebook case that got hot as CPU useage went up.
Block mail ports? You just made the service useless for 99% of travelers.
NO, you've made it useless for the spammers. Many legitimate users still have ways to deal with their e-mail over a web interface. More importantly, incoming and outgoing mail use different ports, so you only block out-going mail ports. Users can still check their e-mail all they want. And for those who just have to send an e-mail "now", there are many websites that will let them create an account and do so over a web interface (which still thwarts the spammer looking to send tens of thousands of pieces of spam an hour from the public access point).
Remember, we're talking about a free service here, not one that charges a few bucks an hour to share an 802.11b connection with a number of other users. Giving people free access to the internet and even a way to check their e-mail for important incoming mesages is a pretty decent deal. If I was traveling I would welome it, and if I did get e-mail that needed a response I would either grab a telephone or use a web based mail service to send a reply. And the URLs for a few free web based mail services could be kept handy for easy access for those like you who cry that the free service just isn't good enough to meet all of their needs.
Personally, I would go the other way. I would put up signs or print handouts that warned people that this was a public access point, and that even checking their e-mail over a wireless link in a public location wasn't a good idea unless they were using a secure tunneling protocol back to their office (which would also solve the sending e-mail problem). But if I had to choose between giving in to the crybabys who complain that the free access I'm giving them isn't exactly what they want and they don't want to have to learn to use any new tools, or to stop spammers from abusing the system, I would choose to stop spammers.
Wouldn't automount / autofs fall under the same shadow?
Heck, wouldn't starting to play the pre-recorded tape when I insert it into my old VHS VCR also fit the discription? I've had VCRs that do that for 20 years.
I seem to have forgotten my wireless card. May I borrow yours?
Oh really? When I installed one on my XP notebook, I had to load drivers from the CD as well. Other people with different brand cards need different drivers. And this is certainly one area where Linux doesn't make it easier than Windows; most wireless cards don't even have Linux drivers. I don't really see this as an easy way to use someone else's MAC address, even if you could find someone willing to just let you share their card.
Oh, "snap", now they have a different address to trace.
And if no one had ever been caught through their MAC address, this would be a good argument. But people have. Some hardware and software might not support that simple MAC address change, and most users will not think to do it. And very few abusers who are stupid enough to try to infect systems in a place where they had to show ID to get in, had cameras take their picture, have computers keeping records of their being their, and likely have security cameras watching and maybe even a bit of electronics listening in on what they do on that wireless link, will be smart enough to cover all of their traces, including the MAC address.
"once you have physical access to a machine it's been compromised"
Sure, but what does this have to do with the WiFi discussion? I could just as easily infest such a system with a pen drive or even a floppy or a CD (although I could insert a pen drive into most laptops without the owner even noticing). There are hundreds of simple ways to infest the ignorant. Heck, I bet if you were to try to talk computer owners at an airport into letting you use their system (even if you were a pretty girl), I could infest more systems just by burning some CD's with a virus and auto-installing code, and some kind of content (so the user wouldn't get suspicious) and then "misplacing" then around the terminal. And I would have far less chance of being caught.
all it takes though is a good worm sent to another user's...
If you really can do that, you can do it right now to most users on the Internet. Most users don't have a hardware firewall in place. If they have a software firewall in place they will have on on their laptop, so no differences there. Do you think you need to be in the same room with the guy to send him that virus? Do you think those users are logging your IP address so that you can only magically infect them from a public IP address? The flaws in your logic are that you don't just send a worm and have it somehow infest another system, unless you're Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum; and if you could such attacks would be much easier to carry off driving around an office park or the 'burbs than to do so in a location where cameras have taken your picture, security people have made you show ID, computers have a record of your being there, and a bunch of bored gun-ho security monkeys are looking for a fight.
Business DSL rather than home DSL might cost a location a bit more; but on the other hand many locations (like airlines) will likely already have network access in the terminal area, so the real cost is much less, just a decent firewall and some good network design to be sure their own systems stay secure.
The bottom like is free access at the gates would cost an airline a lot less than even putting out a coffee maker, cups and condiments. And it would get them 24/7 good will with their customers. And make those delays a little more bearable for many flyers. Yea, free wifi is a no brainer. Hopefully it will catch on more and more.
What I have trouble understanding is how anyone on slashdot could question "how can this make financial sense?"
Re:Free Access great for pedophiles
on
WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yea, because so many more perverts like to go to places like highly monitored government buildings crawling with security people and checkpoints and other people and cameras that can see their screens than, say, just drive around the 'burbs in the privacy of their cars looking for an open access point.
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I didn't mean to say that USB was only useful at high speed (although I can see where you take that meaning). I wanted to make two points: One) that Firewire would have been a much better choice when USB came out (in fact is still a better choice) and could have done everything USB could. Sure, mice and keyboards can run on something as god awful slow as usb 1.1 just fine, but there was no valid reason to build something that slow when firewire already existed. If USB had not been shoved down our throats and firewire used in it's place we would have firewire mice, keyboards, scanners and the rest. "Easy" is also just an issue because the USB drivers are pre-bundeled, if the better choice of firewire had been made then all of those devices would still work the same way for firewire. And Firewire is hot pluggable, the last benefit you attribute to USB. One thing that I don't think firewire offers in it's current form is the power supplying capability of USB, but a firewire based system with power also on the connector could certainly have been made, which would have given us one unified system.
Point Two): was that the choice of USB1.1 was clearly short sighted. The day I saw it I asked people "who ordered this" and within days I saw promise of a faster version coming in the future. But that didn't stop the spread of USB 1.1, with it's slow speed limitations. My notebook is less than a year old, not inexpensive, yet only USB 1.1 support was available in that product line. A lot of people spent a lot of money for USB 1.1 hubs and other devices that are going to start gathering dust soon (if not already) as they migrate to USB2, just to get close to where firewire was when USB came out.
Sure it has vendor support, but Microsoft is far from irrelevant there. We could speculate on why they did it to us, but such speculation can always be argued against. The point is this stuff originally came from Microsoft and Intel and there were better solutions at the time, only Microsoft's market presure made USB 1.1 what the vendors supported. And there is better technology than wusb, but Bill will give you wusb and tell you that it's good enough for you, likely while promising to give you wusb3 some day soon to fix the limitations of wusb.
By the way, there are not always better solutions for the applications I mentioned. Sure, I have my hard drives on an IDE interface on my desktop (and have used SCSI and other inferface technology as well), but when you want to add 120 gigs to a notebook with no external docking connector (or the ability to carry that much data on a hard drive to another location), you need something that can plug into a notebook or another computer. That isn't USB 1.1. While USB 2 is now about the same speed as firewire (actually slightly faster), it doesn't do the job that firewire does in allocating bandwidth on the bus. And just having multiple standards makes it much harder to find mating equipment and more expensive (anyone know where I can get a PCMCIA card with WiFi, USB2 and firewire on it, or even just both USB2 and firewire on the same PCMCIA card for an honest price?)
But what do you think is in that USB external hard drive case now? Do you think it's just the USB wires hooked right to the hard drive? Look again, there's some kind of "whole system" in there already. In some cases it might even be an ARM processor or something very similar. It's not really very different to have an external drive like that connect through a wireless USB connection or a wireless 802.11 type connection, except that in running as a seperate 802.11 server you would have some additional utility that you will not get with wusb. But either way you'll end up with a "whole system" on a chip running the device.
And you really think that it's reasonable to power a hard disk drive off of batteries in your back pocket? I see three issues right away, power drain (battery life), security, and hard drive life when used in this way (the ipod aside, the back pocket isn't the best place for a spinning hard drive).
By the way, most computers I've seen in public places lately have USB ports on the front. But if you've ever tried to attach a USB hard drive or USB flash drive as I have, you may find that some of the software they put on these systems to "keep them safe" in a public place stops you from being able to write to these devices. Until I can walk up and use my pen drive or USB hard drive at such locations, I'm not buying the argument that support for wusb devices will let me access my own drive.
You're missing the point. USB should never have happened either. Firewire already existed, was better, faster, and UBS didn't address anything that firewire didn't do at least as well. (And for many things, Ethernet might have been a better choice than USB too). But we got USB shoved down our throats. Of course, many of use still needed firewire adapters, and the USB built into my expensive notebook is pretty much worthless since it's USB 1.1 (too slow to talk to many devices like external hard drives or DVD/CD writers at a reasonable speed). No one but Microsoft and Intel wanted USB 1.1, but we got it. No reasonable person wants wireless USB (bluetooth and the 802.11x protocols each do better in their own areas and we certainly don't need WUSB interfearing with them), but you're going to get it.
It's a shame that this is being done with Earthlink, the company that cranks DSL and cable "inlimited users" news feed connection down to next to nothing if you dare use more that 1 gigabyte in a month.
Given the insanity of many patents lately, with people who clearly didn't have an original idea but somehow got the PTO to give them a patent on prior art or clearly obvious "inventions", a patent might also be looked at as much as protection from someone coming around and later patenting your code as the evil it has become lately. If some good soul patents something and makes that patent available freely to the open source community, they would seem to be doing a good thing, in protecting all of us from some idiot who might otherwise patent the same thing and claim ownership unless someone with deep pockets can beat him in court (and there's always a chance that a jury is too dumb to understand the issues). If free use for a patent is given, why would that have to be a bad thing? A patent says I own it. Just as I might be the author and copyright holder of code that I can make available to the open source community, why should someone not be able to do the same thing with a patent?
Note to Daryl: Sue the OS/2 users too.
Stupidity certainly takes it's toll. The games I see letely tend to be in locations that almost assure that they will no be played. Almost every WalMart around here, for example, has several games in an area between the entrance and exit doors. I have never ever seen anyone playing any of these games, and I never even go look at what is there. Yet they will still be in these awful locations next time I'm in the store. I'm not going to try to make a case that WalMart should have video games in it, but if they are going to bother at all then they should be put in a location where they would get some play, not in an area that gaurantees they will not. And plenty of other playable games get similar bad locations that make them sit idle. The fact that these games are idle so much does not justify a higher price for those who would play them.
Downright lazyness on the part of the operators is certainly another issue. While this is worse on pinball, where even if you can find a pinball game you usually can't find a fully functional one, it is often a problem with bad buttons, controls, and monitors on a video game too. People have gotten turned off from the whole experience and customers have been lost, likely permanently.
Of course, pre-Win95, Booting Win 3.0 would have been even simpler (no registery to deal with), but back then computers couldn't boot from the CD (and few people had CD writers).
First of all, lets understand you're talking about Windows in general and not WinXP eight years ago. Well, the answer is you could. I saw a number of write-ups on how to make a CD that would win Win95 right from the CD. Let me add that, because of the driver issues and such you did have to build it for the system you were configuring for (at least if you wanted to use anything other than the minimal VGA drivers) and you might have to ignore a few error message that it spit out while it booted, but it could be done. You wouldn't be able to make a CD you could carry anywhere, but some people were making CD"s that could boot like Knoppix for a classroom environment (without the obvious "cheat" of just installing from CD to hard drive and then running from hard drive). Finding the information is proving a bit tricky, but I should have it somewhere. When and if I find it, if someone doesn't beat me to it, I'll post what I have or a link to same.
Who modded this up as insightful? While Knoppix does by default open the hard drives as read-only (to protect them from an accident from a newbiee), it's easy enough to issue a remount command and have full access to the hard drive if you want it. So a Knoppix CD comes with about 2 Gig of good software on it (in a compressed format that it can run the software from) and can write to all the FAT volumes you have available, as well as to any external drive (such as a pen drive). In what way is this even remotely like the limitations of an Apple II?
And don't forget to make it look for that inexpensive USB memory by default, so you don't have to type in the "cheat code" every time you book, like you do on the regular Knoppix release.
Yea, the hard drives were really awful. Used to beat themselves to death against a track zero stop rather than just sense when the drive was at thack zero, all would go out of alignment in short order. Mush more useful than a cable that would let you hook up an old 1541 to a PC would be a program that let a PC store everything on it's hard drive and serve files to the C64 over the serial cable protocol. Of course, they would have to emulate a lot of the 1541 subroutines too, and give you ways to run the fancy loaders some software installed in the drive to speed up a drive that could take several minutes to load a program into a computer with only 64k of memory (as well as to deal with much of the awful "copy protection" many of the orginal disks have).
The VIC20 had much less memory, different hardware, and a different ROM. GEOS will not run on it.
I do see on the GEOS site they have a Wraptor program that they claim is the first step - but they give you no way to get Wraptor to a real C64 either. They seem to think you are only going to run this stiff on a c64 emulator, not a real C64.
Great, I can download GEOS. Now how do I get it on a single sided, strangely formated, low density floppy so that I can actually run it on my C64?
I actually made a number of them for computers at a job about ten years ago. We put a small pizo alarm in ours, but used the blinking a spare LED concept for a more advanced version that actually drove the project. We had some mission critical systems for an automated control system that on rare occasions (we didn't use windows) would crash and need rebooted. To allow the system to operate without someone coming to reboot it, we decided to build hardware watchdog timers for it. I started drawing out a circuit that would use a few timers and gates, amd then realized it would be easier and chaeper to do if I just used an entire computer instead! So we grabbed some PIC chips, threw together some code, and built a watchdog timer that could be attached to the PC reset button and got some input from the PC speaker line. As long as our application kept pulsing the speaker line at a known rate, all was well. If the pulses ever stopped, the system would reboot. Activity on the line at the wrong rate (such as a tone to the PC speaker) wouldn't fool the PIC computer, but could be routed to the actual speaker on another output pin. And we threw in one of the temperature sensing chips as well, except that since we had a PIC available rather than just set an alarm threshold, we programmed the PIC to let us interact with it. We had one manual control (the computer reset button) which we rerouted to the PIC. By tapping in codes we could ask what the temperature was (which read back as LED flashes) or raise or lower the alarm threshold. You could still reset the system, if desired, by pressing and holding the reset button for a couple of seconds. And the guy who programmed it all still had so much memory left in the smallest PIC chip available that he added an input code that would play an Elvis song on the speaker.
First of all, if you're going to run special monitoring software, which this thing needs, then you don't really need a kluge of external components mounted on a breadboard. You can display the results on the screen where they belong, and with far greater accuracy than this kluge does. And if you do want an external display for some strange reason, there would be ways to do it more accurately with an inexpensive analog or digital meter display rather than this hack. It's not like the Duracel indicator is the only hardware he uses, he is already spending a few bucks for other parts (and even includes an external power supply!) At that point it makes more sense to do it with an inexpensive and reliable component than this hack.
I would have been much more impressed if he had just cut the heat sensitive indicator off the battery and super glued it to a spot on a notebook case that got hot as CPU useage went up.
NO, you've made it useless for the spammers. Many legitimate users still have ways to deal with their e-mail over a web interface. More importantly, incoming and outgoing mail use different ports, so you only block out-going mail ports. Users can still check their e-mail all they want. And for those who just have to send an e-mail "now", there are many websites that will let them create an account and do so over a web interface (which still thwarts the spammer looking to send tens of thousands of pieces of spam an hour from the public access point).
Remember, we're talking about a free service here, not one that charges a few bucks an hour to share an 802.11b connection with a number of other users. Giving people free access to the internet and even a way to check their e-mail for important incoming mesages is a pretty decent deal. If I was traveling I would welome it, and if I did get e-mail that needed a response I would either grab a telephone or use a web based mail service to send a reply. And the URLs for a few free web based mail services could be kept handy for easy access for those like you who cry that the free service just isn't good enough to meet all of their needs.
Personally, I would go the other way. I would put up signs or print handouts that warned people that this was a public access point, and that even checking their e-mail over a wireless link in a public location wasn't a good idea unless they were using a secure tunneling protocol back to their office (which would also solve the sending e-mail problem). But if I had to choose between giving in to the crybabys who complain that the free access I'm giving them isn't exactly what they want and they don't want to have to learn to use any new tools, or to stop spammers from abusing the system, I would choose to stop spammers.
Heck, wouldn't starting to play the pre-recorded tape when I insert it into my old VHS VCR also fit the discription? I've had VCRs that do that for 20 years.
Oh really? When I installed one on my XP notebook, I had to load drivers from the CD as well. Other people with different brand cards need different drivers. And this is certainly one area where Linux doesn't make it easier than Windows; most wireless cards don't even have Linux drivers. I don't really see this as an easy way to use someone else's MAC address, even if you could find someone willing to just let you share their card.
And if no one had ever been caught through their MAC address, this would be a good argument. But people have. Some hardware and software might not support that simple MAC address change, and most users will not think to do it. And very few abusers who are stupid enough to try to infect systems in a place where they had to show ID to get in, had cameras take their picture, have computers keeping records of their being their, and likely have security cameras watching and maybe even a bit of electronics listening in on what they do on that wireless link, will be smart enough to cover all of their traces, including the MAC address.
Sure, but what does this have to do with the WiFi discussion? I could just as easily infest such a system with a pen drive or even a floppy or a CD (although I could insert a pen drive into most laptops without the owner even noticing). There are hundreds of simple ways to infest the ignorant. Heck, I bet if you were to try to talk computer owners at an airport into letting you use their system (even if you were a pretty girl), I could infest more systems just by burning some CD's with a virus and auto-installing code, and some kind of content (so the user wouldn't get suspicious) and then "misplacing" then around the terminal. And I would have far less chance of being caught.
If you really can do that, you can do it right now to most users on the Internet. Most users don't have a hardware firewall in place. If they have a software firewall in place they will have on on their laptop, so no differences there. Do you think you need to be in the same room with the guy to send him that virus? Do you think those users are logging your IP address so that you can only magically infect them from a public IP address? The flaws in your logic are that you don't just send a worm and have it somehow infest another system, unless you're Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum; and if you could such attacks would be much easier to carry off driving around an office park or the 'burbs than to do so in a location where cameras have taken your picture, security people have made you show ID, computers have a record of your being there, and a bunch of bored gun-ho security monkeys are looking for a fight.
The bottom like is free access at the gates would cost an airline a lot less than even putting out a coffee maker, cups and condiments. And it would get them 24/7 good will with their customers. And make those delays a little more bearable for many flyers. Yea, free wifi is a no brainer. Hopefully it will catch on more and more.
What I have trouble understanding is how anyone on slashdot could question "how can this make financial sense?"
Yea, because so many more perverts like to go to places like highly monitored government buildings crawling with security people and checkpoints and other people and cameras that can see their screens than, say, just drive around the 'burbs in the privacy of their cars looking for an open access point.