Speaking of SUNW practical jokes...
on
CPAN Shifts Focus
·
· Score: 2
Check this out. What makes it really funny is that I think they are being serious about this. This is from the company that, only a year ago, "put the dot in dot com".
I'd like to add that the 3rd-party keyboard available for the iPAQ is a PEICE OF HORSE PUCKY. I had that damned thing for about half an hour before returning it. The key response is horrible and the damned thing comes detached from the iPAQ if you bang hard on keys like I do. The lack of a decent keyboard was the entire reason that I sold my iPAQ for about 40% of what I paid for it on eBay.:(
If you can still find any of the GDM-F500R's, its essentially the same as the F520 but in different (2000 model year) packaging. I think I paid about $1300 for mine. These are the best CRT's that I've ever owned. I also like my SGI 1600SW flatpanel but you either have to live with the crappy video card it requires or shell out $500+ for their "multilink" adapter to hook it to something decent.
Regarding resolutions, run whatever feels comfortable, but run the highest refresh rate possible.
You think that they'd be embarassed to have this Web site up. Did you notice...
- The "mock-up" phone on their front page is actually just a peice of Photoshop handiwork?
- The bogus Time article. While I don't doubt that they made Time (it's amazing what $$ can buy you), their fake "page curl" effect that shows their product on page 3 is a bit much.
- I love how, in the article, they credit the Hop-On CEO as the "inventor". Inventor of what? I'm sure he's hardly the first to think of a disposable cell phone. The technology is obviously not his, nor is it Hop-On's. What did he invent?
- Is that Scooby-Doo rip-off kangaroo thing missing her lower jaw? Or is she just as dazed as the investors? Her joey looks pretty stunned by the whole mess.
- Check out this page. Look at the "models" on the bottom left. It looks like they Photoshop'ed the phones into their hands.
- I couldn't help but think, the "Our Future" link at the top should have lead to here.
I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
If your employer was a public company, chances are that they asked you to agree to their insider trading policy. If you really did tell your friends, this would probably be considered insider trading (you had insider knowledge regarding @Home's future) and this could get you investigated by the SEC.
I'm not an expert on securities law (IANAL) but this might be considered insider trading even if your employer was not publicly traded and if you didn't sign any agreements regarding insider information.
IDS and biological security are neat but it will be quite some time before they can be deployed on a large network. The reason: bandwidth. If you read the article and look at the included architecture diagram, this should be obvious. To make IDS work, your IDS device must, at a minimum, see all of the incoming ("dirty") traffic on your network. If you have anything more than a single T3 coming in, the amount of data to be analyzed is just too great. Correct me if I'm wrong but is there any machine which is capable of analyzing (in real time, mind you) 150+Mbit/sec of traffic? In addition to monitoring this traffic, a true IDS needs to look for patterns and signatures over a period of time. The processor and storage requirements for this sort of thing are just too enormous.
Do any of y'all remember TSX-32? Well, I shouldn't say "remember", as it is still alive and well. I first found out about the TSX-32 Operating System back when I was in high school in 1992. The neat thing about this OS was that it was multi-user and had virtual consoles way before I had even heard of Linux. Anywho, it's still around and you can download the shareware version from their Web site.
US adults below 21 cannot drink alcohol, but they can serve and get killed in the army. Way to go, USA!
Actually, the last time we instituted selective service (aka the Draft), the drinking age was lowered to 18. This was during the Vietnam era. They kept it in place for a few years after that but eventually moved it back to age 21.
You're forgetting that most of RH's userbase (the ones buying the software, not the dorm kiddies downloading ISOs) are corporate types. When you work in a big corporation, it's always easier to "sell" something like Linux to the bosses when it's backed by a big company. This is something that neither Mandrake, Debian, nor SuSE can provide.
Why Apple Will Stay Away From PDAs
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
[note: obviously, this is just MHO and entirely speculative]
1) The PDA market is stagnant. Most everybody who was going to buy a PDA has already bought one. PDAs aren't deprecated as quickly as PCs and its not uncommon to keep one for two or three years. (I still have and use my originial Pilot).
2) PDA prices have fallen through the floor. You can buy a pocket organizer with functionality that's equivalent to a Franklin Day Planner for about $100. I would guess that an Apple PDA would cost around $300-400, more than most every PDA on the market.
3) The grass is greener elsewhere. The iMac has been hugely profitable for them and the demand for these is strong. If they were to introduce a next-gen iMac (with LCD, etc), they would most likely hit a home run.
4) Apple has always been an innovator. PDAs are not new. I don't see a lot of room for innovation with them. Recall the Newton. That was an Apple innovation. Nobody had ever really seen a PDA before the Newton. Why would Apple, who abandoned the Newton at the start of the PDA boom, go back to handhelds?
5) Apple has no true rackmount server offering. If I had to bet, I think we'll see a (relatively) low-cost 1U G4 server that will come in somewhere around $1800-$2000 retail. Who knows...we might even see a 4-way server, as well. (okay, that was wishful thinking, but still...)
What about those of us that have the BEFW11S4, Linksys' Wireless+Router+4-port Switch device? I don't believe these guys have SNMP capability. There might be something in the firmware that could be tweaked. It would take some poking with a hex editor, I suppose... Anyone hacked on this little Linky?
The Douglass DC-3 was rolled out in 1935 and is still flying today. It is widely used by "bush" airlines flying in third world countries. They've been crashing lately but I suspect that is more due to poor maintainence than bad design.
Coders who follow these rules produce what? 3000-6000 lines of code a year? Ain't gonna get product out the door that way. What you get is code with lots of comments about what it is supposed to do, but doesn't because of all the time spent on documentation instead of design and debugging.
Excellent point. My philosophy about commercial software is this:
Never forget why you're writing the code to begin with. The point is to get working, stable code out the door as fast as possible. Anything that does not accomplish this is a waste of time.
Doing your architecture work is fine, but do it on a whiteboard in your cube with your co-workers. Don't waste time holding formal design meetings and drafting useless documentation and diagrams because, honestly, nobody will ever read them.
Modularize/componentize your code as much as possible. Document what the module as a whole does and what data it requires and what data it returns . You shouldn't have to waste time commenting every single peice of code. If you''ve modularized and documented what the module does, any decent programmer can figure out the rest.
In addition to not hiring idiots, don't hire people who love to wallow in bureaucracy and process. Besides not getting jack shit done, they impede everybody else.
If you want to comment and spend hours drawing Visio diagrams, fine. Wait until after the product is released to do this. These do not accomplish the goal (see point #1).
% This is the RIPE Whois server.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
% Please visit http://www.ripe.net/rpsl for more information.
% Rights restricted by copyright.
% See http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/copyri ght.html
inetnum: 217.52.0.0 - 217.55.255.255
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I would imagine that most parts of the continental US have reception to at least two or three LORAN stations. IIRC, you need four vectors from LORAN station to get a reliable position. I'm not sure how many it would take to fix you to within 10 meters or so.
Placing the beacon at a known location would be pretty easy, I'd imagine. Let's say you wanted to target a certain government building in DC. Place the DGPS beacon at a known location (like the roof of a building down the street) and a receiver on your missle/plane/whatever, and I think you'd be able to hit your target quite accurately.
Get a clue, bro. You can buy this stuff from any Magellan GPS dealer. Almost every GPS has the ability to output coordinates over a serial port. Interface this with a guidance system and you're within 3 meters of your target.
There's really no need to build your own GPS network. It's easy enough (for a foreign country) to get the accuracy they need by using differential GPS. Very simplified, you put several GPSes (or their antennae) in different places, take readings and figure out the average location.
Your assertion that there is no CL interface to OS X is incorrect. You can easily boot to console mode without loading Aqua. From there, you can start the X server.
As for remote administration, it's trivial. I run OpenSSH on my Mac. I can login to my box and do anything that I could do on my FreeBSD box--add/remove users, change networking settings, security settings, etc.
If that's not enough for ya, there are several VNC servers for OS X, as well as some commercial apps that provide remote control similar to PC Anywhere.
Chris
PS- Loose the stupid narrow formatting. It won't get you any more karma.
Re:A/V R/C Helicopter w/ long range capabilities
on
Geek Gift Ideas 2001
·
· Score: 2
I've heard of many people spending thousands of dollars and many hundreds of hours building a RC helicopter. When they fly it for the first time, they get it a few feet off the ground, lose control, and smash the whole thing into tiny bits on the pavement. Sounds fun to me!:)
Re:Home made cards and company
on
Geek Gift Ideas 2001
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Nothing funny about photos. They're among the best presents you can give. I gave framed prints of a b&w photo that I took in high school to my family. To this day, it still hangs on their walls.
The previous two years, I gave my father $150 Amazon certificates. Last time I was home, I opened up the kitchen drawer and found the unused (and expired) certificates under a pile of junk. Perhaps I should go back to making prints this year.:)
There's also the iBook. Before I splurged for the Ti, I came very close to buying the iBook. It had, IIRC, a 20G disk, CDRW *and* DVD built-in, a nice little 14" LCD, very nice styling, and a decent amount of RAM. The only drawback was the 500MHz G3 processor but it should work just fine for most folks as long as they aren't gamers (but who games on a laptop anyway?!?).
Slashdot Mirror
Check this out. What makes it really funny is that I think they are being serious about this. This is from the company that, only a year ago, "put the dot in dot com".
:)
Oh the times, they are a'changing.
I'd like to add that the 3rd-party keyboard available for the iPAQ is a PEICE OF HORSE PUCKY. I had that damned thing for about half an hour before returning it. The key response is horrible and the damned thing comes detached from the iPAQ if you bang hard on keys like I do. The lack of a decent keyboard was the entire reason that I sold my iPAQ for about 40% of what I paid for it on eBay.
If you can still find any of the GDM-F500R's, its essentially the same as the F520 but in different (2000 model year) packaging. I think I paid about $1300 for mine. These are the best CRT's that I've ever owned. I also like my SGI 1600SW flatpanel but you either have to live with the crappy video card it requires or shell out $500+ for their "multilink" adapter to hook it to something decent.
Regarding resolutions, run whatever feels comfortable, but run the highest refresh rate possible.
HTH.
Chris
You think that they'd be embarassed to have this Web site up. Did you notice...
- The "mock-up" phone on their front page is actually just a peice of Photoshop handiwork?
- The bogus Time article. While I don't doubt that they made Time (it's amazing what $$ can buy you), their fake "page curl" effect that shows their product on page 3 is a bit much.
- I love how, in the article, they credit the Hop-On CEO as the "inventor". Inventor of what? I'm sure he's hardly the first to think of a disposable cell phone. The technology is obviously not his, nor is it Hop-On's. What did he invent?
- Is that Scooby-Doo rip-off kangaroo thing missing her lower jaw? Or is she just as dazed as the investors? Her joey looks pretty stunned by the whole mess.
- Check out this page. Look at the "models" on the bottom left. It looks like they Photoshop'ed the phones into their hands.
- I couldn't help but think, the "Our Future" link at the top should have lead to here.
I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
If your employer was a public company, chances are that they asked you to agree to their insider trading policy. If you really did tell your friends, this would probably be considered insider trading (you had insider knowledge regarding @Home's future) and this could get you investigated by the SEC.
I'm not an expert on securities law (IANAL) but this might be considered insider trading even if your employer was not publicly traded and if you didn't sign any agreements regarding insider information.
Achtung.
Gentlemen, start your bidding!
IDS and biological security are neat but it will be quite some time before they can be deployed on a large network. The reason: bandwidth. If you read the article and look at the included architecture diagram, this should be obvious. To make IDS work, your IDS device must, at a minimum, see all of the incoming ("dirty") traffic on your network. If you have anything more than a single T3 coming in, the amount of data to be analyzed is just too great. Correct me if I'm wrong but is there any machine which is capable of analyzing (in real time, mind you) 150+Mbit/sec of traffic? In addition to monitoring this traffic, a true IDS needs to look for patterns and signatures over a period of time. The processor and storage requirements for this sort of thing are just too enormous.
Chris
Do any of y'all remember TSX-32? Well, I shouldn't say "remember", as it is still alive and well. I first found out about the TSX-32 Operating System back when I was in high school in 1992. The neat thing about this OS was that it was multi-user and had virtual consoles way before I had even heard of Linux. Anywho, it's still around and you can download the shareware version from their Web site.
Chris
Actually, the last time we instituted selective service (aka the Draft), the drinking age was lowered to 18. This was during the Vietnam era. They kept it in place for a few years after that but eventually moved it back to age 21.
You're forgetting that most of RH's userbase (the ones buying the software, not the dorm kiddies downloading ISOs) are corporate types. When you work in a big corporation, it's always easier to "sell" something like Linux to the bosses when it's backed by a big company. This is something that neither Mandrake, Debian, nor SuSE can provide.
[note: obviously, this is just MHO and entirely speculative]
1) The PDA market is stagnant. Most everybody who was going to buy a PDA has already bought one. PDAs aren't deprecated as quickly as PCs and its not uncommon to keep one for two or three years. (I still have and use my originial Pilot).
2) PDA prices have fallen through the floor. You can buy a pocket organizer with functionality that's equivalent to a Franklin Day Planner for about $100. I would guess that an Apple PDA would cost around $300-400, more than most every PDA on the market.
3) The grass is greener elsewhere. The iMac has been hugely profitable for them and the demand for these is strong. If they were to introduce a next-gen iMac (with LCD, etc), they would most likely hit a home run.
4) Apple has always been an innovator. PDAs are not new. I don't see a lot of room for innovation with them. Recall the Newton. That was an Apple innovation. Nobody had ever really seen a PDA before the Newton. Why would Apple, who abandoned the Newton at the start of the PDA boom, go back to handhelds?
5) Apple has no true rackmount server offering. If I had to bet, I think we'll see a (relatively) low-cost 1U G4 server that will come in somewhere around $1800-$2000 retail. Who knows...we might even see a 4-way server, as well. (okay, that was wishful thinking, but still...)
I did some poking around. These APs can send SNMP traps but do not have an SNMP server.
What about those of us that have the BEFW11S4, Linksys' Wireless+Router+4-port Switch device? I don't believe these guys have SNMP capability. There might be something in the firmware that could be tweaked. It would take some poking with a hex editor, I suppose... Anyone hacked on this little Linky?
Naaahh, dood. You just gotta get a cell phone antenna booster and stick one of em on your wireless card. "As seen on TV"!!!
The Douglass DC-3 was rolled out in 1935 and is still flying today. It is widely used by "bush" airlines flying in third world countries. They've been crashing lately but I suspect that is more due to poor maintainence than bad design.
Excellent point. My philosophy about commercial software is this:
Never forget why you're writing the code to begin with. The point is to get working, stable code out the door as fast as possible. Anything that does not accomplish this is a waste of time.
Doing your architecture work is fine, but do it on a whiteboard in your cube with your co-workers. Don't waste time holding formal design meetings and drafting useless documentation and diagrams because, honestly, nobody will ever read them.
Modularize/componentize your code as much as possible. Document what the module as a whole does and what data it requires and what data it returns . You shouldn't have to waste time commenting every single peice of code. If you''ve modularized and documented what the module does, any decent programmer can figure out the rest.
In addition to not hiring idiots, don't hire people who love to wallow in bureaucracy and process. Besides not getting jack shit done, they impede everybody else.
If you want to comment and spend hours drawing Visio diagrams, fine. Wait until after the product is released to do this. These do not accomplish the goal (see point #1).
Chris
Be careful. You probably don't want to mess with the Egyptians unless you want Omar, Mamoud and Abad looking for ya (see below).
cjs@mauritius [552] 15:40:01 [~]-> whois -h whois.ripe.net 217.53.98.174
% This is the RIPE Whois server.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
% Please visit http://www.ripe.net/rpsl for more information.
% Rights restricted by copyright.
% See http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/copyr
inetnum: 217.52.0.0 - 217.55.255.255
netname: EG-NILEONLINE-20001016
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changed: hostmaster@ripe.net 20001016
source: RIPE
route: 217.52.0.0/14
descr: Nile Online
descr: For any abuse complain contact abuse@nile-online.com
origin: AS15475
notify: afahmy@nile-online.com
notify: abadreldin@nile-online.com
notify: omar@nile-online.com
mnt-by: O-MAHMOUD
changed: omar@nile-online.com 20001026
changed: omar@nile-online.com 20010118
source: RIPE
role: IP Address Management
address: 15 Mohamed Hafez St.,
address: Mohandessin
address: Giza
address: Egypt
phone: +202 7611153
phone: +202 7611123
fax-no: +202 3607656
e-mail: ipadmin@nile-online.com
admin-c: AF5451-RIPE
tech-c: AB5631-RIPE
tech-c: OM2093-RIPE
nic-hdl: IAM13-RIPE
notify: ipadmin@nile-online.com
notify: abadreldin@nile-online.com
notify: omar@nile-online.com
changed: omar@nile-online.com 20010808
source: RIPE
I would imagine that most parts of the continental US have reception to at least two or three LORAN stations. IIRC, you need four vectors from LORAN station to get a reliable position. I'm not sure how many it would take to fix you to within 10 meters or so.
Placing the beacon at a known location would be pretty easy, I'd imagine. Let's say you wanted to target a certain government building in DC. Place the DGPS beacon at a known location (like the roof of a building down the street) and a receiver on your missle/plane/whatever, and I think you'd be able to hit your target quite accurately.
Get a clue, bro. You can buy this stuff from any Magellan GPS dealer. Almost every GPS has the ability to output coordinates over a serial port. Interface this with a guidance system and you're within 3 meters of your target.
Uhhhhhhh, exactly. It's not easy but any large scale terrorist organization (or country) could probably pull it off.
There's really no need to build your own GPS network. It's easy enough (for a foreign country) to get the accuracy they need by using differential GPS. Very simplified, you put several GPSes (or their antennae) in different places, take readings and figure out the average location.
Your assertion that there is no CL interface to OS X is incorrect. You can easily boot to console mode without loading Aqua. From there, you can start the X server.
As for remote administration, it's trivial. I run OpenSSH on my Mac. I can login to my box and do anything that I could do on my FreeBSD box--add/remove users, change networking settings, security settings, etc.
If that's not enough for ya, there are several VNC servers for OS X, as well as some commercial apps that provide remote control similar to PC Anywhere.
Chris
PS- Loose the stupid narrow formatting. It won't get you any more karma.
I've heard of many people spending thousands of dollars and many hundreds of hours building a RC helicopter. When they fly it for the first time, they get it a few feet off the ground, lose control, and smash the whole thing into tiny bits on the pavement. Sounds fun to me!
Nothing funny about photos. They're among the best presents you can give. I gave framed prints of a b&w photo that I took in high school to my family. To this day, it still hangs on their walls.
The previous two years, I gave my father $150 Amazon certificates. Last time I was home, I opened up the kitchen drawer and found the unused (and expired) certificates under a pile of junk. Perhaps I should go back to making prints this year.
There's also the iBook. Before I splurged for the Ti, I came very close to buying the iBook. It had, IIRC, a 20G disk, CDRW *and* DVD built-in, a nice little 14" LCD, very nice styling, and a decent amount of RAM. The only drawback was the 500MHz G3 processor but it should work just fine for most folks as long as they aren't gamers (but who games on a laptop anyway?!?).
Chris