My Kobo came with 100 (free) books pre-installed and I have read through about 20 of them so far. Having a good e-Reader makes Project Gutenberg books (free) easy to read, and there are about 40,000 books available, I have read about 10 so far. There are many great $1 dollar books available online. Given my Kobo cost me $80, I have broken even and saved money already, not to mention the tremendous convenience. I am also reading things I wouldn't have read otherwise, that I wanted to read. It wasn't worth spending $7 to buy a copy of Anna Karenina, but it was a worthwhile read at no-cost except for the reader which was already paid for.
Get both. A $70-$120 dollar e-reader and a $330 to $280 tablet. e-Readers are bad for surfing the web or any interactive work, they are also bad for any graphical reading. Tablets are bad for long-term reading, both in strain on the eyes and they tend to go to sleep before wordy pages can be read, not to mention who wants to recharge multiple times to finish a book, and are worthless in sunlight, and Tablets are heavy.
I have a Second-gen Kobo I got on sale as Borders was going out of business. And, I have a HP Touchpad I bought as HP discontinued the product line. Together they cost less than $350. Watch for a sale, the previous generation devices can always be found cheap.
Both the tablet and e-Reader grew on me and I reach for each at different times. I keep both with me almost all of the time. My certification/professional work all ends up on the Tablet for the graphics. O'Reilly publishes their e-books without DRM, so I can put books on both and use whichever works best in a given situation. I wasn't too sure about the e-Reader until I went on a trip without it, I was miserable in an 8-hour layover without it. The Tablet I liked immediately, and have it dual booting between WebOS and Android. The E-Reader ends up with most fiction and non-technical non-fiction, I have downloaded about as many Gutenberg Press books as for pay books off of O'reilly, Google, and Kobobooks. I spend about an hour with each device EACH day. I also have learned to build my own Android APPs and ePub books, not that difficult.
Yes, do this. Logged in to make sure someone included this. DSL on a thumb drive works well for wiping.
If you're trying to be nice, do a mkfs.ntfs on the drive afterwards. Also, try to avoid wiping the boot sector.
They should be installing a fresh image afterwards, so wiping the drive shouldn't matter. There is also a good chance this system will end up auctioned or recycled, so you're also protecting the company by wiping the drive.
We're always looking for more afjordable options for data cooling. As long as they avoid the local pines in their construction. No one wants to be pining for the fjords....
Know it all? I do that at work, tell people to RTFM. Basically, I wrote the manuals. And, I wrote the manuals so I wouldn't have to remember this stuff. What's the option for running the process against a whole customer? I look it up. What's the environment variable that has to be set for the command to run? I look it up. I found it out, and wrote down the information in a shared manual. SO I WOULDN'T HAVE TO REMEMBER someone else's bad scripting habits and inconsistencies.
They can spend a minute searching for it in the document. Or, they can spend an hour trying to get a-hold of me to ask me to spend a minute looking it up for them. Who's time is more valuable? Surely not theirs if they don't keep good notes, don't share them, and spend an hour looking for someone when it takes a minute to answer on their own.
No, I don't know that stuff. That's why I wrote it down. I'M NOT THEIR FUCKING RESEARCH ASSISTANT, their SECRETARY, their PEON, or their FATHER. They are trying to waste my time, like they do their own.
I put up with this from my boss. He can't even keep track of his own email messages some times. Put, I provide them with a smile. If someone is new and they genuinely haven't asked a question before, I answer and show them how to look it up on their own. A $17 dollar an hour contractor who can barely spell computer or read the screen will be shown the door all the quicker once they've used up their dumb questions.
Although I pretty much believe you're trolling, peaceful voyages would be comparable to a biologist from the midwest spending several weeks traveling to spend a year in Antarctica researching a microbe. Eventually, if a civilization develops enough, they will have the resources to satisfy their curiosity. However, it is just as likely they will be scavengers looking for pretty fur and make the resource extinct. In a long enough timeline contact is inevitable and one or the other will happen. Might as well make sure it happens gracefully.
If seti style contacts are established, any actual contact is likely to be through time-capsule type care-packages that take millenia to arrive. Maybe eventually carrying biological samples.
I imagine Stephen Hawking because of his celebrity status and his disability is developing some sort of persecution complex and is likely to view aliens in the same context. Yes, when we deal with enough people there will be a few bad eggs. And, the more people we deal with the more likely we are to encounter the really really bad eggs. But, we can't hide in our houses. The vast majority are good people and will help insulate from the bad. Hiding does nothing to insulate us, only leaves us exposed in a different way.
Survive pressures and temperatures? Where is your vision, you're not thinking like a maniacal spacelord! Did you or did you not take maniacal space-lordery at Uni? Who needs to survive the pressures when you can blow the whole planet up and pick up the interesting pieces. Don't worry, if you limit the explosion most of it reform in it's own gravity well. Or in the case of a gas/liquid giant, find the interesting stuff via RADAR/SONAR type systems and push it out the other side via LASERs:) Ooooo, giant nets! Giant space nets lowered from orbit! THAT'S IT! Or, how about a giant claw lowered from geosynchronous orbit like the Hughes Glomar Explorer. You'll get much of it to the surface....
Carbon shields have been used before, was bad idea with bad consequences. The Windscale research reactors were built with a significant amount of graphite for absorbing neutron radiation. The graphite was great at it. But, the energy would build up and spontaneously release itself as energy, and/or fires. Sure, they had work arounds. But, the workarounds gradually stopped being useful and the entire thing went up in flames eventually. Cleanup has just now really started, after over 50 years. Granted, there might be a safe way to use carbon once and change it out. But geez, carbon dioxied waste is one thing. Nuclear/spontaneously combusting carbon waste is another....
What are you trying to accomplish? If you want neat and pretty, that needs one type of thing. If you are trying to organize the cables behind the computer, that needs another type of thing. If you are only trying to neaten the cables between computers, that needs another. You building a rack-room or want something professional? My only concern was getting in-between device cables off of the floor and above doors. Went to home depot, bought 1.5 inch PVC Pipe mounting clasps (used to hold pipes to walls), and suspended them 8 inches from the ceiling. Then ran the cables through the clasp. To manage power-cables behind desk, I strap-tied the power cables to the desk, leaving other ethernet/keyboard cables which will move around loose. If you want something to impress girls, don't think having neat cables counts. Most women that have seen the cables dangling from my walls are more than a little worried.... Keep meaning to string LED lights along them to make them look less disturbing.
Given I drowned, dismantled, then pried apart all components of my last Windows 95 machine with a screw driver before hitting it over and over again with a hammer, it's save to say it wont sync (I hope).
Basic browsing is similar to iPhone albeit on a smaller screen (same resolution). It's much better than previous Palm devices. Unlike when the Treo 650 was released, or the iPhone was released, Sprint had Pre's booted up and useable in the store (although they hadn't turned the alarm off before I reached for it). Tested the web-browsing before I bought one....
Looks like it's mostly understood on a physical level with only a little understood about it's neurological impacts. Physically, it sounds like it tells your body to 'break down and rebuild'. A little bit of cortisol, it works like growth hormone. A lot of cortisol, your body ends up useless mush. I can imagine no cortisol means your body is basically incapable of new things; Wikipedia lists low-cortisol impacts like Addison's_disease, Hypoglycemia , and learning impairment. Sounds like the researchers are taking a physical effect and applying it mentally as well.
I think techies ought to appreciate this, it's entirely Murphy's Law. If he can lose it, he will. A great example is that once Bill Clinton walked out on a check. (Might have been after he was out of office) He just assumed someone else had it. A reporter picked it up. That reporter managed to make a name for himself by covering a $20 tab. Now, imagine if a reporter got ahold of Obama's blackberry. I'm sure the reporter would return it, eventually....
Unless people believe Obama is incapable of getting distracted....
Then again, I'm pretty sure he could ask RIM for a blackberry with a thumb scan and get one custom made....
Don't single out China/Asia. Countries have a massive effect upon each other. I live in far north Texas, and have seen haze/smoke from fires in central Mexico. I've always felt a large part of Texas's pollution problem is pollutants coming North. I've heard engineers talk about offering sulfer scrubbers to Eastern european coal-power plants to reduce smog here in the US.
Part of the problem is different countries worry about different types of pollution. In the US, we are more concerned about visible/long-term pollutants than invisible/short-term ones. Some other countries are completely unconcerned about things like leaded gasoline, which is still used in many countries but has been out of the US for decades. America has a bad record, but has gotten some things right in the end. Europeans make a big deal about CO2, but many European
Everything is a give/take. People are worrying about energy inefficient bulbs, replacing them with their more efficient fluorescent cousins, but are ignoring the problems those bulbs have with mercury. Or with LED bulbs, gallium aresenide. For example, the life returning to New York's harbor happens to be devouring all of the wooden structures built since they last died off.
Nagware is fine and dandy when upgrade is possible. Despite my best attempts, Firefox 3 doesn't run on my Fedora Core 4 system. Runs OK on every Window's system I can put it on, but good luck running it on a Linux distribution older than two years. Anyone find a solution to this or instructions online? And by the way, I'm happy with Core 4 and would rather stick with Firefox 1.5 than chase the distribution flavor of the month. I get uptimes better than the lifespan of some of these distributions./end rant mode
Not sure why the above person got modded down. We shouldn't be arguing against anything, this is a discussions page not a junior-high debate team. NASA's job isn't just to get to space and do research on space. NASA's job is also to accomplish new things, and research craft, people, engineering, manufacture, provide markets and test new-tech. The Apollo Project was the first large commercial client for integrated-circuits and contributed to EVERYTHING that has followed. Apollo was the first real-use of bar-codes for tracking things. The examples could go on, hard defibulators, photo analysis for mapping which was in turn used for medicine.... Apollo changed everything for western-civilization, wasn't just a pretty experiment. Would the research have happened on it's own? Sure, at a much slower rate. A human rated Solid-Rocket-Booster is a new thing, and will be a big accomplishment. SRBs will be cheaper and safer if they can be pulled off for human flight. Like in the Challenger disaster, although they actually caused the failure, they continued to fly afterwards, you can see in the pictures where they flew off. The SRBs survived the ~almost nuclear level explosion~ and continued their flights independently, breaking into only a few large and recognizable pieces: http://history1900s.about.com/od/photographs/ig/Space-Shuttle-Challenger/Rocket-Booster-Debris.htm . Was Ares 1 going to be a challenge for NASA? Yes, and they knew it. And, that's a good thing. Even if the dampening springs are a temporary solution to the burn-wake SRB issue, it's a step in a good direction allowing other things to proceed, while NASA continues to work on a long-term fix. How do you smooth out super-heated, fast-moving gas/plasma? That is a very good question which will have far reaching uses, from materials design, manufacturing, rapid-protyping, even Nuclear fusion:) Even if NASA does not succeed, the research is worth-while. They are doing this precisely because it is hard.
Had to answer this question once ourselves. Never got to the implementation phase, but the plan was to have one or two high-end test sets, and build the others out of the prototypes for the equipment we were building, and Lucent OptiStar NICs on Linux systems. IE, each protype would test the next, and we would have racks full of 1U Linux Boxen with Lucen OC-12 NICs. Can't find out of Lucent or Alcatel-Lucent is still making those things, but you can find used/refurbed OptiStar (?) SONET IP Nics for Linux (PCI) fairely cheaply. No idea if they work, but as low as $60 bucks. New, they were $10k to $6k. Searching for Optistar on Ebay or Google returns a lot of info. Or, searching for SONET PCI NIC. Or, just FIBER PCI NIC. You can probably set up a laptop with Gig-E, if you just want connection tests, regardless of which protocol you're going to use. Honestly, eBay/Amazon are your friends here. At times, you can find million-dollar test sets for $100 bucks (Adtech, Omniber, Cerjac...) Most are left-overs from when startups fail. Also depends on what you're testing.
This is the second time James Doohan's ashes have been lost by a spacecraft. The first was mentioned on Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/10/2249214 about a year go. His remains were lost after a sub-orbital craft landed in an inaccessible area in New Mexico. Last time his remains were eventually retrieved. Third times a charm?
Suicide is the ultimate statement of self-empowerment and control. We now know for sure, this man was unconcerned about disrupting countless lives, and now even destroying them; for his own sense of peace, prosperity, and control. What he feared most was being out of control of his own life, and didn't care about the lives of others. A person unconcerned about disrupting millions of lives for five seconds at a time, could not be bothered to have his interrupted for a few months. Poetic in a monstrous pig way.
Slashdot Mirror
My Kobo came with 100 (free) books pre-installed and I have read through about 20 of them so far. Having a good e-Reader makes Project Gutenberg books (free) easy to read, and there are about 40,000 books available, I have read about 10 so far. There are many great $1 dollar books available online. Given my Kobo cost me $80, I have broken even and saved money already, not to mention the tremendous convenience. I am also reading things I wouldn't have read otherwise, that I wanted to read. It wasn't worth spending $7 to buy a copy of Anna Karenina, but it was a worthwhile read at no-cost except for the reader which was already paid for.
Get both. A $70-$120 dollar e-reader and a $330 to $280 tablet. e-Readers are bad for surfing the web or any interactive work, they are also bad for any graphical reading. Tablets are bad for long-term reading, both in strain on the eyes and they tend to go to sleep before wordy pages can be read, not to mention who wants to recharge multiple times to finish a book, and are worthless in sunlight, and Tablets are heavy.
I have a Second-gen Kobo I got on sale as Borders was going out of business. And, I have a HP Touchpad I bought as HP discontinued the product line. Together they cost less than $350. Watch for a sale, the previous generation devices can always be found cheap.
Both the tablet and e-Reader grew on me and I reach for each at different times. I keep both with me almost all of the time. My certification/professional work all ends up on the Tablet for the graphics. O'Reilly publishes their e-books without DRM, so I can put books on both and use whichever works best in a given situation. I wasn't too sure about the e-Reader until I went on a trip without it, I was miserable in an 8-hour layover without it. The Tablet I liked immediately, and have it dual booting between WebOS and Android. The E-Reader ends up with most fiction and non-technical non-fiction, I have downloaded about as many Gutenberg Press books as for pay books off of O'reilly, Google, and Kobobooks. I spend about an hour with each device EACH day. I also have learned to build my own Android APPs and ePub books, not that difficult.
Today's Dilbert is right on topic: SHHHH! It hears you. .
I don't like being packaged and sold as a commodity.
Yes, do this. Logged in to make sure someone included this. DSL on a thumb drive works well for wiping. If you're trying to be nice, do a mkfs.ntfs on the drive afterwards. Also, try to avoid wiping the boot sector. They should be installing a fresh image afterwards, so wiping the drive shouldn't matter. There is also a good chance this system will end up auctioned or recycled, so you're also protecting the company by wiping the drive.
We're always looking for more afjordable options for data cooling. As long as they avoid the local pines in their construction. No one wants to be pining for the fjords....
Know it all? I do that at work, tell people to RTFM. Basically, I wrote the manuals. And, I wrote the manuals so I wouldn't have to remember this stuff. What's the option for running the process against a whole customer? I look it up. What's the environment variable that has to be set for the command to run? I look it up. I found it out, and wrote down the information in a shared manual. SO I WOULDN'T HAVE TO REMEMBER someone else's bad scripting habits and inconsistencies.
They can spend a minute searching for it in the document. Or, they can spend an hour trying to get a-hold of me to ask me to spend a minute looking it up for them. Who's time is more valuable? Surely not theirs if they don't keep good notes, don't share them, and spend an hour looking for someone when it takes a minute to answer on their own.
No, I don't know that stuff. That's why I wrote it down. I'M NOT THEIR FUCKING RESEARCH ASSISTANT, their SECRETARY, their PEON, or their FATHER. They are trying to waste my time, like they do their own.
I put up with this from my boss. He can't even keep track of his own email messages some times. Put, I provide them with a smile. If someone is new and they genuinely haven't asked a question before, I answer and show them how to look it up on their own. A $17 dollar an hour contractor who can barely spell computer or read the screen will be shown the door all the quicker once they've used up their dumb questions.
Although I pretty much believe you're trolling, peaceful voyages would be comparable to a biologist from the midwest spending several weeks traveling to spend a year in Antarctica researching a microbe. Eventually, if a civilization develops enough, they will have the resources to satisfy their curiosity. However, it is just as likely they will be scavengers looking for pretty fur and make the resource extinct. In a long enough timeline contact is inevitable and one or the other will happen. Might as well make sure it happens gracefully.
If seti style contacts are established, any actual contact is likely to be through time-capsule type care-packages that take millenia to arrive. Maybe eventually carrying biological samples.
I imagine Stephen Hawking because of his celebrity status and his disability is developing some sort of persecution complex and is likely to view aliens in the same context. Yes, when we deal with enough people there will be a few bad eggs. And, the more people we deal with the more likely we are to encounter the really really bad eggs. But, we can't hide in our houses. The vast majority are good people and will help insulate from the bad. Hiding does nothing to insulate us, only leaves us exposed in a different way.
Survive pressures and temperatures? Where is your vision, you're not thinking like a maniacal spacelord! Did you or did you not take maniacal space-lordery at Uni? Who needs to survive the pressures when you can blow the whole planet up and pick up the interesting pieces. Don't worry, if you limit the explosion most of it reform in it's own gravity well. Or in the case of a gas/liquid giant, find the interesting stuff via RADAR/SONAR type systems and push it out the other side via LASERs :) Ooooo, giant nets! Giant space nets lowered from orbit! THAT'S IT! Or, how about a giant claw lowered from geosynchronous orbit like the Hughes Glomar Explorer. You'll get much of it to the surface....
Carbon shields have been used before, was bad idea with bad consequences. The Windscale research reactors were built with a significant amount of graphite for absorbing neutron radiation. The graphite was great at it. But, the energy would build up and spontaneously release itself as energy, and/or fires. Sure, they had work arounds. But, the workarounds gradually stopped being useful and the entire thing went up in flames eventually. Cleanup has just now really started, after over 50 years. Granted, there might be a safe way to use carbon once and change it out. But geez, carbon dioxied waste is one thing. Nuclear/spontaneously combusting carbon waste is another....
Don't forget, a good diamond is basically one big carbon molecule. A diamond's not only imageable, but you can feel/hold/interact with it.
What are you trying to accomplish? If you want neat and pretty, that needs one type of thing. If you are trying to organize the cables behind the computer, that needs another type of thing. If you are only trying to neaten the cables between computers, that needs another. You building a rack-room or want something professional? My only concern was getting in-between device cables off of the floor and above doors. Went to home depot, bought 1.5 inch PVC Pipe mounting clasps (used to hold pipes to walls), and suspended them 8 inches from the ceiling. Then ran the cables through the clasp. To manage power-cables behind desk, I strap-tied the power cables to the desk, leaving other ethernet/keyboard cables which will move around loose. If you want something to impress girls, don't think having neat cables counts. Most women that have seen the cables dangling from my walls are more than a little worried.... Keep meaning to string LED lights along them to make them look less disturbing.
Static configurations are available already, not the intelligent ones being requested. Has sufficed for what I needed:
To have print page break add: <p style="page-break-before: always">
Also, to hide odd font and underline for links:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css" MEDIA=print> <!-- A { text-decoration: none; color: black } --> </STYLE>
Yes, they have to be massaged a little.
Given I drowned, dismantled, then pried apart all components of my last Windows 95 machine with a screw driver before hitting it over and over again with a hammer, it's save to say it wont sync (I hope).
Basic browsing is similar to iPhone albeit on a smaller screen (same resolution). It's much better than previous Palm devices. Unlike when the Treo 650 was released, or the iPhone was released, Sprint had Pre's booted up and useable in the store (although they hadn't turned the alarm off before I reached for it). Tested the web-browsing before I bought one....
Looking around, Cortisol is one of those good/bad things.
http://www.south-florida-personal-trainer.com/stress.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol
Looks like it's mostly understood on a physical level with only a little understood about it's neurological impacts. Physically, it sounds like it tells your body to 'break down and rebuild'. A little bit of cortisol, it works like growth hormone. A lot of cortisol, your body ends up useless mush. I can imagine no cortisol means your body is basically incapable of new things; Wikipedia lists low-cortisol impacts like Addison's_disease, Hypoglycemia , and learning impairment. Sounds like the researchers are taking a physical effect and applying it mentally as well.
I think techies ought to appreciate this, it's entirely Murphy's Law. If he can lose it, he will. A great example is that once Bill Clinton walked out on a check. (Might have been after he was out of office) He just assumed someone else had it. A reporter picked it up. That reporter managed to make a name for himself by covering a $20 tab. Now, imagine if a reporter got ahold of Obama's blackberry. I'm sure the reporter would return it, eventually....
Unless people believe Obama is incapable of getting distracted....
Then again, I'm pretty sure he could ask RIM for a blackberry with a thumb scan and get one custom made....
Here's a shell command to convert base64 encoded files into javascript strings using regular expressions in VI:
for var in *image*.b64; do vi -c ':1d|$g/^=*$/d|1,$s/^/\t\t"/|1,$s/$/" +/|$s/=*" +/" +/|$s/" +$/";/|wq' $var; done
Don't single out China/Asia. Countries have a massive effect upon each other. I live in far north Texas, and have seen haze/smoke from fires in central Mexico. I've always felt a large part of Texas's pollution problem is pollutants coming North. I've heard engineers talk about offering sulfer scrubbers to Eastern european coal-power plants to reduce smog here in the US.
Part of the problem is different countries worry about different types of pollution. In the US, we are more concerned about visible/long-term pollutants than invisible/short-term ones. Some other countries are completely unconcerned about things like leaded gasoline, which is still used in many countries but has been out of the US for decades. America has a bad record, but has gotten some things right in the end. Europeans make a big deal about CO2, but many European
beaches have incredibly toxic water, or land which is unfarmable. Thanks to American pollution reforms, life is even returning to New York's harbor.
Everything is a give/take. People are worrying about energy inefficient bulbs, replacing them with their more efficient fluorescent cousins, but are ignoring the problems those bulbs have with mercury. Or with LED bulbs, gallium aresenide. For example, the life returning to New York's harbor happens to be devouring all of the wooden structures built since they last died off.
Nagware is fine and dandy when upgrade is possible. Despite my best attempts, Firefox 3 doesn't run on my Fedora Core 4 system. Runs OK on every Window's system I can put it on, but good luck running it on a Linux distribution older than two years. Anyone find a solution to this or instructions online? And by the way, I'm happy with Core 4 and would rather stick with Firefox 1.5 than chase the distribution flavor of the month. I get uptimes better than the lifespan of some of these distributions. /end rant mode
Not sure why the above person got modded down. We shouldn't be arguing against anything, this is a discussions page not a junior-high debate team. NASA's job isn't just to get to space and do research on space. NASA's job is also to accomplish new things, and research craft, people, engineering, manufacture, provide markets and test new-tech. The Apollo Project was the first large commercial client for integrated-circuits and contributed to EVERYTHING that has followed. Apollo was the first real-use of bar-codes for tracking things. The examples could go on, hard defibulators, photo analysis for mapping which was in turn used for medicine.... Apollo changed everything for western-civilization, wasn't just a pretty experiment. Would the research have happened on it's own? Sure, at a much slower rate. A human rated Solid-Rocket-Booster is a new thing, and will be a big accomplishment. SRBs will be cheaper and safer if they can be pulled off for human flight. Like in the Challenger disaster, although they actually caused the failure, they continued to fly afterwards, you can see in the pictures where they flew off. The SRBs survived the ~almost nuclear level explosion~ and continued their flights independently, breaking into only a few large and recognizable pieces: http://history1900s.about.com/od/photographs/ig/Space-Shuttle-Challenger/Rocket-Booster-Debris.htm . Was Ares 1 going to be a challenge for NASA? Yes, and they knew it. And, that's a good thing. Even if the dampening springs are a temporary solution to the burn-wake SRB issue, it's a step in a good direction allowing other things to proceed, while NASA continues to work on a long-term fix. How do you smooth out super-heated, fast-moving gas/plasma? That is a very good question which will have far reaching uses, from materials design, manufacturing, rapid-protyping, even Nuclear fusion :) Even if NASA does not succeed, the research is worth-while. They are doing this precisely because it is hard.
Had to answer this question once ourselves. Never got to the implementation phase, but the plan was to have one or two high-end test sets, and build the others out of the prototypes for the equipment we were building, and Lucent OptiStar NICs on Linux systems. IE, each protype would test the next, and we would have racks full of 1U Linux Boxen with Lucen OC-12 NICs. Can't find out of Lucent or Alcatel-Lucent is still making those things, but you can find used/refurbed OptiStar (?) SONET IP Nics for Linux (PCI) fairely cheaply. No idea if they work, but as low as $60 bucks. New, they were $10k to $6k. Searching for Optistar on Ebay or Google returns a lot of info. Or, searching for SONET PCI NIC. Or, just FIBER PCI NIC. You can probably set up a laptop with Gig-E, if you just want connection tests, regardless of which protocol you're going to use. Honestly, eBay/Amazon are your friends here. At times, you can find million-dollar test sets for $100 bucks (Adtech, Omniber, Cerjac...) Most are left-overs from when startups fail. Also depends on what you're testing.
The link to the telegraph article is incorrect. Here's the real link
This is the second time James Doohan's ashes have been lost by a spacecraft. The first was mentioned on Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/10/2249214 about a year go. His remains were lost after a sub-orbital craft landed in an inaccessible area in New Mexico. Last time his remains were eventually retrieved. Third times a charm?
Suicide is the ultimate statement of self-empowerment and control. We now know for sure, this man was unconcerned about disrupting countless lives, and now even destroying them; for his own sense of peace, prosperity, and control. What he feared most was being out of control of his own life, and didn't care about the lives of others. A person unconcerned about disrupting millions of lives for five seconds at a time, could not be bothered to have his interrupted for a few months. Poetic in a monstrous pig way.
My sense of humor crashed the joke program!
Invalid query: Table 'jester5_emptyjokeclusters' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
So, who wants to file a bug report on this one? Wonder if someone played a joke on them by submitting their website to Slashdot?