Bought in March 1976 in Berkely. 2Mhz 8080, and 4K RAM with only the front panel for about 2 months. Then added the Processor technology VDM-1 16X 64 Video card, 3P+S I/O card and a CUTS casette tape interface. When I added the GPM memory board with a 2K byte ROM Monitor, it was actually easy to read a game in from casette and actually use the computer for something. (Target and TREK-80 for the win!) I eventually added some more RAM - 16 K Dynabyte cards and a North Star micro-disk floppy system. The system eventually evolved to a Z-80, CP/M 80, 60K RAM and a Morrow 16 Megabyte Hard disk.
Nope, not concurrent. I worked at a fairly large supercomputer center in the S.F. Bay area. We had to build all of our own I/O systems and networks as this was before CISCO etc.
Actually, for long-haul bulk power, HV DC transmission lines are more efficient than HV AC lines. I took an on-line college class in power generation and distribution systems last year and was surprised to find out that HVDC did not have as much loss as the AC lines. The losses were due to distributed reactance in the lines, both capacitance to ground and series inductance in the wire. These effects are important at the 230KV level.
In the 80's we built custom interfaces for large computers using wire-wrap Standard Logic Inc. wiring modules. The planes of wiring were assembled into rackmount chassis which were fed DC power via a vertical bus-bar system in the rack. The busbars were about.5 X 1 inch solid copper, insulated by shrink tubing with holes cut for the threaded holes in the busbar. The power supplies were rackmount 100 or 200 A Lambda supplies providing either 5 volts or 12 Volts. It was occasionally a pain to be called into the computer center in the middle of the night to replace one of those heavy power supplies - at least they were at the bottom of the rack.
I have DSL and cable. I also have a D-Link DL604 load balancing router. It sucks.
The router seems to think that as long as the physical ethernet connection is up, the provider is up. It tends not to detect network failure. There are ways to set up a periodic monitor of some host to detect if the network is up, but it does not seem to work properly.
What I want from this thing is: Lock SMTP to one port and thus one provider. My AT&T DSL SMTP server will not accept mail from my Comcast account. (this is correct behavior for anti-spam). The DL 604 does this correctly.
I want the router to send any new connection for a naive (not currently in routing table) external network to both providers. I want it to measure the response time ( over a number of packets ) and then lock the route to the network which provides the best performance. It can periodically re-test the routes - perhaps every 5 minutes or so. This should address the problem of non-neutral peering between various providers. It is not always true that the higher bandwidth cable connection is the best connection to where I want to go. If I am accessing a client's machine who is on AT&T DSL, my DSL connection may be faster than my cable connection. I want the router to deeply inspect the traffic and be able to detect if a session breaks on a particular WAN port, and try the other. I also want it to quickly recognize when all sessions on a particular WAN port break and switch to the alternate port, while testing the original port.
I want built-in diagnostics that can show me how often a provider drops the ball, shiny graphs of bandwidth and latency etc. It would be cool if the router would allow me to see what the instant connection graph between my LAN and external networks looks like. ( which of my hosts connect to which external domains at the moment ).
I would like to be able to see graphics of IP address / port scans.
I want the router to be able to do some intrusion prevention, particularly if no one is using my network at the moment - someone tries to scan - shut the thing off for a while. ( do I care if I DOS myself if I am not using the net? NO! )
There is a hardware provider http://www.routerboard.com/ that can provide multi-wan multi-lan and wireless router hardware for cheap. They also have software but nothing that does all the tricks I want...
Being the CIO, he is responsible for computer security within the company. He violated due diligence by certifying the use of an insecure operating system at Microsoft, notably Windows Vista./duck
I use driftnet http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/ running on a computer attached to an Ethernet hub (not switch) between my ISP port and the public side of my home firewall/router/switch. Driftnet displays all GIF and JPEG images going by on the wire. Whenever my kids come into my office to talk with me, they see the monitor sitting there splashing whatever is going by on the network for all to see. Another window is often open displaying any IM on the wire. When they ask why I monitor, I explain that I am probably not the only one monitoring, and that they need to be very careful about any expectation of privacy they may think they can have on the net. I also explain that I care about them and what they do on the net, and that I watch them playing at a park, why would I not watch them playing on the Internet.
I am cleaning out my office at home. I used DBAN - Dan's boot and nuke for drives which worked. It has a variety of options including DOD multiple pass overwrites. For the drives that did not work enough for DBAN to function, I dis-assembled the drives, removed the platters and use a bulk tape eraser. In addition, the platters are never going back into a drive. If someone wants to use an atomic force microscope on my groovy new hard drive platter clocks, I suppose they may get some data off. I think the ROI is pretty small for an identity thief however, and the NSA already knows all my secrets.
Corvus sold a 5MB drive for the apple II about 1980 which also had a clear cover on the case. I believe the drvie was > 5" and the case was about the size of a shoebox. It appeared to the operating system as a whole bunch of floppies, all on-line at the same time.
Seems kind of scary to use Bio building blocks to do nano-tech construction. Will the industrial use of DNA nano-blocks have biosafety scrutiny? I hope that some wonderfully usefull industrial nano-object does not end up with a potent lethality, particularly if it somehow can replicate in the wild.
Hearing about this, the first place I looked for helpful information was Citibanks website. No mention. Nada Zip Zero. Thanks for the help folks. One might think they could have a front-page notice with info on requesting fraud alerts on your credit records. Oh Well....
I was a contractor for a couple years. It was quite an experience.
I was hired through a contract agency, in my case, TekSystems. I was pleased with the arrangement. I had health benefits and a 401K. The money was quite good also, I was paid hourly with overtime over 8 hours per day / 40 hours per week. The client perfered to work me overtime than to hire an additional person, and I liked the money. I was paid weekly by check. Putting $3-5K per week in the bank account is a fairly strange feeling - at least for me. I paid attention each time, appreciating that it was an artifact of the dot-bomb bubble and not "real value", but it was quite fun.
My contract ended Aug 30 2001. Not a good time to find another contract. TekSystems had no Unix geek openings at that time. Dice.com had lots of listings, but they were mostly vapor - I finally got through to a couple of the recruiters and they said they had been trying to get rid of the listings for some time. I was lucky that a previous employer was happy to take me back, and I was ready to go back after 5 years on my own.
The comment about permanant employment is quite real. While I was a contractor, I watched 60 out of 75 of the employees at the bio-tech startup I was housed at ( but not employed by ) get laid off. I was employed by the start-up's parent company and housed at the start-up for location convienience only.
Never built any kind of receiving array antenna. Usually long wire is good enough. Looping the wire into a horizontal loop can help make it more omni-directional.
Sometimes phased arrays are used for getting higher gain and directionality. These are usually beam type yagi antennas. For higher frequencies, the antennas may be side by side on a single boom, for lower (hf) frequencies, the beams may be stacked vertically, one above the other. Note that the effects serve for both receive and transmit. The cost of a stacked multi-band HF yagi with tower can be considerable. Figure about $2-3K for a 50 -75 foot tower, another $1.5K for a rotator, probably $1K for the tower installation ( several cubic yards of concrete for the base in a BIG hole ) not to mention the $1K each for the antenna kits.
The experimenters labs are good for starting out - having a structured set of experiments to build, and yes, you can even go beyond those simple experiments and build simple experiments which are not in the book. For the most fun, however, I like the prototype breadboards. One of those with appropriate power supplies and other test equipment is good for analog, digital or combination circuitry. Add a few experimenters parts kits from Jameco and you are in business.
As for Chemistry kits, I think just buying the labware you need and the various chemicals etc. is a better way to go than a pre-fabricated kit.
The real interesting stuff however would be a molecular biology lab. Slice and splice DNA and build your very own new and interesting critter! Yes, you too can build your own miltary grade anthrax, plague or even smallpox. Add the THC gene to corn! Create that perfect paisley rose! Be the envy of everyone on your block! hmmmm I better quit now. Seriously, it is probably not all that hard to build a DNA synthesizer. Why not convert an ink-jet printer ? DNA = 4 molecules, many printers have 4 ink tanks. How tiny of a drop can you print???
Bullshit. Publicly available cryptography maintain the value of these networks for socially relevant use, beyond the economical capability of the governmnet to monitor. The technologies for building the networks are available as comodities, and the value of the networks exceed the cost of implementation by orders of magnetude. Of course, getting people off their collective asses to actually do this is probably only really accomplished by organizations such as Al Quaeda.
Computer modding seems to me to be the current day version of hot-rodding cars back in the fourties and fifties. Sure, people still hotrod cars, but not to the extent that they did back then. It was a just maturing technology that had not reached it's performance peak - much like computers are now. What standards exist give a reasonable base for which to develop commodity enhancement products which can be used to customize the look and boost the performance of a computer , allowing the owner to express their individuality and technical prowess.
Verizon Cancellation Success Story !
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
When I signed up for a Verizon phone at Radio Shack, I noticed a blank at the bottom of the form in the sentence describing the early termination fee. I can't stand to see a blank on a form ( especially such an important blank ) so I strongly suggested to the sales clerk that we fill in that blank with $5.00. I think five bucks is a reasonable amount to pay for them to turn of my service.
Sure enough, about 3 months before the end of the year's service obligation, my son lost the phone and we decided to cancel since it was costing him too much anyway (read he used it too freely) and the insurance on the phone had a significant deductable.
I took my copy of the original contract to the local Verizon store ( the telephone customer service people said they could not read the form over the phone, imagine that! ) and they verified that the $5.00 was in the spot where I said it was, and that it was the original MCR form, not me writing it in with a pen on my copy only. Verizon honored the contract and did in fact charge me only $5 to cancel although on my final bill this showed up as a combination of the normal termination fee plus a customer service credit cancelling all but $5.00 of the fee.
Zoot
You may THINK you are cancelled
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
It took me about 3 tries to cancel Earthlink. I went through the phone maze about like you described, although I managed to find customer service fairly directly and they were the right people to terminate the account. They did not argue with me and told me that the account was cancelled. The next month, I saw another charge on my bill. I called back and they had no record of my first attempt at cancellation. They entered my cancellation again. Next month, same story. It is finally really cancelled after the third phone call, in which they saw my account "noted" that I wanted to cancel, but it had not been entered into the billing system. I guess they won, since I am unwilling to call again and harangue to try to get some charges reversed on my credit card. I do want to say that I was generally happy with Earthlink which I used as a dial backup to my normally cable-modem-connected linux router for the house. Lets just say that the dotbomb downsizing strongly encouraged me to take severe economy measures like shutting off backup network access services and even shutting down my cluster when I was not actually using it ( $100 per month in electric power for a 4 node cluster ! )
I wonder what kind of neat science tricks one can do with managable amounts of extreme density matter. The strangelets are one example, the problem of interacting with them has more to do with their speed than with their mass. If we could find a way to slow one down it could be very interesting to study. Perhaps we could magnetically contain it to prevent contamination with "regular" matter. The interesting thing would be to study the interaction of time and gravity. We have lots of things in the world which weigh many tens, hundreds or thousands of tons, however becauseof their more normal density we can not get close enough to the center of their mass to really study localized gravitational effects. With extreme density matter, we should be able to measure intersting things getting much closer to the center of gravity of a significant mass. Matter of this type might make an interesting component of a ground based anti-balistic missile system. The bullet would be microscopically small, but would have incredible mass and could hold significant kinetic energy, suitable for the destruction of a warhead. The energy source for the prime mover could be any typical huge ground based power plant. Because of the microscopic size of the projectile, air resistance would be insignificant relative to the kinetic energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Bought in March 1976 in Berkely. 2Mhz 8080, and 4K RAM with only the front panel for about 2 months. Then added the Processor technology VDM-1 16X 64 Video card, 3P+S I/O card and a CUTS casette tape interface. When I added the GPM memory board with a 2K byte ROM Monitor, it was actually easy to read a game in from casette and actually use the computer for something. (Target and TREK-80 for the win!) I eventually added some more RAM - 16 K Dynabyte cards and a North Star micro-disk floppy system. The system eventually evolved to a Z-80, CP/M 80, 60K RAM and a Morrow 16 Megabyte Hard disk.
Nope, not concurrent. I worked at a fairly large supercomputer center in the S.F. Bay area. We had to build all of our own I/O systems and networks as this was before CISCO etc.
OZ
Actually, for long-haul bulk power, HV DC transmission lines are more efficient than HV AC lines. I took an on-line college class in power generation and distribution systems last year and was surprised to find out that HVDC did not have as much loss as the AC lines. The losses were due to distributed reactance in the lines, both capacitance to ground and series inductance in the wire. These effects are important at the 230KV level.
OZ
In the 80's we built custom interfaces for large computers using wire-wrap Standard Logic Inc. wiring modules. The planes of wiring were assembled into rackmount chassis which were fed DC power via a vertical bus-bar system in the rack. The busbars were about .5 X 1 inch solid copper, insulated by shrink tubing with holes cut for the threaded holes in the busbar. The power supplies were rackmount 100 or 200 A Lambda supplies providing either 5 volts or 12 Volts. It was occasionally a pain to be called into the computer center in the middle of the night to replace one of those heavy power supplies - at least they were at the bottom of the rack.
OZ
John DeArmond has a good article on his site about the $100 1KW Chinese-made generators sold at Northern Tool.
http://www.johndearmond.com/2008/12/24/the-generator-that-could/
Enjoy,
OZ
I have DSL and cable. I also have a D-Link DL604 load balancing router. It sucks.
The router seems to think that as long as the physical ethernet connection is up, the provider is up. It tends not to detect network failure. There are ways to set up a periodic monitor of some host to detect if the network is up, but it does not seem to work properly.
What I want from this thing is:
Lock SMTP to one port and thus one provider. My AT&T DSL SMTP server will not accept mail from my Comcast account. (this is correct behavior for anti-spam). The DL 604 does this correctly.
I want the router to send any new connection for a naive (not currently in routing table) external network to both providers. I want it to measure the response time ( over a number of packets ) and then lock the route to the network which provides the best performance. It can periodically re-test the routes - perhaps every 5 minutes or so. This should address the problem of non-neutral peering between various providers. It is not always true that the higher bandwidth cable connection is the best connection to where I want to go. If I am accessing a client's machine who is on AT&T DSL, my DSL connection may be faster than my cable connection. I want the router to deeply inspect the traffic and be able to detect if a session breaks on a particular WAN port, and try the other. I also want it to quickly recognize when all sessions on a particular WAN port break and switch to the alternate port, while testing the original port.
I want built-in diagnostics that can show me how often a provider drops the ball, shiny graphs of bandwidth and latency etc. It would be cool if the router would allow me to see what the instant connection graph between my LAN and external networks looks like. ( which of my hosts connect to which external domains at the moment ).
I would like to be able to see graphics of IP address / port scans.
I want the router to be able to do some intrusion prevention, particularly if no one is using my network at the moment - someone tries to scan - shut the thing off for a while. ( do I care if I DOS myself if I am not using the net? NO! )
There is a hardware provider http://www.routerboard.com/ that can provide multi-wan multi-lan and wireless router hardware for cheap. They also have software but nothing that does all the tricks I want...
Coders, here's a base spec, send some bits!
OZ
Being the CIO, he is responsible for computer security within the company. /duck
He violated due diligence by certifying the use of an insecure operating system at Microsoft, notably Windows Vista.
OldZoot
I use driftnet http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/ running on a computer attached to an Ethernet hub (not switch) between my ISP port and the public side of my home firewall/router/switch. Driftnet displays all GIF and JPEG images going by on the wire. Whenever my kids come into my office to talk with me, they see the monitor sitting there splashing whatever is going by on the network for all to see. Another window is often open displaying any IM on the wire. When they ask why I monitor, I explain that I am probably not the only one monitoring, and that they need to be very careful about any expectation of privacy they may think they can have on the net. I also explain that I care about them and what they do on the net, and that I watch them playing at a park, why would I not watch them playing on the Internet.
Zoot
I am cleaning out my office at home. I used DBAN - Dan's boot and nuke for drives which worked. It has a variety of options including DOD multiple pass overwrites. For the drives that did not work enough for DBAN to function, I dis-assembled the drives, removed the platters and use a bulk tape eraser. In addition, the platters are never going back into a drive. If someone wants to use an atomic force microscope on my groovy new hard drive platter clocks, I suppose they may get some data off. I think the ROI is pretty small for an identity thief however, and the NSA already knows all my secrets.
Zoot
Corvus sold a 5MB drive for the apple II about 1980 which also had a clear cover on the case. I believe the drvie was > 5" and the case was about the size of a shoebox. It appeared to the operating system as a whole bunch of floppies, all on-line at the same time.
Seems kind of scary to use Bio building blocks to do nano-tech construction. Will the industrial use of DNA nano-blocks have biosafety scrutiny? I hope that some wonderfully usefull industrial nano-object does not end up with a potent lethality, particularly if it somehow can replicate in the wild.
Hearing about this, the first place I looked for helpful information was Citibanks website. No mention. Nada Zip Zero. Thanks for the help folks. One might think they could have a front-page notice with info on requesting fraud alerts on your credit records.
Oh Well....
I was a contractor for a couple years. It was quite an experience.
I was hired through a contract agency, in my case, TekSystems. I was pleased with the arrangement. I had health benefits and a 401K. The money was quite good also, I was paid hourly with overtime over 8 hours per day / 40 hours per week. The client perfered to work me overtime than to hire an additional person, and I liked the money. I was paid weekly by check. Putting $3-5K per week in the bank account is a fairly strange feeling - at least for me. I paid attention each time, appreciating that it was an artifact of the dot-bomb bubble and not "real value", but it was quite fun.
My contract ended Aug 30 2001. Not a good time to find another contract. TekSystems had no Unix geek openings at that time. Dice.com had lots of listings, but they were mostly vapor - I finally got through to a couple of the recruiters and they said they had been trying to get rid of the listings for some time. I was lucky that a previous employer was happy to take me back, and I was ready to go back after 5 years on my own.
The comment about permanant employment is quite real. While I was a contractor, I watched 60 out of 75 of the employees at the bio-tech startup I was housed at ( but not employed by ) get laid off. I was employed by the start-up's parent company and housed at the start-up for location convienience only.
Building Better Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow! (tm)
Never built any kind of receiving array antenna. Usually long wire is good enough. Looping the wire into a horizontal loop can help make it more omni-directional.
Sometimes phased arrays are used for getting higher gain and directionality. These are usually beam type yagi antennas. For higher frequencies, the antennas may be side by side on a single boom, for lower (hf) frequencies, the beams may be stacked vertically, one above the other. Note that the effects serve for both receive and transmit. The cost of a stacked multi-band HF yagi with tower can be considerable. Figure about $2-3K for a 50 -75 foot tower, another $1.5K for a rotator, probably $1K for the tower installation ( several cubic yards of concrete for the base in a BIG hole ) not to mention the $1K each for the antenna kits.
Zoot
Have there not been two failures of the Shuttle?
I seem to vaguely remember something called Challenger....
Or maybe there have been more than 62.5 flights total.
Z
The experimenters labs are good for starting out - having a structured set of experiments to build, and yes, you can even go beyond those simple experiments and build simple experiments which are not in the book. For the most fun, however, I like the prototype breadboards. One of those with appropriate power supplies and other test equipment is good for analog, digital or combination circuitry. Add a few experimenters parts kits from Jameco and you are in business.
As for Chemistry kits, I think just buying the labware you need and the various chemicals etc. is a better way to go than a pre-fabricated kit.
The real interesting stuff however would be a molecular biology lab. Slice and splice DNA and build your very own new and interesting critter! Yes, you too can build your own miltary grade anthrax, plague or even smallpox. Add the THC gene to corn! Create that perfect paisley rose! Be the envy of everyone on your block! hmmmm I better quit now. Seriously, it is probably not all that hard to build a DNA synthesizer. Why not convert an ink-jet printer ? DNA = 4 molecules, many printers have 4 ink tanks. How tiny of a drop can you print???
Z
Bullshit. Publicly available cryptography maintain the value of these networks for socially relevant use, beyond the economical capability of the governmnet to monitor. The technologies for building the networks are available as comodities, and the value of the networks exceed the cost of implementation by orders of magnetude. Of course, getting people off their collective asses to actually do this is probably only really accomplished by organizations such as Al Quaeda.
Z
Computer modding seems to me to be the current day version of hot-rodding cars back in the fourties and fifties. Sure, people still hotrod cars, but not to the extent that they did back then. It was a just maturing technology that had not reached it's performance peak - much like computers are now. What standards exist give a reasonable base for which to develop commodity enhancement products which can be used to customize the look and boost the performance of a computer , allowing the owner to express their individuality and technical prowess.
When I signed up for a Verizon phone at Radio Shack, I noticed a blank at the bottom of the form in the sentence describing the early termination fee. I can't stand to see a blank on a form ( especially such an important blank ) so I strongly suggested to the sales clerk that we fill in that blank with $5.00. I think five bucks is a reasonable amount to pay for them to turn of my service.
Sure enough, about 3 months before the end of the year's service obligation, my son lost the phone and we decided to cancel since it was costing him too much anyway (read he used it too freely) and the insurance on the phone had a significant deductable.
I took my copy of the original contract to the local Verizon store ( the telephone customer service people said they could not read the form over the phone, imagine that! ) and they verified that the $5.00 was in the spot where I said it was, and that it was the original MCR form, not me writing it in with a pen on my copy only. Verizon honored the contract and did in fact charge me only $5 to cancel although on my final bill this showed up as a combination of the normal termination fee plus a customer service credit cancelling all but $5.00 of the fee.
Zoot
It took me about 3 tries to cancel Earthlink. I went through the phone maze about like you described, although I managed to find customer service fairly directly and they were the right people to terminate the account. They did not argue with me and told me that the account was cancelled. The next month, I saw another charge on my bill. I called back and they had no record of my first attempt at cancellation. They entered my cancellation again. Next month, same story. It is finally really cancelled after the third phone call, in which they saw my account "noted" that I wanted to cancel, but it had not been entered into the billing system. I guess they won, since I am unwilling to call again and harangue to try to get some charges reversed on my credit card. I do want to say that I was generally happy with Earthlink which I used as a dial backup to my normally cable-modem-connected linux router for the house. Lets just say that the dotbomb downsizing strongly encouraged me to take severe economy measures like shutting off backup network access services and even shutting down my cluster when I was not actually using it ( $100 per month in electric power for a 4 node cluster ! )
Zoot
WalNut Crik???? Danville???? ;)
I am in Antioch, but kindly leave my sausage alone....
I wonder what kind of neat science tricks one can do with managable amounts of extreme density matter. The strangelets are one example, the problem of interacting with them has more to do with their speed than with their mass. If we could find a way to slow one down it could be very interesting to study. Perhaps we could magnetically contain it to prevent contamination with "regular" matter. The interesting thing would be to study the interaction of time and gravity. We have lots of things in the world which weigh many tens, hundreds or thousands of tons, however becauseof their more normal density we can not get close enough to the center of their mass to really study localized gravitational effects. With extreme density matter, we should be able to measure intersting things getting much closer to the center of gravity of a significant mass. Matter of this type might make an interesting component of a ground based anti-balistic missile system. The bullet would be microscopically small, but would have incredible mass and could hold significant kinetic energy, suitable for the destruction of a warhead. The energy source for the prime mover could be any typical huge ground based power plant. Because of the microscopic size of the projectile, air resistance would be insignificant relative to the kinetic energy.
Zoot
Wer'e on the road to nowhere......
RedHat has restored Jim Henson to life? I KNEW linux was miraculous ! !
Z