It's a Kitchen Aid, model Ultra Power Plus. Single slot, wide enough for a split bagel or two slices of ultra-thick french toast bread. Plastic outside to prevent burns if you bump it. Picked it up at Fry's.
Controls:
Shade control: Button: lighter, Button: darker. 7-segment LED showing current setting. (This stuff simulates a slider.)
In other words, a computer controls the timing of the cycle. (I haven't seen any indication that it modulates the power level or only lights one side for bagels.) It provides a convenient interface in terms of type and state of bread and desired doneness, computing the required cycle time.
Unlike a mechanical thermostat, it can compensate for the toaster being preheated, so if you do a second set of slices right after the first they come out the same. And you don't have to burn up a couple loaves or bags of bagels or waffles figuring out the right slider setting.
And both networks [phone and internet] rely on the power grid, which even in a city like New York (or LA) is not as reliable as you'd think..
Actually the phone network - at least the central offices - does not rely on the power grid. They run off big banks of iron-alkaline cells floating on a recharger/load bus, and can keep the COs alive for days. Repeaters are powered from the COs.
If you have a coper pair between you and the switch, and don't have a PBX or other non phone-line-powered premisis equipment, your phone will keep working even though your city is dark. (I'm not sure how good the local tellcos are at battery-backing or CO-powering remote line concentrators, so a copper pair into your house isn't a guarantee.)
Once you've got fifty matchhead-sized computers scattered about you, controlling everything from the gas pressure in your running shoes through the setting of your air conditioner to the caffiene level of your blood, what are you going to use for a control panel?
Back in the early days, control panels were built of discrete components. Every signal you watched needed a lamp, meter, drop flag, noisemaker, or the like. Everything you controlled needed its own switch, knob, slider, or whatever. Every gadget chewed up panel space, required its own expensive wiring back to the thing it monitored or controlled, and created another single point of failure.
Computers were no exception (and you need to control the computer in any system a computer controls.) But their guts were riding Moore's law, while control-panel tech improves more like manufactured products: Economy of scale and occasional inventions. These days a control panel is a bit more work and cost than a printed circuit board. But even if controls DID improve by Moore's law, eyes and fingers only improve at evolutionary rates - which is effectively not-at-all. So the amount of stuff to be controlled outran the panel space to control it.
By the '60s mainframes had more than one entire box dedicated just to the switches and blinky-lights, and it still wasn't enough. IBM was already multiplexing each row of blinky-lights across 16 functions with an associated rotary switch (that also changed the labels). Minicomputers were RISK and had less to display, but they were starting to do the same thing, or to skip displaying stuff of interest.
DEC broke through with the LSI-11. Configuration was still jumpers, but the panel was replaced with a debugger-like interface on the primary serial port. When Amdahl left IBM he saved a lot of work on his first mainframe by building his control panel from a DGC Nova controlling a couple projection displays. Cray did the same BEFORE he left CDC, using a couple big monitors controlled by the 6x00's peripheral processors.
Virtual control panels worked well for other things than computers, too. Factories began to be controlled from displays on screens. NASA scientists were amazed by a private rocket company who rented one of their engine test stands, but ignored the roomfull of control consoles and ran their test through a display hacked up on an early Mac.
At first virtual control panels still required special-purpose hardware and software for each application. Later they were done with software on a general-purpose small computer. But they still required a lot of custom software and were limited to one operating system.
HTML and CGI changed that. They provide a compact representation of arbitrary control panels and a means for switching between them, along with a convenient way to fill in variable display fields and to pass control-setting changes to the processor doing the controlling. And they allow one display to control a multplicity of devices over a network.
These days my toaster has a custom control panel, with six buttons, four LEDs, and a seven-segment display. My ADSL modem, on the other hand, gets away with one failure-prone moving part - the power switch - by using a web server for its panel.
Using web-based consoles the graphic interface is done for you, and the software is available (for FREE!) from multiple vendors for all popular platforms. Powerful graphic design tools are available off-the-shelf as well. The last missing link is the web server for the little embedded systems.
With a rudimentary comm stack and an even more stripped-down web server, filling in the blanks in canned pages and forwarding responses to a cgi-based command handler, you've got all the control and display you need. You can even flip from machine, so you only need one window to run the whole show.
The smaller the web server, the more of your tiny processor is available for useful work (or the smaller a processor you can get away with).
So that's why you suddenly see a flood of little web servers for embedded micros, and why it's very important.
I didn't say ANYTHING about the truth of the claims, or my own opinions, of the matters in question.
The only issue I'm addressing is the incredulity of the previous poster at the concept of making a movie of "Takedown". So I showed how it could be made into a blockbuster.
You may recall that "Takedown" was written by a team composed of Tsutomu and a partner. So of COURSE any movie made from it will portray the Shimomura interpretation of the events.
Sure! It's a police procedural/manhunt, the first about a new kind of crime. And it's also a true story of one of the very first manhunts for this crime - when the techniques are still being developed on-the-fly. Imagine how the crime-movie fans would drool over a true history of the first-ever manhunt for murder, bank-robbery, or swindling.
It's a drama about a battle between the light-side and dark-side. Mitnick is one of the few crackers who can aspire to the title "hacker". Shimomura is a multi-talented expert, a hacker (in the MIT AI lab sense), recognized as such by his peers. Security consultation is a small part of what he does. But he does it very well, and part of doing it was developing some of the tools that he ended up using to track Mitnick down.
Mitnick could have been still-at-large today. But he broke into Tsutomu's machines (while Tsutomu was on vacation) to steal his tools, notes, and correspondence, leaving tracks on the machines (and a "nyah-nyah" on voicemail). By stealing this info he turned himself into a much larger threat to the network community in general, and a personal threat to Tsutomu, dragging him into the manhunt. So Tsutomu dropped his work and spent months tracking down Mitnick, as the lower-cost option. And was reluctantly cast as the hero in a personal duel.
It's a western. Pioneer settler in new territory, top-gun due to talent developed by necessity, whose work includes sometimes helping the other settlers and businessmen defend themselves against criminals, is goaded into a fight by a big-name gunman trying to boost his reputation. With help from (occasionally bumbling) sidekick and (initially reluctant) lawmen, tracks down and captures the bad guy.
And of course it's a documentary of very interesting new tech.
So how often does Hollywood get to do a movie accessable and appealing to crime fans, western fans, fantasy-drama fans, and techies, all in a single package? It could be the biggest movie of the year.
What you want is a pair of passive mixers, one for each channel of the stereo signal.
Given that the output impedence of each of the sources is (nominally) equal to the input impedence of the speakers and that you want equal contributions from each of the sources and don't NEED a master attenuator (or want unnecessary attenuation) either, that reduces to:
Tie the grounds together. Wire up a set of five equal resistors, one from the right-channel hot of each of the sources and one from the right-channel hot of the sink. Tie the other end of the five resistors together. Repeat for the left channel.
Each source and the sink provide a characteristic impeedence "C", and want to see it as well. With resistors of value "R" the impedence they see is:
R + (R+C)/4
Setting that equal to C and solving for R we get:
R = (3/5)*C
For 8 ohms nominal impedence R comes out to 4.8 ohms.
So go out and buy ten 5% resistors as close to 4.8 ohms as you can find. Half-watt should do. So should quarter-watt if you can't find half-watt.
This should still work reasonably well even if some of the output signals are really at a higher impedence and intended for headphones. If some of your sources end up driving your speakers wildly less than others, that may be what happened. In this unlikely instance there are tweaks to compensate, but they'll depend on the actual config you've got and will require a little debugging.
Don't you, or shouldn't you, get disbarred for this? Yes, we countersued on grounds that we knew were wrong, but we were just trying to vigourously defend ourselves
Nope. You get disbarred for lying about a fact. You get to argue for an opinion or interpretation of the law whether you believe in it or not.
Consider the defense of "pleading the alternative" in a criminal trial, for example. Prosecution claims defendant stole it. Defendant PLEADS that he didn't take it, he gave it back, he didn't sell it, he didn't spend the money, etc. That's perfectly legal, because it's the prosecution's job to prove all the elements beyond a reasonable doubt, and the defense's to poke a hole in any one necessary element.
Now if the defendant gets on the stand and TESTIFIES that he didn't take it and he gave it back, or any other claims that are mutually exclusive and therefore one must be a lie, he HAS broken the law and is in deep kimchee. Ditto lawyers who make a false claim of fact.
They need to expand the model to take into account that different drivers have different driving styles, and that these make traffic behave more like a solution of different particles than a uniform substance.
Some years back I noticed that different regions have distinct driving styles, and that someone (like me) from a different region with a different style could be in, or cause, trouble - like a foreign particle acting as a seed crystal or a cavitation site.
Then there are places - like California - where waves of immigration from different regions have produced a wild mix of different driving styles.
And lots of unforseen consequences of government intervention. For instance: The 55 MPH speed limit changed freeway behavior nationally - from mutual repulsion (for safety) to clumping (forming a herd to make it harder for the blue-coated peredator to pick out a victim).
Why do you want to limit the options of the entire free software community?
If you don't want YOUR code to be used to kill people, or to count beans, or to molest baby ducks, you're free to write your own license that reads that way. Even if you're writing changes to GPLed code you can modularize your changes and release them under a GPL+your limits.
What you're talking about is changing the GPL to limit the use of ALL other programmers' GPLed code to conform to your political agenda.
It's nice to get my score bumped. But why for "funny"? I was dead serious.
I worked with synthetic aperture radar back in 1967 - when you processed the data with lasers, film, and optic benches because the closest to a supercomputer available (at least to me) was Cray's very first effort - around which any laptop can now run rings.
You shoud be able to build all the microwave hardware you need for a synthetic aperture mine IMAGER starting with a couple X-band burglar sniffers (and maybe adding a PIN diode to sweep the frequency a bit better), plus a few low-grade discretes from Radio Shack, a pie plate, and a broom handle.
The signals outside the microwave plumbing, both what you generate and what you detect, are no worse than audio frequency, and over 90% of your crunch is one two-dimensional FFT to about the resolution of your screen - just what the DSP shines at. With a modem card you ought to be able to get real-time imaging or close to it - a big improvement over developing film at the lab, twice, after the airplane comes back.
Side-looking sonar is identical to one of the two modes of the radar "magic wand", except you use a sonar transucer you picked up for a hundred bux or so at West Marine or some other yacht outfitter, and you have to do your carrier yourself - which means a little extra crunch: a swept sine wave generation and a per-sample multiply at ultrasound frequencies. Still a piece of cake.
You can put the sonar transducer on a stick and use it {in both modes} for finding mines, too. Like when they're in a rice paddy, for instance.
Or hang the microwave gadget on your car window, drive by the local pizza parlor, and map the ovens and tables. B-)
> The only problem is that tax dollars would be going to R&D which, although it would benefit "mankind", would be filling the pockets of these private companies. In short, they'd be making a profit from Joe Taxpayer. Perhaps the private companies should pay NASA back by providing them with a certain number or percentage of launch-resources.
But Joe Taxpayer would get it back, with interest, big time. The companies "making a profit" would be competing to sell Joe Inc. their new satellite, or sell a hundred thousand Joe Joneses their new satellite-based service.
Note that compeeting - which translates to lowering prices or offering better services.
With a NASA launch monopoly you have to pay NASA their inflated rates, and beg for a slot. With a half-dozen launch services, they'll be competing to sell the slots.
And NASA, and thus Joe Taxpayer, would get a ride on that deal, too. If Sam's Satellites wants to gouge NASA, then NASA can always buy their next half dozen space station payloads from Bob's Ballistics.
A software modem is essentially a downloadable DSP chip with a fast interface to the computer on one side and a phone line on the other. To sell one to Linux folk you have to open-source the code - and probably the board schematic, too.
Think about the hack potential (both white and black) of such a device!
And don't forget tapping into the DSP lines behind the telephone interface.
I'm already drooling over the prospect of making a side-looking sonar for my wife's boat, to explore the local bay's floor, or a landmine-finder synthetic aperture radar hacked up out of a couple radar motion detectors and a laptop with one of these "modems". DSPs have specialized instructions for FFTs, which should make it MUCH easier than using a sound card and pure software.
NASA is SUPPOSED to be doing R&D, and releasing it to the public, so PRIVATE companies can use it to design their OWN spaceships, just as they do for ariplane improvements.
They have already put a major crimp on the private space program, by pressuring their suppliers with threats that if they provide stuff to the private COs, NASA will find new suppliers. (Just TRY to get a guidance system component, for instance, even if you are squeaky clean and have a couple senators in your back pocket.)
Letting them self-fund would give them even more incentive to suppress the people they're SUPPOSED to be helping, by setting them up as a direct competitor, and making their funding dependent on out-competing any independent private company.
Better would be to require them to STOP doing space shots themselves, but fund them to BUY their launches from private companies. That would turn things around, big time.
Once you've got fifty matchhead-sized computers scattered about you, controlling everything from the gas pressure in your running shoes through the setting of your air conditioner to the caffiene level of your blood, what are you going to use for a control panel?
My toaster has a custom control panel, with six buttons, four LEDs, and a seven-segment display. My ADSL modem, on the other hand, gets away with one failure-prone moving part - the power switch - by using a web server for its panel.
Using web-based consoles the graphic interface is done for you, and the software is available (for FREE!) from multiple vendors for all popular platforms. Powerful graphic design tools are available off-the-shelf as well. The last missing link is the web server for the little embedded systems.
With a rudimentary comm stack and an even more stripped-down web server, filling in the blanks in canned pages and forwarding responses to a cgi-based command handler, you've got all the control and display you need. You can even flip from machine, so you only need one window to run the whole show.
The smaller the web server, the more of your tiny processor is available for useful work (or the smaller a processor you can get away with).
So that's why you suddenly see a flood of little web servers for embedded micros, and why it's very important.
Golden opportunity to displace NSI?
on
NSI to be RBL'ed?
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· Score: 2
Scenario:
- MAPS blackholes NSI - NSI starts deregistering domains - perhaps starting with MAPS' own. - Network connectivity starts to go to hell. - One or more alternate registries set up root servers and publish the old domains' data, along with new registrants. They have essentially all the domains while NSI, having deregistered many, has fewer. (Use of their services, of course, is strictly voluntary.) - Sysadmins reconfig their named.root to pick up the new registries in preference to NSI's, in order to retain maximum connectivity. - The net is now migrated to competitive registries.
NSI's misbehavior and the (entirely appropriate) blackholing of NSI thus create a Shelling Point for the migration of the net away from the NSI monopoly.
(For those not aware of them, Shelling Points are those moments in history where a large bulk of people, without explicit advanced agreement, realize that "This is the moment for action X, and everybody else knows it too." The British attempt to sieze the colonists' arms was a Shelling Point for the American Revolution. The acquittal of the policemen accused of beating Rodney King was the Shelling Point for the L.A. Riots, and so on. With a Shelling Point a mass of people can act in concert to great effect - for good or bad. Without one people must forge an agreement on timing, "go off" according to individual thresholds which don't match, or be boiled like a frog in a slowly heated pot.)
By any chance are you someone who makes money from spam tools?
I have seen the "What if I love spam?" argument before, repeatedly. But I have only seen it from anonymous posters or identifiable spammers.
As for MAPS, the only time I looked at their web site I had no trouble finding instructions on how to get off the list - even using Mosaic for a browser. The first link on the index page is "MAPS Realtime Blackhole List". Hit that and you get a page with a list of resource links:
End User information on the RBL Our rationalle for the MAPS RBL Reporting spammers to the MAPS RBL team How to get into the MAPS RBL How to get out of the MAPS RBL How to use the MAPS RBL to protect your network Some of the sites that use the MAPS RBL Look up an entry on the MAPS RBL Trace the route from the RBL server to someplace else. An explanation of "greeting-card spam." RBL in the news
How hard is it to figure out that "How to get out of the MAPS RBL" is the one you want?
> If you do not wish to receive these messages, here is how to remove yourself...
Make that "If you wish to receive these messages, here is how to add yourself" and I could concede the point - provided they put a checkbox in their signup form for new registrations and/or gave the instructions in their signup confirmation mail, and only sent the above, ONCE to OLD accounts.
We consider it spam if somebody repeatedly sends mail to everybody on a list he buys unless they opt out. Why should it be different for a "somebody" who just happens to have had a government mandate to monopolize the internet registry?
> Why dont we put a link on all of our webservers. If they want to be consistent they would have to sue us all.
Simple: They don't have to sue us all at the same time. If they win the first one, THEN they sue the rest. With the precedent established, the additional cases are open-and-shut.
And the penalties for copyright violation are draconian - partly BECAUSE it's so hard to find all the little guys who make copies. So they punish the ones they catch with astronomical fines - to serve as glaring examples, to make piracy uneconomic, and to recover the lost revenue from the few they DO catch.
The classic case was a choirmaster in a little chruch, who bought a copy of some sheet music and found it was sored out of his singers' ranges. So he transposed it and made up a few copies to hand out to the choir. He sent a copy with a nice cover letter to the author, praising the work and offering his easier-to-sing transposition for future editions. The author sued, and won. I think the fine was $100,000 - and this was back in the days before hyperinflation, so think megabux.
What happens to patents when a corp goes bellyup?
on
Beaming Money
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· Score: 1
Do the patents go to the receivers?
How about the patent assignment agreements with the employees who worked down to the end and didn't get their last paycheck? Does that void the assignment contract, thus returning the rights to the inventor?
How about patents in progress or inventions documented but not yet pattent-applied-for?
It would be interesting to put up a color display of flowers that are currently in bloom and see if any bees are attracted to the (blank to humans) screen.
> BO2K is GPL'd. You think RMS will make them call it GNU BO2K?;-)
Why not?
BO2K is really a powerful remote-console/administration tool (that "just happens" to have a number of optimizations for clandestine use. B-b ) If you're using it OFFICIALLY it can be as useful to you as an UNOFFICIAL install is to a cracker.
In fact, your copy can be useless to a cracker, because the source already has customizable security hooks to keep others from using BO2K trapdoor servers they didn't install themselves. (They'll have to sucker you or your users to install their own copy.)
The hack was in the C compiler. It consisted of two parts:
- If the compiler recongized that it was compiling the login program, it expanded a canned macro that added a trapdoor - a canned login and password that gave root access.
- If the compiler recognized that it was compiling itself, it expanded a canned macro that added the recognize-and-expand-canned-macros code, along with the macros, to the new copy of the compiler.
You only have to compile this in once, after which you can throw out the patch and it propagates to later versions of the compiler. BUT:
- It only lives in compilers.
- It only works as long as they're being compiled by themselves, in a never-ending stream. It will NOT propagate to a new compiler implementation, such as making the hop from PCC to gnu, or being installed in a new version of PCC that was compiled by gnu rather than PCC. (In principle you could build one that recognized TWO or more compilers and could hop back and forth, though that makes it twice as fragile.)
- It will die as soon as a change to the compiler source renders the signature unrecognizable.
- Even if it is alive, it stops inserting trapdoors once the signature of the target program changes.
Rumor has it that this was actually propagated in the Portable C Compiler {PCC}, and was discovered and cleaned out when the guys at Berkeley wrote strings, and wondered why the compiler had the string "login".
Note that this is MUCH easier to do with a proprietary compiler than an open one. Gcc, for instance, is shipped in source, with a build file that lets it be built by just about any C compiler, not just an older gcc. Even if a Thompson trojan virus existed for gcc, it isn't inserted when you compile with another compiler, producing a clean gcc that only has what its own source implies and only emits what the target's source implies. (It's almost as if NONinfection was infectious.)
So even a security paranoid like myself isn't worried about trojans that aren't there to be spotted in the open source.
Revalataions appears to be a classic example of a political art form flurishing under the Romans at the time. Seems the Romans didn't allow you to write anything criticizing their government and functionaries, but they did allow religious freedom. So the revolutionaries came up with codes for writing their messages and propagands pieces disguised as scripture and prophecy. Revalations is just the one that happened to get included in the bible, though there are a number of other examples available for study.
The "Beast" in question was apparently a Roman general, and the number was a hash of his name by well-known (at the time) rules, which would let the reader figure out which official they were talking about.
Decent cyphers were necessary, because the Romans had figured out that, as long as they had these military couriers running everywhere to carry government messages, they could provide a service by carrying messages for merchants - for a fee. And this government-subsidized service was cheaper than hiring your own messenger, so everybody used it. "Neither rain nor snow nore sleet..." was originally the Roman Courriers' motto.
Of course the couriers were also the Roman secret police, who read the messages before delivering them and sent interesting tidbits to the rest of the authorities. (And after a lot of naive revolutionaries and crooked or spying-on-the-side businessmen got crucified, private encryption was born.)
This practice of the couriers was also mirrored by the USPS during at least the '60s and '70s. They could open and examine "damaged" mail, so heaven help anybody who lived in an area where drug trafficing was common. I still recall the time my grandmother sent me some cookies at college - carefully packed in a coffee can and wrapped with a dozen layers of brown paper. They smashed it in until the cookies were crumbs and the paper ripped - must have taken ten minutes or more. Then they stamped it "recieved in damaged condition at the post office and delivered it.
Back to the number of the beast: Current theological interpretation by a number of apocalyptic religions has it being variously your Social Security number, a hypothetical goverment banking account number yet to come, or a personal I.D. number to be laser-tatooed or implanted on one of those remotely-readable chips, like they use to identify lost pets. (You need it to buy and sell, so it's obviously an account number or something else used by financial institutions as a universal identifier, right?) One version has the "Beast" as a banking computer in Switzerland.
Of course the.mil domain just HAD to name one of its machines "beast". B-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Kitchen Aid, model Ultra Power Plus. Single slot, wide enough for a split bagel or two slices of ultra-thick french toast bread. Plastic outside to prevent burns if you bump it. Picked it up at Fry's.
Controls:
Shade control: Button: lighter, Button: darker. 7-segment LED showing current setting. (This stuff simulates a slider.)
Options: Button/light: reheat. Button/light: frozen. Button/light: bagel. Button: stop/reset.
Miscelaneous indicator: Light: toasting.
In other words, a computer controls the timing of the cycle. (I haven't seen any indication that it modulates the power level or only lights one side for bagels.) It provides a convenient interface in terms of type and state of bread and desired doneness, computing the required cycle time.
Unlike a mechanical thermostat, it can compensate for the toaster being preheated, so if you do a second set of slices right after the first they come out the same. And you don't have to burn up a couple loaves or bags of bagels or waffles figuring out the right slider setting.
Actually the phone network - at least the central offices - does not rely on the power grid. They run off big banks of iron-alkaline cells floating on a recharger/load bus, and can keep the COs alive for days. Repeaters are powered from the COs.
If you have a coper pair between you and the switch, and don't have a PBX or other non phone-line-powered premisis equipment, your phone will keep working even though your city is dark. (I'm not sure how good the local tellcos are at battery-backing or CO-powering remote line concentrators, so a copper pair into your house isn't a guarantee.)
Back in the early days, control panels were built of discrete components. Every signal you watched needed a lamp, meter, drop flag, noisemaker, or the like. Everything you controlled needed its own switch, knob, slider, or whatever. Every gadget chewed up panel space, required its own expensive wiring back to the thing it monitored or controlled, and created another single point of failure.
Computers were no exception (and you need to control the computer in any system a computer controls.) But their guts were riding Moore's law, while control-panel tech improves more like manufactured products: Economy of scale and occasional inventions. These days a control panel is a bit more work and cost than a printed circuit board. But even if controls DID improve by Moore's law, eyes and fingers only improve at evolutionary rates - which is effectively not-at-all. So the amount of stuff to be controlled outran the panel space to control it.
By the '60s mainframes had more than one entire box dedicated just to the switches and blinky-lights, and it still wasn't enough. IBM was already multiplexing each row of blinky-lights across 16 functions with an associated rotary switch (that also changed the labels). Minicomputers were RISK and had less to display, but they were starting to do the same thing, or to skip displaying stuff of interest.
DEC broke through with the LSI-11. Configuration was still jumpers, but the panel was replaced with a debugger-like interface on the primary serial port. When Amdahl left IBM he saved a lot of work on his first mainframe by building his control panel from a DGC Nova controlling a couple projection displays. Cray did the same BEFORE he left CDC, using a couple big monitors controlled by the 6x00's peripheral processors.
Virtual control panels worked well for other things than computers, too. Factories began to be controlled from displays on screens. NASA scientists were amazed by a private rocket company who rented one of their engine test stands, but ignored the roomfull of control consoles and ran their test through a display hacked up on an early Mac.
At first virtual control panels still required special-purpose hardware and software for each application. Later they were done with software on a general-purpose small computer. But they still required a lot of custom software and were limited to one operating system.
HTML and CGI changed that. They provide a compact representation of arbitrary control panels and a means for switching between them, along with a convenient way to fill in variable display fields and to pass control-setting changes to the processor doing the controlling. And they allow one display to control a multplicity of devices over a network.
These days my toaster has a custom control panel, with six buttons, four LEDs, and a seven-segment display. My ADSL modem, on the other hand, gets away with one failure-prone moving part - the power switch - by using a web server for its panel.
Using web-based consoles the graphic interface is done for you, and the software is available (for FREE!) from multiple vendors for all popular platforms. Powerful graphic design tools are available off-the-shelf as well. The last missing link is the web server for the little embedded systems.
With a rudimentary comm stack and an even more stripped-down web server, filling in the blanks in canned pages and forwarding responses to a cgi-based command handler, you've got all the control and display you need. You can even flip from machine, so you only need one window to run the whole show.
The smaller the web server, the more of your tiny processor is available for useful work (or the smaller a processor you can get away with).
So that's why you suddenly see a flood of little web servers for embedded micros, and why it's very important.
I didn't say ANYTHING about the truth of the claims, or my own opinions, of the matters in question.
The only issue I'm addressing is the incredulity of the previous poster at the concept of making a movie of "Takedown". So I showed how it could be made into a blockbuster.
You may recall that "Takedown" was written by a team composed of Tsutomu and a partner. So of COURSE any movie made from it will portray the Shimomura interpretation of the events.
Pay attention!
Sure! It's a police procedural/manhunt, the first about a new kind of crime. And it's also a true story of one of the very first manhunts for this crime - when the techniques are still being developed on-the-fly. Imagine how the crime-movie fans would drool over a true history of the first-ever manhunt for murder, bank-robbery, or swindling.
It's a drama about a battle between the light-side and dark-side. Mitnick is one of the few crackers who can aspire to the title "hacker". Shimomura is a multi-talented expert, a hacker (in the MIT AI lab sense), recognized as such by his peers. Security consultation is a small part of what he does. But he does it very well, and part of doing it was developing some of the tools that he ended up using to track Mitnick down.
Mitnick could have been still-at-large today. But he broke into Tsutomu's machines (while Tsutomu was on vacation) to steal his tools, notes, and correspondence, leaving tracks on the machines (and a "nyah-nyah" on voicemail). By stealing this info he turned himself into a much larger threat to the network community in general, and a personal threat to Tsutomu, dragging him into the manhunt. So Tsutomu dropped his work and spent months tracking down Mitnick, as the lower-cost option. And was reluctantly cast as the hero in a personal duel.
It's a western. Pioneer settler in new territory, top-gun due to talent developed by necessity, whose work includes sometimes helping the other settlers and businessmen defend themselves against criminals, is goaded into a fight by a big-name gunman trying to boost his reputation. With help from (occasionally bumbling) sidekick and (initially reluctant) lawmen, tracks down and captures the bad guy.
And of course it's a documentary of very interesting new tech.
So how often does Hollywood get to do a movie accessable and appealing to crime fans, western fans, fantasy-drama fans, and techies, all in a single package? It could be the biggest movie of the year.
Any bets on whether Hollywood blows it?
Given that the output impedence of each of the sources is (nominally) equal to the input impedence of the speakers and that you want equal contributions from each of the sources and don't NEED a master attenuator (or want unnecessary attenuation) either, that reduces to:
Tie the grounds together. Wire up a set of five equal resistors, one from the right-channel hot of each of the sources and one from the right-channel hot of the sink. Tie the other end of the five resistors together. Repeat for the left channel.
Each source and the sink provide a characteristic impeedence "C", and want to see it as well. With resistors of value "R" the impedence they see is:
R + (R+C)/4
Setting that equal to C and solving for R we get:
R = (3/5)*C
For 8 ohms nominal impedence R comes out to 4.8 ohms.
So go out and buy ten 5% resistors as close to 4.8 ohms as you can find. Half-watt should do. So should quarter-watt if you can't find half-watt.
This should still work reasonably well even if some of the output signals are really at a higher impedence and intended for headphones. If some of your sources end up driving your speakers wildly less than others, that may be what happened. In this unlikely instance there are tweaks to compensate, but they'll depend on the actual config you've got and will require a little debugging.
Don't you, or shouldn't you, get disbarred for this? Yes, we countersued on grounds that we knew were wrong, but we were just trying to vigourously defend ourselves
Nope. You get disbarred for lying about a fact. You get to argue for an opinion or interpretation of the law whether you believe in it or not.
Consider the defense of "pleading the alternative" in a criminal trial, for example. Prosecution claims defendant stole it. Defendant PLEADS that he didn't take it, he gave it back, he didn't sell it, he didn't spend the money, etc. That's perfectly legal, because it's the prosecution's job to prove all the elements beyond a reasonable doubt, and the defense's to poke a hole in any one necessary element.
Now if the defendant gets on the stand and TESTIFIES that he didn't take it and he gave it back, or any other claims that are mutually exclusive and therefore one must be a lie, he HAS broken the law and is in deep kimchee. Ditto lawyers who make a false claim of fact.
They need to expand the model to take into account that different drivers have different driving styles, and that these make traffic behave more like a solution of different particles than a uniform substance.
Some years back I noticed that different regions have distinct driving styles, and that someone (like me) from a different region with a different style could be in, or cause, trouble - like a foreign particle acting as a seed crystal or a cavitation site.
Then there are places - like California - where waves of immigration from different regions have produced a wild mix of different driving styles.
And lots of unforseen consequences of government intervention. For instance: The 55 MPH speed limit changed freeway behavior nationally - from mutual repulsion (for safety) to clumping (forming a herd to make it harder for the blue-coated peredator to pick out a victim).
Why do you want to limit the options of the entire free software community?
If you don't want YOUR code to be used to kill people, or to count beans, or to molest baby ducks, you're free to write your own license that reads that way. Even if you're writing changes to GPLed code you can modularize your changes and release them under a GPL+your limits.
What you're talking about is changing the GPL to limit the use of ALL other programmers' GPLed code to conform to your political agenda.
I thought that was part of what we were fighting.
It's nice to get my score bumped. But why for "funny"? I was dead serious.
I worked with synthetic aperture radar back in 1967 - when you processed the data with lasers, film, and optic benches because the closest to a supercomputer available (at least to me) was Cray's very first effort - around which any laptop can now run rings.
You shoud be able to build all the microwave hardware you need for a synthetic aperture mine IMAGER starting with a couple X-band burglar sniffers (and maybe adding a PIN diode to sweep the frequency a bit better), plus a few low-grade discretes from Radio Shack, a pie plate, and a broom handle.
The signals outside the microwave plumbing, both what you generate and what you detect, are no worse than audio frequency, and over 90% of your crunch is one two-dimensional FFT to about the resolution of your screen - just what the DSP shines at. With a modem card you ought to be able to get real-time imaging or close to it - a big improvement over developing film at the lab, twice, after the airplane comes back.
Side-looking sonar is identical to one of the two modes of the radar "magic wand", except you use a sonar transucer you picked up for a hundred bux or so at West Marine or some other yacht outfitter, and you have to do your carrier yourself - which means a little extra crunch: a swept sine wave generation and a per-sample multiply at ultrasound frequencies. Still a piece of cake.
You can put the sonar transducer on a stick and use it {in both modes} for finding mines, too. Like when they're in a rice paddy, for instance.
Or hang the microwave gadget on your car window, drive by the local pizza parlor, and map the ovens and tables. B-)
> The only problem is that tax dollars would be going to R&D which, although it would benefit "mankind", would be filling the pockets of these private companies. In short, they'd be making a profit from Joe Taxpayer. Perhaps the private companies should pay NASA back by providing them with a certain number or percentage of launch-resources.
But Joe Taxpayer would get it back, with interest, big time. The companies "making a profit" would be competing to sell Joe Inc. their new satellite, or sell a hundred thousand Joe Joneses their new satellite-based service.
Note that compeeting - which translates to lowering prices or offering better services.
With a NASA launch monopoly you have to pay NASA their inflated rates, and beg for a slot. With a half-dozen launch services, they'll be competing to sell the slots.
And NASA, and thus Joe Taxpayer, would get a ride on that deal, too. If Sam's Satellites wants to gouge NASA, then NASA can always buy their next half dozen space station payloads from Bob's Ballistics.
A software modem is essentially a downloadable DSP chip with a fast interface to the computer on one side and a phone line on the other. To sell one to Linux folk you have to open-source the code - and probably the board schematic, too.
Think about the hack potential (both white and black) of such a device!
And don't forget tapping into the DSP lines behind the telephone interface.
I'm already drooling over the prospect of making a side-looking sonar for my wife's boat, to explore the local bay's floor, or a landmine-finder synthetic aperture radar hacked up out of a couple radar motion detectors and a laptop with one of these "modems". DSPs have specialized instructions for FFTs, which should make it MUCH easier than using a sound card and pure software.
This was supposed to go under the LinModem item.
NASA is SUPPOSED to be doing R&D, and releasing it to the public, so PRIVATE companies can use it to design their OWN spaceships, just as they do for ariplane improvements.
They have already put a major crimp on the private space program, by pressuring their suppliers with threats that if they provide stuff to the private COs, NASA will find new suppliers. (Just TRY to get a guidance system component, for instance, even if you are squeaky clean and have a couple senators in your back pocket.)
Letting them self-fund would give them even more incentive to suppress the people they're SUPPOSED to be helping, by setting them up as a direct competitor, and making their funding dependent on out-competing any independent private company.
Better would be to require them to STOP doing space shots themselves, but fund them to BUY their launches from private companies. That would turn things around, big time.
Once you've got fifty matchhead-sized computers scattered about you, controlling everything from the gas pressure in your running shoes through the setting of your air conditioner to the caffiene level of your blood, what are you going to use for a control panel?
My toaster has a custom control panel, with six buttons, four LEDs, and a seven-segment display. My ADSL modem, on the other hand, gets away with one failure-prone moving part - the power switch - by using a web server for its panel.
Using web-based consoles the graphic interface is done for you, and the software is available (for FREE!) from multiple vendors for all popular platforms. Powerful graphic design tools are available off-the-shelf as well. The last missing link is the web server for the little embedded systems.
With a rudimentary comm stack and an even more stripped-down web server, filling in the blanks in canned pages and forwarding responses to a cgi-based command handler, you've got all the control and display you need. You can even flip from machine, so you only need one window to run the whole show.
The smaller the web server, the more of your tiny processor is available for useful work (or the smaller a processor you can get away with).
So that's why you suddenly see a flood of little web servers for embedded micros, and why it's very important.
Scenario:
- MAPS blackholes NSI
- NSI starts deregistering domains - perhaps starting with MAPS' own.
- Network connectivity starts to go to hell.
- One or more alternate registries set up root servers and publish the old domains' data, along with new registrants. They have essentially all the domains while NSI, having deregistered many, has fewer. (Use of their services, of course, is strictly voluntary.)
- Sysadmins reconfig their named.root to pick up the new registries in preference to NSI's, in order to retain maximum connectivity.
- The net is now migrated to competitive registries.
NSI's misbehavior and the (entirely appropriate) blackholing of NSI thus create a Shelling Point for the migration of the net away from the NSI monopoly.
(For those not aware of them, Shelling Points are those moments in history where a large bulk of people, without explicit advanced agreement, realize that "This is the moment for action X, and everybody else knows it too." The British attempt to sieze the colonists' arms was a Shelling Point for the American Revolution. The acquittal of the policemen accused of beating Rodney King was the Shelling Point for the L.A. Riots, and so on. With a Shelling Point a mass of people can act in concert to great effect - for good or bad. Without one people must forge an agreement on timing, "go off" according to individual thresholds which don't match, or be boiled like a frog in a slowly heated pot.)
By any chance are you someone who makes money from spam tools?
I have seen the "What if I love spam?" argument before, repeatedly. But I have only seen it from anonymous posters or identifiable spammers.
As for MAPS, the only time I looked at their web site I had no trouble finding instructions on how to get off the list - even using Mosaic for a browser. The first link on the index page is "MAPS Realtime Blackhole List". Hit that and you get a page with a list of resource links:
End User information on the RBL
Our rationalle for the MAPS RBL
Reporting spammers to the MAPS RBL team
How to get into the MAPS RBL
How to get out of the MAPS RBL
How to use the MAPS RBL to protect your network
Some of the sites that use the MAPS RBL
Look up an entry on the MAPS RBL
Trace the route from the RBL server to someplace else.
An explanation of "greeting-card spam."
RBL in the news
How hard is it to figure out that "How to get out of the MAPS RBL" is the one you want?
> If you do not wish to receive these messages, here is how to remove yourself...
Make that "If you wish to receive these messages, here is how to add yourself" and I could concede the point - provided they put a checkbox in their signup form for new registrations and/or gave the instructions in their signup confirmation mail, and only sent the above, ONCE to OLD accounts.
We consider it spam if somebody repeatedly sends mail to everybody on a list he buys unless they opt out. Why should it be different for a "somebody" who just happens to have had a government mandate to monopolize the internet registry?
> Why dont we put a link on all of our webservers. If they want to be consistent they would have to sue us all.
Simple: They don't have to sue us all at the same time. If they win the first one, THEN they sue the rest. With the precedent established, the additional cases are open-and-shut.
And the penalties for copyright violation are draconian - partly BECAUSE it's so hard to find all the little guys who make copies. So they punish the ones they catch with astronomical fines - to serve as glaring examples, to make piracy uneconomic, and to recover the lost revenue from the few they DO catch.
The classic case was a choirmaster in a little chruch, who bought a copy of some sheet music and found it was sored out of his singers' ranges. So he transposed it and made up a few copies to hand out to the choir. He sent a copy with a nice cover letter to the author, praising the work and offering his easier-to-sing transposition for future editions. The author sued, and won. I think the fine was $100,000 - and this was back in the days before hyperinflation, so think megabux.
Do the patents go to the receivers?
How about the patent assignment agreements with the employees who worked down to the end and didn't get their last paycheck? Does that void the assignment contract, thus returning the rights to the inventor?
How about patents in progress or inventions documented but not yet pattent-applied-for?
They do see polarized light. It's how they do solar navigation on cloudy days.
(Yes, they see colors in ultraviolet, too.)
It would be interesting to put up a color display of flowers that are currently in bloom and see if any bees are attracted to the (blank to humans) screen.
> BO2K is GPL'd. You think RMS will make them call it GNU BO2K? ;-)
Why not?
BO2K is really a powerful remote-console/administration tool (that "just happens" to have a number of optimizations for clandestine use. B-b ) If you're using it OFFICIALLY it can be as useful to you as an UNOFFICIAL install is to a cracker.
In fact, your copy can be useless to a cracker, because the source already has customizable security hooks to keep others from using BO2K trapdoor servers they didn't install themselves. (They'll have to sucker you or your users to install their own copy.)
Check out http://www.hlz.nl/bo2k/bo2k.ra for details.
The hack was in the C compiler. It consisted of two parts:
- If the compiler recongized that it was compiling the login program, it expanded a canned macro that added a trapdoor - a canned login and password that gave root access.
- If the compiler recognized that it was compiling itself, it expanded a canned macro that added the recognize-and-expand-canned-macros code, along with the macros, to the new copy of the compiler.
You only have to compile this in once, after which you can throw out the patch and it propagates to later versions of the compiler. BUT:
- It only lives in compilers.
- It only works as long as they're being compiled by themselves, in a never-ending stream. It will NOT propagate to a new compiler implementation, such as making the hop from PCC to gnu, or being installed in a new version of PCC that was compiled by gnu rather than PCC. (In principle you could build one that recognized TWO or more compilers and could hop back and forth, though that makes it twice as fragile.)
- It will die as soon as a change to the compiler source renders the signature unrecognizable.
- Even if it is alive, it stops inserting trapdoors once the signature of the target program changes.
Rumor has it that this was actually propagated in the Portable C Compiler {PCC}, and was discovered and cleaned out when the guys at Berkeley wrote strings, and wondered why the compiler had the string "login".
Note that this is MUCH easier to do with a proprietary compiler than an open one. Gcc, for instance, is shipped in source, with a build file that lets it be built by just about any C compiler, not just an older gcc. Even if a Thompson trojan virus existed for gcc, it isn't inserted when you compile with another compiler, producing a clean gcc that only has what its own source implies and only emits what the target's source implies. (It's almost as if NONinfection was infectious.)
So even a security paranoid like myself isn't worried about trojans that aren't there to be spotted in the open source.
A bit off topic, but...
.mil domain just HAD to name one of its machines "beast". B-)
Revalataions appears to be a classic example of a political art form flurishing under the Romans at the time. Seems the Romans didn't allow you to write anything criticizing their government and functionaries, but they did allow religious freedom. So the revolutionaries came up with codes for writing their messages and propagands pieces disguised as scripture and prophecy. Revalations is just the one that happened to get included in the bible, though there are a number of other examples available for study.
The "Beast" in question was apparently a Roman general, and the number was a hash of his name by well-known (at the time) rules, which would let the reader figure out which official they were talking about.
Decent cyphers were necessary, because the Romans had figured out that, as long as they had these military couriers running everywhere to carry government messages, they could provide a service by carrying messages for merchants - for a fee. And this government-subsidized service was cheaper than hiring your own messenger, so everybody used it. "Neither rain nor snow nore sleet..." was originally the Roman Courriers' motto.
Of course the couriers were also the Roman secret police, who read the messages before delivering them and sent interesting tidbits to the rest of the authorities. (And after a lot of naive revolutionaries and crooked or spying-on-the-side businessmen got crucified, private encryption was born.)
This practice of the couriers was also mirrored by the USPS during at least the '60s and '70s. They could open and examine "damaged" mail, so heaven help anybody who lived in an area where drug trafficing was common. I still recall the time my grandmother sent me some cookies at college - carefully packed in a coffee can and wrapped with a dozen layers of brown paper. They smashed it in until the cookies were crumbs and the paper ripped - must have taken ten minutes or more. Then they stamped it "recieved in damaged condition at the post office and delivered it.
Back to the number of the beast: Current theological interpretation by a number of apocalyptic religions has it being variously your Social Security number, a hypothetical goverment banking account number yet to come, or a personal I.D. number to be laser-tatooed or implanted on one of those remotely-readable chips, like they use to identify lost pets. (You need it to buy and sell, so it's obviously an account number or something else used by financial institutions as a universal identifier, right?) One version has the "Beast" as a banking computer in Switzerland.
Of course the