In general, switching this thing while the computer is running would, at least, cause massive problems for any OS that happened to be running. So this is something to be avoided in any case.
After giving the article a quick skim, it also looks like they switched the ground wires too, which is unnecessary. All you really need to do is to switch the red and yellow wires (+12V a,d +5V). They can all share ground no problem.
Bad thing about being a contractor is lack of benefits. Assuming a family in there somewhere, he will need to get COBRA (expensive) health insurance for the family. If the health insurance drops for a while, the new health insurance company may scream "pre-existing condition."
Also, if the employee's only life insurance is through his company, he would not have life insurance for a couple of weeks. PROBABLY no big deal, but there are no guarantees.
Hmmm. After thinking about it a bit more, I have an easier idea. I will describe by example.
For a particular needle, you know that its center is at (x,y). Have a "for" loop go around the circle (say 5 degree increments) and look at (x+20sin(d), y-20cos(d)) where "d" is the angle, and 20 is the number of pixels away to look (depends on the size of the needles and the resolution of your camera). Try to determine if the needle is present or not based on intensity (simple threshold should be enough). When you have a string on "on" pixels, it is easy to determine the middle "on" pixel and its angle.
Once again, though, this assumes that the camera is rigidly mounted and fairly constant lighting.
Rigidly mount the camera in front of it, and use some constant lighting. You want everything to be the same. Note that the light can be off, except when you want a reading.
Take a bunch of baseline readings, as many as possible. Combine these using Gimp or Photoshop to edit out the dial needles (assuming analog needles). If your meter is anything like older US meters, the needles on the left will hardly budge. No problem. Ignore the left-most digits and concentrate on the right-most digits.
At this point, you have an image without needles, and you can take an image with the current reading. Make sure both images have the same brightness, and subtract the images. At this point, you can convert this gray-scale difference into a one-bit image easily enough. You might even want to eliminate any "on" pixel not connected to another "on" pixel to eliminate noise. The needles should pop out like crazy. This data should be easy to process. You have a couple of options.
First, would be to find the centroid of the blobs, and then computer the direction to the centroid from the base of the needle (since you mounted the camera rigidly, you should know the pixel coordinates of the needle bases). Some simple trig, and you have the angle. Some simple algebra to get the number.
The second option would be to somehow compute the actual line. I can imagine taking each point of the blob as a data point, and using basic statistics (least squares) to find the angle. Of course, this may blow up when the needle is vertical, so you also do a least squares on the transpose of your data, and take the better number. This will only give you an angle. Since rotating the needle 180 degrees will still result in the same angle, you will have to fall back on centroids. to possibly add/subtract 180 degrees as needed.
To summarize, not too conceptually difficult, but a time-consuming pain in the butt. I hope this helps.
Hmm. If there is an order of magnitude between what you charge and what everybody else charges, you are usually doing something very wrong. I have no problems with cheaper prices, but if Sprint charges $50, then Cogent charging $30 for the same thing would be a bargain. Charging $5 is scary and makes me wonder what Sprint knows that Cogent doesn't.
Look at it this way. Let's say you move to a new town and open up your own barber shop. Your competition charges $8 to $10 for a hair cut. If you start charging $1, I would certainly use your service (as long as the hair cut was good), but I would not expect the store to be open more than a few months. In reality, whenever a real business charges way too little compared to the competition, they are usually forgetting something (like insurance, workman's comp, taxes, etc.). In this case, is looks like Cogent forgot to factor in the cost of paying Sprint to carry traffic.
My main DVD player right now has motor problems. I have to replace it. It is annoying to replace a $50 DVD player less than a year old. It would really piss me off to have to replace a $250 Wii that I voided the warranty on.
Honesty, why bother? I have not seen any Wii homebrew stuff compelling enough to risk bricking my Wii. I am not an expert on this, but here is my take: you can add the following applications:
* Pirated stuff (WiiWare, virtual console, Wii game copies). I am not into piracy at all. I believe in paying for the stuff that I use. Not interested
* Mame. This is interesting. Still "borderline" piracy, but I can at least understand this. Still, I am not that much into old games when there are so many good new ones out.
* DVD Player. Wow, I can avoid spending $30 on a dedicated DVD player, AND get more wear and tear on the DVD drive motor. Plus, with the Wii fan running, dust accumulation on the heat sinks will be accelerated. The risk of bricking is just a bonus.
I have not really heard of any "must-have" homebrew games for the Wii.
Now, hacking a DS does seem cool. Some people have made some nice DS music synthesis software. Then again, I am still waiting for the DS-10 to be released. That is on my "must buy" list to sit beside my Korg Kaossilator.
A modern scope can cost $5,000 easy for a relatively low-end model. Amateur radio guys can be very frugal, and will often purchase an old analog model, so their opinion would likely be useless. Most hams would pick up a scope for less than $1000, so used Teks would be common, along with minor scope manufacturers from Asia.
I work for a company that makes scopes, so my opinion may be a little biased, but I recommend sorting the manufacturers alphabetically, and then pick the one on the top of the list.;)
The cell network *CAN* get a rough idea of where you are without the GPS. I am just saying that it does not help the GPS much, other than providing current ephemeris data.
For google maps, the cell phone location is apparently used as a fail-over when the GPS fails (or while waiting for it to start up).
In TFA, the explanation of GPS is total BS. The person writing the article does not even have the faintest idea how real GPS works.
Here is the real story:
Unlike in the article, determining the GPS position does not use strength of the signal, but the timing of the signals along with a knowledge of exactly where the GPS satellites are.
There are two types of data needed by a GPS: almanac and ephemeris. Almanac just gives the satellite's orbit. This stuff does not change, unless a satellite dies or the government changes the orbits for some reason. Given a rough location and time, the GPS can use the almanac data to know which satellites it should be looking for. This is why an older GPS may ask for the time, date, and state you are in when first turning it on. The GPS can figure out this stuff by itself, but it will take a few extra minutes.
Ephemeris data, on the other hand, needs to be refreshed every hour or two, and pins the satellite's location down fine enough to be useful. This data is encoded on the GPS signal, and may take a couple of minutes to get (very slow data rate). This is why getting a lock can take some time when first turning on a GPS. If you turn off a GPS and then turn it on 30 minutes later (even if you traveled 100 miles in that time), then the GPS will get a fix in under a minute.
The reason that phones can get a GPS lock almost instantly is that they can get the ephemeris data from the cell tower. It is true the cellular network can have a pretty good idea where the phone is even without the GPS, but that extra information does not help the phone's GPS at all.
The article DID mention a 2G SD card. Regular non-SDHC cards generally top out at 2G.
It this a firmware update that we can use with our existing 2G SD card, or will we need to buy a "special" 2G card? I got a Kingston 150X 2G for under $11. I wanted the fastest card that I could find for my Wii.
All IT hardware would be bought in, and never leave (whole). Any hardware entering the building would have to stay in the building, so workers should leave personal hardware at the door.
This is actually not very far from what is done in practice, but classified data is kept in a "vault." If you want to bring a CD player into a vault, fine, but it stays there forever (better be a cheap one). Want music to play on the CD player, fine, but it stays there forever. Don't bother with a radio, because everything is EM shielded, so no reception. The only way electronics or media can leave is if it goes to another vault, or gets destroyed. It sucks working in a vault. I am glad that, in my entire life, I have only had to spend a couple of hours in one.
You are absolutely right. Any "contaminated" media is NEVER resold. Instead, it is destroyed. Old hard drives are actually shredded, from what I understand.
You clearly know nothing about how the government deals with classified data. Classified data is considered kind of like a virus, not the computer kind, but the biological kind. If the classified data was in a memory card in the camera, the camera itself is contaminated. If the camera was plugged into a computer, then the computer itself is contaminated. Anything electronic device that the computer touched is then considered to be contaminated. Even if you "KNOW" that it is not possible for your mouse to story encrypted data, your mouse is still assumed to be contaminated. This type of "blanket" policy that makes no exceptions is actually pretty smart, as it is the exceptions that will come back and bite you in the butt.
This is the way that the US government does things in real life (and presumably the UK does the same thing). When developing systems that handle classified data, you have to maintain strict "red/black" separation, and the only interface allowed between red and black are things like *APPROVED* encryption units.
Things are actually a little more complicated than this, but this is the general idea.
I kind of like the "troll" comment. It was coherent, and not babbling. Yes, it challenges our common conception of a popular phrase used on the internet a lot. However, I can honestly say that I do not know enough to be able to say that he is wrong, so he may even be right?
To put such a reasonable (although slightly strange) e-mail up here for ridicule seems somewhat unfair.
If there actually was such a thing as a race of benevolent trolls, I bet they'd be pissed right about now.
I think that the concept is that you have a processor with a boat-load of some type of RAM-look-alike (presumably non-volatile). This RAM is used as a RAM-drive (well, if the RAM is non-volatile, then you loose no data). Imagine a linux-based PDA that does not have the usual RAM/FLASH combination, but instead has a few gig of RAM that keeps its memory when powered off. So, you use the same memory for both "main memory" applications (loading programs, stack, heap, etc.) and also holds a file system.
So, you run your favorite application, which gets loaded into main memory from the file system.
Wait... your file system is also main memory. So, your favorite application is now in memory twice -- once in the file system, and once in "main" executable memory. That seems like a waste. This project aims to use the "file system copy" as the executable. Pretty smart, but possibly difficult to get right.
Actually it is that last bit that probably does it, the large quantity of emitted energy that ends up being recycled to maintain the reaction. That is the difficult bit with a Farnsworth Fusor
For those who may not know how a fusor works...
You need to get hydrogen to slam into each other very hard to have fusion. One traditional way to do it is to make a magnetic "bottle" to contain everything. This is hard to do, because the gas does not like to be compressed, and can squirt out the edges if your field is not incredibly strong and consistent. This is kind of like squeezing a hand full of jelly. This is the "traditional" approach. See HERE.
A fusor, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It uses a static electric field. The theory is that, if you ionize the hydrogen, it has a positive charge. So, you put it in a roon with a large electric charge. The hydrogen will accelerate towards the negative-charged region and keep on going all the way through. Once it passes through, the negative charge is behind it, so it starts to slow down, and eventually reverse direction and go back to the charge again at high speed. If you get enough ions doing this, eventually some of them will hit head-on in the middle with enough velocity to fuse. Simple, no? Pretty pictures available HERE.
There are only two problems. The first (and most serious) is that the region of negative charge is usually created by a bunch of wires welded together in a soccer-ball shape. You put a strong negative charge on the wires, and you have an instant negative region of space to attract the hydrogen ions. This works well, but some of the hydrogen ions hit the wires of the ball itself, which rob the entire system of energy. Those ions have to oscillate thousands or millions of times through that region before they, by chance, happen to hit another ion. If the ion hits the wire before hitting another ion, then it's purpose in life has failed. If there was only a way to create a static electric field without those pesky wires.
The other (less serious) problem is, even if you achieve over-unity energy, how do you extract energy from a system like this? The most obvious answer is heat (steam turbines, etc.), but the system (and those little wires) can only take so much heat before melting. Fusors (if I am not mistaken) are very good at producing neutrons, helium, and maybe X-rays. It is pretty hard to get energy out of those.
There is a difference between "programmable" and "hackable," or at least to me...
"Programmable" implies that a programming language is made available. Nothing more, nothing less. You can do what the programming language allows you to do. Of course, certain limits may inherent (or added to) the language. It is like giving you a sandbox to play in.
In this case, "hackable" means that they have thrown the doors wide open, and published almost everything that they know about it (schematics, etc), and are inviting people to dream up new uses (which presumably includes hardware hacks). This is like giving you the keys to the house and saying "It's yours. Make yourself at home. Feel free to paint or remodel if you want."
I happen think that HP makes (or at least made) the best calculators in the world. Then, TI kind of took over after HP rested on their laurels after releasing the 48G series. The 48G firmware, at least to me, was an ugly hack of the 48S code. For example, HP added new units to the 48G. Of course, it would be too easy to add these units to the "units" menu where they belong, so they had to throw them in a "secret" menu that you will only find by reading the manual.
I love RPN, and love my old 48SX. Even the keypad feels nicer than any other calculator in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, switching this thing while the computer is running would, at least, cause massive problems for any OS that happened to be running. So this is something to be avoided in any case.
After giving the article a quick skim, it also looks like they switched the ground wires too, which is unnecessary. All you really need to do is to switch the red and yellow wires (+12V a,d +5V). They can all share ground no problem.
Bad thing about being a contractor is lack of benefits. Assuming a family in there somewhere, he will need to get COBRA (expensive) health insurance for the family. If the health insurance drops for a while, the new health insurance company may scream "pre-existing condition."
Also, if the employee's only life insurance is through his company, he would not have life insurance for a couple of weeks. PROBABLY no big deal, but there are no guarantees.
What is even worse, anybody who would use such a weapon probably reads /.. He will be coming for you soon.
Not true of waitresses in restaurants. I think that extra service costs a lot more than $10.
You mean he isn't???
Hmmm. After thinking about it a bit more, I have an easier idea. I will describe by example.
For a particular needle, you know that its center is at (x,y). Have a "for" loop go around the circle (say 5 degree increments) and look at (x+20sin(d), y-20cos(d)) where "d" is the angle, and 20 is the number of pixels away to look (depends on the size of the needles and the resolution of your camera). Try to determine if the needle is present or not based on intensity (simple threshold should be enough). When you have a string on "on" pixels, it is easy to determine the middle "on" pixel and its angle.
Once again, though, this assumes that the camera is rigidly mounted and fairly constant lighting.
Here is my take on this ... for what it's worth.
Rigidly mount the camera in front of it, and use some constant lighting. You want everything to be the same. Note that the light can be off, except when you want a reading.
Take a bunch of baseline readings, as many as possible. Combine these using Gimp or Photoshop to edit out the dial needles (assuming analog needles). If your meter is anything like older US meters, the needles on the left will hardly budge. No problem. Ignore the left-most digits and concentrate on the right-most digits.
At this point, you have an image without needles, and you can take an image with the current reading. Make sure both images have the same brightness, and subtract the images. At this point, you can convert this gray-scale difference into a one-bit image easily enough. You might even want to eliminate any "on" pixel not connected to another "on" pixel to eliminate noise. The needles should pop out like crazy. This data should be easy to process. You have a couple of options.
First, would be to find the centroid of the blobs, and then computer the direction to the centroid from the base of the needle (since you mounted the camera rigidly, you should know the pixel coordinates of the needle bases). Some simple trig, and you have the angle. Some simple algebra to get the number.
The second option would be to somehow compute the actual line. I can imagine taking each point of the blob as a data point, and using basic statistics (least squares) to find the angle. Of course, this may blow up when the needle is vertical, so you also do a least squares on the transpose of your data, and take the better number. This will only give you an angle. Since rotating the needle 180 degrees will still result in the same angle, you will have to fall back on centroids. to possibly add/subtract 180 degrees as needed.
To summarize, not too conceptually difficult, but a time-consuming pain in the butt. I hope this helps.
If you have an Ubuntu CD lying around, you do know that Memtest is on the CD, right?
Hmm. If there is an order of magnitude between what you charge and what everybody else charges, you are usually doing something very wrong. I have no problems with cheaper prices, but if Sprint charges $50, then Cogent charging $30 for the same thing would be a bargain. Charging $5 is scary and makes me wonder what Sprint knows that Cogent doesn't.
Look at it this way. Let's say you move to a new town and open up your own barber shop. Your competition charges $8 to $10 for a hair cut. If you start charging $1, I would certainly use your service (as long as the hair cut was good), but I would not expect the store to be open more than a few months. In reality, whenever a real business charges way too little compared to the competition, they are usually forgetting something (like insurance, workman's comp, taxes, etc.). In this case, is looks like Cogent forgot to factor in the cost of paying Sprint to carry traffic.
My main DVD player right now has motor problems. I have to replace it. It is annoying to replace a $50 DVD player less than a year old. It would really piss me off to have to replace a $250 Wii that I voided the warranty on.
Honesty, why bother? I have not seen any Wii homebrew stuff compelling enough to risk bricking my Wii. I am not an expert on this, but here is my take: you can add the following applications:
* Pirated stuff (WiiWare, virtual console, Wii game copies). I am not into piracy at all. I believe in paying for the stuff that I use. Not interested
* Mame. This is interesting. Still "borderline" piracy, but I can at least understand this. Still, I am not that much into old games when there are so many good new ones out.
* DVD Player. Wow, I can avoid spending $30 on a dedicated DVD player, AND get more wear and tear on the DVD drive motor. Plus, with the Wii fan running, dust accumulation on the heat sinks will be accelerated. The risk of bricking is just a bonus.
I have not really heard of any "must-have" homebrew games for the Wii.
Now, hacking a DS does seem cool. Some people have made some nice DS music synthesis software. Then again, I am still waiting for the DS-10 to be released. That is on my "must buy" list to sit beside my Korg Kaossilator.
A modern scope can cost $5,000 easy for a relatively low-end model. Amateur radio guys can be very frugal, and will often purchase an old analog model, so their opinion would likely be useless. Most hams would pick up a scope for less than $1000, so used Teks would be common, along with minor scope manufacturers from Asia.
I work for a company that makes scopes, so my opinion may be a little biased, but I recommend sorting the manufacturers alphabetically, and then pick the one on the top of the list. ;)
The cell network *CAN* get a rough idea of where you are without the GPS. I am just saying that it does not help the GPS much, other than providing current ephemeris data.
For google maps, the cell phone location is apparently used as a fail-over when the GPS fails (or while waiting for it to start up).
In TFA, the explanation of GPS is total BS. The person writing the article does not even have the faintest idea how real GPS works.
Here is the real story:
Unlike in the article, determining the GPS position does not use strength of the signal, but the timing of the signals along with a knowledge of exactly where the GPS satellites are.
There are two types of data needed by a GPS: almanac and ephemeris. Almanac just gives the satellite's orbit. This stuff does not change, unless a satellite dies or the government changes the orbits for some reason. Given a rough location and time, the GPS can use the almanac data to know which satellites it should be looking for. This is why an older GPS may ask for the time, date, and state you are in when first turning it on. The GPS can figure out this stuff by itself, but it will take a few extra minutes.
Ephemeris data, on the other hand, needs to be refreshed every hour or two, and pins the satellite's location down fine enough to be useful. This data is encoded on the GPS signal, and may take a couple of minutes to get (very slow data rate). This is why getting a lock can take some time when first turning on a GPS. If you turn off a GPS and then turn it on 30 minutes later (even if you traveled 100 miles in that time), then the GPS will get a fix in under a minute.
The reason that phones can get a GPS lock almost instantly is that they can get the ephemeris data from the cell tower. It is true the cellular network can have a pretty good idea where the phone is even without the GPS, but that extra information does not help the phone's GPS at all.
The article DID mention a 2G SD card. Regular non-SDHC cards generally top out at 2G.
It this a firmware update that we can use with our existing 2G SD card, or will we need to buy a "special" 2G card? I got a Kingston 150X 2G for under $11. I wanted the fastest card that I could find for my Wii.
This is actually not very far from what is done in practice, but classified data is kept in a "vault." If you want to bring a CD player into a vault, fine, but it stays there forever (better be a cheap one). Want music to play on the CD player, fine, but it stays there forever. Don't bother with a radio, because everything is EM shielded, so no reception. The only way electronics or media can leave is if it goes to another vault, or gets destroyed. It sucks working in a vault. I am glad that, in my entire life, I have only had to spend a couple of hours in one.
You are absolutely right. Any "contaminated" media is NEVER resold. Instead, it is destroyed. Old hard drives are actually shredded, from what I understand.
You clearly know nothing about how the government deals with classified data. Classified data is considered kind of like a virus, not the computer kind, but the biological kind. If the classified data was in a memory card in the camera, the camera itself is contaminated. If the camera was plugged into a computer, then the computer itself is contaminated. Anything electronic device that the computer touched is then considered to be contaminated. Even if you "KNOW" that it is not possible for your mouse to story encrypted data, your mouse is still assumed to be contaminated. This type of "blanket" policy that makes no exceptions is actually pretty smart, as it is the exceptions that will come back and bite you in the butt.
This is the way that the US government does things in real life (and presumably the UK does the same thing). When developing systems that handle classified data, you have to maintain strict "red/black" separation, and the only interface allowed between red and black are things like *APPROVED* encryption units.
Things are actually a little more complicated than this, but this is the general idea.
I kind of like the "troll" comment. It was coherent, and not babbling. Yes, it challenges our common conception of a popular phrase used on the internet a lot. However, I can honestly say that I do not know enough to be able to say that he is wrong, so he may even be right?
To put such a reasonable (although slightly strange) e-mail up here for ridicule seems somewhat unfair.
If there actually was such a thing as a race of benevolent trolls, I bet they'd be pissed right about now.
I think that the concept is that you have a processor with a boat-load of some type of RAM-look-alike (presumably non-volatile). This RAM is used as a RAM-drive (well, if the RAM is non-volatile, then you loose no data). Imagine a linux-based PDA that does not have the usual RAM/FLASH combination, but instead has a few gig of RAM that keeps its memory when powered off. So, you use the same memory for both "main memory" applications (loading programs, stack, heap, etc.) and also holds a file system.
So, you run your favorite application, which gets loaded into main memory from the file system.
Wait... your file system is also main memory. So, your favorite application is now in memory twice -- once in the file system, and once in "main" executable memory. That seems like a waste. This project aims to use the "file system copy" as the executable. Pretty smart, but possibly difficult to get right.
For those who may not know how a fusor works...
You need to get hydrogen to slam into each other very hard to have fusion. One traditional way to do it is to make a magnetic "bottle" to contain everything. This is hard to do, because the gas does not like to be compressed, and can squirt out the edges if your field is not incredibly strong and consistent. This is kind of like squeezing a hand full of jelly. This is the "traditional" approach. See HERE.
A fusor, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It uses a static electric field. The theory is that, if you ionize the hydrogen, it has a positive charge. So, you put it in a roon with a large electric charge. The hydrogen will accelerate towards the negative-charged region and keep on going all the way through. Once it passes through, the negative charge is behind it, so it starts to slow down, and eventually reverse direction and go back to the charge again at high speed. If you get enough ions doing this, eventually some of them will hit head-on in the middle with enough velocity to fuse. Simple, no? Pretty pictures available HERE.
There are only two problems. The first (and most serious) is that the region of negative charge is usually created by a bunch of wires welded together in a soccer-ball shape. You put a strong negative charge on the wires, and you have an instant negative region of space to attract the hydrogen ions. This works well, but some of the hydrogen ions hit the wires of the ball itself, which rob the entire system of energy. Those ions have to oscillate thousands or millions of times through that region before they, by chance, happen to hit another ion. If the ion hits the wire before hitting another ion, then it's purpose in life has failed. If there was only a way to create a static electric field without those pesky wires.
The other (less serious) problem is, even if you achieve over-unity energy, how do you extract energy from a system like this? The most obvious answer is heat (steam turbines, etc.), but the system (and those little wires) can only take so much heat before melting. Fusors (if I am not mistaken) are very good at producing neutrons, helium, and maybe X-rays. It is pretty hard to get energy out of those.
There is a difference between "programmable" and "hackable," or at least to me...
"Programmable" implies that a programming language is made available. Nothing more, nothing less. You can do what the programming language allows you to do. Of course, certain limits may inherent (or added to) the language. It is like giving you a sandbox to play in.
In this case, "hackable" means that they have thrown the doors wide open, and published almost everything that they know about it (schematics, etc), and are inviting people to dream up new uses (which presumably includes hardware hacks). This is like giving you the keys to the house and saying "It's yours. Make yourself at home. Feel free to paint or remodel if you want."
I happen think that HP makes (or at least made) the best calculators in the world. Then, TI kind of took over after HP rested on their laurels after releasing the 48G series. The 48G firmware, at least to me, was an ugly hack of the 48S code. For example, HP added new units to the 48G. Of course, it would be too easy to add these units to the "units" menu where they belong, so they had to throw them in a "secret" menu that you will only find by reading the manual.
I love RPN, and love my old 48SX. Even the keypad feels nicer than any other calculator in the world.
If you want it to.
Some assembly required... and maybe some C++.
Back in my day, we had green-on-black text. If you were really lucky, you had AMBER on black. Now, those were the days.
Now where were we? Oh yeah--the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.