Maybe, but one thing that bugs me about new mobos is the almost total lack of a game port -- which you need for MIDI. For those who may not know, MIDI is what you use to hook up keyboards/synthesizers/drum machines/other musical instruments to a computer.
I was considering a new DFI LanParty mobo for the Athlon XP (this was before I decided to go the Athlon 64 path). An e-mail to the company resulted in "Yes, it has a game port header. If you buy the mobo, I can mail you the cable to bring the game port out to a PCI plate." This is very nice of them to mail the cable, but it should come standard in the box! It seems that only the low-end boards even come with the game port these days.
Some people like to hook up a keyboard and play a little music. And I am not sure about the linux support for USB-to-MIDI adapters (anybody know about this one?).
I am typing on a Sun Blade 150 right now. I am not much of a programmer (more of a hardware person), but I would LOVE to be using KDE right now rather than CDE.
CDE is good competition for Windows 3.11, but anything more advanced blows this UI out of the water.
Just my free opinion, and worth every penny that you paid for it.
or how about starting with using high quality drives instead of dirt cheap consumer drives with low life and warrenty lengths...
From a financial standpoint, this makes no sense. Let's analyze further...
You can mathematically analyze risk. The general formula = (cost for event) x (probability of event occuring). Nothing magic here. The hard part is coming up with a cost for an event, especially for personal data.
So, let's assume that there the probability of a drive failure over five years is Q. Q should be well under 1% or so, under ideal circumstances.
So, the cost for a failures is (cost of data recovery) x Q.
However, the cost for no failure is (cost of drive hardware) x (100% - Q).
The point of the exercise is to add both costs together, and find the lowest total. So, lets assume that a cheap RAID is $200, but the chance of failure of BOTH drives is 0.1%. But the expensive RAID is $1000, but your chance of failure of BOTH drives is %0.001 percent (one hundred times more reliable).
In this example, if your data costs more than around $8000 to restore, then go for the most expensive option. Otherwise, go cheaper and take your chances.
Note that this model does NOT take into account the cost of one drive failing, which is just the cost of one drive (no data is lost).
One way is to build the hull to handle the pressure, and pumping the thing up with high-pressure air (bicycle pump). Then, if you are going down to 60 feet, just fill the hull with 40 PSI or so, and if there are any small leaks, air will bubble out instead of watter getting in.
I have some experience building robots. It has been a few years though...
Those sites listed in the parent are neat and some good starting points. But I have some more...
---BRAINS--- I might recommend something like an old HP 100LX, 200LX or similar, or maybe an old Pocket PC or Palm. A robot large enough to hold a real laptop will likely damage furniture and walls when it hits (and it IS a "when" and not "if). You are much better off using something about the same size/wieght as a PDA. This also means smaller (cheaper) batteries, smaller (cheaper) motors, and a smaller and lighter frame. The only downside is that you get less processing horsepower, and debugging is not quite as nice as using an IDE on a PC. If you really want to use a PC, I would suggest using a microcontroller talking to your PC over a wireless serial link.
If you have the money to blow and want nothing but the best, use a PC104 card and a wireless ethernet interface. This will rapidly burn through your cash, though.
One great idea is to have a small microcontroller (cerebellum) board handle the motors and sensors, and use an RS-232 link to transfer this information to your more powerful PDA (cerebrum), which will do the actual behaviors. If you do decide to use the parallel port, you stand a small chance of blowing the outputs in your parallel port if there are any wiring mistakes. Also, your IO is very limited on a parallel port.
---SENSORS--- First, scrap the webcam unless you are looking to do something on the order of a Master's thesis. The human brain is good at taking a 2-d image and exctracting 3-d information from it. With a webcam, all you will get is three matrices of numbers, and it will take some VERY clever programming to get anything useful from that. Perhaps the best that you could do would be to have a "follow the red ball" type mode. A camera is close to useless as far as obstacle avoidance unless you are in a VERY structured environment (not your home). Shadows can be very problematic to most algorithms.
As for sensors, check out this site. I should disclose that this site is run by a former professor as a robotics lab that I used to hang out at. Check their sensors page for the hack of the IR receiver can. This is one of the best hacks that I have seen in that it takes a remote control receiver and turns it in an analog sensor. Very cool.
---MOTORS--- The other great hack is listed under the servos section of the above web site, and will tell you how to turn a $15 hobby servo into a geared DC motor. You do not have to buy anything from there, but the documentation is worth a look.
Avoid stepper motors. They are not very powerful, and they are power hogs. The ONLY advantage is that they do not need gears.
---CONSTRUCTION--- And if you do make a small robot, the near-perfect material is model aircraft plywood. It is light, inexpensive, easy to cut with hand tools, and easy to glue together using Zap-a-Gap glue. The wood and glue are available at your local hobby store, and use a hack saw or coping saw from your favorite hardware store.
---PROGRAMMING--- I hate to toot my own horn here, but here is a document that I wrote almost ten years ago, but is still useful as a general guideline on programming robot behaviors. Also, check out all of the handouts from this web site, which is the main site for a robotics class at the University of Florida.
It should be possible to do a robot for well under $300.
Have you tried your local Goodwill or Salvation Army?
Even garage sales have old phones...
This post is half-funny, and half-sad. Phones are getting more feature-packed every year. Where I work, I am not allowed to have any sort of camera, for security reasons. When all phones have camreas, no phones will be allowed in my office. Sad, but true.
First, let's assume a 10,000 RPM drive. That means 166.7 revolutions per second. This means that there are 6 milliseconds per revolution. Six milliseconds is a LOOOOOONG time in terms of digital electronics.
Let's assume that it takes 50 nanoseconds (and I am pretty sure that it is shorter than this) to read a page of memory (assume 4 bytes wide). This means that in that 6 milliseconds, it could read 480,000 bytes (almost 1/2 MB), assuming no math errors. If an efficient cache is implemented, then it should be a piece of cake!
Get real here! If you want to see boobies, you have the CHOICE to see them. You have the internet, books, magazines, videos, etc. I bet that you could find plenty of pictues of boobies at several stores within 10 miles of your house. You can probably get at least one cable channel dedicated to boobies. So I am NOT telling you that you can't watch all the boobies that you want.
But what if I choose to watch entertainment that is booby-free? It seems that there is nothing safe short of Sesame Street. During the superbowl, nobody asked me if I wanted to see any boobies. I was never given a choice. I just tuned in to see a good football game. It is not that boobies are terrible, but they ARE out of place at a sporting event which has a broad range of the public watching. The point is that there is a place for everything, and the public has a right to know what to expect in any sort of entertainment.
And the whole thing about Howard Stern getting canceled bothers me. Yes, I do agree that he has some crude and inappropriate stuff. But people generally know to expect that from him. If you don't like it turn him off. I would hope that he would go off the air because people develop a sense of good taste, and NOT because he is run off of the air.
PS. I bet that if, instead of Janet Jackson, they had a Christian evangelist show up and do a 15-minute sermon, that the same people who are now crying "censorship" would thing that this was an inappropriate thing and start complaining. And for the record, I would think that it would be inappropriate too.
There was talk a year ago about SCO hoping to be bought out by IBM as a result of the suit...
Wouldn't it be awesome if, once this company is reduced to ashes, IBM were to buy them out for only a million or two (chump change for IBM). They would finally own ALL of the rights to Unix. Then, they could open-source the whole thing! THAT would be cool!
Yeah, well tell your wife that is totaly SUX that ProAsic Plus makes you use Design Compiler instead of the more sensible (and easier to use) FPGA Compiler II.
Actually, it may still be possible, believe it or not.
When each track is written, it may not exactly lie on top of the old track. There may be a little bit of the old data left on the "edge" of the current track.
Of course, to get this, you have to put the platter on the equivalent of a magentic scanning-tunneling microscope. In theory, possible. In practice, good luck.
I have an easier way to wipe a drive. It requres a torx screwdriver and a bulk eraser. Works every time. And yes, I have done this. But the HD was already flakey and destined for the trashcan.
I would disagree with the last statement. Xilinx FPGAs are perfect for an experimentor. They can be easily programmed with a JTAG cable, just like everybody elses parts. And Xilinx has low-cost and free design suites available. This makes is perfect for development/debug. A home experimentor is likely to make a LOT of mistakes when designing, and EEPROM-based parts take longer to program, and they DO wear out after burning too many times.
However, in order to program a Xilinx part in an embedded system (without a PC attached) requires a way to program a serial EEPROM. Programming this might be a pain, but Atmel (for one) makes serial EEPROMS for just this purpose, and will also be happy to sell you a programming cable.
Uh, dude, this isn't an episode of Transformers, it's a CPU. AMD and Intel already resolved this issue by building very strong chips that don't fail. Even if physically modifying the chip to lop off the bad parts is possible, I can only see it leading to a reduction in quality of chips produced, with manufacturers knowing that worst case, if it fails, it'll just lop itself to pieces.
I think that he is not talking about just re-mapping defects, but actually having the architecture change itself on the fly as needed in order to increase efficiency (but I could be wrong).
While this is cool in concept, I do not even see a concept anywhere. Just throwing the word "morph" around is easy. Telling somebody HOW it is done is an entirely different matter. I am an engineer, so I think that an ideal like this has potential *IF* they can pull it off. But the devil is in the details. I will remain doubtful untill I see some serious nuts'n'bolts discussion on how this is done.
Most FPGAs are RAM-based. Reconfigure as much as you want. This includes every Xilinx FPGA made. And there are some Xilinx Spartan II parts under $10. Pretty cool!
There are only a few FPGAs which use any sort of non-volatile memory (Actel's Pro-Asic being one). Those would have a limited life.
While what you say is true, look at it this way...
A drive is designed to write a bit pattern to a secor, and read back the EXACT SAME bit patters. A written "1" is still a "1." Period. If it didn't then it would be a very poor drive, as you could not store data reliably.
Yes, I agree that IN THEORY it is possible to recover data from a drive that has been written over "only once." But, in order to do so, you have to disassemble the drive and read the actual "analog" magnetic value.
If the disc drive is leaving your posession, then write to it a lot of times to keep somebody from disassembling your drive and getting the data.
But if nobody has access to your hard drive, and you are only worried about script kiddies and such, the one write is sufficient.
I happen to be a fan of Linux, from an OSS standpoint, but I must disagree about how easy Linux is.
First, I am in my mid-30's. While I have a great deal of technical knowledge, it is more hardware than software. And I find that my memory is in short supply.
While text files for configuration are, in a sense, elegant, they are also hard to remember. Let's say that you are trying to add some option under Linux. If you are real lucky, the configruation file will have something like "option=false" or something similar that you can change to "true." If you are not lucky, you will not have this line. Then, you will have to go through man files looking for the correct string to type. All of this takes time. And if I have to repeat this procedure in a year, I will not remember anything and will have to repeat the whole procedure.
Under Windows (or any decent GUI, for that matter), it is easier. Yes, there are a lot more clicks. But if you see a checkbox that is un-checked, then checking it should turn that option on. In short, it is easy to find out a lot about something by just "poking around" and seeing what the various options are. No man file needed. And I learn better by doing than by reading. By seeing an empty checkbox, I know that there is an option there. In a text file, there is usually no hints that you COULD insert a line there to do something.
This post is not really about "Windows vs. Linux", but more of a "GUI configurations vs. VI (or emacs) configuration."
First of all, if you are this paranoid, you CAN buy EEPROM-based hard drives which can competely erase in five seconds. Try here, but hold on to your wallet first.
Second, if you did try a complete magnetic erase, you would completely destory the hard drive. There are certain magnetic "marks" on there which mark the locations of the tracks. They are written at the factory, and cannot be restored by the user.
Maybe a removable hard drive would be much easier on the wallet. Keep the programs/OS on the computer's hard drive, but all client data can be kept on an external firewire/USB hard drive. You can even buy two and copy one to the other once a week or so for backup. All for under $100 (if you shop around).
Actually, you only need to overwrite once to make it invisible to the computer over the IDE cable.
There ARE methods to get data off of a hard drive platter that has been overwritten only once, but this requires the hard drive to be removed from the computer and physicly disassembled, and is quite expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard to do when my comany does not let me have admin access. I use what I am given (grumble grumble).
Maybe, but one thing that bugs me about new mobos is the almost total lack of a game port -- which you need for MIDI. For those who may not know, MIDI is what you use to hook up keyboards/synthesizers/drum machines/other musical instruments to a computer.
I was considering a new DFI LanParty mobo for the Athlon XP (this was before I decided to go the Athlon 64 path). An e-mail to the company resulted in "Yes, it has a game port header. If you buy the mobo, I can mail you the cable to bring the game port out to a PCI plate." This is very nice of them to mail the cable, but it should come standard in the box! It seems that only the low-end boards even come with the game port these days.
Some people like to hook up a keyboard and play a little music. And I am not sure about the linux support for USB-to-MIDI adapters (anybody know about this one?).
I am typing on a Sun Blade 150 right now. I am not much of a programmer (more of a hardware person), but I would LOVE to be using KDE right now rather than CDE.
CDE is good competition for Windows 3.11, but anything more advanced blows this UI out of the water.
Just my free opinion, and worth every penny that you paid for it.
From a financial standpoint, this makes no sense. Let's analyze further...
You can mathematically analyze risk. The general formula = (cost for event) x (probability of event occuring). Nothing magic here. The hard part is coming up with a cost for an event, especially for personal data.
So, let's assume that there the probability of a drive failure over five years is Q. Q should be well under 1% or so, under ideal circumstances.
So, the cost for a failures is (cost of data recovery) x Q.
However, the cost for no failure is (cost of drive hardware) x (100% - Q).
The point of the exercise is to add both costs together, and find the lowest total. So, lets assume that a cheap RAID is $200, but the chance of failure of BOTH drives is 0.1%. But the expensive RAID is $1000, but your chance of failure of BOTH drives is %0.001 percent (one hundred times more reliable).
In this example, if your data costs more than around $8000 to restore, then go for the most expensive option. Otherwise, go cheaper and take your chances.
Note that this model does NOT take into account the cost of one drive failing, which is just the cost of one drive (no data is lost).
Why not just get a USB or Firewire hard drive and do a manual copy one a week? It seems saner than swapping drives in a RAID.
One way is to build the hull to handle the pressure, and pumping the thing up with high-pressure air (bicycle pump). Then, if you are going down to 60 feet, just fill the hull with 40 PSI or so, and if there are any small leaks, air will bubble out instead of watter getting in.
I have some experience building robots. It has been a few years though...
Those sites listed in the parent are neat and some good starting points. But I have some more...
---BRAINS---
I might recommend something like an old HP 100LX, 200LX or similar, or maybe an old Pocket PC or Palm. A robot large enough to hold a real laptop will likely damage furniture and walls when it hits (and it IS a "when" and not "if). You are much better off using something about the same size/wieght as a PDA. This also means smaller (cheaper) batteries, smaller (cheaper) motors, and a smaller and lighter frame. The only downside is that you get less processing horsepower, and debugging is not quite as nice as using an IDE on a PC. If you really want to use a PC, I would suggest using a microcontroller talking to your PC over a wireless serial link.
If you have the money to blow and want nothing but the best, use a PC104 card and a wireless ethernet interface. This will rapidly burn through your cash, though.
One great idea is to have a small microcontroller (cerebellum) board handle the motors and sensors, and use an RS-232 link to transfer this information to your more powerful PDA (cerebrum), which will do the actual behaviors. If you do decide to use the parallel port, you stand a small chance of blowing the outputs in your parallel port if there are any wiring mistakes. Also, your IO is very limited on a parallel port.
---SENSORS---
First, scrap the webcam unless you are looking to do something on the order of a Master's thesis. The human brain is good at taking a 2-d image and exctracting 3-d information from it. With a webcam, all you will get is three matrices of numbers, and it will take some VERY clever programming to get anything useful from that. Perhaps the best that you could do would be to have a "follow the red ball" type mode. A camera is close to useless as far as obstacle avoidance unless you are in a VERY structured environment (not your home). Shadows can be very problematic to most algorithms.
As for sensors, check out this site. I should disclose that this site is run by a former professor as a robotics lab that I used to hang out at. Check their sensors page for the hack of the IR receiver can. This is one of the best hacks that I have seen in that it takes a remote control receiver and turns it in an analog sensor. Very cool.
---MOTORS---
The other great hack is listed under the servos section of the above web site, and will tell you how to turn a $15 hobby servo into a geared DC motor. You do not have to buy anything from there, but the documentation is worth a look.
Avoid stepper motors. They are not very powerful, and they are power hogs. The ONLY advantage is that they do not need gears.
---CONSTRUCTION---
And if you do make a small robot, the near-perfect material is model aircraft plywood. It is light, inexpensive, easy to cut with hand tools, and easy to glue together using Zap-a-Gap glue. The wood and glue are available at your local hobby store, and use a hack saw or coping saw from your favorite hardware store.
---PROGRAMMING---
I hate to toot my own horn here, but here is a document that I wrote almost ten years ago, but is still useful as a general guideline on programming robot behaviors. Also, check out all of the handouts from this web site, which is the main site for a robotics class at the University of Florida.
It should be possible to do a robot for well under $300.
Have you tried your local Goodwill or Salvation Army?
Even garage sales have old phones...
This post is half-funny, and half-sad. Phones are getting more feature-packed every year. Where I work, I am not allowed to have any sort of camera, for security reasons. When all phones have camreas, no phones will be allowed in my office. Sad, but true.
Trust me, it does not matter.
First, let's assume a 10,000 RPM drive. That means 166.7 revolutions per second. This means that there are 6 milliseconds per revolution. Six milliseconds is a LOOOOOONG time in terms of digital electronics.
Let's assume that it takes 50 nanoseconds (and I am pretty sure that it is shorter than this) to read a page of memory (assume 4 bytes wide). This means that in that 6 milliseconds, it could read 480,000 bytes (almost 1/2 MB), assuming no math errors. If an efficient cache is implemented, then it should be a piece of cake!
I would hardly call this censorship...
Get real here! If you want to see boobies, you have the CHOICE to see them. You have the internet, books, magazines, videos, etc. I bet that you could find plenty of pictues of boobies at several stores within 10 miles of your house. You can probably get at least one cable channel dedicated to boobies. So I am NOT telling you that you can't watch all the boobies that you want.
But what if I choose to watch entertainment that is booby-free? It seems that there is nothing safe short of Sesame Street. During the superbowl, nobody asked me if I wanted to see any boobies. I was never given a choice. I just tuned in to see a good football game. It is not that boobies are terrible, but they ARE out of place at a sporting event which has a broad range of the public watching. The point is that there is a place for everything, and the public has a right to know what to expect in any sort of entertainment.
And the whole thing about Howard Stern getting canceled bothers me. Yes, I do agree that he has some crude and inappropriate stuff. But people generally know to expect that from him. If you don't like it turn him off. I would hope that he would go off the air because people develop a sense of good taste, and NOT because he is run off of the air.
PS. I bet that if, instead of Janet Jackson, they had a Christian evangelist show up and do a 15-minute sermon, that the same people who are now crying "censorship" would thing that this was an inappropriate thing and start complaining. And for the record, I would think that it would be inappropriate too.
There was talk a year ago about SCO hoping to be bought out by IBM as a result of the suit...
Wouldn't it be awesome if, once this company is reduced to ashes, IBM were to buy them out for only a million or two (chump change for IBM). They would finally own ALL of the rights to Unix. Then, they could open-source the whole thing! THAT would be cool!
Ever heard of the Game Boy Advance???
Two DIFFERENT processors -- one for GBA games, and one for legacy GB games.
OK. I admit that this is not even in the same league as a desktop processor.
Yeah, well tell your wife that is totaly SUX that ProAsic Plus makes you use Design Compiler instead of the more sensible (and easier to use) FPGA Compiler II.
;)
I don't sound a little bitter, do I?
Actually, it may still be possible, believe it or not.
When each track is written, it may not exactly lie on top of the old track. There may be a little bit of the old data left on the "edge" of the current track.
Of course, to get this, you have to put the platter on the equivalent of a magentic scanning-tunneling microscope. In theory, possible. In practice, good luck.
I have an easier way to wipe a drive. It requres a torx screwdriver and a bulk eraser. Works every time. And yes, I have done this. But the HD was already flakey and destined for the trashcan.
What about a diabetic with HIV? Chances are low, but not zero.
I would disagree with the last statement. Xilinx FPGAs are perfect for an experimentor. They can be easily programmed with a JTAG cable, just like everybody elses parts. And Xilinx has low-cost and free design suites available. This makes is perfect for development/debug. A home experimentor is likely to make a LOT of mistakes when designing, and EEPROM-based parts take longer to program, and they DO wear out after burning too many times.
However, in order to program a Xilinx part in an embedded system (without a PC attached) requires a way to program a serial EEPROM. Programming this might be a pain, but Atmel (for one) makes serial EEPROMS for just this purpose, and will also be happy to sell you a programming cable.
This was rated "+5 Interesting!" Yikes!
"+5 Funny" would be appropriate!
The "Bogo" stands for "Bogus" for those of you who don't know.
I got a chuckle out of this.
I think that he is not talking about just re-mapping defects, but actually having the architecture change itself on the fly as needed in order to increase efficiency (but I could be wrong).
While this is cool in concept, I do not even see a concept anywhere. Just throwing the word "morph" around is easy. Telling somebody HOW it is done is an entirely different matter. I am an engineer, so I think that an ideal like this has potential *IF* they can pull it off. But the devil is in the details. I will remain doubtful untill I see some serious nuts'n'bolts discussion on how this is done.
Time will tell
Most FPGAs are RAM-based. Reconfigure as much as you want. This includes every Xilinx FPGA made. And there are some Xilinx Spartan II parts under $10. Pretty cool!
There are only a few FPGAs which use any sort of non-volatile memory (Actel's Pro-Asic being one). Those would have a limited life.
While what you say is true, look at it this way...
A drive is designed to write a bit pattern to a secor, and read back the EXACT SAME bit patters. A written "1" is still a "1." Period. If it didn't then it would be a very poor drive, as you could not store data reliably.
Yes, I agree that IN THEORY it is possible to recover data from a drive that has been written over "only once." But, in order to do so, you have to disassemble the drive and read the actual "analog" magnetic value.
If the disc drive is leaving your posession, then write to it a lot of times to keep somebody from disassembling your drive and getting the data.
But if nobody has access to your hard drive, and you are only worried about script kiddies and such, the one write is sufficient.
I happen to be a fan of Linux, from an OSS standpoint, but I must disagree about how easy Linux is.
First, I am in my mid-30's. While I have a great deal of technical knowledge, it is more hardware than software. And I find that my memory is in short supply.
While text files for configuration are, in a sense, elegant, they are also hard to remember. Let's say that you are trying to add some option under Linux. If you are real lucky, the configruation file will have something like "option=false" or something similar that you can change to "true." If you are not lucky, you will not have this line. Then, you will have to go through man files looking for the correct string to type. All of this takes time. And if I have to repeat this procedure in a year, I will not remember anything and will have to repeat the whole procedure.
Under Windows (or any decent GUI, for that matter), it is easier. Yes, there are a lot more clicks. But if you see a checkbox that is un-checked, then checking it should turn that option on. In short, it is easy to find out a lot about something by just "poking around" and seeing what the various options are. No man file needed. And I learn better by doing than by reading. By seeing an empty checkbox, I know that there is an option there. In a text file, there is usually no hints that you COULD insert a line there to do something.
This post is not really about "Windows vs. Linux", but more of a "GUI configurations vs. VI (or emacs) configuration."
First of all, if you are this paranoid, you CAN buy EEPROM-based hard drives which can competely erase in five seconds. Try here, but hold on to your wallet first.
Second, if you did try a complete magnetic erase, you would completely destory the hard drive. There are certain magnetic "marks" on there which mark the locations of the tracks. They are written at the factory, and cannot be restored by the user.
Maybe a removable hard drive would be much easier on the wallet. Keep the programs/OS on the computer's hard drive, but all client data can be kept on an external firewire/USB hard drive. You can even buy two and copy one to the other once a week or so for backup. All for under $100 (if you shop around).
Actually, you only need to overwrite once to make it invisible to the computer over the IDE cable.
There ARE methods to get data off of a hard drive platter that has been overwritten only once, but this requires the hard drive to be removed from the computer and physicly disassembled, and is quite expensive.