John Whitney did use computers for the into-the-monolith scene, one of the first computer graphics scenes in movies. However he used analog computers and he has been credited with being the person who introduced computer effects into the film industry. Daisy was sung by a digital computer.
The first digital computer I programmed was an IBM 1800 built in 1966 (and was donated to our university in 1975 where I got my hands on it) so I well know the level of computer power available when 2001 ASO was filmed. Back then analog computers were more suitable than digital computers for many real world tasks. Anyone studying computer science then was expected to be able to build an analog circuit to solve differential equations for example, that way was faster than the digital methods at the time. It would have taken quite a while to render a movie scene with the 4K that was left of the 1800's RAM after the compiler/runtime was loaded.
Good articles in Spectrum, thanks for the link. I have a background in Engineering and understand how my car works (both my manual and my wife's Prius) but I had forgotten how the vacuum assisted brakes would behave at very high engine RPM so I found this very interesting:
"The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears."
So, in a runaway Prius you have to depress the engine stop button (for >3 seconds) and the brake pedal and hold them pressed without releasing or 'pumping', oh and don't panic at the same time!
I drive a Prius. The emergency shutdown procedure is to hold the "stop" button pressed for at least three seconds. That's a long time if you are out of control doing high speed on a motorway. I do not know if the transmission switch will respond if you try to select neutral while accelerating. The worry is that the computer controls everything except the manual/hydraulic part of the brake (unless pressed hard the brake pedal only activates "engine braking" which is electrical) and if the ECU is having a brain fart you have limited options.
Sometimes it's not the James Bond technology that defeats the high-tech defense systems. On the Sheffield the electronic antimissile defenses were switched off to allow the captain to speak with Naval headquarters near London because they interferred with satellite comms. http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2.53.html#subj1.1 --
On the topic of TFA, it is in the interests of local defense contractors to promote scare stories about foreign components. I am aware of some research into trojan components (such as CPUs that have a built in error that is triggered by a sequence of opcodes found in a certain encryption algorithm) but I remain unconvinced by the theories on the 2007 Syria attack.
yeah, sure. We're all going to host our own Wave servers or use a provider other than Google ?
It might happen in large companies and a few geek basements but the majority are going to just use Google's Wave servers. How many people set up their own sendmail/postfix/qmail server compared to how many people use gmail/hotmail/yahoo. OK, I know/. is the wrong place to ask that question, I run a sendmail server myself, but you get my point.
Another risk is the interaction with any desktop or proxy software that leaks the URLs. Many systems seem secure but have unintended consequences when used with another system. For example, once the administrator of the proxy learns the "20-digit account id" of the CEOs voicemail a simple grep thru the logs would give access.
Sadly it comes to pass that every generation the Tao of Backup is forgotten and must be relearned through such trial by fire. http://www.taobackup.com/
If the headless box fails to boot due to a problem with the filesystem then it often helps to have a PXE boot image ready on your DHCP server http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment that you can use to boot the box. Some BIOS try a PXE boot if they fail to boot from disk or disc but you may have to press some key to start the PXE boot so try it once before you pull the video card (recursive advice, sorry).
Use a live CD distro (I use Damn Small Linux) as a starting point for building the boot image but most do not allow you to SSH in so you will have to customise the image a little to ensure that sshd is running and that you have an account that you can ssh login to that has sudo/su access.
You should be able to figure out where your BIOS parameters are stored in the battery backed CMOS RAM and make a backup that you can later restore via the PXE booted image if your BIOS settings get lost.
When I look at my personal store of data I realise that quite a lot is now unreadable from the original media.
I have some programs on punched cards that have survived from 1975. The printouts of those programs is faded but still readable.
I can still read (some of) my 8" floppies from 1978 the 5.25" floppies from 1984 and the 3.5" diskettes and I have copied the data onto my current PC (which is backed up on several different media). Many of those floppies had read errors after a decade of storage and the only way the data survived was because it had been copied onto newer media.
My e-mail from 1988-96 is archived on 9-track tape in an IBM format and while I do have source code to read on Linux alas I do not have access to a 9-track tape drive.
The colour photographs from the 70s have faded but my great-grandmothers monochrome silver halide photos from the 20s are still in perfect condition.
I suggest putting some photos in the capsule. Choose the oldest photo of a common ancestor, scan it into your PC (with offsite backup) and put the original in the time capsule (well sealed).
of the day I found a similar exploit in IE6. During a pentest I noticed that a company had a password reset site with a url like "passwordedit.info.example.com" so I regestered "passwordedit.info" and sent e-mails to some employees saying "your password will soon expire, please go to passwordedit.info.example.com and change it". However the 'e' in "example" was a Unicode character thet looked/displayed like ASCII 'e' but was not. The trick was that IE stopped parsing the url at the bogus 'e' and went to "passwordedit.info" (my site) while displaying "passwordedit.info.example.com" in the url bar.
My site recorded the new passwords while forwarding the change request to the real site
IE6 was fixed and no press release was made (we are discreet)
domains and URLs have been changed to protect the guilty
a smart fridge can co-ordinate its duty cycle with neighbours to manage the peak load and reactive loads on the supply. Who cares if your fridge motor/pump delays a few minutes beofre switching on (as it waits for the fridge down the hall to finish), it won't make much difference to the temperature.
I worked on a project back in the 80's where we had half a million lines of code running on a high availability machine with 384 32bit CPUs.
As bandwidth was a tad limited in those days we too looked for an efficient way to distribute updates. The solution was to distribute the smaller bug fixes as patches, similar to debug scripts. The loader would run those debug scripts after loading the program. To apply a patch the customer would put the patch file in the same folder as the program, restart the program on the hot standby side of the cluster and provoke a switchover to the standby.
The patch was applied without any downtime. If the customer wanted to back-out the bug fix then all they had to do was delete the patch file and switch back to the unpatched side of the cluster.
Most patches were small and we only had a few hundred bytes to send out at a time. Afterwards the world upgraded to Windows and forgot such technology:-(
Then move on to a crystal radio. Show them the math behind the design of the inductor, how you calculate the number of turns to make the circuit resonate at the required frequency.
It installs and plays on XP in a virtual machine. That's very apt if you think about since Feynman did so much to help our understanding of virtual particles:-)
you can download a boot floppy image from http://www.bootdisk.com/
The floppy drives of that era often had a rubber drive belt. Check if the rubber has perished or become brittle. Also some had to be calibrated from time to time as the motor speed control was prone to drift. The process was to shine a strobe light (a flourescent tube may do) on the calibration pattern on the drive spindle (looks like a dart board) and ajust the speed till it appears to stop.
Yes, you can connect the drive to a recent PC (a few years old would be better as floppy drives are uncommon now). The power connector is the same as modern HDD but the data connector has changed. In 1984 floppy drives the cable connector plugged onto the edge of the PCB. Get the cable on eBay.
Epson made well engineered PCs, I have an Epson PX-8 from 1984 (laptop running CP/M) still working.
Slashdot Mirror
In America at least, you CAN be arrested for saying that you want to kill the president
The first digital computer I programmed was an IBM 1800 built in 1966 (and was donated to our university in 1975 where I got my hands on it) so I well know the level of computer power available when 2001 ASO was filmed. Back then analog computers were more suitable than digital computers for many real world tasks. Anyone studying computer science then was expected to be able to build an analog circuit to solve differential equations for example, that way was faster than the digital methods at the time. It would have taken quite a while to render a movie scene with the 4K that was left of the 1800's RAM after the compiler/runtime was loaded.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, Get off my lawn!
Google should rename it Goo, or if that's taken then Gooo or Goooooooooo...
"The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears."
So, in a runaway Prius you have to depress the engine stop button (for >3 seconds) and the brake pedal and hold them pressed without releasing or 'pumping', oh and don't panic at the same time!
I drive a Prius. The emergency shutdown procedure is to hold the "stop" button pressed for at least three seconds. That's a long time if you are out of control doing high speed on a motorway. I do not know if the transmission switch will respond if you try to select neutral while accelerating. The worry is that the computer controls everything except the manual/hydraulic part of the brake (unless pressed hard the brake pedal only activates "engine braking" which is electrical) and if the ECU is having a brain fart you have limited options.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/2.53.html#subj1.1
--
On the topic of TFA, it is in the interests of local defense contractors to promote scare stories about foreign components. I am aware of some research into trojan components (such as CPUs that have a built in error that is triggered by a sequence of opcodes found in a certain encryption algorithm) but I remain unconvinced by the theories on the 2007 Syria attack.
yeah, sure. We're all going to host our own Wave servers or use a provider other than Google ? /. is the wrong place to ask that question, I run a sendmail server myself, but you get my point.
It might happen in large companies and a few geek basements but the majority are going to just use Google's Wave servers. How many people set up their own sendmail/postfix/qmail server compared to how many people use gmail/hotmail/yahoo. OK, I know
Another risk is the interaction with any desktop or proxy software that leaks the URLs. Many systems seem secure but have unintended consequences when used with another system. For example, once the administrator of the proxy learns the "20-digit account id" of the CEOs voicemail a simple grep thru the logs would give access.
"Weird" is an irregular adjective that varies with the pronoun. An example illustrates best:
I am interesting
You are eccentric
He is weird
The TOS probably made the users aware that "your data is in Danger" so they can't complain now :-)
Sadly it comes to pass that every generation the Tao of Backup is forgotten and must be relearned through such trial by fire. http://www.taobackup.com/
$ grep gmail pwd.txt | wc -l
25
brilliant !
Use a live CD distro (I use Damn Small Linux) as a starting point for building the boot image but most do not allow you to SSH in so you will have to customise the image a little to ensure that sshd is running and that you have an account that you can ssh login to that has sudo/su access.
You should be able to figure out where your BIOS parameters are stored in the battery backed CMOS RAM and make a backup that you can later restore via the PXE booted image if your BIOS settings get lost.
The best way to fire an SUV would be to sling it with a Trebuchet. One this size should do the job quite well http://www.fitz-claridge.com/Trebuchet/index.html
I have some programs on punched cards that have survived from 1975. The printouts of those programs is faded but still readable.
I can still read (some of) my 8" floppies from 1978 the 5.25" floppies from 1984 and the 3.5" diskettes and I have copied the data onto my current PC (which is backed up on several different media). Many of those floppies had read errors after a decade of storage and the only way the data survived was because it had been copied onto newer media.
My e-mail from 1988-96 is archived on 9-track tape in an IBM format and while I do have source code to read on Linux alas I do not have access to a 9-track tape drive.
The colour photographs from the 70s have faded but my great-grandmothers monochrome silver halide photos from the 20s are still in perfect condition.
I suggest putting some photos in the capsule. Choose the oldest photo of a common ancestor, scan it into your PC (with offsite backup) and put the original in the time capsule (well sealed).
of the day I found a similar exploit in IE6. During a pentest I noticed that a company had a password reset site with a url like "passwordedit.info.example.com" so I regestered "passwordedit.info" and sent e-mails to some employees saying "your password will soon expire, please go to passwordedit.info.example.com and change it". However the 'e' in "example" was a Unicode character thet looked/displayed like ASCII 'e' but was not.
The trick was that IE stopped parsing the url at the bogus 'e' and went to "passwordedit.info" (my site) while displaying "passwordedit.info.example.com" in the url bar.
My site recorded the new passwords while forwarding the change request to the real site
IE6 was fixed and no press release was made (we are discreet)
domains and URLs have been changed to protect the guilty
a smart fridge can co-ordinate its duty cycle with neighbours to manage the peak load and reactive loads on the supply. Who cares if your fridge motor/pump delays a few minutes beofre switching on (as it waits for the fridge down the hall to finish), it won't make much difference to the temperature.
Wardriving in Australia, did anyone else read this and think of the supercharged pursuit cars and high speed chases in Mad Max ?
As bandwidth was a tad limited in those days we too looked for an efficient way to distribute updates. The solution was to distribute the smaller bug fixes as patches, similar to debug scripts. The loader would run those debug scripts after loading the program. To apply a patch the customer would put the patch file in the same folder as the program, restart the program on the hot standby side of the cluster and provoke a switchover to the standby.
The patch was applied without any downtime. If the customer wanted to back-out the bug fix then all they had to do was delete the patch file and switch back to the unpatched side of the cluster.
Most patches were small and we only had a few hundred bytes to send out at a time. Afterwards the world upgraded to Windows and forgot such technology :-(
Hello, is that you NASA ?
Then move on to a crystal radio. Show them the math behind the design of the inductor, how you calculate the number of turns to make the circuit resonate at the required frequency.
It installs and plays on XP in a virtual machine. That's very apt if you think about since Feynman did so much to help our understanding of virtual particles :-)
"It will be tested heavily this month" , so, they are going to post the URL on slashdot ?
Yes, you can connect the drive to a recent PC (a few years old would be better as floppy drives are uncommon now). The power connector is the same as modern HDD but the data connector has changed. In 1984 floppy drives the cable connector plugged onto the edge of the PCB. Get the cable on eBay.
Epson made well engineered PCs, I have an Epson PX-8 from 1984 (laptop running CP/M) still working.