About 20 years ago I 'hacked' a car LED clock module by wiring some ribbon cable to the relevant parts of the PCB and mounting the unit with a 12V transformer+PSU, programming switches and a 10A mains relay in a small case - the end result was a unit into which I could plug my coffee percolator and have it 'brew-up' at the pre-set time in the morning! Because it also had a 59min count down timer, I could also set the coffee brewing at other times knowing that the timer wouldn't let the percolator boil dry!
My most recent hack was to make up a short lead that runs from a universal (90-250v) multi-voltage 2A DC power supply. On the 'output' side of the lead is a 12V car 'cigar lighter' socket into which I can plug a Belkin 12V 'car' to 5V USB socket adaptor - now with the relevant leads I can charge my phone or PDA or use anything else that normally takes power from a USB port - this means I only have to take one power unit with me on holiday or on business rather than one PSU for phone, another for PDA, another for digital camera, NiMh battery charger etc.
I was in North Yorkshire about a month ago and there was a regional TV news article about the transmissions from Fylingdales (lots of military arrays and...sshhhh...top secret signals). Around the area, car central locking systems tend to stop working properly - the landlord of the local pub keeps a tally of stranded motorists! 'The powers that be' acknowledged that the dishes were the problem.
A google search for 'fylingdales car lock' turns up quite a few articles on the subject if you fancy slashdotting some poor souls!
Just think, if they all halved their prices, they would only have lost $US6.5 billion and hence made less of a loss or, in other words, more of a profit!
Believed to be part of a larger gang of code, this fragment is guilty of initialising a register for potentially illegal or disruptive purposes, notably the dissemination of disturbing messages or misinformation. Older intelligence indicates that the code was often seen accompanied by its partner:
INT 21h
But now believed to be part of a larger organisation.
They're not burning, just making use of 24-bit colour rather than 8-bit brownscale. Notice how your heat settings dial used to be marked 1-10 but now shows RGB values?
I look forward to my next fault-tolerant PC; which will comprise an Intel, AMD and Motorola processor. One CPU will run Windows, one Linux and the last one a Mac OS. I will fire up my WP front end, which will spawn copies of Word, Star Office and Nisus Writer Express (Mac). Boy my documents will be soooooooooo perfect!
I did some computer installation work for a company in the UK in the early 1990s - they produced this technology and while I was on site they showed me some of the kit. They even had a rig that could be used in poorer countries; it used bicycles instead of a helicopter!
Be nice to us Brits - we know where you live, and, my, change that tie will you - green and brown don't go with that shirt. Your keyboard needs a clean too;-p
I have an Ipaq 3970 running Pocket Windows 2002 and fitted with a dual CF jacket housing a Wifi card and a 256MB CF card. The unit has bluetooth and I also have a bluetooth-enabled phone.
Software on the PDA includes: PocketVNC, PockeTTY (a ssh client), XSForms (create forms on a PC, fill them in on the PDA and then upload the data in XML format back at base, Pocket Informant (diary/organiser).
In my role as a 'roving' techy, consultant and trainer, I am often away from my main office, where I am one of the support guys. I can use the Ipaq to do remote diags on our servers and desktops (Win2K, XP and Linux) pretty much anywhere through my phone or a wi-fi point, and I also use the forms software for customer questionnaires/surveys - all this saves me lugging my laptop everywhere and also means I can go out even when 'on call' (Last week I checked out and rebooted a Win2K server via PocketVNC while a passenger in a car zooming along the M4 motorway (UK)! I can also check/send mail. It's not the answer to everything but it's damn handy!
The next add-on will be a CF adaptor with a vga/video out lead and an IR remote control so I can use the PDA to show full-size/res Powerpoint presentations-sure beats lugging around the laptop again and looks real smart-ass!
Thanks-looks like it might be useful; for the 'Goldmine/Maximizer' alternative we need a product that's strong on group calendaring and CRM on the sales admin side - I've been looking at eGroupware and MoreGroupware so any insight on these would be great.
We run an online testing and certification engine, written in perl. It WAS hosted on a Win2K/IIS box, but about once a week the server would lock up with IIS hitting 100% CPU utilisation and the only way to 'fix' it was to reboot. The same code's been running on a Redhat 9/Apache server for about 2 months now with no downtime.
Our MD was so impressed with the port (which was very trivial), that she's asked me to consider migrating our main in-house server to Linux too - it's mainly a 'file and print' box so this should be a piece of cake.
We WERE looking at a contact management system (possibly Maximizer or Goldmine), but now we're seriously considering an open source alteratives-should save us about 7000UKP in apps and licences.
I think it's disgusting that all this bulletproof hosting is in India - it's yet another example of a service that could be provided 'at home' going to India.
Surely US ISPs could do this job for a similar price as an Indian host and we could keep jobs in the USA while providing a valuable spamming service for people across the world?
I don't wish to start a heated debate and I'm no evangelist for MS or Linux but isn't your stance a little blinkered - what's your agenda in forbidding Word formats - can't be to help your student's classroom experience mirror real life; seems to pander more to your taste to run Linux/OO on your system and to force everyone to conform to your document processing world.
Slashdot Mirror
About 20 years ago I 'hacked' a car LED clock module by wiring some ribbon cable to the relevant parts of the PCB and mounting the unit with a 12V transformer+PSU, programming switches and a 10A mains relay in a small case - the end result was a unit into which I could plug my coffee percolator and have it 'brew-up' at the pre-set time in the morning! Because it also had a 59min count down timer, I could also set the coffee brewing at other times knowing that the timer wouldn't let the percolator boil dry!
My most recent hack was to make up a short lead that runs from a universal (90-250v) multi-voltage 2A DC power supply. On the 'output' side of the lead is a 12V car 'cigar lighter' socket into which I can plug a Belkin 12V 'car' to 5V USB socket adaptor - now with the relevant leads I can charge my phone or PDA or use anything else that normally takes power from a USB port - this means I only have to take one power unit with me on holiday or on business rather than one PSU for phone, another for PDA, another for digital camera, NiMh battery charger etc.
...that 'the powers that be' are monitoring everything 'on the fly', if they need to get their hands on the physical data repository to check it out.
I was in North Yorkshire about a month ago and there was a regional TV news article about the transmissions from Fylingdales (lots of military arrays and...sshhhh...top secret signals). Around the area, car central locking systems tend to stop working properly - the landlord of the local pub keeps a tally of stranded motorists! 'The powers that be' acknowledged that the dishes were the problem.
A google search for 'fylingdales car lock' turns up quite a few articles on the subject if you fancy slashdotting some poor souls!
Just think, if they all halved their prices, they would only have lost $US6.5 billion and hence made less of a loss or, in other words, more of a profit!
REWARD
Have you seen this code:
MOV AH,09h
Believed to be part of a larger gang of code, this fragment is guilty of initialising a register for potentially illegal or disruptive purposes, notably the dissemination of disturbing messages or misinformation. Older intelligence indicates that the code was often seen accompanied by its partner:
INT 21h
But now believed to be part of a larger organisation.
Yep, and you've just added to it.
They're not burning, just making use of 24-bit colour rather than 8-bit brownscale. Notice how your heat settings dial used to be marked 1-10 but now shows RGB values?
Very nice sonny, now go do your math homework for tomorrow.
Imagine if they'd created a Beo.. but I really couldn't be ar**ed.
...Probably would have taken out half the galaxy.
But will it mean that:
a) At last, the post-mix crap that comes out of bar soda taps will AT LAST taste like the bottled stuff.
or
b) A supermarket chinese ready-meal will ever taste anything CLOSE to a real take-out?
Until we sort out the fundamentals, nothing else matters (or antimatters!?)
Fair point perhaps, but..
My PERL code for a Web-based testing engine:
Win 2K/IIS: Uptime = approx 3 days before IIS hangs CPU with 100% utilisation.
Red Hat 9 + Apache: Uptime = approx 3 months now.
Oh, you want real-world benchmarks with numbers eh? OK...
MS Solution: NIL
Linux Solution: ONE
I look forward to my next fault-tolerant PC; which will comprise an Intel, AMD and Motorola processor. One CPU will run Windows, one Linux and the last one a Mac OS. I will fire up my WP front end, which will spawn copies of Word, Star Office and Nisus Writer Express (Mac). Boy my documents will be soooooooooo perfect!
I did some computer installation work for a company in the UK in the early 1990s - they produced this technology and while I was on site they showed me some of the kit. They even had a rig that could be used in poorer countries; it used bicycles instead of a helicopter!
Be nice to us Brits - we know where you live, and, my, change that tie will you - green and brown don't go with that shirt. Your keyboard needs a clean too ;-p
OK, here goes:
I have an Ipaq 3970 running Pocket Windows 2002 and fitted with a dual CF jacket housing a Wifi card and a 256MB CF card. The unit has bluetooth and I also have a bluetooth-enabled phone.
Software on the PDA includes:
PocketVNC,
PockeTTY (a ssh client),
XSForms (create forms on a PC, fill them in on the PDA and then upload the data in XML format back at base,
Pocket Informant (diary/organiser).
In my role as a 'roving' techy, consultant and trainer, I am often away from my main office, where I am one of the support guys. I can use the Ipaq to do remote diags on our servers and desktops (Win2K, XP and Linux) pretty much anywhere through my phone or a wi-fi point, and I also use the forms software for customer questionnaires/surveys - all this saves me lugging my laptop everywhere and also means I can go out even when 'on call' (Last week I checked out and rebooted a Win2K server via PocketVNC while a passenger in a car zooming along the M4 motorway (UK)! I can also check/send mail. It's not the answer to everything but it's damn handy!
The next add-on will be a CF adaptor with a vga/video out lead and an IR remote control so I can use the PDA to show full-size/res Powerpoint presentations-sure beats lugging around the laptop again and looks real smart-ass!
Nice idea but the process refuses to stop and becomes unkillable.
Thanks-looks like it might be useful; for the 'Goldmine/Maximizer' alternative we need a product that's strong on group calendaring and CRM on the sales admin side - I've been looking at eGroupware and MoreGroupware so any insight on these would be great.
There was nothing to fix, it was a known IIS 'quirk'.
We run an online testing and certification engine, written in perl. It WAS hosted on a Win2K/IIS box, but about once a week the server would lock up with IIS hitting 100% CPU utilisation and the only way to 'fix' it was to reboot. The same code's been running on a Redhat 9/Apache server for about 2 months now with no downtime.
Our MD was so impressed with the port (which was very trivial), that she's asked me to consider migrating our main in-house server to Linux too - it's mainly a 'file and print' box so this should be a piece of cake.
We WERE looking at a contact management system (possibly Maximizer or Goldmine), but now we're seriously considering an open source alteratives-should save us about 7000UKP in apps and licences.
I think it's disgusting that all this bulletproof hosting is in India - it's yet another example of a service that could be provided 'at home' going to India.
Surely US ISPs could do this job for a similar price as an Indian host and we could keep jobs in the USA while providing a valuable spamming service for people across the world?
Maybe it's all these rotating hard disks and optical media drives we've stuck all over the surface!?
It will be interesting to see what happens when we've all migrated over to purely solid-state or bio-organic memory devices!
Fair comments; a slight step back from the 'black and white' stance implied by the original posting.
Best wishes etc.
(...stand by for the code nazis...)
I don't wish to start a heated debate and I'm no evangelist for MS or Linux but isn't your stance a little blinkered - what's your agenda in forbidding Word formats - can't be to help your student's classroom experience mirror real life; seems to pander more to your taste to run Linux/OO on your system and to force everyone to conform to your document processing world.
Anyone found any Liquid of Mass Destruction (LMD) yet?!