TLDR: Long winded post. Nothing new said. Just a long rant over life on the net - Charles Dickens style ( lots of words without saying much ).
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Maybe you have a large powerful system and do not notice when you have a load of baggage scripts running in the background. You might not miss a GB of memory.
You are right, I do open up a lot of windows, and try to leave Firefox running all week, as this laptop "sleeps" nicely, keeping everything just as I left it whenever I close its lid. I will save interesting windows for later use and browse around while I am in a hot spot, then review what I have found later when offline, maybe printing some off, or deleting it after review.
Like an underpowered car on the freeway, its quite noticeable to me when my CPU is slugging down running crap in the background, or something is consuming memory. I have a little desktop widget running that tracks CPU and memory, and this machine does not have much to spare.
Normally, my background CPU usage is around 2%, but this will rise markedly to around 50% as more and more scripts got launched, and never terminated. The slowdown is quite noticeable. I have about 1GB of memory available upon fresh reboot. When this declines to about 200MB free, I increasingly risk system lockup. Closing windows would not return my RAM. I knew it was scripts running as I could see the same patterns in CPU usage in animated pictures in some websites I had visited. Closing those tabs did not stop the undulating patterns of cpu usage, albeit it did cease displaying the image.
I am running on the cheap HP/compaq CQ56 laptop that WalMart sells for $300. It is quite sufficient for me to use as a web browser / file retriever. I got the HP specifically because I did not want to use my critical work machines for risky work on the net. I risk system corruption, viruses, and loss of privacy while on the net. I felt a lot safer knowing I have nothing on this machine that would mess me up if something went wrong, much like I feel much safer using a pusher stick to guide wood through my table saw. If something goes wrong, the stick, not my hand, takes the wrath of the saw.
I felt a lot better knowing the only link between my "web explorer" machine and my highly trusted machines is a sneakernet-based USB stick, whose individual files can be closely scrutinized before and during transfer to their new host, should a transfer be appropriate.
I run four plug-ins... three of them are for capturing streaming media, and No-Script 2.5. I consider the streaming media capture very important, as I am on an AT&T link. AT&T isn't exactly known for living up to advertised claims of speed, albeit their billing and legal departments are quite capable of writing precise contracts requiring full payment while holding themselves harmless for failed performance. Well, they are an old-time company, and asking them to compete in a modern high speed world is kinda like inviting Grandpa to run high-school track. Like grandpa, they have grown fat - lots of highly paid executive types, Not much muscle in there. They seem to use pens and a book of law rather than a solder iron and a book of physics. I have railed this too much, I guess my point is that if AT&T wants the phrase "This is AT&T calling" to be taken seriously, they need to be supporting their engineers better than they support their advertising and legal divisions.
I do my best to work around AT&T's inability to deliver data at video speeds, as well as work around display technology coders trying to appease the content creators by capturing the stream to a file so I can watch it uninterrupted by frequent "buffering" pauses. I often have time to review the captured stream when I do not have a live internet connection. The kind of stuff I watch, I often need to pause or take screen captures of relevant notes. Khan's academy. Arduino tutorials. Atmel's stuff.
I agree with you about the ads. I hesitated for the longest time putting in ad-blocking technology, as I felt the same issue as the orange vendor mentioned in the parent. If the webmaster supported his page with ads, by golly I wasn't going out of my way to block them.
Then I started paying in ways I had not imagined. I was complaining on Slashdot on the Firefox memory leak topic, about catching viruses and forced reboots because of memory leaks. A generous fellow slashdotter offered his advice to install NoScript. Frustrated at all the problems "thinking outside the box" script programmers were causing for me, I went ahead and installed NoScript. Its made a big difference. It wasn't the ads I was trying to block, rather it was the scripts they were launching doing only God-knows-what. If a webmaster wants me to see an ad, I have no problem at all with that. Running an unknown script with unknown intentions is a horse of a different color. Especially when they misbehave, cause me problems, and force me to reboot to clean up the mess so the system runs again.
It was not the ad which caused me to install blocking technology, rather it was the abuse of the scripting system by unscrupulous scriptwriters.
Back to the orange vendor analogy, people might be highly motivated to steal the oranges rather than pay for them if attempting to pay for one resulted in the vendor spraying them with tar at the cash register. The honest guy who paid finds himself having to go clean himself off, while the thief got off scot-free.
The abuse of payment systems is the main reason I am extremely leery of paying for anything on the web. I have a few trusted sites I will deal with, as I feel I go at substantial risk to reveal bank codes and payment authorizations to a vendor. Knowing the abuse rampant on the net, I am even leery of revealing my name or email address, much less payment credentials.
Following is a link to a major Chinese internet shopping mall run very similar to Amazon in America. I have been buying all sorts of electronic goodies here. Caveat: there is usually NO documentation shipped with the product. Be able to determine from the vendors web page if this is the item you want before you buy. Do not expect any technical support. Once in a while I do get a disappointment, so buy a sample or two first.
If you make lots of prototypes, as I do, you will find all sorts of subassemblies of other stuff here you can adapt to what you want. At a fraction of industrial catalog price. Arduino lovers take note.
Fer cryin' out loud, don't pay a big markup to someone else to visit this site for you.
There were a lot of unusual tools we used back in the day to service PCB's. I have not seen them around anymore.
One of the handiest ones I have ever owned was one of those old PACE solder extractor irons. It had a hollow tip and a little pyrex collector tube inside the handle. When you had a pool of solder melted on the PCB, you could cover up a little vent on the side of the iron with your finger and the vacuum would reroute through the tip and suck all the solder neatly up into the collection tube.
Its original vacuum pump has long since failed, and has been replaced by a GAST carbon-vane pump with lengths of tubing connecting it to the iron. I installed automotive fuel filters in the vacuum line to insure bits of wire and solder don't make it into the pump.
I have been making tips for it using short lengths of 1/8 inch copper refrigeration tubing. This tool will let me neatly remove pin-through-hole parts without damaging either the part or the board. I find the guy that has the problem of a failed obsolete part has always been tickled I could get another part - not once have they been concerned I got it out of something else. They were just tickled to have their machine running again. I have gobs of old circuit boards filled with 7400 series stuff I can raid parts off of to support older machines. And lots of discrete transistors. The output transistors usually took a fatal hit if the wires to the machine got shorted.
About the only part I insist I get new are electrolytic capacitors. I have had bad experience trying to coax further life from old electrolytics. Transistors and IC,s seem to last forever until they are misused.
Yes, I am a pack-rat. That has saved my customers both time and money, and allowed me a life of doing the things I know how to do, instead of sweating it out working for some MBA who I mean nothing to - and also gives me a choice in who I work for.
You gave some excellent advice upthread. I lucked into my position as I had known a neighbor who "took me in" and allowed me to fix his machines on a part time basis and spread the word around I did such stuff. I never worked corporate any more, as I did not have the communications skills ( paperwork, administrative, contracts, legal, salesmanship, etc. ) it takes to deal with "big business", but there was enough small businesses that are running on a shoestring budget that really seem to appreciate the idea they do not have to throw a lot of stuff away just because some tiny little part broke.
The latest project I worked on involved the repair and re-calibration of a reverse-recovery time (trr) analyzer for fast ( nanosecond recovery time ) rectifier diodes. To do this, I worked withr friend who owns a very high speed oscilloscope ( well actually, I was fixing this for HIS customer ), and together we got the device back into shape and ready to send to NIST for official certification. It had some bad solder joints, a filter cap had developed some ESR, and an old carbon resistor had changed value a bit. A little time tracing it out sure beat buying a whole new tester.
For me, the word "hacking" is a term used to denote taking something intended for one purpose and using it for another purpose.
Its the ultimate in recycling..
To do this right, it requires enough intelligence to understand how the thing you have works, what you want it to do, and how to arrange things to get what you have to do what you want it to do,
I keep several old machines around for the very purpose you state. Many businesses have invested a substantial sum of money in machinery and their controller that does a specific thing, over and over, day in and day out.
If it breaks ( which is seldom ), they are in a bad way if a replacement part is nowhere to be found.
The good thing is that a lot of that old stuff is very fixable and interchangeable. I can usually pull that old DOS stuff off one machine, slip it onto another, and take off like nothing ever happened. The only critical part is usually the interface board - which in those days was usually nothing more than a bunch of standard TTL latches and drive chips.
The most important thing is the guy at least has a good readable backup of his software and directory structure. There was an old program called "LapLink" which I could use to quickly transfer a working image of his system to a laptop, so I could burn the image onto modern storage devices such as USB sticks, CF cards, and CDRoms.
From what failure rates I have seen, I have enough stock to keep the family of businesses I support operational for as long as I live. At one time, I feared loss of disk drives would do me in, as I simply cannot get those old floppy, MFM and IDE drives anymore, but lately I have found ways of using CF cards to replace the old drives.
I have noted the old power supplies are now failing. The problem is usually the filter capacitors and the small electrolytic capacitors in the switching transistor's base drive circuit. Although I could retrofit the old case with a new supply, I often just re-cap the old one, and sometimes I have to replace the blown transistors which often occur when the transistor's base drive was compromised with insufficient drive due to the deteriorated capacitor. Of course, the fan nearly always needs to be serviced.
The fly I see in this ointment is there are not many of us old guys left which get into these things on the component level any more. I know of no companies which will support them on this kind of thing - as services as Geek Squad do not do this kind of stuff. If companies that have this old stuff have not cultivated a network of old coots like me which understand this old stuff, they have no alternative but replace the thing when it dies. Its such a shame because the controller system is so simple to maintain compared to the expense of replacing the machinery it controls.
I took your advice and installed NoScript. Been using it for a day now so I could get a feeling for what it does.
All I can say is a big "thank you" for posting your reply.
This is something I should have done long, long ago. I have to plead ignorance.
People like you, taking the time to advise problem-ridden folks like me, showing us the solution to our grievances, is what makes this forum a worthwhile read - and believe me - it was well worth the read yesterday!
Yes, now that you say it, I have noted a lot of CPU activity that never goes away, even if the tab is closed, until FF is exited completely. I am quite sure it is exactly as you say - poorly written scripts that continue to run even after the page which instantiated them is no longer there.
Its a shame that programming techniques as useful as javascript are being relegated to the "pesky software - do not run" bin because overzealous web designers can't seem to use it responsibly.
At the risk of being superfluous, after reading the string of posts again, I note a lot of my problems appear to be correlated to use of the Flash plug-in. Just about every time I get the dreaded "firefox not responding" warning from WIN7, it was during the retrieval of Flash or a PDF.
The memory leak I note is usually apparent after visiting YouTube ( viewing Flash content ).
I am running Firefox 13. I have 3GB RAM in my laptop. 1.5 GB overhead. I can usually chew up my remaining 1.5 GB in about 5 hours of using Firefox. The only way I have found of recovering the RAM is to close every Firefox window. Upon closure of the last window - closing Firefox completely, the entire load of tied-up RAM is returned to the pool. It becomes risky to run with less than 200M free, as lockups become increasingly likely, requiring a restart of WIN7 to clear.
Firefox, like nearly everything else these days, is one piece of technology embedding many other pieces of technology, Malfunction of a part causes the whole assembly to come down. I hate to place blame on a Firefox developer for someone else's problem. Firefox developers get blamed for this kinda like a bridge contractor gets blamed for a downed bridge - when all along the real problem was that the rebar vendor didn't verify the tensile strength of his steel.
Thanks for mentioning the memory leak. That is my primary irritation with Firefox.
I love Firefox's speed, and plug-ins. I am not so impressed on why I get so many random hangups which sometimes require a reboot of WIN7 to clear... but then I consider the machine I am using this on is mostly used for internet browsing and file submission/retrieval. Like bits for power tools, this machine is exposed to all sorts of nasties I would not expose my critical business infrastructures to. There is no telling what kind of code the browser was eating when it crashed.
I would have thought that after this many iterations of Firefox, they would have the memory leak known by now... this is something I would have thought would have been corrected by the second iteration.
With the amount of publically produced plug-ins that Firefox allows us to have, I would have to concede that susceptibility to crashes is just about as inevitable as kids congregating at pubic schools share every bug that goes around. That's the price paid for being open. The price paid for being closed is that I will be allowed to use the product only as the vendor - bribed by special interests - will allow.
When I saw this article, I immediately thought of something I had seen done for years.
Basically, this device is a digital signal processor looking at two antennas and looking at the phase shifts induced by a moving reflective object.
The effect is quite pronounced, and only needs some source of RF to illuminate the area. An OTA TV transmitter transmitting its normal fare does very nicely. If you have ever used a TV with rabbit ears, I am sure you have seen the effect yourself. You move about the room, and the TV misbehaves in all sorts of weird ways depending on where everybody in the room is standing. Now, if they move, the pattern of misbehaviour changes.
Its not that big of a thing for a digital signal processor, connected to two or more antennas, to pick up a reference signal - transmitted by a TV tower miles away, compare the signal each antenna receives against the others, and from that deduce the position of any reflecting object moving in the field. It is looking for phase shifts causing aiding and opposing amplitude in various slices of RF spectrum.
These phase shifts are a result of the distance you are from the antenna, as a function with the speed of light. As you traverse one wavelength, you will complete 360 degrees of phase distortion at that frequency to that antenna.
Just as white light illuminating an area enables us to see objects reflecting/absorbing light, with the lens of our eyes doing the beamforming and focusing, wideband RF illuminating an area enables RF signal processing to beamform and focus, providing images of objects that reflect/absorb RF.
Yes, you could use a router as an RF source, but you can just as easily use a high powered RF transmitter miles away to illuminate your area - completely covertly, no less.
You can process your data to see 3D images of objects in the area... while everyone else is watching the game on the carrier wave.
Every pirated copy is NOT a lost sale. Every pirated copy isn't even a total loss if worked right.
Yes. Do the business folk even read Slashdot forums? Invaluable marketing information is here to be had for free, no less. Is business information, like a game, considered more valuable if there is a hefty price associated with it?
What is it business folk want anyway? Is it raw information from the customer who is openly revealing what he will open his wallet for? Or maybe the business folk want business handshakes, catered luncheons, and buttering up from professional marketeers whose specialty is marketing themselves? Why does business pay through the nose for useless "spun" information from "marketing research" firms?
Computer games are prime targets for "product placement" advertising, as many right here on this forum point out. If this is done right, products can be presented and demonstrated to the audience without them getting up to go pee right when the business makes the pitch.
Marketers have to show some ingenuity in doing this. The paradigm of preaching the same old repetitious monologue is dead. TV and radio advertisers have yet to figure this out. Conventional advertising of yesterday is a royal nuisance by today's standards.
We "nerds" have come a long way in developing technology from the spark gap transmitter and "coherer" receivers to the modern digital RF QAM communications networks of today. Marketers need to innovate too. Their failure to innovate leads to business failures, as the old models go over like trying to sell last weeks newspapers.
These businesses are hung up on an immediate cash return. Don't they see they are getting "paid", big time, via another "currency"? They seem to ignore the fact that people playing video games offer something far more important than money - they are playing the game. The game author has your undivided attention. Do this right, and you have millions of eyeballs seeing the products you feature. Do this wrong, and few will want to mess with your game. You catch flies with something tasty - unbaited fly traps catch few flies - and flytraps fronted with a paywall catch none.
Trite phrase, but its still true: When life throws you a lemon, make lemonade!
I guess what bugs me is something like policing copyrights of publicly available information, especially music is almost impossible to enforce.
Rightsholders are quick to privatize their profits, however they are eager to socialize enforcement costs.
I do not want to get into a shouting match on whether or not it is theft to copy a song. Technically, I think it is, but practically, its like trying to enforce a clean mind when seeing porn.
It stretches honesty when one is hungry and sees his neighbor's apple tree, knowing the trunk of the apple tree is his neighbor's property, yet the fruit is hanging in his yard, even dropping on his lawn, and only some law, passed by some senators lobbied by the tree owner, says he can't pick the apple off his lawn and eat it, or even take a picture of it.
There are some things which are are very difficult to enforce... and tend to function not as a deterrent, but as a starting place for learning to disrespect obedience of law. I see this kind of law as a prime example of this.
Like prohibition, trying to enforce law like this does more harm than good, as it gets people started at a very early age to have no inner respect for law, obeying it not for the common good, but only for fear of punishment if caught. It does not foster respect for law, instead it fosters a sense of accomplishment for finding creative ways of disrespecting the law.
Your experience mirrors mine with DRM'ed stuff. I can not count on it to work. While annoying for a movie or music, it can be a real show-stopper if its critical business software.
You nailed the primary reason I insist on NO DRM on anything I have - especially critical software. So far, I have been fortunate to find open-source, free ( Linear Technology SPICE ) or non-DRM solutions ( Eagle Schematic/PCB ) which I feel confident I can count on to work when I have a job to do.
DRM stuff is fine for big businesses with legal staff and lots of financial inertia on hand to keep the payroll running while they hash out DRM issues.
If the law protected me from DRM malfunctions as well as it protects DRM creators from having their DRM violated, I would feel differently. So far, I consider DRM stuff mostly hopeware - I just hope it works and no-one changes the servers, addresses, routing, or whatever the device needs to "phone home" in the future.
Its like living in a rented house - I never know when the landlord is going to evict me - for any reason at all - and there is nothing I can do about it. I should have known all along not to build my business around things I can not control.
This basically means you can't open up your WiFi to visitors and neighbours without spying on their Internet usage.
I wonder how kindly businessmen trying to use the internet at the airport, hotel, or coffee shop for highly confidential business communications will take to knowingly being snooped.
I have set up several wireless hotspots for local businesses. At no time did I ever even try to snoop or log connections - its way too much trouble, zero profit, and 100% chance of irritating the customer to do so.
This will cause much unrest and confusion to businesses such as Starbucks, hotels, airports, and others offering free anonymous wifi.
Isn't it amazing how much law our voted-for Congress passes to irritate our lives, while at the same time freely allowing international tax havens to operate.
Let someone use the same paradigm of a "data haven" enabling copyright violation instead of tax evasion and all hell breaks loose.
We really need to pay a lot more attention to who we elect to represent us and the power we grant his pen.
Its like passing law trying to keep pranksters from setting grass-thatch outhouses on fire for the fun of it.
Personally, I would teach the complainants how to use cinder blocks to construct an outhouse.
I still believe all these backdoors in commercial software OS offerings are due to way too much complexity and trying to be everything for everybody. I firmly believe a small compact well-understood kernel, such as uCOS/2 could be the core of a GUI front-end for a secure system.
If a limited number of known file formats for multimedia and data exchange are supported, data-only - no embedded executables - then vectors for viral infection are nipped in the bud.
The whole OS should be in ROM, so that once installed, it can't be changed. Flash with write disabled by physical jumper would be great for this. One could physically place the jumper or close a physical switch to allow upgrade of the OS. Yes, it would involve user responsibility. And require standardized interface protocols - which means a lot of IP law has to be changed to hold interface protocols free from legal hostage.
All this "remote administration" stuff gives me the willies, especially when people who can barely figure out how to turn the power onto the machine can pass control of that machine to anyone in the "cloud".
I still wonder if one of these can "keep up with traffic" safely given wildly varying road conditions as you note... or will it drive like your stereotypical old geezer on a Sunday drive?
My fear is that our roads become trails of rolling billboards as it would be quite a lucrative business model. One could always modify a vehicle with a minimal "transport space" on it so it would legally qualify as transporting a good. I live in Southern California and have already seen plenty of these trucks, basically two billboards back to back, with two feet between them and a little door, so they can qualify as not being a billboard-only trailer.
Say, 10 MPG for the truck, 20 MPH average down congested city streets during rush hour ( for maximum viewing exposure ), that is 2 gallons per hour, or about $10 per hour. About the going rate for a sign twirler.
Another thing I see is people programming these to wander the streets aimlessly in lieu of finding and paying for parking.
This will be gamed - big time - by those who can afford the technology and lobbyists to do so.
Are we prepared for a lot more cars on the road?
Some may say "people won't stand for it", but I see the things foisted on us already and I'm prone to say the public will take anything Business wants to do as long as a lobbyist or "free gift" of some trinket is involved.
Some countries set themselves up as "tax havens" to reap the benefits of having international corporations headquarter there. Corporations escape tax, yet they still expect the other countries to to enforce the laws beneficial to them.
Other countries set themselves up as "data havens", and all hell breaks loose.
Slashdot Mirror
TLDR: Long winded post. Nothing new said. Just a long rant over life on the net - Charles Dickens style ( lots of words without saying much ).
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Maybe you have a large powerful system and do not notice when you have a load of baggage scripts running in the background. You might not miss a GB of memory.
You are right, I do open up a lot of windows, and try to leave Firefox running all week, as this laptop "sleeps" nicely, keeping everything just as I left it whenever I close its lid. I will save interesting windows for later use and browse around while I am in a hot spot, then review what I have found later when offline, maybe printing some off, or deleting it after review.
Like an underpowered car on the freeway, its quite noticeable to me when my CPU is slugging down running crap in the background, or something is consuming memory. I have a little desktop widget running that tracks CPU and memory, and this machine does not have much to spare.
Normally, my background CPU usage is around 2%, but this will rise markedly to around 50% as more and more scripts got launched, and never terminated. The slowdown is quite noticeable. I have about 1GB of memory available upon fresh reboot. When this declines to about 200MB free, I increasingly risk system lockup. Closing windows would not return my RAM. I knew it was scripts running as I could see the same patterns in CPU usage in animated pictures in some websites I had visited. Closing those tabs did not stop the undulating patterns of cpu usage, albeit it did cease displaying the image.
I am running on the cheap HP/compaq CQ56 laptop that WalMart sells for $300. It is quite sufficient for me to use as a web browser / file retriever. I got the HP specifically because I did not want to use my critical work machines for risky work on the net. I risk system corruption, viruses, and loss of privacy while on the net. I felt a lot safer knowing I have nothing on this machine that would mess me up if something went wrong, much like I feel much safer using a pusher stick to guide wood through my table saw. If something goes wrong, the stick, not my hand, takes the wrath of the saw.
I felt a lot better knowing the only link between my "web explorer" machine and my highly trusted machines is a sneakernet-based USB stick, whose individual files can be closely scrutinized before and during transfer to their new host, should a transfer be appropriate.
I run four plug-ins... three of them are for capturing streaming media, and No-Script 2.5. I consider the streaming media capture very important, as I am on an AT&T link. AT&T isn't exactly known for living up to advertised claims of speed, albeit their billing and legal departments are quite capable of writing precise contracts requiring full payment while holding themselves harmless for failed performance. Well, they are an old-time company, and asking them to compete in a modern high speed world is kinda like inviting Grandpa to run high-school track. Like grandpa, they have grown fat - lots of highly paid executive types, Not much muscle in there. They seem to use pens and a book of law rather than a solder iron and a book of physics. I have railed this too much, I guess my point is that if AT&T wants the phrase "This is AT&T calling" to be taken seriously, they need to be supporting their engineers better than they support their advertising and legal divisions.
I do my best to work around AT&T's inability to deliver data at video speeds, as well as work around display technology coders trying to appease the content creators by capturing the stream to a file so I can watch it uninterrupted by frequent "buffering" pauses. I often have time to review the captured stream when I do not have a live internet connection. The kind of stuff I watch, I often need to pause or take screen captures of relevant notes. Khan's academy. Arduino tutorials. Atmel's stuff.
The last virus I got was while trying to find
I agree with you about the ads. I hesitated for the longest time putting in ad-blocking technology, as I felt the same issue as the orange vendor mentioned in the parent. If the webmaster supported his page with ads, by golly I wasn't going out of my way to block them.
Then I started paying in ways I had not imagined. I was complaining on Slashdot on the Firefox memory leak topic, about catching viruses and forced reboots because of memory leaks. A generous fellow slashdotter offered his advice to install NoScript. Frustrated at all the problems "thinking outside the box" script programmers were causing for me, I went ahead and installed NoScript. Its made a big difference. It wasn't the ads I was trying to block, rather it was the scripts they were launching doing only God-knows-what. If a webmaster wants me to see an ad, I have no problem at all with that. Running an unknown script with unknown intentions is a horse of a different color. Especially when they misbehave, cause me problems, and force me to reboot to clean up the mess so the system runs again.
It was not the ad which caused me to install blocking technology, rather it was the abuse of the scripting system by unscrupulous scriptwriters.
Back to the orange vendor analogy, people might be highly motivated to steal the oranges rather than pay for them if attempting to pay for one resulted in the vendor spraying them with tar at the cash register. The honest guy who paid finds himself having to go clean himself off, while the thief got off scot-free.
The abuse of payment systems is the main reason I am extremely leery of paying for anything on the web. I have a few trusted sites I will deal with, as I feel I go at substantial risk to reveal bank codes and payment authorizations to a vendor. Knowing the abuse rampant on the net, I am even leery of revealing my name or email address, much less payment credentials.
Following is a link to a major Chinese internet shopping mall run very similar to Amazon in America. I have been buying all sorts of electronic goodies here. Caveat: there is usually NO documentation shipped with the product. Be able to determine from the vendors web page if this is the item you want before you buy. Do not expect any technical support. Once in a while I do get a disappointment, so buy a sample or two first.
Import it yourself!
If you make lots of prototypes, as I do, you will find all sorts of subassemblies of other stuff here you can adapt to what you want. At a fraction of industrial catalog price. Arduino lovers take note.
Fer cryin' out loud, don't pay a big markup to someone else to visit this site for you.
There were a lot of unusual tools we used back in the day to service PCB's. I have not seen them around anymore.
One of the handiest ones I have ever owned was one of those old PACE solder extractor irons. It had a hollow tip and a little pyrex collector tube inside the handle. When you had a pool of solder melted on the PCB, you could cover up a little vent on the side of the iron with your finger and the vacuum would reroute through the tip and suck all the solder neatly up into the collection tube.
Its original vacuum pump has long since failed, and has been replaced by a GAST carbon-vane pump with lengths of tubing connecting it to the iron. I installed automotive fuel filters in the vacuum line to insure bits of wire and solder don't make it into the pump.
I have been making tips for it using short lengths of 1/8 inch copper refrigeration tubing. This tool will let me neatly remove pin-through-hole parts without damaging either the part or the board. I find the guy that has the problem of a failed obsolete part has always been tickled I could get another part - not once have they been concerned I got it out of something else. They were just tickled to have their machine running again. I have gobs of old circuit boards filled with 7400 series stuff I can raid parts off of to support older machines. And lots of discrete transistors. The output transistors usually took a fatal hit if the wires to the machine got shorted.
About the only part I insist I get new are electrolytic capacitors. I have had bad experience trying to coax further life from old electrolytics. Transistors and IC,s seem to last forever until they are misused.
Yes, I am a pack-rat. That has saved my customers both time and money, and allowed me a life of doing the things I know how to do, instead of sweating it out working for some MBA who I mean nothing to - and also gives me a choice in who I work for.
You gave some excellent advice upthread. I lucked into my position as I had known a neighbor who "took me in" and allowed me to fix his machines on a part time basis and spread the word around I did such stuff. I never worked corporate any more, as I did not have the communications skills ( paperwork, administrative, contracts, legal, salesmanship, etc. ) it takes to deal with "big business", but there was enough small businesses that are running on a shoestring budget that really seem to appreciate the idea they do not have to throw a lot of stuff away just because some tiny little part broke.
The latest project I worked on involved the repair and re-calibration of a reverse-recovery time (trr) analyzer for fast ( nanosecond recovery time ) rectifier diodes. To do this, I worked withr friend who owns a very high speed oscilloscope ( well actually, I was fixing this for HIS customer ), and together we got the device back into shape and ready to send to NIST for official certification. It had some bad solder joints, a filter cap had developed some ESR, and an old carbon resistor had changed value a bit. A little time tracing it out sure beat buying a whole new tester.
For me, the word "hacking" is a term used to denote taking something intended for one purpose and using it for another purpose.
Its the ultimate in recycling..
To do this right, it requires enough intelligence to understand how the thing you have works, what you want it to do, and how to arrange things to get what you have to do what you want it to do,
What's not respectable in that?
I keep several old machines around for the very purpose you state. Many businesses have invested a substantial sum of money in machinery and their controller that does a specific thing, over and over, day in and day out.
If it breaks ( which is seldom ), they are in a bad way if a replacement part is nowhere to be found.
The good thing is that a lot of that old stuff is very fixable and interchangeable. I can usually pull that old DOS stuff off one machine, slip it onto another, and take off like nothing ever happened. The only critical part is usually the interface board - which in those days was usually nothing more than a bunch of standard TTL latches and drive chips.
The most important thing is the guy at least has a good readable backup of his software and directory structure. There was an old program called "LapLink" which I could use to quickly transfer a working image of his system to a laptop, so I could burn the image onto modern storage devices such as USB sticks, CF cards, and CDRoms.
From what failure rates I have seen, I have enough stock to keep the family of businesses I support operational for as long as I live. At one time, I feared loss of disk drives would do me in, as I simply cannot get those old floppy, MFM and IDE drives anymore, but lately I have found ways of using CF cards to replace the old drives.
I have noted the old power supplies are now failing. The problem is usually the filter capacitors and the small electrolytic capacitors in the switching transistor's base drive circuit. Although I could retrofit the old case with a new supply, I often just re-cap the old one, and sometimes I have to replace the blown transistors which often occur when the transistor's base drive was compromised with insufficient drive due to the deteriorated capacitor. Of course, the fan nearly always needs to be serviced.
The fly I see in this ointment is there are not many of us old guys left which get into these things on the component level any more. I know of no companies which will support them on this kind of thing - as services as Geek Squad do not do this kind of stuff. If companies that have this old stuff have not cultivated a network of old coots like me which understand this old stuff, they have no alternative but replace the thing when it dies. Its such a shame because the controller system is so simple to maintain compared to the expense of replacing the machinery it controls.
Its called "tragedy of the commons".
I took your advice and installed NoScript. Been using it for a day now so I could get a feeling for what it does.
All I can say is a big "thank you" for posting your reply.
This is something I should have done long, long ago. I have to plead ignorance.
People like you, taking the time to advise problem-ridden folks like me, showing us the solution to our grievances, is what makes this forum a worthwhile read - and believe me - it was well worth the read yesterday!
Again, thanks for the advice.
Thanks. I wish I could mod you up for that.
Yes, now that you say it, I have noted a lot of CPU activity that never goes away, even if the tab is closed, until FF is exited completely. I am quite sure it is exactly as you say - poorly written scripts that continue to run even after the page which instantiated them is no longer there.
Its a shame that programming techniques as useful as javascript are being relegated to the "pesky software - do not run" bin because overzealous web designers can't seem to use it responsibly.
At the risk of being superfluous, after reading the string of posts again, I note a lot of my problems appear to be correlated to use of the Flash plug-in. Just about every time I get the dreaded "firefox not responding" warning from WIN7, it was during the retrieval of Flash or a PDF.
The memory leak I note is usually apparent after visiting YouTube ( viewing Flash content ).
I am running Firefox 13. I have 3GB RAM in my laptop. 1.5 GB overhead. I can usually chew up my remaining 1.5 GB in about 5 hours of using Firefox. The only way I have found of recovering the RAM is to close every Firefox window. Upon closure of the last window - closing Firefox completely, the entire load of tied-up RAM is returned to the pool. It becomes risky to run with less than 200M free, as lockups become increasingly likely, requiring a restart of WIN7 to clear.
Firefox, like nearly everything else these days, is one piece of technology embedding many other pieces of technology, Malfunction of a part causes the whole assembly to come down. I hate to place blame on a Firefox developer for someone else's problem. Firefox developers get blamed for this kinda like a bridge contractor gets blamed for a downed bridge - when all along the real problem was that the rebar vendor didn't verify the tensile strength of his steel.
Thanks for mentioning the memory leak. That is my primary irritation with Firefox.
I love Firefox's speed, and plug-ins. I am not so impressed on why I get so many random hangups which sometimes require a reboot of WIN7 to clear... but then I consider the machine I am using this on is mostly used for internet browsing and file submission/retrieval. Like bits for power tools, this machine is exposed to all sorts of nasties I would not expose my critical business infrastructures to. There is no telling what kind of code the browser was eating when it crashed.
I would have thought that after this many iterations of Firefox, they would have the memory leak known by now... this is something I would have thought would have been corrected by the second iteration.
With the amount of publically produced plug-ins that Firefox allows us to have, I would have to concede that susceptibility to crashes is just about as inevitable as kids congregating at pubic schools share every bug that goes around. That's the price paid for being open. The price paid for being closed is that I will be allowed to use the product only as the vendor - bribed by special interests - will allow.
When I saw this article, I immediately thought of something I had seen done for years.
Basically, this device is a digital signal processor looking at two antennas and looking at the phase shifts induced by a moving reflective object.
The effect is quite pronounced, and only needs some source of RF to illuminate the area. An OTA TV transmitter transmitting its normal fare does very nicely. If you have ever used a TV with rabbit ears, I am sure you have seen the effect yourself. You move about the room, and the TV misbehaves in all sorts of weird ways depending on where everybody in the room is standing. Now, if they move, the pattern of misbehaviour changes.
Its not that big of a thing for a digital signal processor, connected to two or more antennas, to pick up a reference signal - transmitted by a TV tower miles away, compare the signal each antenna receives against the others, and from that deduce the position of any reflecting object moving in the field. It is looking for phase shifts causing aiding and opposing amplitude in various slices of RF spectrum.
These phase shifts are a result of the distance you are from the antenna, as a function with the speed of light. As you traverse one wavelength, you will complete 360 degrees of phase distortion at that frequency to that antenna.
Just as white light illuminating an area enables us to see objects reflecting/absorbing light, with the lens of our eyes doing the beamforming and focusing, wideband RF illuminating an area enables RF signal processing to beamform and focus, providing images of objects that reflect/absorb RF.
Yes, you could use a router as an RF source, but you can just as easily use a high powered RF transmitter miles away to illuminate your area - completely covertly, no less.
You can process your data to see 3D images of objects in the area... while everyone else is watching the game on the carrier wave.
Yes. Do the business folk even read Slashdot forums? Invaluable marketing information is here to be had for free, no less. Is business information, like a game, considered more valuable if there is a hefty price associated with it?
What is it business folk want anyway? Is it raw information from the customer who is openly revealing what he will open his wallet for? Or maybe the business folk want business handshakes, catered luncheons, and buttering up from professional marketeers whose specialty is marketing themselves? Why does business pay through the nose for useless "spun" information from "marketing research" firms?
Computer games are prime targets for "product placement" advertising, as many right here on this forum point out. If this is done right, products can be presented and demonstrated to the audience without them getting up to go pee right when the business makes the pitch.
Marketers have to show some ingenuity in doing this. The paradigm of preaching the same old repetitious monologue is dead. TV and radio advertisers have yet to figure this out. Conventional advertising of yesterday is a royal nuisance by today's standards.
We "nerds" have come a long way in developing technology from the spark gap transmitter and "coherer" receivers to the modern digital RF QAM communications networks of today. Marketers need to innovate too. Their failure to innovate leads to business failures, as the old models go over like trying to sell last weeks newspapers.
These businesses are hung up on an immediate cash return. Don't they see they are getting "paid", big time, via another "currency"? They seem to ignore the fact that people playing video games offer something far more important than money - they are playing the game. The game author has your undivided attention. Do this right, and you have millions of eyeballs seeing the products you feature. Do this wrong, and few will want to mess with your game. You catch flies with something tasty - unbaited fly traps catch few flies - and flytraps fronted with a paywall catch none.
Trite phrase, but its still true: When life throws you a lemon, make lemonade!
I guess what bugs me is something like policing copyrights of publicly available information, especially music is almost impossible to enforce.
Rightsholders are quick to privatize their profits, however they are eager to socialize enforcement costs.
I do not want to get into a shouting match on whether or not it is theft to copy a song. Technically, I think it is, but practically, its like trying to enforce a clean mind when seeing porn.
It stretches honesty when one is hungry and sees his neighbor's apple tree, knowing the trunk of the apple tree is his neighbor's property, yet the fruit is hanging in his yard, even dropping on his lawn, and only some law, passed by some senators lobbied by the tree owner, says he can't pick the apple off his lawn and eat it, or even take a picture of it.
There are some things which are are very difficult to enforce... and tend to function not as a deterrent, but as a starting place for learning to disrespect obedience of law. I see this kind of law as a prime example of this.
Like prohibition, trying to enforce law like this does more harm than good, as it gets people started at a very early age to have no inner respect for law, obeying it not for the common good, but only for fear of punishment if caught. It does not foster respect for law, instead it fosters a sense of accomplishment for finding creative ways of disrespecting the law.
Did they have any prototypes to share with TEPCO last year? The Japanese have a royal mess in Fukushima to deal with.
When "the oppressed" have had enough of this, "the oppressed" will develop their own drones.
Your experience mirrors mine with DRM'ed stuff. I can not count on it to work. While annoying for a movie or music, it can be a real show-stopper if its critical business software.
You nailed the primary reason I insist on NO DRM on anything I have - especially critical software. So far, I have been fortunate to find open-source, free ( Linear Technology SPICE ) or non-DRM solutions ( Eagle Schematic/PCB ) which I feel confident I can count on to work when I have a job to do.
DRM stuff is fine for big businesses with legal staff and lots of financial inertia on hand to keep the payroll running while they hash out DRM issues.
If the law protected me from DRM malfunctions as well as it protects DRM creators from having their DRM violated, I would feel differently. So far, I consider DRM stuff mostly hopeware - I just hope it works and no-one changes the servers, addresses, routing, or whatever the device needs to "phone home" in the future.
Its like living in a rented house - I never know when the landlord is going to evict me - for any reason at all - and there is nothing I can do about it. I should have known all along not to build my business around things I can not control.
I wonder how kindly businessmen trying to use the internet at the airport, hotel, or coffee shop for highly confidential business communications will take to knowingly being snooped.
I have set up several wireless hotspots for local businesses. At no time did I ever even try to snoop or log connections - its way too much trouble, zero profit, and 100% chance of irritating the customer to do so.
It is sure getting dangerous to be a parent these days.
This will cause much unrest and confusion to businesses such as Starbucks, hotels, airports, and others offering free anonymous wifi.
Isn't it amazing how much law our voted-for Congress passes to irritate our lives, while at the same time freely allowing international tax havens to operate.
Let someone use the same paradigm of a "data haven" enabling copyright violation instead of tax evasion and all hell breaks loose.
We really need to pay a lot more attention to who we elect to represent us and the power we grant his pen.
If come Monday, and you have to help a friend regain DNS, Google's public DNS is at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
More here
We sure try to control this awkwardly...
Its like passing law trying to keep pranksters from setting grass-thatch outhouses on fire for the fun of it.
Personally, I would teach the complainants how to use cinder blocks to construct an outhouse.
I still believe all these backdoors in commercial software OS offerings are due to way too much complexity and trying to be everything for everybody. I firmly believe a small compact well-understood kernel, such as uCOS/2 could be the core of a GUI front-end for a secure system.
If a limited number of known file formats for multimedia and data exchange are supported, data-only - no embedded executables - then vectors for viral infection are nipped in the bud.
The whole OS should be in ROM, so that once installed, it can't be changed. Flash with write disabled by physical jumper would be great for this. One could physically place the jumper or close a physical switch to allow upgrade of the OS. Yes, it would involve user responsibility. And require standardized interface protocols - which means a lot of IP law has to be changed to hold interface protocols free from legal hostage.
All this "remote administration" stuff gives me the willies, especially when people who can barely figure out how to turn the power onto the machine can pass control of that machine to anyone in the "cloud".
Interesting take, TWX.
I still wonder if one of these can "keep up with traffic" safely given wildly varying road conditions as you note... or will it drive like your stereotypical old geezer on a Sunday drive?
My fear is that our roads become trails of rolling billboards as it would be quite a lucrative business model. One could always modify a vehicle with a minimal "transport space" on it so it would legally qualify as transporting a good. I live in Southern California and have already seen plenty of these trucks, basically two billboards back to back, with two feet between them and a little door, so they can qualify as not being a billboard-only trailer.
Say, 10 MPG for the truck, 20 MPH average down congested city streets during rush hour ( for maximum viewing exposure ), that is 2 gallons per hour, or about $10 per hour. About the going rate for a sign twirler.
Another thing I see is people programming these to wander the streets aimlessly in lieu of finding and paying for parking.
This will be gamed - big time - by those who can afford the technology and lobbyists to do so.
Are we prepared for a lot more cars on the road?
Some may say "people won't stand for it", but I see the things foisted on us already and I'm prone to say the public will take anything Business wants to do as long as a lobbyist or "free gift" of some trinket is involved.
Some countries set themselves up as "tax havens" to reap the benefits of having international corporations headquarter there. Corporations escape tax, yet they still expect the other countries to to enforce the laws beneficial to them.
Other countries set themselves up as "data havens", and all hell breaks loose.
No wonder we have such a mess.
This thing is Nicolai Tesla's Boundary Drag Pump...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine
Looks like what they patented is using it as a heat exchanger by heating the rotor.