Yeh, I remember the day I bought a new timex "datalink" watch. I had high hopes and dreams of what I could do with that watch, being I could "talk" to it with nothing more than a LED.
I bought three of the things.
I remember well the frustration I encountered when I tried to find out aboutl the protocols needed to talk to the watch. I had all sorts of microcontroller projects I wanted to use it with... at the time, all 6502 based. Microsoft was involved. That's when I began to get a real sour taste in my mind every time Microsoft was mentioned. Microsoft had gotten big, and no longer thought well of those of us trying to find other ways of using their products.
Now, please tell me why keeping the protocols under tight wraps helped Microsoft or Timex? Did they really think I was going to copy their watches? Geez, there is no way I had any intention of getting into the watch manufacturing business! I just wanted to horse around with the darned thing and have fun seeing what I could do with it. To me, that was the fun of having the watch in the first place. If I can't do anything with it, I might as well buy a Porsche as a lawn ornament.
I ended up, five years later. throwing the watches away, two still in the original packaging. Junk. The only benefit I got was a lesson to be very wary of my intentions to see potential in products when the manufacturer is going to do their legal darndest to make sure I can't horse around with it. Its like going to a restaurant and having the chef come to my table and make sure I "enjoy" the meal exactly as he deemed. A shake of salt could bring a lawsuit.
I have seen books on how to program Androids at the bookstore. That, by itself, has biased me strongly towards the purchase of an Android phone when I get ready to buy a "smart" phone. The other phones look too much like a "datalink" to me.
With solar panels and backup DC systems becoming more popular, light sources giving 100 lumens/watt or more of high quality white light will be quite useful for a lot of stuff besides cars.
Thanks, Joshua, for posting that. I was aware of the problem of collisions generating debris, but had no idea how to refer to it.
A concern I have had is if a small country, feeling threatened by a larger country, decides to launch a couple of tons of pea gravel into an elliptical retrograde orbit.
Such a move would make space unusable for everyone.
The solution was so brilliant that it is studied today in every naval war college on the planet. Alexander was the first general to defeat a navy on land...
How do you defeat a navy on land? Well, Alexander carefully gathered data until he completely understood his enemy... in this case, a fleet. This analysis revealed a key weakness: the need for fresh water...Naval commanders were constrained to carry their water with them, which put an upper bound on operating distances...
Alexander's army garrisoned all sources of fresh water (e.g., rivers, wells, and lakes) or poisoned those sources they could not control or did not want to control.
In our case, its not water we need to wage war, its the dominion of space and satellites.
: Can that zero relative speed point be tweaked to be as close to touchdown as possible. Can the asteroid be going fast enough to counteract gravity and have Earth "catch up" to it.
I get the idea that the Chinese are going to use the same trick to decelerate asteroids as we used to accelerate our voyagers out of the solar system.
The trick is gravitational "slingshots", where the kinetic energy is transferred to a much more massive body, such as Mars.
My guess is that the Chinese will bump an asteroid out of the belt between Mars and Jupiter to swing it into Mars' gravitational field so as to transfer the asteroid's kinetic energy to Mars ( making Mars slightly more distant from the sun ) in order to decelerate the asteroid to an energy level consistent with Earth orbit, then snare the asteroid in Earth's gravitational well.
I find the idea exciting.
Not only that, the asteroid has no atmosphere or gravity to get in the way of robotic mining. Huge solar collectors can be fabricated without the physical bracing required to withstand gravity.
Upon removing anything useful, I would imagine they would slingshot it from Earth to send it to a Venusian orbit, just to make sure it was parked safely in the Venusian gravity well, ( or ON Venus ).
All sorts of things are possible in the planetary pinball machine of gravity wells and kinetic energy.
If the Chinese have the technology to snare an asteroid rich in a useful mineral, what authority do we have to tell them not to do what they can do?
I am of the impression that the USA has rested on our laurels of having our forefathers emerge victorious from WWII so long that we have damn near completely forgotten what work is. Our best paid work has nothing to do with actually producing anything, rather its in formation of monopolies and restricting what others will be allowed to do.
Creativity is frowned upon, with management types referring to it as "re-inventing the wheel".
The fate of this planet may well rest with the Chinese, who take the industrial leadership baton from the USA and carry it forward.
I have no idea who Avril Lavigne is or what she sounds like.
Even if I could pirate a copy, the name does not stand out enough to me to make it worth the time to download.
RIAA, you wanted us to not share. I did not. Nor did anyone share with me. I am quite ignorant of the music scene these days.
I still enjoy my old stuff, but its been several years since I have spent a dime on music, cause quite frankly, buying music these days is like me going into some strange ethnic restaurant and being offered various bowls of goo, most of which taste bad.
For Windows machines... What if Microsoft, being they are the author of their code, released an image of a bootable CD that's only function was to verify the integrity of an installed version of Windows on the hard drive?
It would have the capability of restoring mangled kernel files.
For trust's sake, one would have to get it from Microsoft or one of their approved vendors. The disk would be insufficient to pirate a fullblown installation of Windows, but would be able to detect and restore the kernel to safe mode operations. If you have rogue programs in your machine, you may have to go as far as to delete every program you have ever installed to nab the one the virus infected, but at least the boot CDROM would give you an operable platform to launch your investigative and remedial efforts from.
I can hardly hold Microsoft responsible for malware installed by the user, but I do need the tools to let me at least clean up shop to the original as-purchased state should malware make such a mess as to make salvage of my executables impossible. At least I might be able to salvage some of the data files.
As far as I am concerned, Microsoft did good giving us a system restore option. One thing I miss is the option of just restoring system files sans all the "shovelware" various business interests got Microsoft and the computer manufacturers in their preloaded software.
ATM skimming kits are pretty good sellers on the Internet, if you know where to shop,
That, my friend, is scary.
If the ATM programmer offered me the option of morse code, I wonder how easy that would be to crack.
Years ago, I configured my home security system to arm/disarm via the doorbell. I send it morse code to unlock it. Only the first press will actually ring the bell. Subsequent presses issued before timeout are interpreted ty the ATMEL microcontroller as morse code and are not routed to the bell. For all intents and purposes, it looks and works exactly like a doorbell, only it changes color to indicate system state.
If I were given the option to morse my PIN onto the "5" key, I would go for it.
Very few of us know Morse code, so this obviously isn't for everybody. For those of us who do, it could offer an additional layer of security by obscurity. It could be cracked, but it would likely discourage the thief by diverting him to easier prey.
Did you ever spill your box of cards and just cry, knowing you were never going to get them in order again?
However, if there was one good thing about the cards.
If you got pestered by some business about some billing issue ( think book-of-the-month club membership your kid started by sending in a postcard for what it claimed was a free book), you could take their card to the keypunch machine, turn off the print, type a "/*" in the first two columns of the card if you could, just type random crap if you couldn't, and know you were going to wreak havoc on that business when they ran your card on their batch process. They would be so pissed after being forced to find your card that botched up their run that they would gladly not do any more business with you.
With spread spectrum technologies, you can transmit damn near anything covertly.
If the snooper does not have your exact algorithm, not only does he has no way of decoding your transmission, he doesn't even know a transmission took place.
Yes, spread spectrum can be jammed if a wideband noise source is placed near the receiver. The S/N drops so much the receiver will fail to extricate the signal from the ambient noise.
IIRC, the generators at Chevron were not "backup" generators, per se. They were fullbore online generators, run by the utility.
These were not backup generators. Even though that was their alternate function. These were online and ran 24/7.
The problem with backup generators is they sit idle too much and you are likely not to discover a problem until you fire them up.
The continuously running generators, operated and maintained by the utility, had a very low probability of failure, and were sized to easily accommodate the refinery load, so that if a divorce from the grid was inevitable, we could continue.
There are economies of scale from running a continuous generation facility locally that justify the costs of more robust equipment than can be justified by something that sits idly by waiting until you need it.
Proper generator operation is verified 24 hours a day by the circumstance of it being online. I would consider the possibility of a rogue lightning bolt doing it in, along with the whole grid, but having the skill and resources of the utility to bring it back up would help a lot.
Never underestimate the skills of a determined utility crew.
While working at Chevron Oil Pascagoula Mississippi refinery, I noted Chevron had the same problem. Loss of electrical power to the refinery would be catastrophic. No one wants to be around tons of petrochemical products undergoing serious chemical reactions when one loses control.
To mitigate this threat, Chevron worked with Mississippi Power to operate a power generation facility at the refinery.
I would think that anywhere there is a substantial "data processing farm" with critical power requirements, business arrangements should be made with the power generation utilities to run a natgas power plant in the immediate area.
The utilities often run these plants as "topping" plants, as they needed anyway to even out short-time load variances on the line.
But, in the event of a serious loss of grid power, it can be awful handy to have a few megawatts of power coming from down the street.
This application, even just the fear of the possibility of it running, will instill a lot of fear in those using their phone for personal relationship infidelity,
Variants of this application are apt to become very popular amongst those suspecting their relationships are not pure.
I could not agree with you more, Alpha. Ever since the "police state" BSA mafia began back in the 90's, I have been very careful about building any critical structures around stuff I did not feel I had clear title to, much as I would not build a building on land whose title is unclear.
I would not have replied to your post, but I am the *sshole who gave you the "redundant" moderation. My laptop screen was glaring and I lost the cursor, and by the time I found it, I found out I had done this. This post is to kill that moderation.
I keep getting ads through the mail to sign up for their "Universe" service. Ohh the large print looks so enticing!
But when I try to read all the "AT&T print" on the thing, I just get irritated and nauseous. Basically the whole mailer is just a legal document to get my approval to commit myself to paying them money while their fine print absolves them of any responsibility to provide me any service.
I think the only way of resolving this is organization. As customers, we need to adapt to doing business like a business, using the same business techniques already trailblazed by business.
We need to prepare documents using the same kind of fine print where we hold ourselves harmless for failure to remit payment just as they hold themselves harmless for failing to meet advertised bandwidth. Beautiful legal language for doing this is right on the AT&T business forms.
Insist they sign or no MONEY changes hands. Be prepared to NOT do business with them!
I do not mean to be a royal pain in the arse to cheat a business from revenue earned, rather I just propose to do business the way a business does business.
Its been my experience - things like "being a perfectionist" and "exercises poor judgment"- being placed in my employment record by supervisory types made me reconsider how much I want to do what I considered a "complete" job.
I lost my employment at an aerospace corporation over an argument over using proprietary software. I flat did not trust that software because I was ignorant of how it worked, nor did I know any of its file formats. I felt I *had* to stand my ground because the product I was designing for the government would be around for 30 years, I felt the proprietary software would be dead in two years - if that. If I can control my tools and what I write them in, at least I know I can access it anytime in the future I need to. I can still access every project I have ever done - and that's back to 1987. I have lived though numerous machines, but the software - because I used standard file formats and programming languages, lives on. To me, its like the original story referred to as an "exoskeleton". Its like my cyber home, where I know where everything is, what it does, and how to change it if I want.
That's why I have built everything around standard C++ and simple non-DRM versions of what was once popular programs. The programs install easily via the old DOS techniques, and I guess the biggest problem would be in finding out who to send the royalty money to as by now everything I have has been either given away on magazine CDROMS or its abandonware.
I saw on Slashdot a couple of days ago some general lamenting over his IT being in "the dark ages" and nothing talks to anything else. That is exactly what I was trying to keep from happening. The manager who was forcing proprietary software on me kept his job and got a bonus. I ended up working independently from then on. That proprietary software required special hardware and dongles to run, yet it did nothing special. It was just a moneymaker for someone who knew how to work the system.
Well, I *did* stand up against authority. I felt they were delusionally persuaded by slick salesmen who were after the government buck. Guess I've seen too many Steven Segall movies. And probably paid too much credence to those "ethics awareness" courses. Carborundum is useless for executive bedding.
The points you bring up are very valid. If I was working in a group that would stay together for more than a few months it would definitely be the way to go.
The problem I have with making fancy code is that it takes a long time for me to do all the "presentation" stuff and bounds-checking required for decent "releaseable" software.
My employers usually have time deadlines they hold me to and I have to use my judgment on cutting corners so I can still meet deadlines and targets set by management. If I spent a lot of time doing fancy software, I would most likely be delivering poorly thought out science.
If management found out I had time to make fancy code, they just trim the time estimates next time. And they did. I do the best I can in the time allotted to me.
I choose to spend that time doing science, not presentation.
As much as I hate to speak not-so-glowingly about the first high-level language I learned, I must admit once I dabbled in Borland C++, I was hooked big-time.
My programming is definitely the exoskeleton. Not for display. Its for me and me alone.
My latest programs are mostly thermodynamic equation solvers to help me with heat transfer and physical work output estimations. These programs model systems I am working on. They help me estimate heat exchangers, entropy loss, flow rates, pipe sizes, refrigerants (mostly R290 Propane), ice formation rates, heat rejection rates. This kinda stuff is meaningless to anyone else, but its exactly what means anything to me. By the time anyone else understands what I have done, they would have been better off writing their own code as I have done for myself. That way, they know exactly what their computer is doing, and would have a really good sense what's wrong when something peculiar is observed.
When I used to work in Aerospace, I had coded lots of programs that helped me do circuit analysis, SMPS magnetics, and phase-locked-loop design. These were mostly re-iterators which would change one parameter to make some other parameter meet some specified value. I hated running someone else's code because if I didn't know exactly what was going on, I was wide open to some very embarrassing (and usually very expensive) misunderstandings.
Even to this day, my old Borland C++ for DOS, with my assorted libraries which I have coded over the years, is my tool of choice for horsing around with computational techniques. When all is said and done, if I need graphical outputs, I can make bitmaps, and if necessary, animate a series of them as an AVI ( I got the code for that right over at SourceForge as EasyBMP,... Thanks, guys! ).
About the fanciest I get is if I *really* get seriously worked up, I put it up as a web page (in the vein of TCP/IP Lean by Jeremy Bentham) so I can transfer data in our out via the RJ45 jack. I have a drawer of 3-Com 905 boards just in case the machine I'm tinkering on doesn't have one.
I don't enjoy at all spending all that time gussying the code up for GUI presentation. (Neither do I enjoy getting all gussied up myself for formal dinners!). I am at the core a scientist/engineer, not at all a suit-guy. I am firmly of the camp that ranks design quality above packaging, even though I know as well as anyone that its packaging that sells a product.
I am going to date myself terribly, Go ahead and laugh.
To start off, I am 60 years old, so humor me.
Back in the late 80's, I fell in love with a schematic capture program that ran on a PC. Yes, the original PC. I am talking 8088 here. The program is Futurenet DASH-2.
The entire program, libraries, and files would fit on a 360K floppy.
For me, it was a really simple way of quickly sketching up a circuit diagram I could edit until the cows came home, and not leave eraser crumbs all over. When I get to going, I really burn through erasers!
Not only that, when I finally got it right, I had written little programs that would let me send the resulting netlist to SPICE and PADS-PCB would import the netlist directly.
Not only that, I was able to get un-DRM'd versions of both Futurenet and PADS, so that I could run it on anything handy.
Here's the funny part. Like the old V-GER of "Star Trek" fame, these two programs remain-to this very day- the core of all of my design systems! For a long time, I refused to go beyond WIN95, as the old programs, written for DOS, needed FAT32 filesystems.
I now have them running in my WIN7 laptop thanks to DOSBOX.
In the 25 years I have been using these, everything I have ever done fits on ONE cdrom (that's CDROM, not DVD-R mind you), with lots and lots of room left over for things like complete copies of DOS, the WIN95 OS, Borland C++, Mathcad, Spice, and all the other tools I liked.
I can pull up work I did 25 years ago as easy as I pull up work I did an hour ago. Its all there on the backup CDROM. Thanks to some nifty disk searching utilities that came out a decade after I first started messing with computers, I can even FIND the files. Yes, I ended up with thousands of little 20 to 50 kilobyte files zipped into categories.
But then I have never worked on "large" projects like some today. Mine have been pretty specific, like ultralow phase noise PLL, battery supervisor-charging systems (LTC-6802/NetBurner/banks of SMPS), and maximal power point controllers for solar micro-inverters. For me, the old schematic capture technology was good enough. The newer stuff, laced with DRM, proprietary file formats, and my ignorance of its use, provided sufficient barriers to dissuade me to adopt it.
I felt the newer software was like newer cars. Impressive to look at, but finicky and difficult to work with, especially if I had to look to someone else to "support" me. I felt out of my league trying to mess with software that was always insisting on me agreeing to everything it demanded or it wouldn't run. That is OK for entertainment products, but I am hard-pressed to consider finicky "customer lock-in ware" for critical applications. My grandpa survived on the farm because he knew everything about how his stuff worked, I expected to do the same. Let the rich man wave his pens in the air, signing every agreement demanded of him. For me, I needed to know how to fix it myself because I did not have the money it takes to hire a rich man.
From my viewpoint, the old stuff was so simple it allowed me to solve *my* problem without introducing a whole mess of other problems that needed to be addressed before I could address what I needed to do.
I never thought anything of it, I just thought it was work ethic. That's something it seems no-one in this nation values anymore.
Sports and idle party-talk bore the shit out of me. I thoroughly enjoy a good science chat. Yep, that's why I am here on Slashdot, not facebook.
In my younger years, I got to work with some people just like me - and thoroughly enjoyed it. Good engineering work requiring lots of ingenuity and cleverness to build the things we did. Big business bought up the little company, brought in their managers, and goodbye having any fun.
No, I do not "team play" very well, Neither was I a fraternity guy - to me those were just guys who got by by cheating by having access to all the professor's old tests.
No, I did it the hard way. I did the work personally. Got "A"'s too. Today, no one seems to respect that. Rewards go to those who can connive others to do the work.
Damm aspergers. If I had only done the party thing, I could have been one of those guys the MBA hires to lay guys like me off for lacking "social skills".
I'll run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
Say, some large entity ( which can't easily be sued out of existence ) keeps log of all IP addresses, and if some IP addresses are dispensing problems on the web, their activites are noted, kinda like the credit reporting agencies keep track of all of us.
A web application, much like a PING, could be distributed which would query this repository. Hit it with a packet containing the IP being queried, and it would return with either a clean bill-of-health, or a pointer to news of that IP's misbehaviour if that IP has a record of dispensing problems.
Its not a guarantee of safety, but it would give one a heads-up is that IP or subnet has a history of leaving messes on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeh, I remember the day I bought a new timex "datalink" watch. I had high hopes and dreams of what I could do with that watch, being I could "talk" to it with nothing more than a LED.
I bought three of the things.
I remember well the frustration I encountered when I tried to find out aboutl the protocols needed to talk to the watch. I had all sorts of microcontroller projects I wanted to use it with... at the time, all 6502 based. Microsoft was involved. That's when I began to get a real sour taste in my mind every time Microsoft was mentioned. Microsoft had gotten big, and no longer thought well of those of us trying to find other ways of using their products.
Now, please tell me why keeping the protocols under tight wraps helped Microsoft or Timex? Did they really think I was going to copy their watches? Geez, there is no way I had any intention of getting into the watch manufacturing business! I just wanted to horse around with the darned thing and have fun seeing what I could do with it. To me, that was the fun of having the watch in the first place. If I can't do anything with it, I might as well buy a Porsche as a lawn ornament.
I ended up, five years later. throwing the watches away, two still in the original packaging. Junk. The only benefit I got was a lesson to be very wary of my intentions to see potential in products when the manufacturer is going to do their legal darndest to make sure I can't horse around with it. Its like going to a restaurant and having the chef come to my table and make sure I "enjoy" the meal exactly as he deemed. A shake of salt could bring a lawsuit.
I have seen books on how to program Androids at the bookstore. That, by itself, has biased me strongly towards the purchase of an Android phone when I get ready to buy a "smart" phone. The other phones look too much like a "datalink" to me.
With solar panels and backup DC systems becoming more popular, light sources giving 100 lumens/watt or more of high quality white light will be quite useful for a lot of stuff besides cars.
A concern I have had is if a small country, feeling threatened by a larger country, decides to launch a couple of tons of pea gravel into an elliptical retrograde orbit.
Such a move would make space unusable for everyone.
Consider these snippets from Applying the wisdom of Alexander the Great to Business Intelligence.
In our case, its not water we need to wage war, its the dominion of space and satellites.
I get the idea that the Chinese are going to use the same trick to decelerate asteroids as we used to accelerate our voyagers out of the solar system.
The trick is gravitational "slingshots", where the kinetic energy is transferred to a much more massive body, such as Mars.
My guess is that the Chinese will bump an asteroid out of the belt between Mars and Jupiter to swing it into Mars' gravitational field so as to transfer the asteroid's kinetic energy to Mars ( making Mars slightly more distant from the sun ) in order to decelerate the asteroid to an energy level consistent with Earth orbit, then snare the asteroid in Earth's gravitational well.
I find the idea exciting.
Not only that, the asteroid has no atmosphere or gravity to get in the way of robotic mining. Huge solar collectors can be fabricated without the physical bracing required to withstand gravity.
Upon removing anything useful, I would imagine they would slingshot it from Earth to send it to a Venusian orbit, just to make sure it was parked safely in the Venusian gravity well, ( or ON Venus ).
All sorts of things are possible in the planetary pinball machine of gravity wells and kinetic energy.
If the Chinese have the technology to snare an asteroid rich in a useful mineral, what authority do we have to tell them not to do what they can do?
I am of the impression that the USA has rested on our laurels of having our forefathers emerge victorious from WWII so long that we have damn near completely forgotten what work is. Our best paid work has nothing to do with actually producing anything, rather its in formation of monopolies and restricting what others will be allowed to do.
Creativity is frowned upon, with management types referring to it as "re-inventing the wheel".
The fate of this planet may well rest with the Chinese, who take the industrial leadership baton from the USA and carry it forward.
I get the idea China could crash the US economy with nothing more than a pen.
That's the bad thing about being a debtor nation or a renter.
RIAA did their job well.
I have no idea who Avril Lavigne is or what she sounds like.
Even if I could pirate a copy, the name does not stand out enough to me to make it worth the time to download.
RIAA, you wanted us to not share. I did not. Nor did anyone share with me. I am quite ignorant of the music scene these days.
I still enjoy my old stuff, but its been several years since I have spent a dime on music, cause quite frankly, buying music these days is like me going into some strange ethnic restaurant and being offered various bowls of goo, most of which taste bad.
Let me run this up the flagpole...
For Windows machines... What if Microsoft, being they are the author of their code, released an image of a bootable CD that's only function was to verify the integrity of an installed version of Windows on the hard drive?
It would have the capability of restoring mangled kernel files.
For trust's sake, one would have to get it from Microsoft or one of their approved vendors. The disk would be insufficient to pirate a fullblown installation of Windows, but would be able to detect and restore the kernel to safe mode operations. If you have rogue programs in your machine, you may have to go as far as to delete every program you have ever installed to nab the one the virus infected, but at least the boot CDROM would give you an operable platform to launch your investigative and remedial efforts from.
I can hardly hold Microsoft responsible for malware installed by the user, but I do need the tools to let me at least clean up shop to the original as-purchased state should malware make such a mess as to make salvage of my executables impossible. At least I might be able to salvage some of the data files.
As far as I am concerned, Microsoft did good giving us a system restore option. One thing I miss is the option of just restoring system files sans all the "shovelware" various business interests got Microsoft and the computer manufacturers in their preloaded software.
That, my friend, is scary.
If the ATM programmer offered me the option of morse code, I wonder how easy that would be to crack.
Years ago, I configured my home security system to arm/disarm via the doorbell. I send it morse code to unlock it. Only the first press will actually ring the bell. Subsequent presses issued before timeout are interpreted ty the ATMEL microcontroller as morse code and are not routed to the bell. For all intents and purposes, it looks and works exactly like a doorbell, only it changes color to indicate system state.
If I were given the option to morse my PIN onto the "5" key, I would go for it.
Very few of us know Morse code, so this obviously isn't for everybody. For those of us who do, it could offer an additional layer of security by obscurity. It could be cracked, but it would likely discourage the thief by diverting him to easier prey.
Did you ever spill your box of cards and just cry, knowing you were never going to get them in order again?
However, if there was one good thing about the cards.
If you got pestered by some business about some billing issue ( think book-of-the-month club membership your kid started by sending in a postcard for what it claimed was a free book), you could take their card to the keypunch machine, turn off the print, type a "/*" in the first two columns of the card if you could, just type random crap if you couldn't, and know you were going to wreak havoc on that business when they ran your card on their batch process. They would be so pissed after being forced to find your card that botched up their run that they would gladly not do any more business with you.
What do we do when the "bad guys" game the system by listening to our police so they can vamoose before the police arrive?
Try googling "spread spectrum" communications.
With spread spectrum technologies, you can transmit damn near anything covertly.
If the snooper does not have your exact algorithm, not only does he has no way of decoding your transmission, he doesn't even know a transmission took place.
Yes, spread spectrum can be jammed if a wideband noise source is placed near the receiver. The S/N drops so much the receiver will fail to extricate the signal from the ambient noise.
A spark gap is a wideband noise generator.
IIRC, the generators at Chevron were not "backup" generators, per se. They were fullbore online generators, run by the utility.
These were not backup generators. Even though that was their alternate function. These were online and ran 24/7.
The problem with backup generators is they sit idle too much and you are likely not to discover a problem until you fire them up.
The continuously running generators, operated and maintained by the utility, had a very low probability of failure, and were sized to easily accommodate the refinery load, so that if a divorce from the grid was inevitable, we could continue.
There are economies of scale from running a continuous generation facility locally that justify the costs of more robust equipment than can be justified by something that sits idly by waiting until you need it.
Proper generator operation is verified 24 hours a day by the circumstance of it being online. I would consider the possibility of a rogue lightning bolt doing it in, along with the whole grid, but having the skill and resources of the utility to bring it back up would help a lot.
Never underestimate the skills of a determined utility crew.
While working at Chevron Oil Pascagoula Mississippi refinery, I noted Chevron had the same problem. Loss of electrical power to the refinery would be catastrophic. No one wants to be around tons of petrochemical products undergoing serious chemical reactions when one loses control.
To mitigate this threat, Chevron worked with Mississippi Power to operate a power generation facility at the refinery.
I would think that anywhere there is a substantial "data processing farm" with critical power requirements, business arrangements should be made with the power generation utilities to run a natgas power plant in the immediate area.
The utilities often run these plants as "topping" plants, as they needed anyway to even out short-time load variances on the line.
But, in the event of a serious loss of grid power, it can be awful handy to have a few megawatts of power coming from down the street.
The Oil Drum
That was the first thing that popped into my mind too when I saw this topic, but AC beat me to it.
I don't have any mod points to bump him high enough to get past other people's filters. He has an excellent link.
Maybe someone else can bump him up?
The Oil Drum is a site which attracts geologists and petroleum engineers much like Slashdot attracts IT professionals. It runs on Drupal software.
You will find a lot of energy related concerns addressed in the forums there.
This application, even just the fear of the possibility of it running, will instill a lot of fear in those using their phone for personal relationship infidelity,
Variants of this application are apt to become very popular amongst those suspecting their relationships are not pure.
I could not agree with you more, Alpha. Ever since the "police state" BSA mafia began back in the 90's, I have been very careful about building any critical structures around stuff I did not feel I had clear title to, much as I would not build a building on land whose title is unclear.
I would not have replied to your post, but I am the *sshole who gave you the "redundant" moderation. My laptop screen was glaring and I lost the cursor, and by the time I found it, I found out I had done this. This post is to kill that moderation.
I keep getting ads through the mail to sign up for their "Universe" service. Ohh the large print looks so enticing!
But when I try to read all the "AT&T print" on the thing, I just get irritated and nauseous. Basically the whole mailer is just a legal document to get my approval to commit myself to paying them money while their fine print absolves them of any responsibility to provide me any service.
I think the only way of resolving this is organization. As customers, we need to adapt to doing business like a business, using the same business techniques already trailblazed by business.
We need to prepare documents using the same kind of fine print where we hold ourselves harmless for failure to remit payment just as they hold themselves harmless for failing to meet advertised bandwidth. Beautiful legal language for doing this is right on the AT&T business forms.
Insist they sign or no MONEY changes hands. Be prepared to NOT do business with them!
I do not mean to be a royal pain in the arse to cheat a business from revenue earned, rather I just propose to do business the way a business does business.
You give excellent points, John.
Its been my experience - things like "being a perfectionist" and "exercises poor judgment"- being placed in my employment record by supervisory types made me reconsider how much I want to do what I considered a "complete" job.
I lost my employment at an aerospace corporation over an argument over using proprietary software. I flat did not trust that software because I was ignorant of how it worked, nor did I know any of its file formats. I felt I *had* to stand my ground because the product I was designing for the government would be around for 30 years, I felt the proprietary software would be dead in two years - if that. If I can control my tools and what I write them in, at least I know I can access it anytime in the future I need to. I can still access every project I have ever done - and that's back to 1987. I have lived though numerous machines, but the software - because I used standard file formats and programming languages, lives on. To me, its like the original story referred to as an "exoskeleton". Its like my cyber home, where I know where everything is, what it does, and how to change it if I want.
That's why I have built everything around standard C++ and simple non-DRM versions of what was once popular programs. The programs install easily via the old DOS techniques, and I guess the biggest problem would be in finding out who to send the royalty money to as by now everything I have has been either given away on magazine CDROMS or its abandonware.
I saw on Slashdot a couple of days ago some general lamenting over his IT being in "the dark ages" and nothing talks to anything else. That is exactly what I was trying to keep from happening. The manager who was forcing proprietary software on me kept his job and got a bonus. I ended up working independently from then on. That proprietary software required special hardware and dongles to run, yet it did nothing special. It was just a moneymaker for someone who knew how to work the system.
Well, I *did* stand up against authority. I felt they were delusionally persuaded by slick salesmen who were after the government buck. Guess I've seen too many Steven Segall movies. And probably paid too much credence to those "ethics awareness" courses. Carborundum is useless for executive bedding.
The points you bring up are very valid. If I was working in a group that would stay together for more than a few months it would definitely be the way to go.
The problem I have with making fancy code is that it takes a long time for me to do all the "presentation" stuff and bounds-checking required for decent "releaseable" software.
My employers usually have time deadlines they hold me to and I have to use my judgment on cutting corners so I can still meet deadlines and targets set by management. If I spent a lot of time doing fancy software, I would most likely be delivering poorly thought out science.
If management found out I had time to make fancy code, they just trim the time estimates next time. And they did. I do the best I can in the time allotted to me.
I choose to spend that time doing science, not presentation.
As much as I hate to speak not-so-glowingly about the first high-level language I learned, I must admit once I dabbled in Borland C++, I was hooked big-time.
My programming is definitely the exoskeleton. Not for display. Its for me and me alone.
My latest programs are mostly thermodynamic equation solvers to help me with heat transfer and physical work output estimations. These programs model systems I am working on. They help me estimate heat exchangers, entropy loss, flow rates, pipe sizes, refrigerants (mostly R290 Propane), ice formation rates, heat rejection rates. This kinda stuff is meaningless to anyone else, but its exactly what means anything to me. By the time anyone else understands what I have done, they would have been better off writing their own code as I have done for myself. That way, they know exactly what their computer is doing, and would have a really good sense what's wrong when something peculiar is observed.
When I used to work in Aerospace, I had coded lots of programs that helped me do circuit analysis, SMPS magnetics, and phase-locked-loop design. These were mostly re-iterators which would change one parameter to make some other parameter meet some specified value. I hated running someone else's code because if I didn't know exactly what was going on, I was wide open to some very embarrassing (and usually very expensive) misunderstandings.
Even to this day, my old Borland C++ for DOS, with my assorted libraries which I have coded over the years, is my tool of choice for horsing around with computational techniques. When all is said and done, if I need graphical outputs, I can make bitmaps, and if necessary, animate a series of them as an AVI ( I got the code for that right over at SourceForge as EasyBMP,... Thanks, guys! ).
About the fanciest I get is if I *really* get seriously worked up, I put it up as a web page (in the vein of TCP/IP Lean by Jeremy Bentham) so I can transfer data in our out via the RJ45 jack. I have a drawer of 3-Com 905 boards just in case the machine I'm tinkering on doesn't have one.
I don't enjoy at all spending all that time gussying the code up for GUI presentation. (Neither do I enjoy getting all gussied up myself for formal dinners!). I am at the core a scientist/engineer, not at all a suit-guy. I am firmly of the camp that ranks design quality above packaging, even though I know as well as anyone that its packaging that sells a product.
DRM has been, far and away, my biggest reason not to embrace new technologies.
When facing an uncertain future, why would I want finicky products which may not perform their intended function in my life?
I have enough to deal with already. I have no intention of bringing yet more nuisances into my life for someone else's benefit.
I am going to date myself terribly, Go ahead and laugh.
To start off, I am 60 years old, so humor me.
Back in the late 80's, I fell in love with a schematic capture program that ran on a PC. Yes, the original PC. I am talking 8088 here. The program is Futurenet DASH-2.
The entire program, libraries, and files would fit on a 360K floppy.
For me, it was a really simple way of quickly sketching up a circuit diagram I could edit until the cows came home, and not leave eraser crumbs all over. When I get to going, I really burn through erasers!
Not only that, when I finally got it right, I had written little programs that would let me send the resulting netlist to SPICE and PADS-PCB would import the netlist directly.
Not only that, I was able to get un-DRM'd versions of both Futurenet and PADS, so that I could run it on anything handy.
Here's the funny part. Like the old V-GER of "Star Trek" fame, these two programs remain-to this very day- the core of all of my design systems! For a long time, I refused to go beyond WIN95, as the old programs, written for DOS, needed FAT32 filesystems.
I now have them running in my WIN7 laptop thanks to DOSBOX.
In the 25 years I have been using these, everything I have ever done fits on ONE cdrom (that's CDROM, not DVD-R mind you), with lots and lots of room left over for things like complete copies of DOS, the WIN95 OS, Borland C++, Mathcad, Spice, and all the other tools I liked.
I can pull up work I did 25 years ago as easy as I pull up work I did an hour ago. Its all there on the backup CDROM. Thanks to some nifty disk searching utilities that came out a decade after I first started messing with computers, I can even FIND the files. Yes, I ended up with thousands of little 20 to 50 kilobyte files zipped into categories.
But then I have never worked on "large" projects like some today. Mine have been pretty specific, like ultralow phase noise PLL, battery supervisor-charging systems (LTC-6802/NetBurner/banks of SMPS), and maximal power point controllers for solar micro-inverters. For me, the old schematic capture technology was good enough. The newer stuff, laced with DRM, proprietary file formats, and my ignorance of its use, provided sufficient barriers to dissuade me to adopt it.
I felt the newer software was like newer cars. Impressive to look at, but finicky and difficult to work with, especially if I had to look to someone else to "support" me. I felt out of my league trying to mess with software that was always insisting on me agreeing to everything it demanded or it wouldn't run. That is OK for entertainment products, but I am hard-pressed to consider finicky "customer lock-in ware" for critical applications. My grandpa survived on the farm because he knew everything about how his stuff worked, I expected to do the same. Let the rich man wave his pens in the air, signing every agreement demanded of him. For me, I needed to know how to fix it myself because I did not have the money it takes to hire a rich man.
From my viewpoint, the old stuff was so simple it allowed me to solve *my* problem without introducing a whole mess of other problems that needed to be addressed before I could address what I needed to do.
I have been diagnosed with this, too.
I never thought anything of it, I just thought it was work ethic. That's something it seems no-one in this nation values anymore.
Sports and idle party-talk bore the shit out of me. I thoroughly enjoy a good science chat. Yep, that's why I am here on Slashdot, not facebook.
In my younger years, I got to work with some people just like me - and thoroughly enjoyed it. Good engineering work requiring lots of ingenuity and cleverness to build the things we did. Big business bought up the little company, brought in their managers, and goodbye having any fun.
No, I do not "team play" very well, Neither was I a fraternity guy - to me those were just guys who got by by cheating by having access to all the professor's old tests.
No, I did it the hard way. I did the work personally. Got "A"'s too. Today, no one seems to respect that. Rewards go to those who can connive others to do the work.
Damm aspergers. If I had only done the party thing, I could have been one of those guys the MBA hires to lay guys like me off for lacking "social skills".
Say, some large entity ( which can't easily be sued out of existence ) keeps log of all IP addresses, and if some IP addresses are dispensing problems on the web, their activites are noted, kinda like the credit reporting agencies keep track of all of us.
A web application, much like a PING, could be distributed which would query this repository. Hit it with a packet containing the IP being queried, and it would return with either a clean bill-of-health, or a pointer to news of that IP's misbehaviour if that IP has a record of dispensing problems.
Its not a guarantee of safety, but it would give one a heads-up is that IP or subnet has a history of leaving messes on the net.