Penguin might have retitled the book, but until those 2 f-ugly bitches stop billing Katie T.'s "online safety, look, I was stupid and this could happen to you too" crap as "Katie.com", this mess isn't over yet.
It appears that Tarbox did indeed get a clue and register her own domain:
Organization:
Katie Tarbox, Inc.
Katie Tarbox
745 Carter Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
US
Phone: 203-966-1828
Email: ktarbox261@aol.com
Created on..............: Thu, Aug 05, 2004
Expires on..............: Sat, Aug 05, 2006
Record last updated on..: Thu, Aug 05, 2004
Administrative Contact:
Katie Tarbox, Inc.
Katie Tarbox
745 Carter Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
US
Phone: 203-966-1828
Email: ktarbox261@aol.com
In the meantime, if someone wants to convince the lawyer that she should back down:
Aftab, Parry
(PA286)
parry.aftab@COUNSEL.COM
E. 80 Rt. 4, The Atrium, Suite 410
Paramus, NJ 07652
US
Phone: (201) 845-0100
Fax: 999 999 9999
The lawyer's cell # is: 201-463-8663. It appears to be a Bell Atlantic Nylex Mobile, registered in New Jersey. Anyone care to post her SMS email address and send her a few messages to convince her to drop the campaign?:-)
And, yeah, never understimate the power of geeks in large numbers. Esp bored geeks with nothing to do on Friday nights:-)
Step 1: Create a mod for a popular first person shooter game involving a list of prolific spammer and relistic weapons.
Step 2: Distribute said game to those "evil teenagers that plays too much video games and get influenced and shoot up their classmates".
Step 3: Wait for problem to take care of itself.
That way loosers who shoot their classmates and random people are *educated* to shoot the actual varmints of this society instead of random innocent people. And for the rest of us who can learn to differentiate a game from real life, it does sound like a fun game...:-)
What a crock of racist bullshit. Do you bash people that drive a Honda or a Toyota too because it's Jap?
MO drives are technically superior for data archival. I've owned one for years - the damn drive died before I had a single piece of media failure - and it died because my asshole of a landlady tossed it into the trash for me then dumped charcoal dust over it. I've had the drive since 1997, it was at one time a nightly incremental backup system for me. The drive was a Fujitsu Dynamo 640.
Every Fujitsu drive out there was fully backward compartible. My drive could read and write the very first 128Mb MO Disc. Their 2.3Gb unit can read and write every MO standard there ever was. Try that with any other optical media. It required no special drivers under every OS that I've played with (Windows 9X, NT and 2K, Linux, my friend's BeOS box), and it's just treated as a drive - no need to "rewrite" the disc like a CDRW, no need for specialized write software like a DVD-R/RW, CD-R, RW, etc. A simple cron entry that tar and cp/home was all it took for making nightly backups.
I have read somewhere that MO is the media of choice for the Japanese government. I am not surprised. Maybe they like their data to last longer. Yeah, back then I was poor, but I sprang for an Adaptec SCSI card and plugged my MO drive into it. To me that investment was a defining point going from average joe user to being somewhat of a sysadmin where I actually cared about the longetivity of my data. It was the difference between "fun toys" and "professional gear", at least in my mind.
Why did it never catch on in the US? Lack of marketing and media cost, would be my guess. Minidisc didn't catch on because the RIAA lobbied (and boy did they lobby hard) for the longest time and when they finally suceeded they got the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992, which for a while made big companies nervous about releasing a format that can be used for BOTH music recording *and* computer data storage. Sony intentionally never built a MiniDisc computer drive because of this, which allowed Iomega and their crappy ZIP drives to take over. Think about that one - Minidiscs held 128Mbs - this was back in 1992 or so, and in Asian countries, the discs were US$2.00 each. They are reliable as all hell, no "Clicks of death". Had a computer version of that been released, it would have blown Iomega away. Even when Minidiscs were finally released in the US, the costs (back in the 90s) were highway robbery! The same is true with MO discs today. Those discs don't cost more than US$7.50 a pop in Hong Kong. For some reason, maybe because of its rarity and because American distributors can get away with charging more, they do just that.
Reminds me of the time in HS once upon a time when we'd go to the local "Lamp Post Pizza" where they had a pinball machine. Bring along a hard drive magnet, and play as long as you want on a quarter. The people who worked there were cool and as long as we ordered food, they thought it was a pretty cool "hack".
Anyone else knows any cool pinball tricks?
-=- Terence
(For those who can't see how this trick works: The pinball is a steel ball bearing. So, plop the magnet down at the bottom near the pit and when you loose, you just drag the ball back up and keep playing:-D. HD magnets are nice and strong and does the trick quite nicely.)
Look in your local phone book, under "Liquid Air". It is sometimes used in industry for assembly of mechanical components (it's called a cold press, you cool down one part to shrink it, press it into it's mate, at room temperature you get a strong interference fit without having to worry about heating the part with the hole up and having it warp). My physics teacher and I use to buy this for science demo all the time; under $10.00 (1995 dollars) to fill up a 1 L flask
Liquid Nitrogen in research labs are handled in dewars, basically stainless steel 1gal + vacuum flask. Small flasks are inefficient to fill because LN2 has a very low heat content, so it takes a LOT of LN2 to cool the flask down, and a tremenendous amount of LN2 gets boiled off in the progress (in fact, about 4 times the volume of LN2 is required to cool our thermos bottle down before we could fill it. This efficiency goes up with the volume of the tank). Since normal people don't have ready access to a dewar, the recommended alternative container of choice is a Stainless steel thermos. Stay away from glass thermos (they will shatter) or even plastic ones (they crack). I had a plastic thermos explode on me once; LN2 had seeped in through the cracked seams and when it boiled off, shot the inner bulb of the thermos accross the lab like a mortar shell.
All of the business world revolves around ideas, people generally build businesses around one or two of them. There are companies with good ideas that fail, there are companies with bad ideas that manage to survive. You have a fairly good success record with startups (MP3.com, now Lindows). What advice would you give to someone trying to start-up a company, in this post 9-11 economy? What, in your opinion, makes the difference between a sucessful and an unsucessful company? Any stories about investors that you can share? What do you think the biggest hurdle to starting a company is? Thanks!
PC 104 is basically a form factor, just like ATX, mini-ATX, mini-ITX, etc. It is one of the smallest form factor out there, largely used in industrial automation setup.
The one characteristic that makes PC104 interesting is the "pass through" bus connector. Consisting of 104 pins (hence it's name), you stack modules of extension card on the base board, and build vertically your components. See link:
They tend to be pretty low power consumption, and there are a mind boggling array of PC104 modules out there, from radio modems to GPS receivers to servo controllers and 3 axis accelerometers. For hobby use, I wouldn't really go with them, since they are more expensive than the much cheaper mini-itx boards (which is what I will be using for my next car computer).
Man, reading through the projects - they outfitted a 1997 Corvette with a "fly by wire" steering. My god, I wish my research lab has the amount of cash handy to buy a corvette for a ressearch project...
Well, it really depends on what sort of precision you need. You're really comparing a cadallac to a geo metro here!:-).
For those wondering, a milling machine is like a drill press, only the part can be positioned accurately relative to the spinning metal cutter, and the cutter and head is designed to take side loads as well as axle load encountered in drilling. In all machine shops, calibration marks are in increments of 0.001", or 0.01mm. A human hair is usually 0.003", and most skilled operators can hold 0.001" precision quite nicely. This gives you an idea of what sort of cutting operations we can do.
The cool thing about CNC is that under computer control, 3, 4 or even 5 axis can rotate simultaneously. It is like drawing vector graphics, and vector shapes, except in 3D. Newer CNC mills can actually be programmed using NURBS. They really are amazing robots to watch, they can rapidly accelerate to over 200 inch per minute tranverse speed, and come to a stop within 0.0005" of their target.
A bridgeport machine is about the best manual milling machine you can buy. Everything, as the previous poster pointed out, is a piece of art - down to the table (the surface the work is held on), which is hand-engraved by some old 80 year old guy with a chisel, then finished to within 0.0002" flatness. That's right, every point on a 12 x 60" table is within 0.0002" in vertical height.
On the other hand, home brew variety uses regular screws for motion control, cut corners everywhere, etc. You really get what you pay for. My team used extensively Sherline milling machines, and recently acquired a TAIG. Both are very nice, hobby priced CNC mills, both can be had for under $1000.00. They have all the features of the big industrial machines, and we've made parts from aluminum, delrin, steel, and even titanium on them. As long as you're not in a hurry to get parts done, they work quite well.
BTW - if you're looking at getting one of these machines for PCB milling - my advice is to invest in a black light and a UV etch resist kit. Even with our most well maintained machine, and a 10,000 rpm spindle upgrade, production of anything that allows surface mount components is still a bit of a nightmare. The fibreglass (FR4) dust is very very abrasive and will do BAD THINGS to your lungs. Also, keep in mind that most of these hobby machines cannot match a commercial unit for spindle speed - and a higher spindle speed is required for small diameter cutting bits to adequately cut detailed features. (Commercial engravers run at 300,000 rpm - yup, 0.3 million revs per minute, on air bearings). Food for thought.
BTW, I am the shopmaster (read, machine sys-admin;-) ) for a high school robotics team [www.swatrobotics.org] . We have 6 weeks to build a robot, and I am in charge of production to make sure the crew get their training, their tools, and their machine time to get things made. Pretty cool project:-).
I guess what it all comes down to, is people using common sense.
Personally, I ride a bike (nice one with disc brakes), and I am a very good rollerblader. I do all my equipment maintanence myself, my bike will stop pretty fast even in downright shitty wet weather.
Now, majority of bike riding I do I do on the road. I stop for stop signs and red lights. However, there are places where riding on the street just isn't possible. In those cases, I hop on to the sidewalk and I go slow. Slow as in 10 miles per hour. My reasoning is that I am about the same speed as a guy jogging, and I am way more alert than your average pedesterian walking and talking on a cell phone.
I've been yelled at by the police for rollerblading on the street. By their logic, rollerbladers are pedestrians and do not belong on the street. I think they are on crack - because I hit 20 mph EASILY on my rollerblades - and when I am faster than a jogger, I jump into the streets. I then also obey all traffic rules.
Unfortunately, there are always idiots who blast down the sidewalk at 30 mph on a bike, or really, really slow bikers that can barely make 5 mph in the middle of the street. Go figure.
Yet another cultural misconception. Southern China places a big emphasis on rice grains, but the climate is way too dry in the north to grow it as a grain. Wheat, as a result is the predominant grain. Chinese cusine is divided into 4 big regions, corresponding to the 4 directions on the compass, each with its own unique charactersitics. Historically a lot of dried (and reconstituted) ingredients are used in cooking - stuff like mushrooms, cloud ears, bamboo shoots, shark fins, etc, so it'd be REALLY intresting to see what they come up with for "Space food". Hopefully it'll beat freeze-dried pizza at the Exploratorium:-)
I know the grief. I was able to finance the purchase of my laptop because I shipped my desktop (P200MMX back then) and put $2000.00 insurance on it. When my box arrived the hard drives tumbled out of my case and I was like "Oh, my God..."
My housemate recently shipped a downhilling mountain bike from Wyoming, with insurance on it. When the bike arrived they had bashed in what everyone thought were bomb-proof front shocks and bent the rotors on the disc brakes. The typical insurance run-around that they use in *both* cases here are:
- "Oh, it's not our fault, you packaged it incorrectly".
- "Oh, the item was damaged before we shipped it"
- "We'll conduct our own evaluations and keep you informed"
So, this is what you should do, and in my experience works quite well:
* Keep all receipts of the packaging.
* Have it shipped from an authorized shipping outlet, *and* have them sign a letter saying that they packaged it.
* Photo document the packaging if possible.
And when they give you shit about it being not packaged properly, show them but do not hand over the documentation. And if they still give you crap, this is what my housemate did:
* Have a lawyer, lawyer friend, etc, write a letter to UPS, threatening to supeona the records that they have on your package, and the insurance claim paperwork and the inspection results.
Boy did they pay up quick after that. They weren't going to even take a second look at his bike, the lawyer did his thing, and now he's at least getting his disc rotors replaced.
90 year old men with heart problems can die from heart attack after an overdose of viagra...
(Come on, use some common sense, people - just because a chemical can push your body to do mor, doens't mean it can handle it. It's like setting that overclock setting on your motherboard without adequate cooling...)
There's absolutely NOTHING to push against in space (last I check, there's no air to push up against there).
This is not an application of Newton's 3rd law (used in rocketry). In a rocket, the mass of the propellant reaction products excaping the nozzle generates the reaction needed to push the rocket forward, here, there's no mass ejected, only a structure "wriggling".
Conceivability, you could laminate a sheet of piezoelectric element, and generate power from that, and feed the power to an ion engine. But ion engines still require fuel (a tank of xenon or a gas with a hefty mass, see above for reason why), so it still wouldn't be an unlimited source of power, as far as propulsion is concerned...
-=- SiKnight
Typical anti-chinese bullshit
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 2
It's very obvious that you havn't really studied the cultural history of the Chinese.
The Chinese people had never been agressive towards their neighboors. Yes, they are proud people, they have every right to be - their civilization has a long and rich cultural history. But the Great War of China wasn't exactly built for invading other countries, is it?
The Chinese had never been domineering. They've never sent their troops to intervene in other country's political affairs - unlike the Americans who routinely send their carrier fleets everywhere. In fact, if you look at how often the US had been invaded (never), and when the last time the Chinese had been invaded (Japanese invasion during WW II, Allied invasion (including the US during the end of the Ching dynasty), all the "oh, fear China, they're gonna nuke us all" is just plain bullshit.
And for god's sake - they're building a f*ckin' building - what's so scary aout that?
No, it might not have been accidental. Somewhere down the line something might have started out one way (by choice) but then evolution would have dictated that the sucessful species generate enzymes and whatnots that are a specific chiraltiy.
Look at the post I made in the other thread explaining the importance of chirality and the difference between cellulose and starch, and the difference in the enzyme requires to cleave it.
Let's say that you're some protozoa somewhere, and you need to break down a food source that has a certain chirality. In order to be sucessful, your enzymes must fit this chirality requirement (much like threads on pipes) for this reaction to occur). From here on, your proteins, RNAs, DNAs, must all evolve to be of a certain chirality for everything to work...
Chirality refers to the stereochemistry of an atom, usually carbon. Carbon forms 4 bonds with things, each bond at a 109.5 degree angle (not 90!). At this angle, each atom bonded forms the corner of a tetrahedron with the carbon smack in the center, to maximize distance between each bonded substance.
If the 4 objects bonded to the carbon is different, then the carbon is said to be chiral. This means that there is a NONIMPOSIBLE MIRROR IMAGE of this compound. A good example would be your hands. Your left hand is a mirror image of your right hand, but you cannot (palm down) overlay them. So, for molecule CClBrI, 2 of the bonded halogens (Cl, Br, I) cannot overlap in the mirror image.
Chirality affects everything around us. For one thing, chiral molecules are optically active, meaning that it rotates plane polarized light, much like crystals in an LCD display. Cool thing is, say a molecule rotates plane polarized light 30 degrees clockwise. It's mirror image molecule (remember, these things come in pairs) will rotate it 30 degs counterclockwise.
Biological activity is also governed by chirality. Sugar, for instance, is chiral (take karo syrup and 2 polarizing filters and play with it if you don't believe me). alpha-D-Glucose (one of the two sugars that form common table sugar, the other is alpha-d-FRUCTOSE) rotates light clockwise (I believe), and upon polymerization it forms starch, which we humans have an enzyme (also chiral) that can break it down. There is another form of glucose that rotates light counterclockwise called beta-D-glucose, and when that forms *CELLULOSE* upon polymerization. Because our enzymes are chiral, it will cleave starge (alpha polymer) into glucose, and we can digest it, but it won't cleave the beta polymer (cellulose). Termites and cows have a bacteria in their stomach that will synthesise the mirror image enzyme that will cleave the beta polymer, hence, they can eat cellulose, we can't.
There are very cool implications to this. First of all, virtually all drugs are chiral, and in synthesis we have to perform isolation. Isolation of chiral substances often involves chromatography, and the chromatography column packing material to resolve chiral compounds are often (you guessed it) chiral. Improvement made in separation techniques will give better catalysts and better synthesis options, which in turn opens up new bio and non-bio synthetic techniques towards new material. Optical activity is used for LCDs, so potentially this could be used in LCD display (though the impact here is not that great, there are existing material that can fit this bill). Other potential applications include the possibility of using this in a electro-optical computer system.
I don't know why MD havn't been pushed as a data storage media. IT is a logical choice. The same technology that MD uses is called Magneto-Optical, and it's used in drives that are called (duh) magneto-optical drives. Fujitsu makes them. The discs are about $5.00 for a 640 Mb disc (in Taiwan).
The technology that MD and MO discs uses requires a laser to heat the material past it's curie point, where a magnetic field can then flip the "polarity" of the material. This is very similar to a CDRW and the "Phrase change" technology. Combined with a good enclosure for the discs, they are virtually indestructable. I use it to back up my/home directory at night, and NEVER had a failure.
I meant 80 MM , not 80 mm. In other words, CD single size. I have a few of these CDRs around. And those will fit in a wallet. They are only a bit bigger than a credit card dimensional wise, holds almost 200 Mbs. Which is enough for a small slackware install with X. SiKnight
Anyone seen www.demolinux.org? They have a CD-ROM based linux distro that boots off a CDROM, autodetects the hardware, and runs off a RAMDISK partition.
With an 80min CDR blank (which fits nicely into my wallet, and the ability to build a custom linux distro, imagine the possibility: Being able to walk into any computer lab, or borrow a machine, insert this little disc, and bam! have ssh, an xterm, etc...
You are right, newer power hungry laptops won't work off these solar cell puppies.
BUT, something like the IBM Z50 workpad, modded to run Linux, would run pretty much INDEFINATELY on that solar cell. I actually thought about that, making a unit (calling for engineering samples? 8-) and wiring together a folding panel...
As for sunlight readability, nobody said anything about the solar cell and the laptop at the same spot. Just sit under the tree, and run a short cable out to the solar panel in the sun. Voila. Problem solved... 8-)
I'd like to see how someone pumps dietry fiber through that patch. Of course, I've heard that MERs are specially processed so that fibre content is at a minimum (so that the troops won't be caught literally with their pants down...)
Wonder if HooAh bars are available Military Surplus?
Offer parts for sale, individually, at a price that will cover their cost, with full specifications.
I have a SONY laptop, and I wanted to get an extra (kanji) keyboard. No go, since they won't ship parts to anyone BUT a sony authorized refurb center. A part breaks on my laptop? I have to ship it back, I can't install it myself. From a hacking standpoint, even simple customerization of the Sony laptop will require me jumping through lots and lots of hoops.
OTOH, take a good look at Handspring. I can go to their website, and with a few simple clicks I can order blank springboard module plastics - the same parts used in production springboards. I can get full access to their documentations, wiring schematics of their springboard modules, and software APIs that they have changed in PalmOS to call them. And, guess what, my friend's senior EE project he's building a smartmedia springboard reader. A simple act of selling their hardware and parts to anybody and opening the documentation makes the visor a lot more hackable.
A tilt sensor would make a rather interesting UI design. Imagine that instead of scrolling up or down while reading etextz, you'd just rock the palm up and down. Or rock it sideways to pan. The Compaq Itsy has a feature similar to this, except that they use "yaw" motions instead of "pitch" motions (borrowing the terms from pilots).
I don't know beans about solid state accelerometers (I'm assuming that's what they are using...) so I can't comment on the sensitivity. Device like that though must have some sort of discriminatory circuit. Afterall the human hand does not actually stay still, it shakes a bit (more so if you are on a caffiene high 8-) ). The really difficult part would be to discern background motions (such as reading on a bus, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Penguin might have retitled the book, but until those 2 f-ugly bitches stop billing Katie T.'s "online safety, look, I was stupid and this could happen to you too" crap as "Katie.com", this mess isn't over yet.
:-)
:-)
It appears that Tarbox did indeed get a clue and register her own domain:
Organization:
Katie Tarbox, Inc.
Katie Tarbox
745 Carter Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
US
Phone: 203-966-1828
Email: ktarbox261@aol.com
Registrar Name....: Register.com
Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.register.com
Domain Name: AGIRLSLIFEONLINE.COM
Created on..............: Thu, Aug 05, 2004
Expires on..............: Sat, Aug 05, 2006
Record last updated on..: Thu, Aug 05, 2004
Administrative Contact:
Katie Tarbox, Inc.
Katie Tarbox
745 Carter Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
US
Phone: 203-966-1828
Email: ktarbox261@aol.com
In the meantime, if someone wants to convince the lawyer that she should back down:
Aftab, Parry
(PA286)
parry.aftab@COUNSEL.COM
E. 80 Rt. 4, The Atrium, Suite 410
Paramus, NJ 07652
US
Phone: (201) 845-0100
Fax: 999 999 9999
The lawyer's cell # is: 201-463-8663. It appears to be a Bell Atlantic Nylex Mobile, registered in New Jersey. Anyone care to post her SMS email address and send her a few messages to convince her to drop the campaign?
And, yeah, never understimate the power of geeks in large numbers. Esp bored geeks with nothing to do on Friday nights
-=- SiKnight
The geek way to stop spam:
Step 1: Create a mod for a popular first person shooter game involving a list of prolific spammer and relistic weapons.
Step 2: Distribute said game to those "evil teenagers that plays too much video games and get influenced and shoot up their classmates".
Step 3: Wait for problem to take care of itself.
That way loosers who shoot their classmates and random people are *educated* to shoot the actual varmints of this society instead of random innocent people. And for the rest of us who can learn to differentiate a game from real life, it does sound like a fun game...
One word, because it's *Jap*?
/home was all it took for making nightly backups.
What a crock of racist bullshit. Do you bash people that drive a Honda or a Toyota too because it's Jap?
MO drives are technically superior for data archival. I've owned one for years - the damn drive died before I had a single piece of media failure - and it died because my asshole of a landlady tossed it into the trash for me then dumped charcoal dust over it. I've had the drive since 1997, it was at one time a nightly incremental backup system for me. The drive was a Fujitsu Dynamo 640.
Every Fujitsu drive out there was fully backward compartible. My drive could read and write the very first 128Mb MO Disc. Their 2.3Gb unit can read and write every MO standard there ever was. Try that with any other optical media. It required no special drivers under every OS that I've played with (Windows 9X, NT and 2K, Linux, my friend's BeOS box), and it's just treated as a drive - no need to "rewrite" the disc like a CDRW, no need for specialized write software like a DVD-R/RW, CD-R, RW, etc. A simple cron entry that tar and cp
I have read somewhere that MO is the media of choice for the Japanese government. I am not surprised. Maybe they like their data to last longer. Yeah, back then I was poor, but I sprang for an Adaptec SCSI card and plugged my MO drive into it. To me that investment was a defining point going from average joe user to being somewhat of a sysadmin where I actually cared about the longetivity of my data. It was the difference between "fun toys" and "professional gear", at least in my mind.
Why did it never catch on in the US? Lack of marketing and media cost, would be my guess. Minidisc didn't catch on because the RIAA lobbied (and boy did they lobby hard) for the longest time and when they finally suceeded they got the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992, which for a while made big companies nervous about releasing a format that can be used for BOTH music recording *and* computer data storage. Sony intentionally never built a MiniDisc computer drive because of this, which allowed Iomega and their crappy ZIP drives to take over. Think about that one - Minidiscs held 128Mbs - this was back in 1992 or so, and in Asian countries, the discs were US$2.00 each. They are reliable as all hell, no "Clicks of death". Had a computer version of that been released, it would have blown Iomega away. Even when Minidiscs were finally released in the US, the costs (back in the 90s) were highway robbery! The same is true with MO discs today. Those discs don't cost more than US$7.50 a pop in Hong Kong. For some reason, maybe because of its rarity and because American distributors can get away with charging more, they do just that.
-=- Terence
Reminds me of the time in HS once upon a time when we'd go to the local "Lamp Post Pizza" where they had a pinball machine. Bring along a hard drive magnet, and play as long as you want on a quarter. The people who worked there were cool and as long as we ordered food, they thought it was a pretty cool "hack".
:-D. HD magnets are nice and strong and does the trick quite nicely.)
Anyone else knows any cool pinball tricks?
-=- Terence
(For those who can't see how this trick works: The pinball is a steel ball bearing. So, plop the magnet down at the bottom near the pit and when you loose, you just drag the ball back up and keep playing
Look in your local phone book, under "Liquid Air". It is sometimes used in industry for assembly of mechanical components (it's called a cold press, you cool down one part to shrink it, press it into it's mate, at room temperature you get a strong interference fit without having to worry about heating the part with the hole up and having it warp). My physics teacher and I use to buy this for science demo all the time; under $10.00 (1995 dollars) to fill up a 1 L flask
Liquid Nitrogen in research labs are handled in dewars, basically stainless steel 1gal + vacuum flask. Small flasks are inefficient to fill because LN2 has a very low heat content, so it takes a LOT of LN2 to cool the flask down, and a tremenendous amount of LN2 gets boiled off in the progress (in fact, about 4 times the volume of LN2 is required to cool our thermos bottle down before we could fill it. This efficiency goes up with the volume of the tank). Since normal people don't have ready access to a dewar, the recommended alternative container of choice is a Stainless steel thermos. Stay away from glass thermos (they will shatter) or even plastic ones (they crack). I had a plastic thermos explode on me once; LN2 had seeped in through the cracked seams and when it boiled off, shot the inner bulb of the thermos accross the lab like a mortar shell.
And, yeah, the ice cream is fabulous!
-=- Terence
All of the business world revolves around ideas, people generally build businesses around one or two of them. There are companies with good ideas that fail, there are companies with bad ideas that manage to survive. You have a fairly good success record with startups (MP3.com, now Lindows). What advice would you give to someone trying to start-up a company, in this post 9-11 economy? What, in your opinion, makes the difference between a sucessful and an unsucessful company? Any stories about investors that you can share? What do you think the biggest hurdle to starting a company is? Thanks!
PC 104 is basically a form factor, just like ATX, mini-ATX, mini-ITX, etc. It is one of the smallest form factor out there, largely used in industrial automation setup.
The one characteristic that makes PC104 interesting is the "pass through" bus connector. Consisting of 104 pins (hence it's name), you stack modules of extension card on the base board, and build vertically your components. See link:
PC104 FAQ with pictures
They tend to be pretty low power consumption, and there are a mind boggling array of PC104 modules out there, from radio modems to GPS receivers to servo controllers and 3 axis accelerometers. For hobby use, I wouldn't really go with them, since they are more expensive than the much cheaper mini-itx boards (which is what I will be using for my next car computer).
Mini-ITX info link
Man, reading through the projects - they outfitted a 1997 Corvette with a "fly by wire" steering. My god, I wish my research lab has the amount of cash handy to buy a corvette for a ressearch project...
-=- Terence
Bridgeport actually got picked up by Hardinge. Fitting end for such a company, the lathes by Hardinge are simply beautiful.
l
http://www.hardinge.com/Pages/16_bridgeport.htm
-=- Terence
Well, it really depends on what sort of precision you need. You're really comparing a cadallac to a geo metro here! :-).
y ahoo.com/group/CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO/h oo.com/group/sherline/r oup/taigtools/
. cartertools.com/
i gtools.com
;-) ) for a high school robotics team [www.swatrobotics.org] . We have 6 weeks to build a robot, and I am in charge of production to make sure the crew get their training, their tools, and their machine time to get things made. Pretty cool project :-).
For those wondering, a milling machine is like a drill press, only the part can be positioned accurately relative to the spinning metal cutter, and the cutter and head is designed to take side loads as well as axle load encountered in drilling. In all machine shops, calibration marks are in increments of 0.001", or 0.01mm. A human hair is usually 0.003", and most skilled operators can hold 0.001" precision quite nicely. This gives you an idea of what sort of cutting operations we can do.
The cool thing about CNC is that under computer control, 3, 4 or even 5 axis can rotate simultaneously. It is like drawing vector graphics, and vector shapes, except in 3D. Newer CNC mills can actually be programmed using NURBS. They really are amazing robots to watch, they can rapidly accelerate to over 200 inch per minute tranverse speed, and come to a stop within 0.0005" of their target.
A bridgeport machine is about the best manual milling machine you can buy. Everything, as the previous poster pointed out, is a piece of art - down to the table (the surface the work is held on), which is hand-engraved by some old 80 year old guy with a chisel, then finished to within 0.0002" flatness. That's right, every point on a 12 x 60" table is within 0.0002" in vertical height.
On the other hand, home brew variety uses regular screws for motion control, cut corners everywhere, etc. You really get what you pay for.
My team used extensively Sherline milling machines, and recently acquired a TAIG. Both are very nice, hobby priced CNC mills, both can be had for under $1000.00. They have all the features of the big industrial machines, and we've made parts from aluminum, delrin, steel, and even titanium on them. As long as you're not in a hurry to get parts done, they work quite well.
Here's a few links to get newbies started:
Vendor neutral information links:
http://www.mini-lathe.com
http://groups.
http://groups.ya
http://groups.yahoo.com/g
Hobbiest turned vendors site with great info:
http://www.seanet.com/~dmauch/
http://www
Commercial products:
http://www.sherline.com
http://www.ta
BTW - if you're looking at getting one of these machines for PCB milling - my advice is to invest in a black light and a UV etch resist kit. Even with our most well maintained machine, and a 10,000 rpm spindle upgrade, production of anything that allows surface mount components is still a bit of a nightmare. The fibreglass (FR4) dust is very very abrasive and will do BAD THINGS to your lungs. Also, keep in mind that most of these hobby machines cannot match a commercial unit for spindle speed - and a higher spindle speed is required for small diameter cutting bits to adequately cut detailed features. (Commercial engravers run at 300,000 rpm - yup, 0.3 million revs per minute, on air bearings). Food for thought.
BTW, I am the shopmaster (read, machine sys-admin
-=- Terence
I guess what it all comes down to, is people using common sense.
Personally, I ride a bike (nice one with disc brakes), and I am a very good rollerblader. I do all my equipment maintanence myself, my bike will stop pretty fast even in downright shitty wet weather.
Now, majority of bike riding I do I do on the road. I stop for stop signs and red lights. However, there are places where riding on the street just isn't possible. In those cases, I hop on to the sidewalk and I go slow. Slow as in 10 miles per hour. My reasoning is that I am about the same speed as a guy jogging, and I am way more alert than your average pedesterian walking and talking on a cell phone.
I've been yelled at by the police for rollerblading on the street. By their logic, rollerbladers are pedestrians and do not belong on the street. I think they are on crack - because I hit 20 mph EASILY on my rollerblades - and when I am faster than a jogger, I jump into the streets. I then also obey all traffic rules.
Unfortunately, there are always idiots who blast down the sidewalk at 30 mph on a bike, or really, really slow bikers that can barely make 5 mph in the middle of the street. Go figure.
Yet another cultural misconception. Southern China places a big emphasis on rice grains, but the climate is way too dry in the north to grow it as a grain. Wheat, as a result is the predominant grain. Chinese cusine is divided into 4 big regions, corresponding to the 4 directions on the compass, each with its own unique charactersitics. Historically a lot of dried (and reconstituted) ingredients are used in cooking - stuff like mushrooms, cloud ears, bamboo shoots, shark fins, etc, so it'd be REALLY intresting to see what they come up with for "Space food". Hopefully it'll beat freeze-dried pizza at the Exploratorium :-)
I know the grief. I was able to finance the purchase of my laptop because I shipped my desktop (P200MMX back then) and put $2000.00 insurance on it. When my box arrived the hard drives tumbled out of my case and I was like "Oh, my God..."
My housemate recently shipped a downhilling mountain bike from Wyoming, with insurance on it. When the bike arrived they had bashed in what everyone thought were bomb-proof front shocks and bent the rotors on the disc brakes. The typical insurance run-around that they use in *both* cases here are:
- "Oh, it's not our fault, you packaged it incorrectly".
- "Oh, the item was damaged before we shipped it"
- "We'll conduct our own evaluations and keep you informed"
So, this is what you should do, and in my experience works quite well:
* Keep all receipts of the packaging.
* Have it shipped from an authorized shipping outlet, *and* have them sign a letter saying that they packaged it.
* Photo document the packaging if possible.
And when they give you shit about it being not packaged properly, show them but do not hand over the documentation. And if they still give you crap, this is what my housemate did:
* Have a lawyer, lawyer friend, etc, write a letter to UPS, threatening to supeona the records that they have on your package, and the insurance claim paperwork and the inspection results.
Boy did they pay up quick after that. They weren't going to even take a second look at his bike, the lawyer did his thing, and now he's at least getting his disc rotors replaced.
- SK
90 year old men with heart problems can die from heart attack after an overdose of viagra...
(Come on, use some common sense, people - just because a chemical can push your body to do mor, doens't mean it can handle it. It's like setting that overclock setting on your motherboard without adequate cooling...)
-=- SiKnight
There's absolutely NOTHING to push against in space (last I check, there's no air to push up against there).
This is not an application of Newton's 3rd law (used in rocketry). In a rocket, the mass of the propellant reaction products excaping the nozzle generates the reaction needed to push the rocket forward, here, there's no mass ejected, only a structure "wriggling".
Conceivability, you could laminate a sheet of piezoelectric element, and generate power from that, and feed the power to an ion engine. But ion engines still require fuel (a tank of xenon or a gas with a hefty mass, see above for reason why), so it still wouldn't be an unlimited source of power, as far as propulsion is concerned...
-=- SiKnight
It's very obvious that you havn't really studied the cultural history of the Chinese.
The Chinese people had never been agressive towards their neighboors. Yes, they are proud people, they have every right to be - their civilization has a long and rich cultural history. But the Great War of China wasn't exactly built for invading other countries, is it?
The Chinese had never been domineering. They've never sent their troops to intervene in other country's political affairs - unlike the Americans who routinely send their carrier fleets everywhere. In fact, if you look at how often the US had been invaded (never), and when the last time the Chinese had been invaded (Japanese invasion during WW II, Allied invasion (including the US during the end of the Ching dynasty), all the "oh, fear China, they're gonna nuke us all" is just plain bullshit.
And for god's sake - they're building a f*ckin' building - what's so scary aout that?
Um...it's the wrong fsckin' answer?
Anyone with OChem 101 can tell you that. And I'm a chemistry major.
-=- SiliconKnight
No, it might not have been accidental. Somewhere down the line something might have started out one way (by choice) but then evolution would have dictated that the sucessful species generate enzymes and whatnots that are a specific chiraltiy.
Look at the post I made in the other thread explaining the importance of chirality and the difference between cellulose and starch, and the difference in the enzyme requires to cleave it.
Let's say that you're some protozoa somewhere, and you need to break down a food source that has a certain chirality. In order to be sucessful, your enzymes must fit this chirality requirement (much like threads on pipes) for this reaction to occur). From here on, your proteins, RNAs, DNAs, must all evolve to be of a certain chirality for everything to work...
Chirality refers to the stereochemistry of an atom, usually carbon. Carbon forms 4 bonds with things, each bond at a 109.5 degree angle (not 90!). At this angle, each atom bonded forms the corner of a tetrahedron with the carbon smack in the center, to maximize distance between each bonded substance.
If the 4 objects bonded to the carbon is different, then the carbon is said to be chiral. This means that there is a NONIMPOSIBLE MIRROR IMAGE of this compound. A good example would be your hands. Your left hand is a mirror image of your right hand, but you cannot (palm down) overlay them. So, for molecule CClBrI, 2 of the bonded halogens (Cl, Br, I) cannot overlap in the mirror image.
Chirality affects everything around us. For one thing, chiral molecules are optically active, meaning that it rotates plane polarized light, much like crystals in an LCD display. Cool thing is, say a molecule rotates plane polarized light 30 degrees clockwise. It's mirror image molecule (remember, these things come in pairs) will rotate it 30 degs counterclockwise.
Biological activity is also governed by chirality. Sugar, for instance, is chiral (take karo syrup and 2 polarizing filters and play with it if you don't believe me). alpha-D-Glucose (one of the two sugars that form common table sugar, the other is alpha-d-FRUCTOSE) rotates light clockwise (I believe), and upon polymerization it forms starch, which we humans have an enzyme (also chiral) that can break it down. There is another form of glucose that rotates light counterclockwise called beta-D-glucose, and when that forms *CELLULOSE* upon polymerization. Because our enzymes are chiral, it will cleave starge (alpha polymer) into glucose, and we can digest it, but it won't cleave the beta polymer (cellulose). Termites and cows have a bacteria in their stomach that will synthesise the mirror image enzyme that will cleave the beta polymer, hence, they can eat cellulose, we can't.
There are very cool implications to this. First of all, virtually all drugs are chiral, and in synthesis we have to perform isolation. Isolation of chiral substances often involves chromatography, and the chromatography column packing material to resolve chiral compounds are often (you guessed it) chiral. Improvement made in separation techniques will give better catalysts and better synthesis options, which in turn opens up new bio and non-bio synthetic techniques towards new material. Optical activity is used for LCDs, so potentially this could be used in LCD display (though the impact here is not that great, there are existing material that can fit this bill). Other potential applications include the possibility of using this in a electro-optical computer system.
I don't know why MD havn't been pushed as a data storage media. IT is a logical choice. The same technology that MD uses is called Magneto-Optical, and it's used in drives that are called (duh) magneto-optical drives. Fujitsu makes them. The discs are about $5.00 for a 640 Mb disc (in Taiwan).
/home directory at night, and NEVER had a failure.
The technology that MD and MO discs uses requires a laser to heat the material past it's curie point, where a magnetic field can then flip the "polarity" of the material. This is very similar to a CDRW and the "Phrase change" technology. Combined with a good enclosure for the discs, they are virtually indestructable. I use it to back up my
Reading is thru a laser, so no contacts, no wear.
-=- SiKnight
I meant 80 MM , not 80 mm. In other words, CD single size. I have a few of these CDRs around. And those will fit in a wallet. They are only a bit bigger than a credit card dimensional wise, holds almost 200 Mbs. Which is enough for a small slackware install with X. SiKnight
Anyone seen www.demolinux.org? They have a CD-ROM based linux distro that boots off a CDROM, autodetects the hardware, and runs off a RAMDISK partition.
With an 80min CDR blank (which fits nicely into my wallet, and the ability to build a custom linux distro, imagine the possibility: Being able to walk into any computer lab, or borrow a machine, insert this little disc, and bam! have ssh, an xterm, etc...
-=- SiKnight
You are right, newer power hungry laptops won't work off these solar cell puppies.
BUT, something like the IBM Z50 workpad, modded to run Linux, would run pretty much INDEFINATELY on that solar cell. I actually thought about that, making a unit (calling for engineering samples? 8-) and wiring together a folding panel...
As for sunlight readability, nobody said anything about the solar cell and the laptop at the same spot. Just sit under the tree, and run a short cable out to the solar panel in the sun. Voila. Problem solved... 8-)
-=- SiKnight
I'd like to see how someone pumps dietry fiber through that patch. Of course, I've heard that MERs are specially processed so that fibre content is at a minimum (so that the troops won't be caught literally with their pants down...)
Wonder if HooAh bars are available Military Surplus?
-=- SiKnight
Offer parts for sale, individually, at a price that will cover their cost, with full specifications.
I have a SONY laptop, and I wanted to get an extra (kanji) keyboard. No go, since they won't ship parts to anyone BUT a sony authorized refurb center. A part breaks on my laptop? I have to ship it back, I can't install it myself. From a hacking standpoint, even simple customerization of the Sony laptop will require me jumping through lots and lots of hoops.
OTOH, take a good look at Handspring. I can go to their website, and with a few simple clicks I can order blank springboard module plastics - the same parts used in production springboards. I can get full access to their documentations, wiring schematics of their springboard modules, and software APIs that they have changed in PalmOS to call them. And, guess what, my friend's senior EE project he's building a smartmedia springboard reader. A simple act of selling their hardware and parts to anybody and opening the documentation makes the visor a lot more hackable.
-=- SiKnight
A tilt sensor would make a rather interesting UI design. Imagine that instead of scrolling up or down while reading etextz, you'd just rock the palm up and down. Or rock it sideways to pan. The Compaq Itsy has a feature similar to this, except that they use "yaw" motions instead of "pitch" motions (borrowing the terms from pilots).
I don't know beans about solid state accelerometers (I'm assuming that's what they are using...) so I can't comment on the sensitivity. Device like that though must have some sort of discriminatory circuit. Afterall the human hand does not actually stay still, it shakes a bit (more so if you are on a caffiene high 8-) ). The really difficult part would be to discern background motions (such as reading on a bus, etc).
Still an interesting hack though.
-=- SiKnight