That's all I need, two computers with two different ideas of how the filesystem should look performaing simultaneous reads/writes on the same disk fubaring everything. Are you sure this is what you want? Why not just use simple ethernet sharing, NFS/Samba/whatever? I'm thinking it would be a lot more stable.
Well, d'oh, you use a file system that supports simultaneous accesses, don't you?
There are good reasons for wanting such a thing. For example: say you have a mission-critical database server. You want instant failover if anything goes wrong. Your database is being continuously modified, so merely duplicating it won't do.
One solution is to do something similar to the above. Have two database machines plugged into the same drive (in the real world, RAID drive array). The database software is intelligent enough to cope with simultaneous accesses. Now you can send a query to either server and they'll access the same data, at full hard disk speeds. Pull the plug on one server and the other just keeps rolling.
Why not use ethernet sharing? Because there's a single point of failure. Your drive is attached to a file server. Your file server is attached to your database servers. If your file server goes down, your database servers are cut off.
Solutions to this? Duplicate your file server. Broadcast your data to all file servers, all attached on some high-speed network. This'll work. Unfortunately, you've just reinvented, in a heavy and expensive way, having one disk attached to several machines at once...
You see, your file servers are duplicating all the functionality of a RAID array but with a lot more overhead. Your high-speed network is duplicating all the functionality of your Firewire or SCSI bus, again with more overhead. Your databases now have to send their file accesses over that network, which will be slow. There's overhead everywhere.
By simply using a drive (or drive array) attached to several servers, you get the same functionality, much cheaper, and with a much simpler setup. Remember, complex == unreliable. You can buy certified, five nines RAID arrays off the warehouse shelf and they will Just Work. You can buy high-speed SCSI cards with multi-initiator support (this is the magic phrase to Google for) and they will Just Work.
Of course, it's not simple. You need a piece of software known as a distributed lock manager to handle the atomicity issues. But you can buy them, and they will Just Work.
This kind of setup has been around for years in the big iron SCSI world. I haven't come across anything yet for Firewire, though. Personally, I'd be a bit dubious as to whether you're going to anything fast enough or stable enough for Firewire; high-performance SCSI beats Firewire into the ground, and all the kit is available off-the-shelf. But I'd be interested to see if anything comes up.
A neighbor I once had composted all their kitchen scraps in our shared back yard and there I learned that not all things rot well. It stank, but that was the least of it's problems.
Well, yeah. That's why you get a Green Cone. They're deceptively simple; there's some very cunning engineering in there that makes your compost decompose properly. It's not just a bucket.
Basically, it's a solar-powered convector. There's a big air space inside, and baffles to route the air into the compost. The air is drawn through the material, maintaining high oxygen levels and preventing anaerobic decomposition (this was the problem you had; without proper ventilation, you get anaerobic bacteria, which produce assorted unpleasant substances including ketones, which smell to high heaven). It's largely sealed and even if you leave the lid off, they don't smell.
If installed properly --- it's got to get sunlight --- it basically requires no maintenance. You put waste in. Nothing comes out. The decomposed material is absorbed into the ground under the Cone. They say that in a particularly bad year the bacteria might not be able to decompose everything, and you may need to empty it... but this will only happen every couple of years at most.
They are seriously neat gadgets, and are a stunning example of high-tech designs implemented in low-tech materials. They're definately worth checking out at their website. If I didn't have a flat I'd buy one like a shot.
...
The same sort of technology is coming into fashion. In Australia I've seen lavatories built this way. These have a solar-powered fan to force the air through the waste; air is sucked down through the lavatory, through the sewage, which is kept dry, and then vented out a chimney at the top. No water needed. No power needed. No maintenance needed, except for someone to come and clean the human-accessable bits every now and then. In fact, you can make money out of them --- the processed sewage is top-grade fertiliser.
Firstly: yes, for city driving, which is where hybrid cars will be really useful. Diesels only get those fantastic mileages when driving long distance.
Secondly: remember that US gallons are a different size to the gallons the rest of the world uses! Assuming the article was using US gallons, that would would come out as 50*1.2 = 60 mpg.
what exactly are the usages of all these space shuttles, including the most successful of all, the US space shuttle program?
The space shuttle is not successful. The space shuttle is an utter disaster. In fact, the space shuttle is, arguably, the worst thing that ever happened to the American space programme.
The problem is that the shuttle is trying to be both a man-rated lifter, a reusable lifter, and a heavy lifter, and as a result it does all three incredibly badly. It's a massive money pit that swallowed the American space station, SSTOs, the moon base, and any manned Mars missions...
Put it like this:
Space shuttle capacity: 6 people, 15 tonnes cargo; cost: $600M.
Soyuz capacity: 3 people, no cargo; cost: $60M.
Proton capacity: no people, 20 tonnes cargo; cost: $70M.
This means that you could replace a single shuttle launch with the Russian alternative, launch three seperate vehicles, and have over four hundred million dollars in change! With a single shuttle launch budget, you could put nearly two hundred tonnes into LEO --- or sixteen tonnes into GEO, and the shuttle can't do that at all.
Unfortunately, the shuttle is now become political, so noone's going to be able to get rid of it. It's going to hang around consuming more and more of NASA's budget, until eventually another one will blow up, and then NASA will be reorganised out of existence. Meanwhile, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Pakistani, and basically anyone else with a clue (and alas, I don't live in such a country) will be using disposable launchers to maintain their space presence. The ISS will probably be kept up until the shuttle explosion, and then it'll be quietly evacuated and deorbited; but by then, there'll be other space stations, at least some of them privately funded.
But the heat just gives us even more reasons to not (at least not as a first step) land first and try to launch back up. It's much easier to propel the canister(s) from a decent altitude than if you wait until you're in deep. Gravity, pressure and heat all combine to make it unnecessary difficult (and expensive, since all propellants and other resources has to be brought along for the ride) to do launches from the surface.
Damn straight. Venus has the same gravity as Earth, remember? Which means that getting stuff out of its gravity well is an incredible hassle. If you need an Ariane or a Proton to get an object off Earth, you're going to need another Ariane or Proton to get it off Venus again once you've landed it there. And the super-dense atmosphere is going to cause even more problems.
No, launching from Venus is a problem that can happily wait until nuclear rockets or antigravity are feasible.
Besides, if there is life on Venus, I'd much rather study it in situ than bring some back here. While it almost certainly wouldn't survive in an Earth environment, that 'almost' worries me a bit...
I keep hearing rumours about a distro somewhere consisting of the Linux kernel plus a BSD userland, not the GNU one. Does anyone know anything about this? It would strike me as being the perfect solution to those who feel that the FSF get up their nose (not that I care either way).
Apart from anything else, the BSD userland makes a great starting point for a cut-down server. Not only is it audited, but it's odd enough that most attacks on it will fail.
If it's so amazingly simple, feel free to go ahead and make it!
Okay. Let's see. Let's use cardboard voting slips, with pencils.
Intuitive --- check. Everyone knows how to make marks on paper. Put an X in the box next to the name of your candidate. Because the slips aren't machine-read, you don't have to cater to the machines, so you can put the boxes next to the candidate's name.
Self-validating --- check. The human who counts the voting slip can tell at a glance if it's been filled out correctly. You can verify that each person has voted only once by keeping a list of people eligable to vote at each polling station, and crossing their names off the list.
Secure storage --- check. Well, not quite. You need a box with a padlock on it and a slit in the lid, and a seal to indicate tampering. Seals are old technology. Trivial money from your local hardware store.
Rugged, portable, low cost --- check. Carboard is cheap. Printed cardboard is cheap. It's also tough; if you use pencils rather than pens, then even if a filled box is submersed in water, the votes can still be read (carefully).
Saves state --- check. Each vote is physically encoded on to a piece of cardboard, which can be counted as many times as is necessary to get it right. Won't crash. Ever.
So: we have a cheap, simple, secure voting system that's hard to spoof (with adequate physical security), easy to use, and with excellent accountability. You still need to count the votes, of course; here in the UK, we use volunteer bank tellers, who are really good at this sort of thing. The system scales really well, because each voting region is sized by population, and each area has about the same ratio of bank tellers to non bank tellers. The votes are counted in O(n) where n is the number of votes in the largest area, and then the results are phoned in to a central location.
It's an operating systemish thing that runs on top of DOS. What you get is a complete Windows-like operating environment with virtual memory, long filenames, threads, outline fonts, WYSIWYG word processor, drawing package, database, spreadsheet, loads of applications, basic web browser, email, PPP, etc. It runs in bugger all memory. Minimum useful spec is a 386 with 4MB and 20MB or so of hard disk space, but it'll run on a 286 and up with 640kB or RAM (but it won't be pleasant). All the applications can deal with documents too big to fit in memory.
It is, unfortunately, payware. But it's 100 USD, it's a complete integrated solution containing everything from high-level apps to printer drivers, it's easy to use --- the user interfaces are all customisable; for experts you can rearrange the toolbars, for newbies you can turn most of the buttons and menus off to make something dead simple --- it's an excellent choice for low-end systems. It'll run like a storm on your machine.
(I did my fourth-year project writeup at university on it. 300 pages in a single document. No problem whatsoever. The built-in word processor is a hell of a lot more flexible and powerful than a lot of commercial products I've seen. For ease of use it beats Word into a cocked hat, and it's got most of the useful features --- frame-based text flowing, built-in vector drawing tools, built-in bitmap drawing tools, rotatable & transformable & editable text, wrapping text around graphics, spelling checker and thesaurus, hierarchical paragraph styles...)
You will have to support them, including installing it on the empty machine. However, they'll need much less support than Windows or, heaven forbid, Unix will. It won't run Windows apps, which is a plus. It will run third-party GEOS apps, but you probably don't want them to.
It's ideally suited for a turnkey system, which I think is what you want here.
There's a laser corner reflector on the moon, left there by Apollo 11. It's the only instrument still in use today; fire a laser pulse at the moon, wait for the reflected pulse, and you get a really accurate measure of how far away it is.
Given that it's usable by anyone in the world (who has a really big telescope and laser setup) I suspect it would be rather hard to fake...
My microwave has two dials: amount of heating, and a timer. Oh, yes, and a door release.
A friend of mine has a microwave with twenty to thirty buttons, including a full keypad, with a dozen different cooking modes, memory facility, loads of preprogrammed settings, and an LCD display to let you know what you've done. It's so complicated it actually has a special mode where it will run through the program without producing any microwaves, just so you can check your programming. Oh, yes, and it has a door release.
When my microwave dies, I'm going to replace it with as identical a model as I can find...
Compared to the CM-100, the new casios are incredibly awful for my purposes. Lots of shifts needed to do hex conversions, and no dedicated A-F keys. They were clearly designed by a different person who wasn't actually planning on using the thing.
Damn straight. Nearly all of them require you to type in an expression and evaluate it, which makes using them a complete pain.
I have a FX451M. I love it. It's ancient and falling to pieces; the battery went long ago, and the solar panel isn't sufficient to trigger the reset circuitry, so every time I need to use it I have to get it out of base 14.5 or whatever the confused circuitry has decided to put it in this time, and the hinge is going so that the buttons on the right half of it only work if I press a certain place on the case.
So I want to replace it. I had a look at Casio's current selection. Every single one uses expression evaluation, which makes 'em useless for my purpose. I don't want a pocket computer. I want a calculator.
My FX451 is small, simple, flexible, powerful, and I know it so well that I can think with it. It's got the four bases I commonly use, it's got all the logical operations I commonly use, it's a scientific calculator, it does unit conversions (saving me from remembering how many bloody millimetres there are in an inch this year), it's got a decent set of scientific constants, and everything is two keypresses away. (The FX451 is wallet-shaped, with lots of extra buttons on the right half of the wallet, so it doesn't use the shift key much.) It's so well designed you don't need a manual to work it, and I'd like to see you try that on a modern calculator.
Since I can't replace it, I've been seriously considering reboxing it in another case with, like, real keyswitches. I'd lose the portability but keep the feature set.
So where are the real calculators? Why is it that all you can get are these idiotic semi-programmable user interface nightmares? There has to be a demand for simple, powerful calculators, so why isn't anybody meeting it?
Get a synthetic diamond. It's cheaper, can be larger, far better ethically, can be an interesting shape, and the cool factor in having something that someone actually made is far greater than having something someone just dug out of the ground.
Unfortunately, de Beers controls the market to such an extent that it can be tricky finding a jeweller willing to order and set a synthetic diamond for you...
Whenever I hear people talk about the total shambles that is the US DTV phenomenon, the biggest criticism I come across is that people say they'll have to buy new televisions.
Um, what?
Here in the UK, we're slowly but surely switching over to all-digital broadcasts. I forget when the analogue turn-off date is, but we seem to be on target (more or less). You can't get a new cable or satellite installation these days that isn't digital, and the BBC is picking up the broadcast digital stations.
This is all done with a little box that sits under your TV. It decodes the digital data, and then you plug in a SCART connector or S-Video or whatever you like and watch it on your analogue TV. Usually the boxes come free when you sign the contract. For broadcast, you'll probably end up buying the boxes for under 50 UKP, but then the channels are all free.
So what am I missing? What's all this stuff about having to replace your TVs?
I'm working on a run-from-CD system. To speed up testing, I'm doing the development by booting the kernel off CD and then using a USB disk for the root filesystem.
Setting it up's pretty easy; just tell Linux that the root is/dev/sda1, insert the mass storage driver into the kernel, etc. No initrd or user daemon is necessary.
However, the delay-before-detection bit me. USB seems to be initialised last, so by the time Linux tries to mount the root filesystem the USB bus is still powering up and Linux panics because it can't find the root. I fixed this by patching the kernel to have a 3s delay just before mounting the root filesystem. What I'd really like to do is to move the USB initialisation so that it occurs before the IDE initialisation; as detecting the IDE devices takes about three seconds anyway, that would give time for the USB stuff to come up without slowing down the boot process.
The eyes can play very funny tricks on you. I live under the flight path for Heathrow, and at night you see these huge diamond-shaped aircraft flying over. I look at one, I know it's a jet, I tell myself it's a jet, but I can clearly see the lines connecting the nose and tail with the wing tips, and the body is easily visible.
The brain's got this amazing pattern-recognition system as part of the visual processing. Unfortunately, when it doesn't know what something is, it tends to guess, and one of the algorithms it uses is to connect points with lines... and to fill in shapes... and the four beacons on the nose, wingtips and tail of a 747, seen at night, is perfect material for this.
Of course, I don't know exactly what you saw, I wasn't there. But I strongly suspect what it was was a jet, a lot further away than it looked, banking away from you (so making the tail beacon invisible). You didn't make any sound because passenger jets are pretty quiet and it was a long way away, and any noise that reached you was drowned in the traffic noise.
I read it. I liked it. I didn't believe any of it.
On the purely literary side, it's a dreadful book. The plot exists purely to put across her various philosophical points. Her characters are so thin they don't even count as cardboard; they are pure stereotypes (you can find most of the same people, with different names, in The Fountainhead. The writing style is clunky to say the least. And that lecture at the end --- good gods, woman, don't you have any sense of pacing?
And yet... there's an energy behind it that makes it compulsive reading. I couldn't put it down. That counts for something.
And now the philosophy. I am not an economist; I can only call it as I see it. I think she's making the exact opposite mistake Karl Marx made. Marx forgot that humans are greedy and selfish, and so won't put the same effort into working for an abstract state that they will into working for themselves. Ayn Rand, however, forgot that humans need to care and believe, and her Objectivist society is completely uncaring. If you don't or can't work, you will drop off the bottom and society will forget you and let you die. There is no safety net. (Imagine what would happen during a period of surplus labour, for example.) In fact, Objectivism would rather let you die; if you're not economically useful, you would be better got rid of. Humans can't live like that.
In fact, it's rather telling that all the Great Figures of her perfect society in Atlas Shrugged are more alien than some of the best SF aliens. All the interesting people are the villains. The only --- the only --- person I could identify with is Jim Taggart, Dagny's brother, who is unable to pull his life out of the mire and ends up spiralling down with the rest of the contrived, doomed society.
I won't deny it has its moments. The image of the doomed train heading down the tunnel, the only worthwhile person on board running for safety, is extremely powerful (and rather telling in that it demonstrates Rand's disregard for 'unproductive' human life). The random beggars wandering around saying, "Who is John Galt?" And I won't deny it's been influential, and I will agree that it's a must-read for anyone into economics. But for gods' sake don't take it at its face values. Think about it. It does not make sense.
(And if you liked it, you need to read the potted synopsis of an oddly similar book called 'Prometheus Bowed' [more or less, memory lapse] in the Illuminatus books...)
...but if you install Cygwin, fire up an rxvt and type 'ssh user@foo.bar.com', it Just Works.
Although, I have had problems that if you try and resize the rxvt it stops responding, and stupid Windows doesn't kill the children if you kill the rxvt so you end up with dead processes hanging around if you're not careful, but in principle it all works fine. ssh, scp, the lot. It all interoperates with Unix beautifully.
Check out Mysteries under Moscow. A group have been exploring the tunnels under Moscow since the 1970s and have found:
Up to 12 levels of tunnels
Nuclear bunkers
Lots of human skulls
Whole tribes of people living there
Mass burial sites
A hastily abandoned chemical laboratory
A 3000-seat bunker under a cathedral
Strange religious rites
All kinds of other weird stuff
It would be scary if it wasn't so fascinating. The article linked to above is quite old; have any Russian slashdotters seen the TV programme mentioned?
My father recently built a conservatory to my parent's house. He did this by spending about a year meticulously planning it, researching the various companies that supply conservatories, planning all the stages it would take to build (this long to lay the foundation, this long to put up the frame, this long to put on the roof, this long to glaze, etc; plus that stage 1 must be done during a dry spell, as must stages 2 & 3, but it's all right to get wet before stage 2 and after stage 3, and so on).
The result? The conservatory went up smoothly and flawlessly and *completely* perfectly. (Although I did have to help shovel about two tonnes of soil. God, soil is heavy.) But if you calculate the amount of hours he put into that conservatory, it would hardly be cost efficient --- if he had to pay for those hours. Which he didn't.
The next big project is to put in central heating. This involves ripping up every floor in the house and installing a wood stove. This one's been planned for about five years...
Or even low voltage, high current devices. Car batteries are designed to supply 300A at 12V. Yes, that's three *hundred* amps. And it's unfused. They warn you to take off any jewellery while working on a battery. Do you know what happens if you accidentally short, say, a wedding ring between live and ground (such as the car chassis)? The ring flashes into vapour and neatly strips the flesh from your finger. Not pretty.
Treat 'em with respect, people. Big batteries are seriously kick-ass things.
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I'd have thought at least one of them would have ducked.
Well, d'oh, you use a file system that supports simultaneous accesses, don't you?
There are good reasons for wanting such a thing. For example: say you have a mission-critical database server. You want instant failover if anything goes wrong. Your database is being continuously modified, so merely duplicating it won't do.
One solution is to do something similar to the above. Have two database machines plugged into the same drive (in the real world, RAID drive array). The database software is intelligent enough to cope with simultaneous accesses. Now you can send a query to either server and they'll access the same data, at full hard disk speeds. Pull the plug on one server and the other just keeps rolling.
Why not use ethernet sharing? Because there's a single point of failure. Your drive is attached to a file server. Your file server is attached to your database servers. If your file server goes down, your database servers are cut off.
Solutions to this? Duplicate your file server. Broadcast your data to all file servers, all attached on some high-speed network. This'll work. Unfortunately, you've just reinvented, in a heavy and expensive way, having one disk attached to several machines at once...
You see, your file servers are duplicating all the functionality of a RAID array but with a lot more overhead. Your high-speed network is duplicating all the functionality of your Firewire or SCSI bus, again with more overhead. Your databases now have to send their file accesses over that network, which will be slow. There's overhead everywhere.
By simply using a drive (or drive array) attached to several servers, you get the same functionality, much cheaper, and with a much simpler setup. Remember, complex == unreliable. You can buy certified, five nines RAID arrays off the warehouse shelf and they will Just Work. You can buy high-speed SCSI cards with multi-initiator support (this is the magic phrase to Google for) and they will Just Work.
Of course, it's not simple. You need a piece of software known as a distributed lock manager to handle the atomicity issues. But you can buy them, and they will Just Work.
This kind of setup has been around for years in the big iron SCSI world. I haven't come across anything yet for Firewire, though. Personally, I'd be a bit dubious as to whether you're going to anything fast enough or stable enough for Firewire; high-performance SCSI beats Firewire into the ground, and all the kit is available off-the-shelf. But I'd be interested to see if anything comes up.
Well, yeah. That's why you get a Green Cone. They're deceptively simple; there's some very cunning engineering in there that makes your compost decompose properly. It's not just a bucket.
Basically, it's a solar-powered convector. There's a big air space inside, and baffles to route the air into the compost. The air is drawn through the material, maintaining high oxygen levels and preventing anaerobic decomposition (this was the problem you had; without proper ventilation, you get anaerobic bacteria, which produce assorted unpleasant substances including ketones, which smell to high heaven). It's largely sealed and even if you leave the lid off, they don't smell.
If installed properly --- it's got to get sunlight --- it basically requires no maintenance. You put waste in. Nothing comes out. The decomposed material is absorbed into the ground under the Cone. They say that in a particularly bad year the bacteria might not be able to decompose everything, and you may need to empty it... but this will only happen every couple of years at most.
They are seriously neat gadgets, and are a stunning example of high-tech designs implemented in low-tech materials. They're definately worth checking out at their website. If I didn't have a flat I'd buy one like a shot.
...
The same sort of technology is coming into fashion. In Australia I've seen lavatories built this way. These have a solar-powered fan to force the air through the waste; air is sucked down through the lavatory, through the sewage, which is kept dry, and then vented out a chimney at the top. No water needed. No power needed. No maintenance needed, except for someone to come and clean the human-accessable bits every now and then. In fact, you can make money out of them --- the processed sewage is top-grade fertiliser.
Firstly: yes, for city driving, which is where hybrid cars will be really useful. Diesels only get those fantastic mileages when driving long distance.
Secondly: remember that US gallons are a different size to the gallons the rest of the world uses! Assuming the article was using US gallons, that would would come out as 50*1.2 = 60 mpg.
The space shuttle is not successful. The space shuttle is an utter disaster. In fact, the space shuttle is, arguably, the worst thing that ever happened to the American space programme.
The problem is that the shuttle is trying to be both a man-rated lifter, a reusable lifter, and a heavy lifter, and as a result it does all three incredibly badly. It's a massive money pit that swallowed the American space station, SSTOs, the moon base, and any manned Mars missions...
Put it like this:
Space shuttle capacity: 6 people, 15 tonnes cargo; cost: $600M.
Soyuz capacity: 3 people, no cargo; cost: $60M.
Proton capacity: no people, 20 tonnes cargo; cost: $70M.
This means that you could replace a single shuttle launch with the Russian alternative, launch three seperate vehicles, and have over four hundred million dollars in change! With a single shuttle launch budget, you could put nearly two hundred tonnes into LEO --- or sixteen tonnes into GEO, and the shuttle can't do that at all.
Unfortunately, the shuttle is now become political, so noone's going to be able to get rid of it. It's going to hang around consuming more and more of NASA's budget, until eventually another one will blow up, and then NASA will be reorganised out of existence. Meanwhile, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Pakistani, and basically anyone else with a clue (and alas, I don't live in such a country) will be using disposable launchers to maintain their space presence. The ISS will probably be kept up until the shuttle explosion, and then it'll be quietly evacuated and deorbited; but by then, there'll be other space stations, at least some of them privately funded.
...would make a really good name for an east Asian domain registrar.
Damn straight. Venus has the same gravity as Earth, remember? Which means that getting stuff out of its gravity well is an incredible hassle. If you need an Ariane or a Proton to get an object off Earth, you're going to need another Ariane or Proton to get it off Venus again once you've landed it there. And the super-dense atmosphere is going to cause even more problems.
No, launching from Venus is a problem that can happily wait until nuclear rockets or antigravity are feasible.
Besides, if there is life on Venus, I'd much rather study it in situ than bring some back here. While it almost certainly wouldn't survive in an Earth environment, that 'almost' worries me a bit...
Apart from anything else, the BSD userland makes a great starting point for a cut-down server. Not only is it audited, but it's odd enough that most attacks on it will fail.
If it's so amazingly simple, feel free to go ahead and make it!
Okay. Let's see. Let's use cardboard voting slips, with pencils.
So: we have a cheap, simple, secure voting system that's hard to spoof (with adequate physical security), easy to use, and with excellent accountability. You still need to count the votes, of course; here in the UK, we use volunteer bank tellers, who are really good at this sort of thing. The system scales really well, because each voting region is sized by population, and each area has about the same ratio of bank tellers to non bank tellers. The votes are counted in O(n) where n is the number of votes in the largest area, and then the results are phoned in to a central location.
And it all still works if the power goes out.
Why do we need machines, again?
Available from Breadbox Computing. (They call it New Deal Office 2000.)
It's an operating systemish thing that runs on top of DOS. What you get is a complete Windows-like operating environment with virtual memory, long filenames, threads, outline fonts, WYSIWYG word processor, drawing package, database, spreadsheet, loads of applications, basic web browser, email, PPP, etc. It runs in bugger all memory. Minimum useful spec is a 386 with 4MB and 20MB or so of hard disk space, but it'll run on a 286 and up with 640kB or RAM (but it won't be pleasant). All the applications can deal with documents too big to fit in memory.
It is, unfortunately, payware. But it's 100 USD, it's a complete integrated solution containing everything from high-level apps to printer drivers, it's easy to use --- the user interfaces are all customisable; for experts you can rearrange the toolbars, for newbies you can turn most of the buttons and menus off to make something dead simple --- it's an excellent choice for low-end systems. It'll run like a storm on your machine.
(I did my fourth-year project writeup at university on it. 300 pages in a single document. No problem whatsoever. The built-in word processor is a hell of a lot more flexible and powerful than a lot of commercial products I've seen. For ease of use it beats Word into a cocked hat, and it's got most of the useful features --- frame-based text flowing, built-in vector drawing tools, built-in bitmap drawing tools, rotatable & transformable & editable text, wrapping text around graphics, spelling checker and thesaurus, hierarchical paragraph styles...)
You will have to support them, including installing it on the empty machine. However, they'll need much less support than Windows or, heaven forbid, Unix will. It won't run Windows apps, which is a plus. It will run third-party GEOS apps, but you probably don't want them to.
It's ideally suited for a turnkey system, which I think is what you want here.
There's a laser corner reflector on the moon, left there by Apollo 11. It's the only instrument still in use today; fire a laser pulse at the moon, wait for the reflected pulse, and you get a really accurate measure of how far away it is.
Given that it's usable by anyone in the world (who has a really big telescope and laser setup) I suspect it would be rather hard to fake...
A friend of mine has a microwave with twenty to thirty buttons, including a full keypad, with a dozen different cooking modes, memory facility, loads of preprogrammed settings, and an LCD display to let you know what you've done. It's so complicated it actually has a special mode where it will run through the program without producing any microwaves, just so you can check your programming. Oh, yes, and it has a door release.
When my microwave dies, I'm going to replace it with as identical a model as I can find...
Damn straight. Nearly all of them require you to type in an expression and evaluate it, which makes using them a complete pain.
I have a FX451M. I love it. It's ancient and falling to pieces; the battery went long ago, and the solar panel isn't sufficient to trigger the reset circuitry, so every time I need to use it I have to get it out of base 14.5 or whatever the confused circuitry has decided to put it in this time, and the hinge is going so that the buttons on the right half of it only work if I press a certain place on the case.
So I want to replace it. I had a look at Casio's current selection. Every single one uses expression evaluation, which makes 'em useless for my purpose. I don't want a pocket computer. I want a calculator.
My FX451 is small, simple, flexible, powerful, and I know it so well that I can think with it. It's got the four bases I commonly use, it's got all the logical operations I commonly use, it's a scientific calculator, it does unit conversions (saving me from remembering how many bloody millimetres there are in an inch this year), it's got a decent set of scientific constants, and everything is two keypresses away. (The FX451 is wallet-shaped, with lots of extra buttons on the right half of the wallet, so it doesn't use the shift key much.) It's so well designed you don't need a manual to work it, and I'd like to see you try that on a modern calculator.
Since I can't replace it, I've been seriously considering reboxing it in another case with, like, real keyswitches. I'd lose the portability but keep the feature set.
So where are the real calculators? Why is it that all you can get are these idiotic semi-programmable user interface nightmares? There has to be a demand for simple, powerful calculators, so why isn't anybody meeting it?
Unfortunately, de Beers controls the market to such an extent that it can be tricky finding a jeweller willing to order and set a synthetic diamond for you...
Um, what?
Here in the UK, we're slowly but surely switching over to all-digital broadcasts. I forget when the analogue turn-off date is, but we seem to be on target (more or less). You can't get a new cable or satellite installation these days that isn't digital, and the BBC is picking up the broadcast digital stations.
This is all done with a little box that sits under your TV. It decodes the digital data, and then you plug in a SCART connector or S-Video or whatever you like and watch it on your analogue TV. Usually the boxes come free when you sign the contract. For broadcast, you'll probably end up buying the boxes for under 50 UKP, but then the channels are all free.
So what am I missing? What's all this stuff about having to replace your TVs?
Setting it up's pretty easy; just tell Linux that the root is /dev/sda1, insert the mass storage driver into the kernel, etc. No initrd or user daemon is necessary.
However, the delay-before-detection bit me. USB seems to be initialised last, so by the time Linux tries to mount the root filesystem the USB bus is still powering up and Linux panics because it can't find the root. I fixed this by patching the kernel to have a 3s delay just before mounting the root filesystem. What I'd really like to do is to move the USB initialisation so that it occurs before the IDE initialisation; as detecting the IDE devices takes about three seconds anyway, that would give time for the USB stuff to come up without slowing down the boot process.
The eyes can play very funny tricks on you. I live under the flight path for Heathrow, and at night you see these huge diamond-shaped aircraft flying over. I look at one, I know it's a jet, I tell myself it's a jet, but I can clearly see the lines connecting the nose and tail with the wing tips, and the body is easily visible.
The brain's got this amazing pattern-recognition system as part of the visual processing. Unfortunately, when it doesn't know what something is, it tends to guess, and one of the algorithms it uses is to connect points with lines... and to fill in shapes... and the four beacons on the nose, wingtips and tail of a 747, seen at night, is perfect material for this.
Of course, I don't know exactly what you saw, I wasn't there. But I strongly suspect what it was was a jet, a lot further away than it looked, banking away from you (so making the tail beacon invisible). You didn't make any sound because passenger jets are pretty quiet and it was a long way away, and any noise that reached you was drowned in the traffic noise.
Sorry.
On the purely literary side, it's a dreadful book. The plot exists purely to put across her various philosophical points. Her characters are so thin they don't even count as cardboard; they are pure stereotypes (you can find most of the same people, with different names, in The Fountainhead. The writing style is clunky to say the least. And that lecture at the end --- good gods, woman, don't you have any sense of pacing?
And yet... there's an energy behind it that makes it compulsive reading. I couldn't put it down. That counts for something.
And now the philosophy. I am not an economist; I can only call it as I see it. I think she's making the exact opposite mistake Karl Marx made. Marx forgot that humans are greedy and selfish, and so won't put the same effort into working for an abstract state that they will into working for themselves. Ayn Rand, however, forgot that humans need to care and believe, and her Objectivist society is completely uncaring. If you don't or can't work, you will drop off the bottom and society will forget you and let you die. There is no safety net. (Imagine what would happen during a period of surplus labour, for example.) In fact, Objectivism would rather let you die; if you're not economically useful, you would be better got rid of. Humans can't live like that.
In fact, it's rather telling that all the Great Figures of her perfect society in Atlas Shrugged are more alien than some of the best SF aliens. All the interesting people are the villains. The only --- the only --- person I could identify with is Jim Taggart, Dagny's brother, who is unable to pull his life out of the mire and ends up spiralling down with the rest of the contrived, doomed society.
I won't deny it has its moments. The image of the doomed train heading down the tunnel, the only worthwhile person on board running for safety, is extremely powerful (and rather telling in that it demonstrates Rand's disregard for 'unproductive' human life). The random beggars wandering around saying, "Who is John Galt?" And I won't deny it's been influential, and I will agree that it's a must-read for anyone into economics. But for gods' sake don't take it at its face values. Think about it. It does not make sense.
(And if you liked it, you need to read the potted synopsis of an oddly similar book called 'Prometheus Bowed' [more or less, memory lapse] in the Illuminatus books...)
Although, I have had problems that if you try and resize the rxvt it stops responding, and stupid Windows doesn't kill the children if you kill the rxvt so you end up with dead processes hanging around if you're not careful, but in principle it all works fine. ssh, scp, the lot. It all interoperates with Unix beautifully.
- Up to 12 levels of tunnels
- Nuclear bunkers
- Lots of human skulls
- Whole tribes of people living there
- Mass burial sites
- A hastily abandoned chemical laboratory
- A 3000-seat bunker under a cathedral
- Strange religious rites
- All kinds of other weird stuff
It would be scary if it wasn't so fascinating. The article linked to above is quite old; have any Russian slashdotters seen the TV programme mentioned?My father recently built a conservatory to my parent's house. He did this by spending about a year meticulously planning it, researching the various companies that supply conservatories, planning all the stages it would take to build (this long to lay the foundation, this long to put up the frame, this long to put on the roof, this long to glaze, etc; plus that stage 1 must be done during a dry spell, as must stages 2 & 3, but it's all right to get wet before stage 2 and after stage 3, and so on).
The result? The conservatory went up smoothly and flawlessly and *completely* perfectly. (Although I did have to help shovel about two tonnes of soil. God, soil is heavy.) But if you calculate the amount of hours he put into that conservatory, it would hardly be cost efficient --- if he had to pay for those hours. Which he didn't.
The next big project is to put in central heating. This involves ripping up every floor in the house and installing a wood stove. This one's been planned for about five years...
You need to read the comp.basilisk FAQ.
Treat 'em with respect, people. Big batteries are seriously kick-ass things.
What with 'Film, Solaris', I thought the post was going to be talking about a certain obscure Russian science-fiction movie...
Arthur: You know, it's at times like this that I really wish I had listened to what my mother had told me when I was young.
Ford: Why, what did she say?
Arthur: (crossly) I don't know, I didn't listen.