We're sort of already there with cars. I nearly bought an Audi A2 a while back. Imagine this: an aluminium small car that does 70 MPG, who wouldnt want one!
What put me off the purchase was the fact that on an A2 you cant open the bonnet (hood:) yourself. And my Audi dealer claimed if I got another mechanic to do it, my warranty is void. I have no idea whether this is legal or not in the UK (though I suspect it isnt!) but the fact is I didnt want that kind of hassle for my GBP15k so I voted with my wallet and bought another marque's 60MPG steel car.
I think this research misses the point. They deal with the number of security advisories, not with how quickly or effectively (or even if) the holes were fixed.
I would be far more interested to hear, on the MacOs example for instance, how Apple responded to its security holes and how that compared to those of Microsoft or the Linux community.
The vast majority of spam I receive has random from and reply-to addresses. Thus an autoreply just bounces harmlessly off into the ether, or if it's really unlucky, into the catchall of whichever hapless geek owns the random address the spamers mailing software picked.
So dont worry too much about your company policy signing you up for more spam, if your spam is like mine all they are doing is generating more internet background noise.
In fact, count yourself lucky that you have such a high useful mail to spam ratio, I wish I had that little spam.
Further to my comment earlier I decided to have a look for a picture of a Play Station on Google.
The Play Station was a failed colaboration between Sony and Nintendo to produce a SNES with a CD-ROM. I remember when working for a PS1 developer in the '90s that sony used to get very upset with people who used the phrase "Play Station" instead of "PlayStation", there's the reason why.
Edge magazine here in the UK had a picture of a Play Station a while back so pictures do exist but I cant find one on the web. The best I can find are these two links which mention the project in passing.
Damn! I was hoping to see the famous Sony/Nintendo stillborn child, the Play Station (note before you flame:Play Station i.e.2 words not PlayStation!), and it seems to be about the only one he hasnt got! Or did I miss it amongst all the Slashdotted photographs?
Editors for DOS migrants
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I used to use JOE but moved to vi when I found myself working on more JOE-less machines. I used because it had the Wordstar keys I was used to from the DOS editor I used at the time.
There are still a lot of people out there with DOS skills who find life difficult when moving to a Linux or similar environment. For many this might seem like a retrograde step, but I have often wished that there was a port of the DOS 5 Edit interface on a Linux editor, complete with clunky MS style menu system. If people are to be encouraged to move operating systems, a few familiar looking tools would help them along their way.
As I understood it from the last time this was mooted here in the UK we were going to see this as a last mile solution from your local distribution transformer to your home. The substation would get its internet connection via fibre and redistribute it in much the same way as low power mains intercom and network products work, with very low range. In the UK context this would be at the 11kv-to-240v transformer which usually serves a street of houses.
Am I right in gathering that the systems described here use high power HF on powerlines to distribute over much longer distances than this?
And since light won't be disturbed by the magnetic fields generated by the current
I remember reading a very interesting article years ago, may have been 1980s, about a device for measuring leakage currents in metal pylons(towers) on very high voltage power transmission lines. It was a fibre optic device, you wrapped it round the base of the pylon and measured the amount of light you could transmit through it. It seems that the magenetic field generated by the leakage current affected the refractive index of the fibre, varying the amount of light that could escape, thus you could non-intrusively measure the current by measuring the amount of light you lost.
Of course, they probably used a special fibre optic material with the right properties, but I have often wondered how they get round this with the fibre-on-powerline systems. Sadly I cant find anything about it on the www.
I thought Hershey produced those cocoa flavoured sugar candy bars that make such a good alternative to Kendal Mint Cake when I'm over there. The news that they also make chocolate is most welcome, I must try to find some next time I'm somewhere I can spend dollars.
You'll be telling me next that Cadbury have started producing chocolate!
Yahoo's more than a search engine
on
Yahoo to Dump Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is as well to bear in mind at this point that while Yahoo started out as a classified directory and became a search engine, the search engine probably isnt such a big deal for them these days. They left it behind when they became a portal. Remember portals?:) Services like Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Mail, Geo5h1tties, Yahoo personals etc etc all join the search engine to make up the greater Yahoo portal. I am guessing that most Yahoo users rarely use it for searching these days.
Looking at this story I have a strong sense of deja vu. As a member of a team competing in the UK Robot Wars series I remeber 2 or 3 years ago when a disparate group of teams either rejected by, disenchanted with or simply not involved with the TV production company tried to go it alone with an independant combat robots association. Their business model was based around a touring roadshow for which they set about building a mobile arena. In principle this was a fine idea, but AFAIK it stalled for lack of money and management issues.
I appreciate that the DARPA teams are working in a different ballpark from your average garden shed RW team. But the same basic economic rules apply and looking at the web site the sense of deja vu is increased. If they've got these sponsors then power to them but yet again the www site is a little sparse on the subject. You need more than just a shared sense of rejection to make a business model.
First, those of us who rely on Cobalt appliances will stand a better chance of finding useful updates and peer support as no doubt from the existing Cobalt users communities a thriving community will appear around this project. I have spoken in the past about Sun's lacklustre approach to providing software updates for these boxes so from there any progress can only be an improvement.
Second, the Cobalt www based admin software is not that bad. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's quite good. It allows people who would normally have no idea to administer a www connected server appliance and having at times seen some of the competing commercial offerings I'd say it does that job well and I'll certainly spend some time poking around inside it. To have this project in the public domain as open source can only be of benefit to the open source world as a whole.
I await with interest further developments upon this piece of software.
Have you ever heard the Mario Bros. theme done by a 90-piece orchestra? It's beautiful.
No, as it happens.
A quick Altavista search delivers the goods, I must try it out on my classical-music-snob associate, ask him if he can identify it:)
I'm not a low level expert so can someone please explain whether the following is possible.
A motherboard is a load of hardware, a processor and a chunk of flash memory, right? When you turn it on, it looks in the flash memory and runs the code there. It could be the good ol' BIOS, it could be LinuxBios, Open Firmware, the Intel/Microsoft DRM thing, whatever.
So would it be unreasonable to expect to see a motherboard shipped with a CD with several alternative BIOS-like interfaces for the customer to choose the one they would like to re-flash the board with? Most boards would stick with the Wintel route, that's what monopolies are about, but if customers want an alternative someone will sell it to them.
The players to watch here are not Intel or M$. They are the motherboard and chipset makers in Taiwan. These are the people to whom what the customer wants _really_ matters and they have proved themselves quite capable of going against the party line when it suits them in the past. Just as a graphics card manufacturer has to provide Linux support these days, so will a motherboard manufacturer in the future if they expect to be taken seriously by the early adopters.
It would be nice to believe that the Dawning of a New Era of Open Source Peace and Harmony was nigh and Microsoft were about to be consigned to the pit of doom from whence they came, but before we get too enthusiastic we should consider one of the things that put them where they are.
Anyone who installed one of the earliest versions of Windows 95 (look, I crave forgiveness, I was younger and being paid to do it, OK!) will remember that it didnt come with MSIE, instead it came with the Microsoft Network. Back in the early '90s (so went the script) the internet wasnt going to happen, instead we were all going to use paid online services like AOL and Compuserve. MSN was on the roadmap as Microsoft's entry into the market and in the MSdream it was going to sweep aside AOL and Compuserve lust like MSIE swept aside Netscape a few years later.
Of course, we know it didnt happen that way. If MS had been IBM we'd have seen them soldier on with the MSN dream and suddenly have to backpedal in about 2000 just in time to miss the dotcom thing and lose loads of cash. As it was they dropped the idea like a hot potato and changed the direction of the entire company in record time to embrace the Internet. It's an overused phrase, but the rest is history.
My point? Dont write off Microsoft. They've stayed where they are by flexibility and they wont have lost that flexibility. It could be different this time of course because the flexibility of the OS movement is what makes it so cool, but I'll start dancing on Microsoft's grave when I see the headstone.
Quite a few of my customers have used Cobalt Raq servers in hosting facilities. In my view they were a fantastic product, offering a very useful Linux box to me the developer and one of the best www based admin frontends around to my non-tech-savvy customers.
I know that Sun paid well too much for the company and that perhaps in a post-dotcom culture the market for server appliances may have contracted somewhat, but it surprises me that there was aparently no money to be made from selling Cobalts. I have met more than one hosting provider desperate to source more Raqs over the past year.
In my view Sun have damaged their reputation in my sector of the marketplace. Fair enough they're dropping the range, so I guess they expect customers to be happy to migrate to equivalent Sun kit. But how can I trust to buy a replacement Sun brnaded server from a company whose idea of support for a range of web server appliances was to stick with PHP 4.0.6, a rather aged piece of software that simply doesnt run everything these days. Leaving people like me to either compile our own or scour the web for install-and-pray packages would be fine for a geeks-only free distribution but is not what you expect from a product you pay good money for.
The idea that companies who use open source software and give nothing back are just taking and not giving is preposterous. They ARE giving, and in more ways than one.
First of all, they're giving the OSS community their support by using the code. Not much, but knowing that makes a difference.
Then, they're giving employment to the geeks that roll out the code. I've built a successful career... well, a career anyway, out of being paid to run,use and tame free software, and I owe it not only to the free software I work with but to the people who chose to use the free sotware. My career, and the things my employers can do, would have been a lot more limited had they not had another option but the roadmap laid down for them by a well known developer of feature limited and proprietary software.
It's a commercial world out there chaps, let's not forget it. Every one of you who gets paid to do something based on free software has been given something by your employer that depends on that choice of theirs: your liveliehood. If you still feel that nothing's been given back then dont break the chain, give something back yourselves and write some free software of your own.
In a word: yes!
When I was a young and foolish electronic engineering student I and my friends did just that and partially ruined an otherwise perfectly sound rubber keyboard Sinclair Spectrum. I can not remember the exact details but it was not a succesful project. IIRC we tried feeding the system clock line from a squarewave of our own making and tried to run some timer code in an EPROM to flash an LED on an i/o port. My guess is that the Sinclair support chips (and possibly even the NEC Z80 chip our spectrum used) were like AMD processors: just about able to work at their rated frequency, not higher.
Why cant they produce a dual voltage version? This mystifies me.
In a dual voltage switch mode power supply the AC input is rectified to form a high voltage DC which is then switched at high frequency(tens of kHz or so) and passed through a ferrite transformer to step down the voltage. The dual voltage bit comes from the rectifier being a bridge rectifier when you set the switch to "240" and a voltage doubler when you set the switch to "110", both giving a DC voltage to the switch somewhere around 300V.
I would be extremely surprised to find these piezo transformers work at line frequency, i.e. 50 or 60 Hz, I'd expect this to have a detrimental effect on the size of the thing. So I'd expect that the circuit would be surprisingly similar to a conventional switch mode PSU with a rectifier and high frequency switch driving the high voltage side of the piezo transformer. Hence you could use the same bridge rec/voltage doubler arangement I described earlier to give you a dual voltage PSU.
If there's a piezo expert around to explain whether the piezo transformer will work at 50/60 Hz, I'd love to hear an answer to this one.
Slashdot Mirror
" In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click.
Step 1: scrap my free software based www site.
Step 2: welcome to my FPS-holidays-for-lawyers website!
Step 3: Profit!!
This site has quite a few links to people's NBTV projects and software: Narrow-bandwidth Television Association
What put me off the purchase was the fact that on an A2 you cant open the bonnet (hood:) yourself. And my Audi dealer claimed if I got another mechanic to do it, my warranty is void. I have no idea whether this is legal or not in the UK (though I suspect it isnt!) but the fact is I didnt want that kind of hassle for my GBP15k so I voted with my wallet and bought another marque's 60MPG steel car.
I would be far more interested to hear, on the MacOs example for instance, how Apple responded to its security holes and how that compared to those of Microsoft or the Linux community.
So dont worry too much about your company policy signing you up for more spam, if your spam is like mine all they are doing is generating more internet background noise.
In fact, count yourself lucky that you have such a high useful mail to spam ratio, I wish I had that little spam.
The Play Station was a failed colaboration between Sony and Nintendo to produce a SNES with a CD-ROM. I remember when working for a PS1 developer in the '90s that sony used to get very upset with people who used the phrase "Play Station" instead of "PlayStation", there's the reason why.
Edge magazine here in the UK had a picture of a Play Station a while back so pictures do exist but I cant find one on the web. The best I can find are these two links which mention the project in passing.
http://www.nintendoland.com/home2.htm?snes/snescdr .htm 2 08
http://hankfiles.pcvsconsole.com/answer.php?file=
Damn! I was hoping to see the famous Sony/Nintendo stillborn child, the Play Station (note before you flame:Play Station i.e.2 words not PlayStation!), and it seems to be about the only one he hasnt got! Or did I miss it amongst all the Slashdotted photographs?
I used to use JOE but moved to vi when I found myself working on more JOE-less machines. I used because it had the Wordstar keys I was used to from the DOS editor I used at the time. There are still a lot of people out there with DOS skills who find life difficult when moving to a Linux or similar environment. For many this might seem like a retrograde step, but I have often wished that there was a port of the DOS 5 Edit interface on a Linux editor, complete with clunky MS style menu system. If people are to be encouraged to move operating systems, a few familiar looking tools would help them along their way.
Am I right in gathering that the systems described here use high power HF on powerlines to distribute over much longer distances than this?
I remember reading a very interesting article years ago, may have been 1980s, about a device for measuring leakage currents in metal pylons(towers) on very high voltage power transmission lines. It was a fibre optic device, you wrapped it round the base of the pylon and measured the amount of light you could transmit through it. It seems that the magenetic field generated by the leakage current affected the refractive index of the fibre, varying the amount of light that could escape, thus you could non-intrusively measure the current by measuring the amount of light you lost.
Of course, they probably used a special fibre optic material with the right properties, but I have often wondered how they get round this with the fibre-on-powerline systems. Sadly I cant find anything about it on the www.
Damn.reply to a post with a funny and meanwhile the parent gets modded down. C'est la vie!, mod me down, mod me down...
You'll be telling me next that Cadbury have started producing chocolate!
It is as well to bear in mind at this point that while Yahoo started out as a classified directory and became a search engine, the search engine probably isnt such a big deal for them these days. They left it behind when they became a portal. Remember portals?:) Services like Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Mail, Geo5h1tties, Yahoo personals etc etc all join the search engine to make up the greater Yahoo portal. I am guessing that most Yahoo users rarely use it for searching these days.
I appreciate that the DARPA teams are working in a different ballpark from your average garden shed RW team. But the same basic economic rules apply and looking at the web site the sense of deja vu is increased. If they've got these sponsors then power to them but yet again the www site is a little sparse on the subject. You need more than just a shared sense of rejection to make a business model.
First, those of us who rely on Cobalt appliances will stand a better chance of finding useful updates and peer support as no doubt from the existing Cobalt users communities a thriving community will appear around this project. I have spoken in the past about Sun's lacklustre approach to providing software updates for these boxes so from there any progress can only be an improvement.
Second, the Cobalt www based admin software is not that bad. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's quite good. It allows people who would normally have no idea to administer a www connected server appliance and having at times seen some of the competing commercial offerings I'd say it does that job well and I'll certainly spend some time poking around inside it. To have this project in the public domain as open source can only be of benefit to the open source world as a whole.
I await with interest further developments upon this piece of software.
No, as it happens.
A quick Altavista search delivers the goods, I must try it out on my classical-music-snob associate, ask him if he can identify it:)
A motherboard is a load of hardware, a processor and a chunk of flash memory, right? When you turn it on, it looks in the flash memory and runs the code there. It could be the good ol' BIOS, it could be LinuxBios, Open Firmware, the Intel/Microsoft DRM thing, whatever.
So would it be unreasonable to expect to see a motherboard shipped with a CD with several alternative BIOS-like interfaces for the customer to choose the one they would like to re-flash the board with? Most boards would stick with the Wintel route, that's what monopolies are about, but if customers want an alternative someone will sell it to them.
The players to watch here are not Intel or M$. They are the motherboard and chipset makers in Taiwan. These are the people to whom what the customer wants _really_ matters and they have proved themselves quite capable of going against the party line when it suits them in the past. Just as a graphics card manufacturer has to provide Linux support these days, so will a motherboard manufacturer in the future if they expect to be taken seriously by the early adopters.
Anyone who installed one of the earliest versions of Windows 95 (look, I crave forgiveness, I was younger and being paid to do it, OK!) will remember that it didnt come with MSIE, instead it came with the Microsoft Network. Back in the early '90s (so went the script) the internet wasnt going to happen, instead we were all going to use paid online services like AOL and Compuserve. MSN was on the roadmap as Microsoft's entry into the market and in the MSdream it was going to sweep aside AOL and Compuserve lust like MSIE swept aside Netscape a few years later.
Of course, we know it didnt happen that way. If MS had been IBM we'd have seen them soldier on with the MSN dream and suddenly have to backpedal in about 2000 just in time to miss the dotcom thing and lose loads of cash. As it was they dropped the idea like a hot potato and changed the direction of the entire company in record time to embrace the Internet. It's an overused phrase, but the rest is history.
My point? Dont write off Microsoft. They've stayed where they are by flexibility and they wont have lost that flexibility. It could be different this time of course because the flexibility of the OS movement is what makes it so cool, but I'll start dancing on Microsoft's grave when I see the headstone.
I know that Sun paid well too much for the company and that perhaps in a post-dotcom culture the market for server appliances may have contracted somewhat, but it surprises me that there was aparently no money to be made from selling Cobalts. I have met more than one hosting provider desperate to source more Raqs over the past year.
In my view Sun have damaged their reputation in my sector of the marketplace. Fair enough they're dropping the range, so I guess they expect customers to be happy to migrate to equivalent Sun kit. But how can I trust to buy a replacement Sun brnaded server from a company whose idea of support for a range of web server appliances was to stick with PHP 4.0.6, a rather aged piece of software that simply doesnt run everything these days. Leaving people like me to either compile our own or scour the web for install-and-pray packages would be fine for a geeks-only free distribution but is not what you expect from a product you pay good money for.
Nah, where they went wrong was hiring Damien Hirst. The extra weight of that pickled calf was guaranteed to send them spinning out of control!
First of all, they're giving the OSS community their support by using the code. Not much, but knowing that makes a difference.
Then, they're giving employment to the geeks that roll out the code. I've built a successful career... well, a career anyway, out of being paid to run,use and tame free software, and I owe it not only to the free software I work with but to the people who chose to use the free sotware. My career, and the things my employers can do, would have been a lot more limited had they not had another option but the roadmap laid down for them by a well known developer of feature limited and proprietary software.
It's a commercial world out there chaps, let's not forget it. Every one of you who gets paid to do something based on free software has been given something by your employer that depends on that choice of theirs: your liveliehood. If you still feel that nothing's been given back then dont break the chain, give something back yourselves and write some free software of your own.
I cant remember where I first saw the stuff linked below, some of the ZX stuff wasnt quite closed source enough.
Prepare your soldering iron:)
How to build your own ZX80/ZX81
Another zx81 clone using an FPGA
Yet another ZX81
I was about to say "Shame no one's done it for a Spectrum", but a quick Google search reveals that someone has. I am not worthy.
Is this a worthy haggis?
Has anybody overclocked a Z-80?
In a word: yes!When I was a young and foolish electronic engineering student I and my friends did just that and partially ruined an otherwise perfectly sound rubber keyboard Sinclair Spectrum. I can not remember the exact details but it was not a succesful project. IIRC we tried feeding the system clock line from a squarewave of our own making and tried to run some timer code in an EPROM to flash an LED on an i/o port. My guess is that the Sinclair support chips (and possibly even the NEC Z80 chip our spectrum used) were like AMD processors: just about able to work at their rated frequency, not higher.
I've not looked at a z80 since then but a quick Google search finds that the instruction set has not faded away, here are just two offerings claimed to be Z80 compatable.p rocessors/
http://www.rabbitsemiconductor.com/products/Micro
http://www.ab-semicon.com/datasheets/181e-20.pdf
I've not tried tandooring a haggis yet, you've given me ideas.
In a dual voltage switch mode power supply the AC input is rectified to form a high voltage DC which is then switched at high frequency(tens of kHz or so) and passed through a ferrite transformer to step down the voltage. The dual voltage bit comes from the rectifier being a bridge rectifier when you set the switch to "240" and a voltage doubler when you set the switch to "110", both giving a DC voltage to the switch somewhere around 300V.
I would be extremely surprised to find these piezo transformers work at line frequency, i.e. 50 or 60 Hz, I'd expect this to have a detrimental effect on the size of the thing. So I'd expect that the circuit would be surprisingly similar to a conventional switch mode PSU with a rectifier and high frequency switch driving the high voltage side of the piezo transformer. Hence you could use the same bridge rec/voltage doubler arangement I described earlier to give you a dual voltage PSU.
If there's a piezo expert around to explain whether the piezo transformer will work at 50/60 Hz, I'd love to hear an answer to this one.
Like it:)
Why didnt I think of looking on a bike manufacturer's site?
You're UK based by the looks of your URL, have you ever come across the Ixion motorcycle mailing list?