Re:FOUR, er FIVE symlink styles, all kinda *wrong*
on
Vista To Get Symlinks?
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· Score: 1
"But isn't "subst" the same thing as mapping a directory to a drive letter?"
That's the problem, it looks like the same thing, but has wildly different effects.
In the old DOS days, "subst" was done by hooking the BIOS disk I/O calls and blindly mapping the drive indices. About 20 lines of asm. Worked swell, except when certain programs went straight to the disk controller. Then you'd end up backing up or formatting the wrong disk.
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Mappng a drive uses the barely documented file system redirector calls. Very different animal from "subst".
FOUR, er FIVE symlink styles, all kinda *wrong*
on
Vista To Get Symlinks?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So there's going to be FOUR ways to alias files and folders and volumes:
(1) Mapping a directory to a drive letter.
(2) Shortcuts.
(3) NTFS mount drive as folder.
(4) The new symlink thingy.
oops, isnt there still:
the old DOS "subst" command too?
Make that FIVE ways. All of them looking somewhat alike, but all with subtly different syntax, semantics, overhead, and security implications.
Sweet!
"Seeing it clearly" is much more dependent on the distance through the atmosphere you have to look through. The distance to Mars is only a teensy, tiny, itsy-bitsy, microscopically shorter right now.
To see Mars most clearly you should wait until it's as high above the horizon as possible, not until it's a wee bit closer.
Good info, but beware of anything from "Spycatcher". Quite a bit of the info in there is uncorroberated and even plainly incorrect. He writes that he discovered local oscillator emanations in 1960-something and the CIA wasnt aware of it.
Not so, radio receivers as far back as 1938 were SPECIFICALLY designed with extra care, isolation, and shielding to prevent local oscillator emanations. Navy subs even went to the length of using obsolete but local-oscillator-less TRF radios, just to avoid the slightest possibility of their being detected in this way. As late as 1945 the Navy was stocking obsolete type 26 and type 27 tubes, just for these old but trustworthy radios.
Sarcasm is better when it fits the situation. There are scads of radar images showing very strong reflections from windowsill corners. This is not an arguable phenomenon. In fact the USAF spent many $$$ trying to figure out how to minimize getting these reflections-- they tend to be much stronger than the reflections from more desireable landmarks.
No great precision is needed, as the surfaces only need be as flat as 1/4 of the wavelength-- several centimeters. And with the transmitters right across the street, no great precision is needed on the angles either.
>K band is near 20 GHZ. There wasn't much in the 1 GHZ and up band then. Vacuum tubes just didn't work that high.
You seem to be confusing the years or the technology. By 1960 there were K-band magnetrons and klystrons capable of kilowatts of CW output power.
And yes, the seal might have been at VHF or UHF frequencies, but that just strengthens my argument-- this is REALLY old news-- It could have been done as early as WW2 !!
Regards,
A_H
haw, haw haw... For those of you not in on the joke, TEMPEST is some military spec for electromagnetic leakage. Just like the Steve Martin machinist's in-crowd joke-- "that's a sprocket, not a socket!" Haw.
Methinks you're looking at it kinda backwards.
Without the correct angle of incidence, you get neither reflection nor polarization.
At the correct angle, you get reflection, which just so happens to also be polarized.
But the incident polarization cannot *trigger* reflection, no mather what the angle of polarization.
Regards!
>"You cant modulate a 3mm wave to record 0.001 mm changes."
You're partially correct. It would be difficult to detect the modulations, EXCEPT that if you're also the sender of the original signal, you can mix the incoming and outgoing signals and extract the phase difference. Subtraction is a VERY powerful signal-extraction method!
There's an anecdote in the engineering field: where some poor sods at Racal-Dana had a phase detector at 50MHz that was so sensitive to vibration they had to stop their experiments whenever a plane took off from Orange County Airport (quite a few miles away). They eventually had to get special thick aluminum wall castings to enclose the phase detector to block the vibrations. And this was at just 50MHz. Phase detectors get more sensitive proportional to operating frequency, so a 5,000 MHz phase detector is *mighty* sensitive!
There were no "lasers" in 1960. At least not the very stable continuous-wave lasers that you need for this, and especially not in the USSR.
Think-- do lasers go through glass? Do lasers bounce off glass? Might other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation act similarly?
Microwaves bounce off most anything, if you pick the right angle. Conveniently, most buildings have the windows recessed a bit, and any concave corner makes an EXCELLENT "corner reflector", which has the amazing property of bouncing any incident beam right back to the sender.
Not only did they bounce microwaves off glass-- they had the hutzpah to give the US ambassador a honorary plaque, which he hung on his office wall. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little diaphragm inside the plaque, just the right wavelength to reflect K-band microwavesm, which vibrated very nicely to every word spoken in his office. Look it up.
The Soviet KGB have been doing exactly this since before 1960. Windowpanes make good microwave reflectors. All it takes is a simple microwave source and mixer. Nothing new to see here.
I think you friend was putting you on. Go to any govt depository library and they'll have about 27 feet of shelf space devioted to the Apollo plans and reports. IIRC the national air and space museum has all the plans avilable for viewing in their library.
You might also want to ask him how they could build anything after "every two months the plans were destroyed"
This design is in no particular or identifiable way "Apollo":
Apparently not a smidgen of Apollo hardware will be used.
We're talking separate boosters for crew and cargo, again not an Apollo paridigm.
Using liquid methane ain't the Apollo way either.
It's more a marketing thing, piggybacking on the name of a successfull project. Just like calling everything "Ethernet", even though it's now completely different in every way from the original.
The reason it doesnt have a motor is your basic physics. Make a motor 10 times smaller, and its power output goes down by a factor of 1,000, but the friction only down by a factor of 100. Ten times more friction than before, proportionally. Do this just a few times and you have a motor that can't even turn itself over. Kinda reminds me of a Chevette diesel.
This imbroglio happens many many powers of ten up the scale from this nano-idiocy. It may look cool but its very unlikely to ever be mobile.
Yes, it's a computer, an analog computer. Before there were digital computers, a whole big heapin canful of computation was done with slide-rules, nomographs, sextants, and other devices that COMPUTED answers using mechanical (proportional) means.
And Richard Feynman was mighty dubious about this device-- is it likely that just one of these survived all that time? And they'd be useless for navigation in the Mediterranean-- you need a very accurate clock to compute longitude, which didnt come about til the late 1700's. And navigation in the Med is mostly about longitude.
"designed to run for 10,000 years". Well, no. The article kinda suggests but never quite states that they don't have any idea what material is gonna work for 10,000 years. Without wearing out, corroding, sticking, galling, spalling, pitting, grooving, and all the other things time does to materials.
And they don't have a power source either.
And obviously even if it gets "designed", there's no way to actually test it. There will be functions that are only exercised every 4,000 years, so those parts will be mighty hard to test under realistic conditions. How do you design a mechanical flip-flop that has to sit still for 4,000 years, then flip?
And they apparently don't have a good time reference! No atomic clock, as they tend to run out of cesium atoms after a few years. It's apparently meant to be locked to the Sun, but that's not a particularly *good* clock. Even now we have to occasionally add a leap-second to keep roughly in sync with the Sun. And locking to the Sun is problematical, as the Earths' axis precesses a bit, changing local noon on a roughly 18,000 year cycle.
So not to put too fine a point on it, should we really be impressed by a very sketchy design, and very partial prototype, for a useless, marketless, and probably unbuildable gadget that won't tell time all that well anyway?
It's not really aluminum, it's an aluminum compound.
Probably much ther same thing as what gets made when you anodize aluminum. Been done for over 120 years.
Due to the laws of physics, anything that is transparent isnt going to be very aluminum-like
It won't conduct heat or electricity too well.
It won't be very strong in tension.
It will be more like glass than aluminum.
So it's quite misleading to claim it's "transparent aluminum".
Some university PR hack had a quota to fulfill for last month. This isnt really news. Anybody can try at "developing" a better battery. And recharging from outside the body has nothing to do with the battery-- it's been succesfully done for decades with a little coil of wire. Absolutely nothing to see here.
It's all part of the great, (as in old), and stupid ( as in forgetting the past), circle of software.
In general, things run MUCH faster on your PC that on a remote server. If this "new" stuff has each keypress going to the server, many users are going to toss it out the window as soon as the echo gets behind their typing every time somebody sends a bitmap to the printer.
Of course the marketing types never test it that much, so they';re all for it. The Bosses are for the centralization and the alleged "cost savings". It's just the poor end-user that gets screwed. As usual.
The chip is the tip of the iceberg re Airbus
on
Airbus A380 Under Fire
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· Score: 3, Informative
Now maybe Boeing is just as bad, but Airbus seems to be particularly ATROCIOUS at systems design. BAd chips are about the least of their problems. A few examples:
Airbus runs off end of runway, investigation shows:
Water in brake cylinder back end froze up. Cylinder lacked weep hole.
Brake electronics had two identical systems running in parallel.
If you pressed one of the brake system buttons for more than 10 msec, but less than 20 msec, one computer might see the keypress, the other might not. Never tested for.
Brake system uber-boss hardware checks for differences between two computers.
If it finds a difference, it turns off the secondary computer, WITHOUT SNOOPING AROUND to see if in fact it was the secondary computer that was getting off-track.
Said turning off is not signaled to the pilots in any obvious way.
Even if the pilot notices, by flipping to a obscure status-page, that the secondary braking system has been downed, pressing the RESET button doesnt actually reset much of anything.
Airbus encourages pilots to use auto-braking mode, which supposedly gives a steady 0.3G's of decelleartion.
If auto-braking doesnt seem to give 0.3G's, some TILT lights go on, but the braking system doesnt try using the suspect bad system, even after the other system is now known to be bad.
I could go on, but I think you see the basic drift here. Not a clue among the designers, testers, or managers.
Similar totally foobared design blew up the $400M Ariane rocket. Similarly foobared design for the Airbus flight control computer: lessee-- Pilot is pulling very hard on the stick, should we do what he says or drill a big hole in the ground? Hmmmmmm.....
Full report URL's I can find if anybody is interested.
To paraphrase Milton Freidman, there are four kinds of computers you can design:
(1) A computer you pay for, designed for you by you.
(2) A computer someone else pays for, designed for you by you.
(3) A computer you pay for designed for somebody else designed by you..
(4) A computer someone else pays for, designed for somebody else, designed by you.
In case #1 you're going to end up with an economical design that suits your needs.
It goes downhill from there. By the time you get to #4, nobody is watching the cost or features, nobody knows what the customer really wants, and you usually end up trying to give away deep-freezers to the Eskimos.
Same with these laptops-- a guy sitting in Cambridge, eyeing UN or Ted Turner $$$, is very unlikely to come up with the optimum design for a 2.5 world computer.
In the parts of the 2.5 world I've seen, a laptop computer would be snatched out of a child's hands within a minute or three.
The costs are really blue-sky too-- Go to www.digi-key.com and lookup the price of even a 640x480 LCD screen. Even in quantities of 1000's the screen costs more than $100. 128MB of flash memory is going to be $40 or so. CPU, say $30. Battery, $30. We are up to $200 and havent even touched the costs of manufacturing, testing, shipping, distributing, and support.
Sounds more like a $300 laptop at least.
And of course we've forgotten that it isn't all a 1950's USA-style world. IN many cultures, there's NO WAY a child could ever be given something the parents did not pay for, or something that the parents or elder children don't have. Or anything the local Mullah or town elder doesnt have or approve of. Kids have been ostracized, kidnapped, and killed for less than this. Remember the scene in "Airplane!" where they're teaching the natives about the wonders of Tupperware? THis isnt far off.
Slashdot Mirror
"But isn't "subst" the same thing as mapping a directory to a drive letter?" That's the problem, it looks like the same thing, but has wildly different effects. In the old DOS days, "subst" was done by hooking the BIOS disk I/O calls and blindly mapping the drive indices. About 20 lines of asm. Worked swell, except when certain programs went straight to the disk controller. Then you'd end up backing up or formatting the wrong disk. ----- Mappng a drive uses the barely documented file system redirector calls. Very different animal from "subst".
oops, isnt there still:
Make that FIVE ways. All of them looking somewhat alike, but all with subtly different syntax, semantics, overhead, and security implications. Sweet!
To see Mars most clearly you should wait until it's as high above the horizon as possible, not until it's a wee bit closer.
Not so, radio receivers as far back as 1938 were SPECIFICALLY designed with extra care, isolation, and shielding to prevent local oscillator emanations. Navy subs even went to the length of using obsolete but local-oscillator-less TRF radios, just to avoid the slightest possibility of their being detected in this way. As late as 1945 the Navy was stocking obsolete type 26 and type 27 tubes, just for these old but trustworthy radios.
No great precision is needed, as the surfaces only need be as flat as 1/4 of the wavelength-- several centimeters. And with the transmitters right across the street, no great precision is needed on the angles either.
You seem to be confusing the years or the technology. By 1960 there were K-band magnetrons and klystrons capable of kilowatts of CW output power.
And yes, the seal might have been at VHF or UHF frequencies, but that just strengthens my argument-- this is REALLY old news-- It could have been done as early as WW2 !! Regards, A_H
haw, haw haw... For those of you not in on the joke, TEMPEST is some military spec for electromagnetic leakage. Just like the Steve Martin machinist's in-crowd joke-- "that's a sprocket, not a socket!" Haw.
Methinks you're looking at it kinda backwards. Without the correct angle of incidence, you get neither reflection nor polarization. At the correct angle, you get reflection, which just so happens to also be polarized. But the incident polarization cannot *trigger* reflection, no mather what the angle of polarization. Regards!
There's an anecdote in the engineering field: where some poor sods at Racal-Dana had a phase detector at 50MHz that was so sensitive to vibration they had to stop their experiments whenever a plane took off from Orange County Airport (quite a few miles away). They eventually had to get special thick aluminum wall castings to enclose the phase detector to block the vibrations. And this was at just 50MHz. Phase detectors get more sensitive proportional to operating frequency, so a 5,000 MHz phase detector is *mighty* sensitive!
- There were no "lasers" in 1960. At least not the very stable continuous-wave lasers that you need for this, and especially not in the USSR.
- Think-- do lasers go through glass? Do lasers bounce off glass? Might other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation act similarly?
- Microwaves bounce off most anything, if you pick the right angle. Conveniently, most buildings have the windows recessed a bit, and any concave corner makes an EXCELLENT "corner reflector", which has the amazing property of bouncing any incident beam right back to the sender.
Not only did they bounce microwaves off glass-- they had the hutzpah to give the US ambassador a honorary plaque, which he hung on his office wall. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little diaphragm inside the plaque, just the right wavelength to reflect K-band microwavesm, which vibrated very nicely to every word spoken in his office. Look it up.The Soviet KGB have been doing exactly this since before 1960. Windowpanes make good microwave reflectors. All it takes is a simple microwave source and mixer. Nothing new to see here.
Just go look at the drdos web site. At least one typo per page. Contentless if not meaningless pages. I wouldnt buy a used toothpick from those folks.
I think you friend was putting you on. Go to any govt depository library and they'll have about 27 feet of shelf space devioted to the Apollo plans and reports. IIRC the national air and space museum has all the plans avilable for viewing in their library. You might also want to ask him how they could build anything after "every two months the plans were destroyed"
- Apparently not a smidgen of Apollo hardware will be used.
- We're talking separate boosters for crew and cargo, again not an Apollo paridigm.
- Using liquid methane ain't the Apollo way either.
It's more a marketing thing, piggybacking on the name of a successfull project. Just like calling everything "Ethernet", even though it's now completely different in every way from the original.The reason it doesnt have a motor is your basic physics. Make a motor 10 times smaller, and its power output goes down by a factor of 1,000, but the friction only down by a factor of 100. Ten times more friction than before, proportionally. Do this just a few times and you have a motor that can't even turn itself over. Kinda reminds me of a Chevette diesel. This imbroglio happens many many powers of ten up the scale from this nano-idiocy. It may look cool but its very unlikely to ever be mobile.
Yes, it's a computer, an analog computer. Before there were digital computers, a whole big heapin canful of computation was done with slide-rules, nomographs, sextants, and other devices that COMPUTED answers using mechanical (proportional) means. And Richard Feynman was mighty dubious about this device-- is it likely that just one of these survived all that time? And they'd be useless for navigation in the Mediterranean-- you need a very accurate clock to compute longitude, which didnt come about til the late 1700's. And navigation in the Med is mostly about longitude.
And they don't have a power source either.
And obviously even if it gets "designed", there's no way to actually test it. There will be functions that are only exercised every 4,000 years, so those parts will be mighty hard to test under realistic conditions. How do you design a mechanical flip-flop that has to sit still for 4,000 years, then flip?
And they apparently don't have a good time reference! No atomic clock, as they tend to run out of cesium atoms after a few years. It's apparently meant to be locked to the Sun, but that's not a particularly *good* clock. Even now we have to occasionally add a leap-second to keep roughly in sync with the Sun. And locking to the Sun is problematical, as the Earths' axis precesses a bit, changing local noon on a roughly 18,000 year cycle.
So not to put too fine a point on it, should we really be impressed by a very sketchy design, and very partial prototype, for a useless, marketless, and probably unbuildable gadget that won't tell time all that well anyway?
Due to the laws of physics, anything that is transparent isnt going to be very aluminum-like
- It won't conduct heat or electricity too well.
- It won't be very strong in tension.
- It will be more like glass than aluminum.
So it's quite misleading to claim it's "transparent aluminum".Some university PR hack had a quota to fulfill for last month. This isnt really news. Anybody can try at "developing" a better battery. And recharging from outside the body has nothing to do with the battery-- it's been succesfully done for decades with a little coil of wire. Absolutely nothing to see here.
Then again, if you're a terrorist, just stick your dynamite into some VENISON SAUSAGES. Probably will work for you.
In general, things run MUCH faster on your PC that on a remote server. If this "new" stuff has each keypress going to the server, many users are going to toss it out the window as soon as the echo gets behind their typing every time somebody sends a bitmap to the printer.
Of course the marketing types never test it that much, so they';re all for it. The Bosses are for the centralization and the alleged "cost savings". It's just the poor end-user that gets screwed. As usual.
- Water in brake cylinder back end froze up. Cylinder lacked weep hole.
- Brake electronics had two identical systems running in parallel.
- If you pressed one of the brake system buttons for more than 10 msec, but less than 20 msec, one computer might see the keypress, the other might not. Never tested for.
- Brake system uber-boss hardware checks for differences between two computers.
- If it finds a difference, it turns off the secondary computer, WITHOUT SNOOPING AROUND to see if in fact it was the secondary computer that was getting off-track.
- Said turning off is not signaled to the pilots in any obvious way.
- Even if the pilot notices, by flipping to a obscure status-page, that the secondary braking system has been downed, pressing the RESET button doesnt actually reset much of anything.
- Airbus encourages pilots to use auto-braking mode, which supposedly gives a steady 0.3G's of decelleartion.
- If auto-braking doesnt seem to give 0.3G's, some TILT lights go on, but the braking system doesnt try using the suspect bad system, even after the other system is now known to be bad.
I could go on, but I think you see the basic drift here. Not a clue among the designers, testers, or managers.Similar totally foobared design blew up the $400M Ariane rocket. Similarly foobared design for the Airbus flight control computer: lessee-- Pilot is pulling very hard on the stick, should we do what he says or drill a big hole in the ground? Hmmmmmm.....
Full report URL's I can find if anybody is interested.
- (1) A computer you pay for, designed for you by you.
- (2) A computer someone else pays for, designed for you by you.
- (3) A computer you pay for designed for somebody else designed by you..
- (4) A computer someone else pays for, designed for somebody else, designed by you.
In case #1 you're going to end up with an economical design that suits your needs.It goes downhill from there. By the time you get to #4, nobody is watching the cost or features, nobody knows what the customer really wants, and you usually end up trying to give away deep-freezers to the Eskimos.
Same with these laptops-- a guy sitting in Cambridge, eyeing UN or Ted Turner $$$, is very unlikely to come up with the optimum design for a 2.5 world computer.
In the parts of the 2.5 world I've seen, a laptop computer would be snatched out of a child's hands within a minute or three.
The costs are really blue-sky too-- Go to www.digi-key.com and lookup the price of even a 640x480 LCD screen. Even in quantities of 1000's the screen costs more than $100. 128MB of flash memory is going to be $40 or so. CPU, say $30. Battery, $30. We are up to $200 and havent even touched the costs of manufacturing, testing, shipping, distributing, and support.
Sounds more like a $300 laptop at least.
And of course we've forgotten that it isn't all a 1950's USA-style world. IN many cultures, there's NO WAY a child could ever be given something the parents did not pay for, or something that the parents or elder children don't have. Or anything the local Mullah or town elder doesnt have or approve of. Kids have been ostracized, kidnapped, and killed for less than this. Remember the scene in "Airplane!" where they're teaching the natives about the wonders of Tupperware? THis isnt far off.
Okay, I give up, what are the similarities?
The TR-1 has a round metal dial that rotates, mounted on the center shaft of a tuning capacitor.
The iPod has no metal dial does not rotate, and no tuning capacitor.
-----
The TR-1 has a speaker grille with a plain old voice-coil and permanent magnet speaker behind it.
The iPod has no speaker grille and no speaker.
-----
The TR-1 came in a very fragile styrene plastic case, which was likely to shatter at the first drop.
The iPod comes in a metal and poly-butyl-acrilate case, very sturdy and hard to break.
------
The TR-1 had exactly FOUR transistors, one diode, and a handful of parts, all hand-soldered to a single-layer PC board.
The iPod has, oh, at least 100,000 transistors, many many parts, all automatically placed and soldered onto a four-layer PC board.
---------
OH I GET it NOW! They both have PC boards! WOw!!!