Unfortunately for the satellite phone business, people like you are common enough that there ought to be a market, but not common enough to get the economies of scale to make service cheap, though like the fiber telecomm cable business in the 90s/00s, it's a lot cheaper if you can buy bankrupt companies at pennies on the dollar than building from scratch.
There have been satellite/GSM hybrids in the past, which let you pay conventional cellphone prices with terrestrial latency when service was available, and use the satellite when you couldn't get GSM or when you were somewhere that roaming was even more expensive than satphone minutes.
I don't know if anybody's still using it, but back in the 80s there was a technology called "meteor burst", which let you do low-speed comms by bouncing off the ionosphere trails left by micrometeorites. Typical applications were collecting snowfall data, where you needed to run on very low power because solar panels often got covered with snow and you mainly wanted results from inaccessible places in bad weather. If I remember correctly, the systems averaged about 300 ps, transmitting at 4800 baud when the reflections were open, and could go about 50 miles.
The military liked it because it worked ok even if there was nuclear explosion between the transmitter and receiver, which normally leaves enough noise to disrupt everything.
REAL hackers use one Arduino for the blog cred (and ICSP burning), and a stack of raw ATmega328 chips on breadboard without all the fine Italian printed circuit boards for the production work. (Or even one '328 for I/O pins and a stack of ATtiny8s for the rest, and you can use two of the breadboard rails for I2C instead of power and ground:-)
And yes, all of this is ignoring the fact that a 1GHz 32-bit ARM chip has a lot more horsepower than 64 16MHz 8-bit AVRs, but it doesn't give you das blinkenlichts.
If you've got a 9x15 space for your lab, it's probably in an office building, and probably in a city, and there are so many sets of rules that you will not be able to meet if you want to do it safely and legally. For welding, you need things like cement floors, lots of ventilation, fireproof construction, beefed-up electricity, safety inspectors, fire code compliance, appropriate insurance, etc. etc., and that's if you're doing something nice and clean like MIG or spot welding, as opposed to acetylene torches. Not gonna happen, unless you start working from the beginning with your building people to find out what they need you to do.
The real question is going to be whether you can get approval for soldering, which still takes a decent fireproof bench and some ventilation.
If you're doing anything computer or network related, you're going to need a 19" rack, and you should get it upfront so you can allocate the space to access the front and back. You'll want some shelving in a fixed location, but rolling shelves or carts let you effectively use the space in back of your racks. You'll want lots of electricity, and usually Wiremold is the winning way to deploy it. The real trick, if you're in a US-like country, is deciding whether you only need 110v or also 220-240v.
Your Building-management people may have lots of opinions about whether you can have 220vAC, and whether your racks, shelves, and desks need to be earthquake-braced, and what kind of HVAC you can have, and whether they need to install fire sprinklers or other fire suppression systems if you're soldering things. Let the wookies win - You will not successfully work around them, and you'll occasionally want them to be your friends, even if some of them are corporate droids. When I built a lab in the mid-90s, in San Francisco, I could have had it up and running in a couple of weeks for a couple of thousand dollars, before we hit the "earthquake bracing" question; by the time I was done, 6-8 months later, we had $900/seat "workstations" (that's the desks, not the $300 computers sitting under them), and an extra A/C system in the ceiling that only occasionally iced up and leaked, but we also had all the electric supply we needed to run a couple of eventually-full 19" racks.
And you do want some kinds of cabinets or toolboxes to store miscellaneous stuff - the Sears Automotive tool drawers can be nice for random parts, and you'll want somewhere to keep random crap that isn't visibly cluttered, and some bookshelves for books.
If I'm reading a bunch of stuff with complex web pages (e.g. open all today's links from a news aggregator such as Fark in tabs, getting a wide mixture of badly designed web pages), eventually FF will start hogging the whole CPU and burning more RAM. Fortunately I've got a dual-core machine, so it normally only burns one core, and I can't actually tell if it's Javascript or Flash that's doing it, but I'm really much more interested in stability than speed at this point. Speed matters a bit after Firefox crashes, when I'm reloading the session, though that's probably limited more by dynamic web pages than by FF itself, but Chrome seems to load faster (it doesn't crash quite as often, but I also have to reboot the machine occasionally due to power issues or installing software.)
They've only released a fraction of the files - there's a lot of assessment, categorization, and possibly redaction they need to do, which is going to take time. But for now, it fits on a DVD, and they could be mailing them out to major press outlets, random volunteers, etc.
Yes, the content will grow over time, but they can still release it as "Volume 1", "Volume 2", etc., maybe come out with the Director's Cut on Bue-Ray later on, with a bonus "Making of WIkileaks" track...
I'm always running Task Manager, so there's a little icon down in the corner that tells me when there's a problem, and when I had a single-core machine my mouse would usually choke when Firefox stole the CPU, so it would be hard even to kill it. This way I can at least read mail while FF is hosed, or while it's reloading all its pages. (And since I've been keeping Chrome open as well, I can actually use a browser for some things as well.)
I've been starting to use Chrome for most new work in addition to Firefox. It doesn't do everything, but it doesn't crash or hang as much as FF, and it reloads much much faster than Firefox if I need to kill it or if I need to reboot my laptop. I still keep IE around for sites that need it (and $WORK finally approved IE7:-).
Firefox still has trouble - even running NoScript and ad blocker and Ghostery, it'll still hang up every couple of days and start burning the entire CPU core, whether that's from Javascript or Flash or just bugs, and sometimes it crashes, especially on AJAX pages, and sometimes it's unresponsive enough that I need to kill it even if it doesn't crash. It's become tolerable now that I've got a dual-core CPU and more than 1.5GB RAM, but it's annoying.
The application that doesn't work well on Chrome is reading news - take a news aggregator site like FARK, open a hundred news articles in tabs, and then start reading them; Chrome often gets stuck and can't handle it.
Sure, there were other reasons, but fundamentally, Javascript has been a big hole in browsers since it was introduced. If you're going to let unknown people run untrusted code on your machine, you need to run it in a sandbox where it can't do any damage. It's possible to write clean, safe, reliable Javascript, but it's also possible to write malicious or broken Javascript, and if you've got Javascript turned on, then you're allowing malware to find whatever holes your browser has.
It helps to run NoScript, and ad-blockers, and Ghostery, but even with that, the amount of ostensibly-non-malicious Javascript and flash out there on pages I want to see is enough that Firefox often tries to burn the entire CPU (and one of the nice things about dual-core machines is that now when that happens, FF is stuck on one core and the rest of my machine is still working fine.)
I certainly hope so. It's not actually real likely, since he'd have to find a lawyer willing to take the case on spec, but at least he can get the perps, er, prosecution embarrassed in public and maybe even fired.
Sure, sometimes you can kill all your enemies without making far more of them in the process; that occasionally even works when two governments are fighting each other. But if people are fighting you because they're pissed off that you're invading their country and attacking their culture and you killed their cousin, killing them is just going to get more people with dead cousins pissed off at you.
Slashdot is hardly the only news source with Slashvertisements - Fox is big on them as well, and the military-industrial complex just loves that kind of thing. And some high-tech weapons are actually effective, while some fail badly in real environments; back during Vietnam, US Army rifles would jam a lot, while AK47s that were dirt-cheap to make usually didn't, even though they weren't as accurate.
Thanks for adding the summary. There was another Moodle book review on Slashdot last week, which also made the same incorrect assumption about its audience, and I was one of several people who ranted about that. I'm curious about how you got asked to write the book review - was it the Moodle organization, or Slashdot's editors, or a publisher?
It's fairly common to have articles on Slashdot saying that Frobnitz 3.2.4 has just been released, with descriptions of a couple of bugs that got fixed and minor features that got added, which might mean something to existing users, but with a couple of million readers, not everybody knows if something's a widely popular game (we're not all gamers) or a software development product or something hopelessly obscure and niche-y, or if it's something new and cool we might want to read about. A sentence or two of summary up front really helps readers know whether they want to read the whole article or not.
ICANN isn't in the Internet Protocol business, they're in the Intellectual Property business. It's about Trademark Control Protectionism, not Transmission Control Protocol. And the people who run the real root servers don't work for ICANN, but they do cooperate with them, and any attempts at alternate roots failed years ago, for reasons that aren't going to change.
Furthermore, if you want to start an alternate naming business, you can hang it off the existing DNS structure as myroot.someTLD so real people can find it, and then try convincing customers that they should buy theirname.yourTLD.myroot.someTLD from you because 0.0001% of the population can access it as theirname.yourTLD using your root. If you've got a spare couple hundred thousand dollars, write up a proposal to ICANN about why your project is cool enough and they might sell you your own real TLD, but the catch is that "competing with ICANN" isn't a business plan they're interested in, and "selling names in a.sex TLD for Profit" is a plan that other people with far more money than you have already been trying to sell them on.
If you don't like that, you could try buying a country code TLD from some small country. Most of the good ones already realize their commercial value, and ICANN has been trying to bully all the CCTLD administrations for years, with some success, and a lot of random small countries end up deciding that they don't like the business plan you've spent big bucks promoting because they're Islamic Republics and they're shocked to discover that there's porn on the internet, though in some cases they can become less shocked for a sufficiently large cut of the profits. But maybe you'll think up a clever naming convention that you can sell to somebody; it can't be clunkier than bit.ly.
Friends of mine were working for Ingres when CA bought them in the mid 90s. If you didn't get laid off or quit, you could only keep your job by signing some ridiculously pro-CA hiring agreement. Lots of bitterness and classic software-industry war stories ensued, like the 15 people on the "really try to keep these critical engineers" list all walking in to HR together to quit, and the general opinion was "Friends don't let CA buy their friends."
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for the satellite phone business, people like you are common enough that there ought to be a market, but not common enough to get the economies of scale to make service cheap, though like the fiber telecomm cable business in the 90s/00s, it's a lot cheaper if you can buy bankrupt companies at pennies on the dollar than building from scratch.
There have been satellite/GSM hybrids in the past, which let you pay conventional cellphone prices with terrestrial latency when service was available, and use the satellite when you couldn't get GSM or when you were somewhere that roaming was even more expensive than satphone minutes.
I don't know if anybody's still using it, but back in the 80s there was a technology called "meteor burst", which let you do low-speed comms by bouncing off the ionosphere trails left by micrometeorites. Typical applications were collecting snowfall data, where you needed to run on very low power because solar panels often got covered with snow and you mainly wanted results from inaccessible places in bad weather. If I remember correctly, the systems averaged about 300 ps, transmitting at 4800 baud when the reflections were open, and could go about 50 miles.
The military liked it because it worked ok even if there was nuclear explosion between the transmitter and receiver, which normally leaves enough noise to disrupt everything.
Thanks - I got the same version number. Fark still crashes occasionally ("Oh, Snap!"), though it also runs faster when it's not crashing.
"Look, I haven't even updated my resume in five years; you think I'm going to bother doing anything with your data?"
So you're going to need some water tanks and a faucet.
Why yes, I actually *do* work in an underground lab0ratory for my day job.
REAL hackers use one Arduino for the blog cred (and ICSP burning), and a stack of raw ATmega328 chips on breadboard without all the fine Italian printed circuit boards for the production work. (Or even one '328 for I/O pins and a stack of ATtiny8s for the rest, and you can use two of the breadboard rails for I2C instead of power and ground :-)
And yes, all of this is ignoring the fact that a 1GHz 32-bit ARM chip has a lot more horsepower than 64 16MHz 8-bit AVRs, but it doesn't give you das blinkenlichts.
If you've got a 9x15 space for your lab, it's probably in an office building, and probably in a city, and there are so many sets of rules that you will not be able to meet if you want to do it safely and legally. For welding, you need things like cement floors, lots of ventilation, fireproof construction, beefed-up electricity, safety inspectors, fire code compliance, appropriate insurance, etc. etc., and that's if you're doing something nice and clean like MIG or spot welding, as opposed to acetylene torches. Not gonna happen, unless you start working from the beginning with your building people to find out what they need you to do.
The real question is going to be whether you can get approval for soldering, which still takes a decent fireproof bench and some ventilation.
If you're doing anything computer or network related, you're going to need a 19" rack, and you should get it upfront so you can allocate the space to access the front and back. You'll want some shelving in a fixed location, but rolling shelves or carts let you effectively use the space in back of your racks. You'll want lots of electricity, and usually Wiremold is the winning way to deploy it. The real trick, if you're in a US-like country, is deciding whether you only need 110v or also 220-240v.
Your Building-management people may have lots of opinions about whether you can have 220vAC, and whether your racks, shelves, and desks need to be earthquake-braced, and what kind of HVAC you can have, and whether they need to install fire sprinklers or other fire suppression systems if you're soldering things. Let the wookies win - You will not successfully work around them, and you'll occasionally want them to be your friends, even if some of them are corporate droids. When I built a lab in the mid-90s, in San Francisco, I could have had it up and running in a couple of weeks for a couple of thousand dollars, before we hit the "earthquake bracing" question; by the time I was done, 6-8 months later, we had $900/seat "workstations" (that's the desks, not the $300 computers sitting under them), and an extra A/C system in the ceiling that only occasionally iced up and leaked, but we also had all the electric supply we needed to run a couple of eventually-full 19" racks.
And you do want some kinds of cabinets or toolboxes to store miscellaneous stuff - the Sears Automotive tool drawers can be nice for random parts, and you'll want somewhere to keep random crap that isn't visibly cluttered, and some bookshelves for books.
If I'm reading a bunch of stuff with complex web pages (e.g. open all today's links from a news aggregator such as Fark in tabs, getting a wide mixture of badly designed web pages), eventually FF will start hogging the whole CPU and burning more RAM. Fortunately I've got a dual-core machine, so it normally only burns one core, and I can't actually tell if it's Javascript or Flash that's doing it, but I'm really much more interested in stability than speed at this point. Speed matters a bit after Firefox crashes, when I'm reloading the session, though that's probably limited more by dynamic web pages than by FF itself, but Chrome seems to load faster (it doesn't crash quite as often, but I also have to reboot the machine occasionally due to power issues or installing software.)
Chrome says it's up to date, and I'm running an 8.x version - does that mean it installed itself last night when I was asleep?
So it shouldn't take any time at all to update...
Or something; l33tsp34k it however you'd like...
They've only released a fraction of the files - there's a lot of assessment, categorization, and possibly redaction they need to do, which is going to take time. But for now, it fits on a DVD, and they could be mailing them out to major press outlets, random volunteers, etc.
Yes, the content will grow over time, but they can still release it as "Volume 1", "Volume 2", etc., maybe come out with the Director's Cut on Bue-Ray later on, with a bonus "Making of WIkileaks" track...
I'm always running Task Manager, so there's a little icon down in the corner that tells me when there's a problem, and when I had a single-core machine my mouse would usually choke when Firefox stole the CPU, so it would be hard even to kill it. This way I can at least read mail while FF is hosed, or while it's reloading all its pages. (And since I've been keeping Chrome open as well, I can actually use a browser for some things as well.)
I've been starting to use Chrome for most new work in addition to Firefox. It doesn't do everything, but it doesn't crash or hang as much as FF, and it reloads much much faster than Firefox if I need to kill it or if I need to reboot my laptop. I still keep IE around for sites that need it (and $WORK finally approved IE7 :-).
Firefox still has trouble - even running NoScript and ad blocker and Ghostery, it'll still hang up every couple of days and start burning the entire CPU core, whether that's from Javascript or Flash or just bugs, and sometimes it crashes, especially on AJAX pages, and sometimes it's unresponsive enough that I need to kill it even if it doesn't crash. It's become tolerable now that I've got a dual-core CPU and more than 1.5GB RAM, but it's annoying.
The application that doesn't work well on Chrome is reading news - take a news aggregator site like FARK, open a hundred news articles in tabs, and then start reading them; Chrome often gets stuck and can't handle it.
Sure, there were other reasons, but fundamentally, Javascript has been a big hole in browsers since it was introduced. If you're going to let unknown people run untrusted code on your machine, you need to run it in a sandbox where it can't do any damage. It's possible to write clean, safe, reliable Javascript, but it's also possible to write malicious or broken Javascript, and if you've got Javascript turned on, then you're allowing malware to find whatever holes your browser has.
It helps to run NoScript, and ad-blockers, and Ghostery, but even with that, the amount of ostensibly-non-malicious Javascript and flash out there on pages I want to see is enough that Firefox often tries to burn the entire CPU (and one of the nice things about dual-core machines is that now when that happens, FF is stuck on one core and the rest of my machine is still working fine.)
You can't stop us, Audit Trolls, we're using it for Black Ops! So Go Away!
... And the governor's a dinosaur, so he got left behind on the ride...
I certainly hope so. It's not actually real likely, since he'd have to find a lawyer willing to take the case on spec, but at least he can get the perps, er, prosecution embarrassed in public and maybe even fired.
Sure, sometimes you can kill all your enemies without making far more of them in the process; that occasionally even works when two governments are fighting each other. But if people are fighting you because they're pissed off that you're invading their country and attacking their culture and you killed their cousin, killing them is just going to get more people with dead cousins pissed off at you.
Slashdot is hardly the only news source with Slashvertisements - Fox is big on them as well, and the military-industrial complex just loves that kind of thing. And some high-tech weapons are actually effective, while some fail badly in real environments; back during Vietnam, US Army rifles would jam a lot, while AK47s that were dirt-cheap to make usually didn't, even though they weren't as accurate.
Thanks for adding the summary. There was another Moodle book review on Slashdot last week, which also made the same incorrect assumption about its audience, and I was one of several people who ranted about that. I'm curious about how you got asked to write the book review - was it the Moodle organization, or Slashdot's editors, or a publisher?
It's fairly common to have articles on Slashdot saying that Frobnitz 3.2.4 has just been released, with descriptions of a couple of bugs that got fixed and minor features that got added, which might mean something to existing users, but with a couple of million readers, not everybody knows if something's a widely popular game (we're not all gamers) or a software development product or something hopelessly obscure and niche-y, or if it's something new and cool we might want to read about. A sentence or two of summary up front really helps readers know whether they want to read the whole article or not.
ICANN isn't in the Internet Protocol business, they're in the Intellectual Property business. It's about Trademark Control Protectionism, not Transmission Control Protocol. And the people who run the real root servers don't work for ICANN, but they do cooperate with them, and any attempts at alternate roots failed years ago, for reasons that aren't going to change.
Furthermore, if you want to start an alternate naming business, you can hang it off the existing DNS structure as myroot.someTLD so real people can find it, and then try convincing customers that they should buy theirname.yourTLD.myroot.someTLD from you because 0.0001% of the population can access it as theirname.yourTLD using your root. If you've got a spare couple hundred thousand dollars, write up a proposal to ICANN about why your project is cool enough and they might sell you your own real TLD, but the catch is that "competing with ICANN" isn't a business plan they're interested in, and .sex TLD for Profit" is a plan that other people with far more money than you have already been trying to sell them on.
"selling names in a
If you don't like that, you could try buying a country code TLD from some small country. Most of the good ones already realize their commercial value, and ICANN has been trying to bully all the CCTLD administrations for years, with some success, and a lot of random small countries end up deciding that they don't like the business plan you've spent big bucks promoting because they're Islamic Republics and they're shocked to discover that there's porn on the internet, though in some cases they can become less shocked for a sufficiently large cut of the profits. But maybe you'll think up a clever naming convention that you can sell to somebody; it can't be clunkier than bit.ly.
Friends of mine were working for Ingres when CA bought them in the mid 90s. If you didn't get laid off or quit, you could only keep your job by signing some ridiculously pro-CA hiring agreement. Lots of bitterness and classic software-industry war stories ensued, like the 15 people on the "really try to keep these critical engineers" list all walking in to HR together to quit, and the general opinion was "Friends don't let CA buy their friends."