Acard's adapter is narrow-ended, and it works perfectly for me. 120G western digital on an SGI Indy, for the purpose of GNU Devel tools, actually... wasn't too expensive on ebay. eBay is your friend.
Why not engineer a smart system that tries everything in its power to prevent its demise, a la Hal? The trouble is things like physical security, but some episodes of X-files have demonstrated that a computer that controls the security system in a building can protect itself fairly well =)
I use Win98 and Slackware on the job, and I already know them inside and out. I am interested in *learning* about stuff on my own so I won't walk in cold to a unix shop. Because I've set up a home network and set up my own servers, I've learned tons about networking, both in the unix sense and in a generic sense. Using Windows, stuff usually "Just Works" like magic, and when it doesn't you have to bring in somebody who understands what is really going on, and they're getting harder and harder to come by.
It is my goal to become one of those people, and why spend money when I can invest my spare time with Linux?
Maybe Linux isn't ready for the corporate world, but the corporate world can go fuck themselves^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^His not an interest of mine at the moment.
Companies train engineers to use their equipment and software. Why is this not also true for IT? Companies expect IT people to come in and know everything.
Computer administration is a skill. If you learn a couple types of systems very well, you can pick up new systems without too much work.
I've found Linux far, far cheaper than Windows. Sure, I have to invest more time in it, and time is money, but---I've learned one fuckuvalot more about how computers and networks work using Linux than I ever did using Windows, and the college classes I would need to take to learn about things in detail if I were using Windows are hella expensive.
I've had this idea before, too...heh. Seemed obvious to me! What else are neural networks for? I know some companies use neural networks to sort out acceptable vs. unacceptable on the assembly line, and this is really the same thing...
I am frustrated when PC's come with only one serial port instead of two. Serial ports are incredibly useful for connecting external modems (sorry, but winmodems are solid cpu-using crap and there's no guarantee an internal modem isn't a winmodem) and for serial consoles. When you want to remotely administer a server that can't connect to the network, do you login through the serial port, or do you talk instructions over the phone to some idiot who doesn't know the difference between a PC and a lunchbox? Oh, wait...
Actually, with those thingies that let you turn a wall into a speaker, I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual goal is a CD player that will only play proprietary CD's, does not have any output devices, connects over Wi-Fi to a network to check for authorization to play a CD, and checks itself for nod chips.
Man, I can't wait for cassettes. Those things will kick CD ass!
Decent ISP's in my area are about $25 a month (seriously). The cable company is the only alternative at the moment (DSL isn't quite to my house yet), and they're $40-$50 a month.
You're right, no one is forcing me to do anything. However, that's only because my pocketbook is not a person. (I can hear the trolls now: "Go back to modem!" "Get a higher-paying job!" "Natalie Portman and hot grits!" "Get off the Internet!" Of course, if anyone has any/serious/ suggestions, I'll be glad to hear them...)
(By 57.6k, I meant 57.6kilobits, which is 57600, which is about 56kibibits. I can't remember the proper" designation for the modems, but I had an internal one that said 57600 and an external one that said 56K. Around here, people call them fifty-seven-six modems, or fifty-six-kay modems, so both designations are correct as far as I care (I just need to communicate, really...). And due to FCC restrictions they only run at 53k anyway... heh.)
Eletricity is the phenomena of charged particle interaction such as to cause a ``current'' that can be made to do useful work. Electrons in an electric current move *VERY* slowly. However, the EMF field induced by the charged particle motion propagates at the speed of light (light is just an EM wave, after all). Imagine the creation of an electric current as an explosion from a bomb; the shock wave propagates outwards at the speed of sound, even though very little motion happened near the bomb. The shock wave is a pressure wave, and its speed is a function of the propagation of pressure waves through the surrounding medium (e.g. the speed of sound in air or in water). The creation of the electric current does something very similar, except the "shock wave" is replaced by a causality horizon (in other words, because information can travel no faster than the speed of light, I can't cause something to happen in a galaxy far away any faster than light can travel, and an electric current that creates an EMF field can't zap your brain with microwaves any sooner than however long it would take for a "light wave" to get there) whose boundary expands at the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic wave through a medium (e.g., the speed of light in a vacuum).
However, digital devices are slow things. When you want a transistor to switch on, you have to push electrons over a quantum "cliff" (in a sense). This happens much slower than EM wave propagation; that's why silicon switching speeds are measured in nanoseconds rather than fractions of a femtosecond...
If you are confused (I may be a bit confused too, it's been a while since I studied this stuff), check out http://www.amasci.com/ for more info. It's a very informative site.
As for the noise cancellation idea, the laptop mic's own frequency response would have to be compensated for, otherwise the cancellation signal will have noticable imperfections. You'll need a really, really fast machine to do this too (lots of overlapping fast fourier transforms), if you want to keep up with the sound.
An easier way to get cheap noise cancellation is to take a "snapshot" of the noise in the current room and play back the inverse of that overtop of your sound. You'll still get some white noise, of course, but it'll be evenly distributed across the spectrum, rather than being focused at certain frequencies; your ears will get used to the background white noise fairly easily, though, and you'll have the added benefit of perceived distortion being even across the spectrum, so the sound will probably "feel" a bit cleaner. If you want to calibrate the system, though, you'll need to do a few measurements. You need the audio "fingerprint" of your mic, your headphones, your sound card input, and your sound card output; you can use two different mics, two different sound inputs, two different sound outputs, and two different sets of output devices. Then, you can emit test frequencies and see how much they get reduced by all 2x2x2x2=16 combinations of apparatus (I *think* that will work), do some algebra, and solve many many systems of equations to find a decent audio profile of each of the pieces in the chain. One sample equation would be: SoftwareOutputVolume * SoundCardDtoAReduction * HeadphoneReduction * MicReduction * SoundCardAtoDReduction = SoftwareInputVolume. Compare the output level you think you're sending to the soundcard, the input level from the soundcard, and repeat ad nauseum. Or, if you don't mind some loss of quality, and you have at least one very good sound card, pair of headphones, and microphone (you want the flattest frequency response possible for all of these), you can simplify the above approach quite a bit (just record signals from your laptop through your everyday headphones with the good equipment, then play signals with the good equipment and record them with your laptop; you get the idea).
Just some thoughts =) If you decide to do a project for this, best of luck (you'll need it).
If you start a cable company, *please* let home users run web servers, peer to peer, etc., without griping. (You can always get some linux boxes to do Quality-of-Service routing, and put things like peer to peer and customer port 80 connections in the low priority partition or something.) Also, Don't send the Feds after people who uncap their modems (fix your SNMP system, dammit! also cap at the router! etc.) And don't put ridiculously low upload caps on (10k? Man, I could do better with two 57.6k modems!) Don't forget that you're just an ISP, not the network police! Your job is mostly to make sure things get from point A to point B on time without getting lost.
" This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. "
IBM's Mainframe line of computers kicks WinDOS ass. You can run binaries compiled on slow, clunky 1960's System-360 refrigerators on modern multiprocessing, fault-tolerant, redundant zSeries systems. I can't even run my favorite DOS 5.0 apps under DOS 6.0, least of all under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. My PC, when it was a DOS machine, had DOS 3.0, DOS 5.0, DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. Lots of rebooting to use all my old apps, unless I wanted mysterious crashes and freezes.
Linux can still run QMAGIC executables compiled against BSD libc4 on a modern ELF/glibc2.3 system by turning on a kernel option and copying a few.so files.
My only complaint about Linux compatibility, actually, is just the idiots careless programmers who change the API of their library without changing the major revision number. (*cough QT cough*)
You can secure-wipe only if you're sure the file hasn't been automagically moved by the drive's firmware because of bad sectors. There's some tools floating around that do this. Search freshmeat and google for secure delete, secure format, etc.
In 1984, there were very few sensors (the TV-like two-way screens), but they were very comprehensive. In this system, there would be a vast array of simple sensors working in tandem. [I think] He was alluding to the ability of either system to watch people closely.
Actually, yes. It's some sort of funky medium-level format, IIRC (and it may even screw up your IDE drives permanently). But then again, the true low-level format includes all sorts of special blocks that store tracking information and bad sector tables. You wouldn't want your BIOS to screw with that. I don't trust my BIOS farther than I can throw it! (And, btw, a 120G drive actually has 130G-150G of disk space... you just can't use it;)
I think the idea is that A-A-P can be used on any UNIX-ish system to build a program---he refers to a Makefile template system (sounds like he means autoconf/configure), and how it has limitations and requires learning all this extra stuff...
Do they have to pay for their internet access? My University (www.udel.edu) does not allow students to use the free ineternet for non-academic uses---running a business or having any sort of network server is specifically mentioned as a violation of the terms of the contract. (Is it just me, or is the server part kind of... strange?)
How come nobody *ever* mentions skipstone? It, in my opinion, is better than galeon because it lacks the gnome cruft (especially frustrating on machines where gnome isn't installed, and since galeon requires many pieces of it, you're eating up loads of disk space for just a browser)
Re:Am I the only one that has found this useful?
on
No More WHOIS scams?
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· Score: 1
I have sometimes found it necessary to contact the owner of a domain---I saw a mention of proxying, but this whole idea still makes me a bit uneasy.
The more points on the line, the more pressured I feel. The more pressured I feel, the more trouble I have thinking. The more trouble I have thinking, the longer it takes me to do the essay. The longer it takes me to do the essay, the less effort I can put into it. The less effort I can put into it, the poorer quality it comes out. The poorer quality it comes out, the more points I lose. The more points I lose, the lower my grade.
Forgive me for not being one of those "productive under pressure" types. I really just want to hack code for a hobby, play music for some income, and maybe farm for some more income.
You don't even need wire strippers. Remember, electricity and magnetism have this nifty inter-relation. It may be possible (although maybe non-trivial) to use coils to record the sound without modifying the apparatus they distribute.
Slashdot Mirror
Acard's adapter is narrow-ended, and it works perfectly for me. 120G western digital on an SGI Indy, for the purpose of GNU Devel tools, actually... wasn't too expensive on ebay. eBay is your friend.
Why not engineer a smart system that tries everything in its power to prevent its demise, a la Hal? The trouble is things like physical security, but some episodes of X-files have demonstrated that a computer that controls the security system in a building can protect itself fairly well =)
I use Win98 and Slackware on the job, and I already know them inside and out. I am interested in *learning* about stuff on my own so I won't walk in cold to a unix shop. Because I've set up a home network and set up my own servers, I've learned tons about networking, both in the unix sense and in a generic sense. Using Windows, stuff usually "Just Works" like magic, and when it doesn't you have to bring in somebody who understands what is really going on, and they're getting harder and harder to come by.
It is my goal to become one of those people, and why spend money when I can invest my spare time with Linux?
Maybe Linux isn't ready for the corporate world, but the corporate world can go fuck themselves^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^His not an interest of mine at the moment.
Companies train engineers to use their equipment and software. Why is this not also true for IT? Companies expect IT people to come in and know everything.
Computer administration is a skill. If you learn a couple types of systems very well, you can pick up new systems without too much work.
Stick shift kicks ass. But back on topic...
I've found Linux far, far cheaper than Windows. Sure, I have to invest more time in it, and time is money, but---I've learned one fuckuvalot more about how computers and networks work using Linux than I ever did using Windows, and the college classes I would need to take to learn about things in detail if I were using Windows are hella expensive.
I've had this idea before, too...heh. Seemed obvious to me! What else are neural networks for? I know some companies use neural networks to sort out acceptable vs. unacceptable on the assembly line, and this is really the same thing...
I am frustrated when PC's come with only one serial port instead of two. Serial ports are incredibly useful for connecting external modems (sorry, but winmodems are solid cpu-using crap and there's no guarantee an internal modem isn't a winmodem) and for serial consoles. When you want to remotely administer a server that can't connect to the network, do you login through the serial port, or do you talk instructions over the phone to some idiot who doesn't know the difference between a PC and a lunchbox? Oh, wait...
Actually, with those thingies that let you turn a wall into a speaker, I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual goal is a CD player that will only play proprietary CD's, does not have any output devices, connects over Wi-Fi to a network to check for authorization to play a CD, and checks itself for nod chips.
Man, I can't wait for cassettes. Those things will kick CD ass!
Decent ISP's in my area are about $25 a month (seriously). The cable company is the only alternative at the moment (DSL isn't quite to my house yet), and they're $40-$50 a month.
/serious/ suggestions, I'll be glad to hear them...)
You're right, no one is forcing me to do anything. However, that's only because my pocketbook is not a person. (I can hear the trolls now: "Go back to modem!" "Get a higher-paying job!" "Natalie Portman and hot grits!" "Get off the Internet!" Of course, if anyone has any
(By 57.6k, I meant 57.6kilobits, which is 57600, which is about 56kibibits. I can't remember the proper" designation for the modems, but I had an internal one that said 57600 and an external one that said 56K. Around here, people call them fifty-seven-six modems, or fifty-six-kay modems, so both designations are correct as far as I care (I just need to communicate, really...). And due to FCC restrictions they only run at 53k anyway... heh.)
Eletricity is the phenomena of charged particle interaction such as to cause a ``current'' that can be made to do useful work. Electrons in an electric current move *VERY* slowly. However, the EMF field induced by the charged particle motion propagates at the speed of light (light is just an EM wave, after all). Imagine the creation of an electric current as an explosion from a bomb; the shock wave propagates outwards at the speed of sound, even though very little motion happened near the bomb. The shock wave is a pressure wave, and its speed is a function of the propagation of pressure waves through the surrounding medium (e.g. the speed of sound in air or in water). The creation of the electric current does something very similar, except the "shock wave" is replaced by a causality horizon (in other words, because information can travel no faster than the speed of light, I can't cause something to happen in a galaxy far away any faster than light can travel, and an electric current that creates an EMF field can't zap your brain with microwaves any sooner than however long it would take for a "light wave" to get there) whose boundary expands at the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic wave through a medium (e.g., the speed of light in a vacuum).
However, digital devices are slow things. When you want a transistor to switch on, you have to push electrons over a quantum "cliff" (in a sense). This happens much slower than EM wave propagation; that's why silicon switching speeds are measured in nanoseconds rather than fractions of a femtosecond...
If you are confused (I may be a bit confused too, it's been a while since I studied this stuff), check out http://www.amasci.com/ for more info. It's a very informative site.
As for the noise cancellation idea, the laptop mic's own frequency response would have to be compensated for, otherwise the cancellation signal will have noticable imperfections. You'll need a really, really fast machine to do this too (lots of overlapping fast fourier transforms), if you want to keep up with the sound.
An easier way to get cheap noise cancellation is to take a "snapshot" of the noise in the current room and play back the inverse of that overtop of your sound. You'll still get some white noise, of course, but it'll be evenly distributed across the spectrum, rather than being focused at certain frequencies; your ears will get used to the background white noise fairly easily, though, and you'll have the added benefit of perceived distortion being even across the spectrum, so the sound will probably "feel" a bit cleaner. If you want to calibrate the system, though, you'll need to do a few measurements. You need the audio "fingerprint" of your mic, your headphones, your sound card input, and your sound card output; you can use two different mics, two different sound inputs, two different sound outputs, and two different sets of output devices. Then, you can emit test frequencies and see how much they get reduced by all 2x2x2x2=16 combinations of apparatus (I *think* that will work), do some algebra, and solve many many systems of equations to find a decent audio profile of each of the pieces in the chain. One sample equation would be: SoftwareOutputVolume * SoundCardDtoAReduction * HeadphoneReduction * MicReduction * SoundCardAtoDReduction = SoftwareInputVolume. Compare the output level you think you're sending to the soundcard, the input level from the soundcard, and repeat ad nauseum. Or, if you don't mind some loss of quality, and you have at least one very good sound card, pair of headphones, and microphone (you want the flattest frequency response possible for all of these), you can simplify the above approach quite a bit (just record signals from your laptop through your everyday headphones with the good equipment, then play signals with the good equipment and record them with your laptop; you get the idea).
Just some thoughts =)
If you decide to do a project for this, best of luck (you'll need it).
If you start a cable company, *please* let home users run web servers, peer to peer, etc., without griping. (You can always get some linux boxes to do Quality-of-Service routing, and put things like peer to peer and customer port 80 connections in the low priority partition or something.) Also, Don't send the Feds after people who uncap their modems (fix your SNMP system, dammit! also cap at the router! etc.) And don't put ridiculously low upload caps on (10k? Man, I could do better with two 57.6k modems!) Don't forget that you're just an ISP, not the network police! Your job is mostly to make sure things get from point A to point B on time without getting lost.
That's my 2pence, anyway. [Stupid Comcast.]
" This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. "
.so files.
IBM's Mainframe line of computers kicks WinDOS ass. You can run binaries compiled on slow, clunky 1960's System-360 refrigerators on modern multiprocessing, fault-tolerant, redundant zSeries systems. I can't even run my favorite DOS 5.0 apps under DOS 6.0, least of all under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. My PC, when it was a DOS machine, had DOS 3.0, DOS 5.0, DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. Lots of rebooting to use all my old apps, unless I wanted mysterious crashes and freezes.
Linux can still run QMAGIC executables compiled against BSD libc4 on a modern ELF/glibc2.3 system by turning on a kernel option and copying a few
My only complaint about Linux compatibility, actually, is just the idiots careless programmers who change the API of their library without changing the major revision number. (*cough QT cough*)
You can secure-wipe only if you're sure the file hasn't been automagically moved by the drive's firmware because of bad sectors. There's some tools floating around that do this. Search freshmeat and google for secure delete, secure format, etc.
In 1984, there were very few sensors (the TV-like two-way screens), but they were very comprehensive. In this system, there would be a vast array of simple sensors working in tandem. [I think] He was alluding to the ability of either system to watch people closely.
Actually, yes. It's some sort of funky medium-level format, IIRC (and it may even screw up your IDE drives permanently). But then again, the true low-level format includes all sorts of special blocks that store tracking information and bad sector tables. You wouldn't want your BIOS to screw with that. I don't trust my BIOS farther than I can throw it! (And, btw, a 120G drive actually has 130G-150G of disk space... you just can't use it ;)
But what country *wants* me? "Sick of the USA, no real reason to go anywhere else. Reluctant to leave it all behind. Call xxx-xxxx if interested."
It's very expensive to leave, and I would be leaving behind all my friends...
Even though many areas in the US are not community-oriented, I have created my own community, and I do not wish to kick myself out!
Let's treat the disease, not treat the symptoms.
I think the idea is that A-A-P can be used on any UNIX-ish system to build a program---he refers to a Makefile template system (sounds like he means autoconf/configure), and how it has limitations and requires learning all this extra stuff...
What I want to know is...
Do they have to pay for their internet access? My University (www.udel.edu) does not allow students to use the free ineternet for non-academic uses---running a business or having any sort of network server is specifically mentioned as a violation of the terms of the contract. (Is it just me, or is the server part kind of... strange?)
Smart author... he didn't include any links to Columbia University's pages! ;)
Don't forget EBCDIC, on all those /beautiful/ IBM!'s (International Brontosaurus Machines)
No, that's my point---skipstone has very, very few dependencies, compared to Galeon.
How come nobody *ever* mentions skipstone? It, in my opinion, is better than galeon because it lacks the gnome cruft (especially frustrating on machines where gnome isn't installed, and since galeon requires many pieces of it, you're eating up loads of disk space for just a browser)
I have sometimes found it necessary to contact the owner of a domain---I saw a mention of proxying, but this whole idea still makes me a bit uneasy.
Fine, I may be an `idiot', but then I guess everyone else with OCD is an idiot too.
Damn those scientists, damn those computer programmers, and especially damn those mathematicians.
The more points on the line, the more pressured I feel. The more pressured I feel, the more trouble I have thinking. The more trouble I have thinking, the longer it takes me to do the essay. The longer it takes me to do the essay, the less effort I can put into it. The less effort I can put into it, the poorer quality it comes out. The poorer quality it comes out, the more points I lose. The more points I lose, the lower my grade.
Forgive me for not being one of those "productive under pressure" types. I really just want to hack code for a hobby, play music for some income, and maybe farm for some more income.
*sigh* Stupid business-centred country.
You don't even need wire strippers. Remember, electricity and magnetism have this nifty inter-relation. It may be possible (although maybe non-trivial) to use coils to record the sound without modifying the apparatus they distribute.