Ben Rich's book, Skunk Works, his memoir of working at Lockheed and eventually directing the Skunk Works, mentions OXCART as the A-12's code name. It also discusses the test area (not using name "Area 51," but by the well-known alias "Paradise Ranch"), and a variety of other interesting projects from both the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich eras at SW. The U-2, A-12 and SR-71 Blackbirds, and the F-117 are discussed in surprising detail.
Fun fact: the A-12 (CIA Blackbird) was retired and the SR-71 two-seater version was built for the USAF because the blue-suiters didn't like the idea of the CIA having its own private air force...
This will give you a detailed report including the drive's make, model, serial number, firmware revision, and S.M.A.R.T. status values. It will also show the drive's error log if present.
Other methods include examining the kernel boot messages (dmesg is your friend), or using hdparm.
The truth is that typical LCD power usage now exceeds that of a typical CRT of the same size.
My 22" LCD monitor consumes less than half the power of the 17" CRT it replaced. On the other hand, my 32" LCD TV uses about the same amount of power as my parents' 32" CRT set.
Yes and no. On one side, AC can trigger atrial fibrillation, bringing your heart to a stop. On the other, DC could make you clamp tighter onto a voltage source, reducing your likelihood of getting away, and increasing your likelihood of getting electrocooked.
DC is also more likely to cause arcing. An AC supply's voltage crosses zero twice per cycle, which extinguishes the arc, while a DC voltage remains constant. If you look at the ratings stamped into switches, the DC current rating for a switch will always be quite a bit smaller than the AC current rating (if there's a DC rating at all).
The construction of a Toyota Prius and its battery unit consumes more resources and generates more pollution than a Hummer.
Has any reputable, independent organization actually verified this claim, or is it just another example of a Big Lie that has been repeated so often that people believe it's true?
Most of my telescum calls these days come from some group that runs car warranty, cruise, and "lower your credit card interest rate" scams. These almost always come from numbers belonging to a few second-tier phone companies. So, I keep a greylist of these phone prefixes. Anyone calling from one of these phone companies gets:
(DTMF 1) Hello. (long pause) You have reached SIGBUS. Press (randomly-selected digit) to ring my phone.
This stops a lot of the crap. I also have a blacklist, though. Blacklisted numbers get:
Hello. (long pause) Welcome to Special Price Analysis and Marketing. For cheap Valium, Xanax, and Viagra please press 1. For Rolex and Gucci replicas, press 2. To enlarge your penis or breasts, press 3. To speak with the Minister of Finance of Nigeria, regarding a fifty million dollar account, press 4.
The menu choices go to various other silly recordings, and then back to the menu. FYI, the "Special Price Analysis and Marketing" recording is found in the asterisk-sounds package as spam.gsm.
Calls that hit the blacklist menu get recorded. One political spammer spent over a minute trying to navigate the menu...
I miss clubcastlive.com - it had live webcasts of bands at various clubs in Austin, TX. Shortly after they appeared on one of the morning TV news programs, they vanished from the web - and the domain eventually got snagged by a squatter.
I think bandwidth costs ate them alive - they streamed in 112 kbps MP3. I managed to snag a few shows before they went Tango Uniform.
427 S. LaSalle St. is the old Telegraph Building, once a major Western Union facility. Nowadays, it's a big co-lo center, with various data providers and CLECs.
That would be Texas Instruments; they told the geeks to go to hell when they wanted detailed information to write software for the TI-99/4 systems. Have you seen any computer systems from TI lately?
Back to the topic of Creative, I have a USB Audigy 2 NX - which works beautifully on Ubuntu. I'm running it on my MythTV box, since it has an IR remote control, and the motherboard's onboard audio is weak.
IMO, Creative's actions regarding Vista drivers is reason enough to avoid them in the future - as if there wasn't already enough reason to avoid Vista in the first place.
...the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.
It's coming to the point where eSATA is the only realistic solution for external drives. USB2 and FireWire 400 just don't cut it any more, and I haven't seen many systems supporting FireWire 800.
One thing that has received rather little attention is that DTV broadcasts can contain multiple subchannels. For instance, in Chicago, the local PBS affiliate (WTTW) has four DTV subchannels: one 720p HD that's dedicated exclusively to HD programming, along with their regular SD channel, and two extra SD channels.
Unfortunately, they're the only Chicago station that's really taking advantage of this capability. I'd love to see ABC run ESPN on a subchannel, but that'll probably never happen unless enough people start ditching cable and satellite TV.
I am completely under-whelmed by 80+ ATX power supplies and I'd like to find a power supply which reached better than 90%.
On the other hand, even an 80+ supply is far better than older ones. Last year, an old Antec 300W supply died in my file server after a capacitor went *pop* (the classic bad capacitor syndrome), and I replaced it with an OCZ 700W unit (overkill, I know, but it had lots of SATA power connectors, and eliminated a rat's nest of adapters and Y-cables). I was flabbergasted to see that the load on the UPS dropped by 50%.
A MythTV box with an HD tuner card works quite nicely. I have a pcHDTV HD-5500 card in my system, and even though I don't subscribe to digital cable, all of the local over-the-air channels (and subchannels) are sent over the cable in unencrypted QAM format.
All of the HD programming is stored in straight MPEG-2 format.
Even better, the MythArchive plugin will burn DVDs, automatically downscaled to standard widescreen DVD resolution, if you want to archive shows that way.
The only real problem with the HD-5500 is that the analog tuner works poorly on the analog channels - but I have an old Hauppauge WinTV card that takes care of that problem.
I've set up an Asterisk box on my phone line, and a nifty CGI script that lists incoming calls from the call detail record database. With one click, it can do a whocalled.us lookup on the number, and with another click, I can blacklist it. Once it's in the blacklist, when they call again, I get blessed silence, while the junk caller gets SIT tones (boop-bap-BEEP!) and a recorded message not to call again.
I can also blacklist the last caller by picking up the phone and dialing *60, if I'm not at a computer.
I've noticed that certain blocks of numbers are rather spammy, so I'll go ahead and blacklist blocks of ten or 100 numbers when I start noticing a pattern. I'm not interrupted nearly as much as I used to be.
RBN addresses (and assorted other nasties) are also listed in the Spamhaus DROP (Don't Route Or Peer) list. IMO, it's a useful thing to drop (pun intended) into your firewall...
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Ben Rich's book, Skunk Works, his memoir of working at Lockheed and eventually directing the Skunk Works, mentions OXCART as the A-12's code name. It also discusses the test area (not using name "Area 51," but by the well-known alias "Paradise Ranch"), and a variety of other interesting projects from both the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich eras at SW. The U-2, A-12 and SR-71 Blackbirds, and the F-117 are discussed in surprising detail.
Fun fact: the A-12 (CIA Blackbird) was retired and the SR-71 two-seater version was built for the USAF because the blue-suiters didn't like the idea of the CIA having its own private air force...
...the same folks that gave us the spam router. Why am I not surprised?
Use the command:
smartctl -a /dev/sdX
(X is the drive number)
This will give you a detailed report including the drive's make, model, serial number, firmware revision, and S.M.A.R.T. status values. It will also show the drive's error log if present.
Other methods include examining the kernel boot messages (dmesg is your friend), or using hdparm.
"Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it."
Burma Shave.
Just let the spammers, malware pushers, and con artists clog up the net?
The real question is, who's protecting these scumbags and why? Why has it taken so long to do anything about them?
The truth is that typical LCD power usage now exceeds that of a typical CRT of the same size.
My 22" LCD monitor consumes less than half the power of the 17" CRT it replaced. On the other hand, my 32" LCD TV uses about the same amount of power as my parents' 32" CRT set.
Is 120VDC safe? Is it as safe as AC?
Yes and no. On one side, AC can trigger atrial fibrillation, bringing your heart to a stop. On the other, DC could make you clamp tighter onto a voltage source, reducing your likelihood of getting away, and increasing your likelihood of getting electrocooked.
DC is also more likely to cause arcing. An AC supply's voltage crosses zero twice per cycle, which extinguishes the arc, while a DC voltage remains constant. If you look at the ratings stamped into switches, the DC current rating for a switch will always be quite a bit smaller than the AC current rating (if there's a DC rating at all).
The construction of a Toyota Prius and its battery unit consumes more resources and generates more pollution than a Hummer.
Has any reputable, independent organization actually verified this claim, or is it just another example of a Big Lie that has been repeated so often that people believe it's true?
Then again, his cellmate just might have a sackful of pride...
This stops a lot of the crap. I also have a blacklist, though. Blacklisted numbers get:
The menu choices go to various other silly recordings, and then back to the menu. FYI, the "Special Price Analysis and Marketing" recording is found in the asterisk-sounds package as spam.gsm.
Calls that hit the blacklist menu get recorded. One political spammer spent over a minute trying to navigate the menu...
Something makes me want to go and re-read H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.
I miss clubcastlive.com - it had live webcasts of bands at various clubs in Austin, TX. Shortly after they appeared on one of the morning TV news programs, they vanished from the web - and the domain eventually got snagged by a squatter.
I think bandwidth costs ate them alive - they streamed in 112 kbps MP3. I managed to snag a few shows before they went Tango Uniform.
427 S. LaSalle St. is the old Telegraph Building, once a major Western Union facility. Nowadays, it's a big co-lo center, with various data providers and CLECs.
...that it has better sales than Sousaphone Hero.
Which company was first?
That would be Texas Instruments; they told the geeks to go to hell when they wanted detailed information to write software for the TI-99/4 systems. Have you seen any computer systems from TI lately?
Back to the topic of Creative, I have a USB Audigy 2 NX - which works beautifully on Ubuntu. I'm running it on my MythTV box, since it has an IR remote control, and the motherboard's onboard audio is weak.
IMO, Creative's actions regarding Vista drivers is reason enough to avoid them in the future - as if there wasn't already enough reason to avoid Vista in the first place.
...the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.
It's coming to the point where eSATA is the only realistic solution for external drives. USB2 and FireWire 400 just don't cut it any more, and I haven't seen many systems supporting FireWire 800.
One thing that has received rather little attention is that DTV broadcasts can contain multiple subchannels. For instance, in Chicago, the local PBS affiliate (WTTW) has four DTV subchannels: one 720p HD that's dedicated exclusively to HD programming, along with their regular SD channel, and two extra SD channels.
Unfortunately, they're the only Chicago station that's really taking advantage of this capability. I'd love to see ABC run ESPN on a subchannel, but that'll probably never happen unless enough people start ditching cable and satellite TV.
I am completely under-whelmed by 80+ ATX power supplies and I'd like to find a power supply which reached better than 90%.
On the other hand, even an 80+ supply is far better than older ones. Last year, an old Antec 300W supply died in my file server after a capacitor went *pop* (the classic bad capacitor syndrome), and I replaced it with an OCZ 700W unit (overkill, I know, but it had lots of SATA power connectors, and eliminated a rat's nest of adapters and Y-cables). I was flabbergasted to see that the load on the UPS dropped by 50%.
A MythTV box with an HD tuner card works quite nicely. I have a pcHDTV HD-5500 card in my system, and even though I don't subscribe to digital cable, all of the local over-the-air channels (and subchannels) are sent over the cable in unencrypted QAM format.
All of the HD programming is stored in straight MPEG-2 format.
Even better, the MythArchive plugin will burn DVDs, automatically downscaled to standard widescreen DVD resolution, if you want to archive shows that way.
The only real problem with the HD-5500 is that the analog tuner works poorly on the analog channels - but I have an old Hauppauge WinTV card that takes care of that problem.
I've set up an Asterisk box on my phone line, and a nifty CGI script that lists incoming calls from the call detail record database. With one click, it can do a whocalled.us lookup on the number, and with another click, I can blacklist it. Once it's in the blacklist, when they call again, I get blessed silence, while the junk caller gets SIT tones (boop-bap-BEEP!) and a recorded message not to call again.
I can also blacklist the last caller by picking up the phone and dialing *60, if I'm not at a computer.
I've noticed that certain blocks of numbers are rather spammy, so I'll go ahead and blacklist blocks of ten or 100 numbers when I start noticing a pattern. I'm not interrupted nearly as much as I used to be.
Although the list contains more than just RBN-related netblocks, the Spamhaus DROP List is your friend.
This looks like it could be extended - add a -j DROP rule after the -j LOG (log the offending packet, and then send it to the bit bucket).
IMO, I'd rather do the blocking myself than have AT&T do it for me. That being said, I don't hesitate to block RBN traffic.
RBN addresses (and assorted other nasties) are also listed in the Spamhaus DROP (Don't Route Or Peer) list. IMO, it's a useful thing to drop (pun intended) into your firewall...