Already posted this, I have had DOS apps that just don't work on new machines and with a bit of patching DOSBox worked fine..
Also mentioned in the same post, I have recently found a few cases where 5 different onboard serial ports failed to work but a USB port worked just fine... really strange.
The beauty of OSS is that if it doesn't work you can add support yourself. And if you lack the technical expertise, pay someone to add the support for you.
A few years ago I was asked to organise a new PC to replace a failing vintage laptop that connected via rs232 to a cnc machine. The problem was that the program didn't seem to work on anything else. DOSBox didn't work initially because the program used api calls that were considered obsolete when DOS2.0 came out. DOSBox had support for those calls but it was broken, but fortunately easy enough for me to fix and it now works great. Or did work until the machine it was running on broke and they replaced it with a laptop that didn't have an rs232 port. For some reason DOSBox + USB RS232 works very slowly and I haven't had a chance to figure out why yet. Or try the SVN builds.
OSS FTW!
Unrelated, I was doing much the same thing somewhere else with a drill, but with slightly more modern software that didn't require DOSBox, but no matter what machine we tried it wouldn't talk to the drill. We tried machine after machine with no success. I asked for a USB serial port but then didn't have internet connectivity to download the drivers so kept analysing the serial output and trying to figure out wtf was going on. Eventually I got internet connectivity, downloaded the drivers for the USB serial port and it worked first time and every time since. I guess the control board on the drill (a paper tape emulator) had slightly dodgy rs232 signalling and for some reason the onboard serial ports of all the computers we tried weren't quite able to talk.
Agents (virus or bacteria) that kill 100 percent of those it infects do not last long, and generally do not spread far.
It is a counter productive evolutionary path for infective agents.
Therefore, the tendency is to become less deadly in order to spread wider. Its not like there is any conscious thought involved here its just that those agents that are totally deadly tend to get buried or burned with their victims, whereas the less deadly
versions spread far and wide due to the mobility of their hosts.
A virus that kills 100 percent of those it infects will do just fine as long as it makes you a bit sneezy and coughy and contagious but not too sick for a while first. Something like HIV, when untreated, results in the death of most of its victims, but there is plenty of opportunity for it to spread before this happens.
Have you checked yourself into the nearest psychiatric facility to help deal with these genocidal tendencies and impulses?
Because you need to.
Now.
The _only_ way humanity is going to survive is if very soon there are a lot less people on the planet, or if we turn the comfort level _way_ down. And when a president says "the american way of life is not negotiable" or something like that, you know the latter ain't gonna happen. The way we are living is unsustainable. Hoping for a plague to wipe everyone out certainly sounds like insanity, but no more so than the alternative.
And anyway, psych facilities are mostly filled with people who are a danger to themselves. People who are a danger to others are put in prison. Or government.
It's harder than solving the halting problem - since in many cases you're not even given the full source and inputs.
And if you are writing malware, why release one version tweaked to evade the top 10 AV products, when you can release 1000 variants that the top 10 AV products won't catch.
The better way to deal with malware is sandboxing. Instead of solving the halting problem by trying to figure out whether a program will halt or not, you get the OS to set a limit to the program.
Even getting the program to declare up front what sort of sandbox it wants from the OS is useful.
Agreed. Every so often malware will find a way to exploit a 0-day bug and break out of the sandbox, but such things will be much rarer than what we have now. The problem will always be the user though... "This naked lady picture viewer is incompatible with sandbox. Cancel or Allow?".
I see. If you believe that AV products are useless, what would be your suggestion of a solution to preventing and detecting malware?
No you're not getting it. Currently, any decent malware released right now will not be detected by AV products. AV vendors will get hold of a copy of the malware, tweak their dictionaries, and a subsequent update will detect the malware. Running AV products is a good idea because they will detect malware not too long after the malware is released, but TFA changes nothing about this.
The reason being is the law has no right to take away my freedom.
The law does this all the time - there's a huge list of things you aren't allowed to do. I hear you can get away with a whole load of things in some countries though... maybe you should move there?
At some point, science just got too weird. We had this nice model of the universe with atoms, some laws of motion and thermodynamics. The universe was basically a giant billiards match. It made sense. It was easy to explain. Then we get into quantum mechanics and everything is crap shoot. Multiple universes. Particles that behave differently when being observed. Spooky action at a distance.
Douglas Adams had some very wise words on this subject, the implied conclusion being that scientists studying the universe are making it more complicated.
Let's all pretend the last 80+ years of science didn't happen and we live under Newton's ideas of how everything behaved. Who's in?
Maybe you could go all the way back to when the universe began, 6000 years ago? But don't look back or you might get turned into a pillar of salt or something like that.
Maybe the super capacitor won't explode, but you still have to consider the amount of energy they can hold, and what the result might be if all that energy discharges instantly into the phone if some fault arises. I bet it could generate a loud enough pop to damage your hearing.
you can buy capacitor based battery replacements for cars.
The only new thing in there was "holds its charge for a long time", which I thought was the only real barrier to supercapacitors replacing batteries. I suspect that "a long time" isn't quite correct for useful values of "long".
Safety is obviously a concern too, but industry doesn't really need to worry about that until the first cell phone blows someone's ear off or laptop blows someone's crotch apart.
The one thing I like about supercapacitors (and non-super capacitors) is how quickly they can release all their energy. I can't wait to hold one up to my ear when it's embedded inside a device whose manufacture was outsourced to the lowest bidder!
I have a robot vacuum cleaner and it's more than a toy. I really cherish the thing. It's great. This is indeed a bit close to the specs of a robot vacuum cleaner. Now of course it's potentially much more than that. I certainly get that. That's nice but . ..
The other day I was looking around at Aliexpress. As a matter of fact, I was buying a ten pack of ATMega328s in the DIP 28 format since I'm an Arduino lover. As I was checking out I got one of those ads at that bottom saying: Other people who bought ten packs of ATMega328s also bought
And there was a totally bad ass looking robot hand. The thing looked like a piece of art. It was a human hand made of stainless steel wire basically. A pretty thing where every little finger moved independently. Sexy little thing. I hadn't thought to search for off-the-shelf robot hands.
But I was inspired to do so and I was quite impressed. There was a whole range of six degree of freedom hands for less than two hundred bucks. The down side was the controllers didn't look all that friendly. I'm just a hobbyist but I know from my investigations that industrial robots tend to use these things called teaching pendants which are basically like macro recorders that just take the input from the servos and record it so that you can rough-in a certain manipulation and then starting with that you can go to and editor and fine tune the functionality. So having an open and friendly user community for something like that would be amazing.
I'd hope to see Arduino putting something like that to work although I can imagine that perhaps a teaching pendant application might involve something a bit more beefy like the BeagleBone Black or RasPi.
An application like an open source robot hand massage would be the beginning of something interesting.
I'm making assumptions about your gender here, but please watch this public service video on the dangers of robot arms when used for massage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-VJLz65QhM
So basically this slashvertisement is for a childrens toy of absolutely no interest to geeks. I'm still waiting for an affordable, programmable, personal robot to replace the Sony AIBO.
It may be of interest to future geeks. When I was a kid with an 8 bit computer (Amstrad CPC 664), there was almost zero barrier to entry to start coding. The book that came with it contained all the info you needed to write programs. 10 print "hello world!" [ENTER] run [ENTER]. Hey look at what I made the computer do! You'd have to write the programs in basic, but it was enough to get started. At somewhere between 8-10 years old I opened up the book and went for it. My social life evaporated and i've been coding in one way or another ever since.
These days you buy a computer and it comes with Windows. If you want to code you have to do a reasonable amount of work (30 minutes of googling and downloading is a lot for a young kid with no patience who doesn't even know where to start) before you can even think about it. Or maybe you'd install linux. If you're lucky you might stumble across scratch. Mostly it's much easier to say screw it and just load a game. It's a different ballgame if your parents are geeks too, but a lot of people my age still don't know much beyond facebook.
Anything that someone can get their hands on that might unleash their inner geek is a good thing even if it seems childish to you. I assume that's where the elitist comments came from.
I read that google did some experiments a while back and found that running the datacenter hotter saved more $$$ in cooling than the cost of the increased failure rate of hardware. That's fine for some computing workloads, but what are the obstacles to making computers that can run with an acceptable failure rate in an ambient temperature of (say) 50C (~120F)? I assume there are some major obstacles, i'm just curious as to what they are.
Even if you could run the solid state hardware at 50C and the disks in a separate storage room at 22C, that would still be a win right?
Where's the kaboom? You call that an earth shattering kaboom?
Oh. Wait.
I
It's on the moon, silly. That should be a "moon shattering kaboom". And it seems on-one has ever heard one of those, so we don't know how they sound like.
I was thinking about this. On the next trip to the moon they should stick a few seismic monitoring devices around the place. From that they could synthesize some audio which would make that youtube video a bit more exciting, and start a few flame wars on why there is audio at all from people who don't read tfs.
"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
"size of a small boulder"? This has to be one of the most useless size descriptions possible (I suppose they could have said "the size of a random rock"). Given that they later indicate
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide
it's not as if they shouldn't have been able to come up with a more descriptive metaphor.
That bothered me less than the fact that in the same sentence they describe its size and mass in metric units but its speed in imperial units.
if 1 milliamp produces a 6 month increase in maths performance, then logically, 1 ampere should produce a 6000 month increase in maths performance. Your genius would be smokin'!
Slashdot Mirror
Already posted this, I have had DOS apps that just don't work on new machines and with a bit of patching DOSBox worked fine..
Also mentioned in the same post, I have recently found a few cases where 5 different onboard serial ports failed to work but a USB port worked just fine... really strange.
The beauty of OSS is that if it doesn't work you can add support yourself. And if you lack the technical expertise, pay someone to add the support for you.
A few years ago I was asked to organise a new PC to replace a failing vintage laptop that connected via rs232 to a cnc machine. The problem was that the program didn't seem to work on anything else. DOSBox didn't work initially because the program used api calls that were considered obsolete when DOS2.0 came out. DOSBox had support for those calls but it was broken, but fortunately easy enough for me to fix and it now works great. Or did work until the machine it was running on broke and they replaced it with a laptop that didn't have an rs232 port. For some reason DOSBox + USB RS232 works very slowly and I haven't had a chance to figure out why yet. Or try the SVN builds.
OSS FTW!
Unrelated, I was doing much the same thing somewhere else with a drill, but with slightly more modern software that didn't require DOSBox, but no matter what machine we tried it wouldn't talk to the drill. We tried machine after machine with no success. I asked for a USB serial port but then didn't have internet connectivity to download the drivers so kept analysing the serial output and trying to figure out wtf was going on. Eventually I got internet connectivity, downloaded the drivers for the USB serial port and it worked first time and every time since. I guess the control board on the drill (a paper tape emulator) had slightly dodgy rs232 signalling and for some reason the onboard serial ports of all the computers we tried weren't quite able to talk.
What the GP said is generally true.
Agents (virus or bacteria) that kill 100 percent of those it infects do not last long, and generally do not spread far. It is a counter productive evolutionary path for infective agents.
Therefore, the tendency is to become less deadly in order to spread wider. Its not like there is any conscious thought involved here its just that those agents that are totally deadly tend to get buried or burned with their victims, whereas the less deadly versions spread far and wide due to the mobility of their hosts.
A virus that kills 100 percent of those it infects will do just fine as long as it makes you a bit sneezy and coughy and contagious but not too sick for a while first. Something like HIV, when untreated, results in the death of most of its victims, but there is plenty of opportunity for it to spread before this happens.
Have you checked yourself into the nearest psychiatric facility to help deal with these genocidal tendencies and impulses?
Because you need to.
Now.
The _only_ way humanity is going to survive is if very soon there are a lot less people on the planet, or if we turn the comfort level _way_ down. And when a president says "the american way of life is not negotiable" or something like that, you know the latter ain't gonna happen. The way we are living is unsustainable. Hoping for a plague to wipe everyone out certainly sounds like insanity, but no more so than the alternative.
And anyway, psych facilities are mostly filled with people who are a danger to themselves. People who are a danger to others are put in prison. Or government.
I wonder how much an iPhone 1 will be worth in 40-50 years... I suspect they made more of those than the Apple 1 though.
The truth is the AV vendors nowadays can't cope with the increasing flood of malware out there: http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/01/02/0348247/antivirus-software-performs-poorly-against-new-threats
It's harder than solving the halting problem - since in many cases you're not even given the full source and inputs.
And if you are writing malware, why release one version tweaked to evade the top 10 AV products, when you can release 1000 variants that the top 10 AV products won't catch.
The better way to deal with malware is sandboxing. Instead of solving the halting problem by trying to figure out whether a program will halt or not, you get the OS to set a limit to the program.
Even getting the program to declare up front what sort of sandbox it wants from the OS is useful.
Agreed. Every so often malware will find a way to exploit a 0-day bug and break out of the sandbox, but such things will be much rarer than what we have now. The problem will always be the user though... "This naked lady picture viewer is incompatible with sandbox. Cancel or Allow?".
I see. If you believe that AV products are useless, what would be your suggestion of a solution to preventing and detecting malware?
No you're not getting it. Currently, any decent malware released right now will not be detected by AV products. AV vendors will get hold of a copy of the malware, tweak their dictionaries, and a subsequent update will detect the malware. Running AV products is a good idea because they will detect malware not too long after the malware is released, but TFA changes nothing about this.
Meanwhile, the bad guys will keep tweaking their malware until none of the big players detect it, and then will release it. Just like always.
Matthew Hagee says that praying for healing in Jesus' name always cures everything. Except a case of the stupids.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hagee-healing-jesus-name-works-every-time
If prayer isn't curing stupidity then you obviously aren't praying hard enough, or praying to the wrong god(s).
I wonder if it can cure a nasty case of "leg fell off"?
The reason being is the law has no right to take away my freedom.
The law does this all the time - there's a huge list of things you aren't allowed to do. I hear you can get away with a whole load of things in some countries though... maybe you should move there?
Do you not believe that the Sun is moving?
Not relative to the Earth's frame of reference it isn't, which is all that matters for this calculation.
Rubbish. Gravity is not FTL, and your argument is BS.
I suspect a whoosh might be in order here... "The Sun is of course moving" should have been a dead giveaway.
At some point, science just got too weird. We had this nice model of the universe with atoms, some laws of motion and thermodynamics. The universe was basically a giant billiards match. It made sense. It was easy to explain. Then we get into quantum mechanics and everything is crap shoot. Multiple universes. Particles that behave differently when being observed. Spooky action at a distance.
Douglas Adams had some very wise words on this subject, the implied conclusion being that scientists studying the universe are making it more complicated.
Let's all pretend the last 80+ years of science didn't happen and we live under Newton's ideas of how everything behaved. Who's in?
Maybe you could go all the way back to when the universe began, 6000 years ago? But don't look back or you might get turned into a pillar of salt or something like that.
Probably the tried and true method of 7 proxies
The FBI has just cracked 7 proxies. You have to use 8 now.
Maybe the super capacitor won't explode, but you still have to consider the amount of energy they can hold, and what the result might be if all that energy discharges instantly into the phone if some fault arises. I bet it could generate a loud enough pop to damage your hearing.
did she have some new angle to the tech?
you can buy capacitor based battery replacements for cars.
The only new thing in there was "holds its charge for a long time", which I thought was the only real barrier to supercapacitors replacing batteries. I suspect that "a long time" isn't quite correct for useful values of "long".
Safety is obviously a concern too, but industry doesn't really need to worry about that until the first cell phone blows someone's ear off or laptop blows someone's crotch apart.
The one thing I like about supercapacitors (and non-super capacitors) is how quickly they can release all their energy. I can't wait to hold one up to my ear when it's embedded inside a device whose manufacture was outsourced to the lowest bidder!
I have a robot vacuum cleaner and it's more than a toy. I really cherish the thing. It's great. This is indeed a bit close to the specs of a robot vacuum cleaner. Now of course it's potentially much more than that. I certainly get that. That's nice but . . .
The other day I was looking around at Aliexpress. As a matter of fact, I was buying a ten pack of ATMega328s in the DIP 28 format since I'm an Arduino lover. As I was checking out I got one of those ads at that bottom saying: Other people who bought ten packs of ATMega328s also bought
And there was a totally bad ass looking robot hand. The thing looked like a piece of art. It was a human hand made of stainless steel wire basically. A pretty thing where every little finger moved independently. Sexy little thing. I hadn't thought to search for off-the-shelf robot hands.
But I was inspired to do so and I was quite impressed. There was a whole range of six degree of freedom hands for less than two hundred bucks. The down side was the controllers didn't look all that friendly. I'm just a hobbyist but I know from my investigations that industrial robots tend to use these things called teaching pendants which are basically like macro recorders that just take the input from the servos and record it so that you can rough-in a certain manipulation and then starting with that you can go to and editor and fine tune the functionality. So having an open and friendly user community for something like that would be amazing.
I'd hope to see Arduino putting something like that to work although I can imagine that perhaps a teaching pendant application might involve something a bit more beefy like the BeagleBone Black or RasPi.
An application like an open source robot hand massage would be the beginning of something interesting.
I'm making assumptions about your gender here, but please watch this public service video on the dangers of robot arms when used for massage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-VJLz65QhM
So basically this slashvertisement is for a childrens toy of absolutely no interest to geeks. I'm still waiting for an affordable, programmable, personal robot to replace the Sony AIBO.
It may be of interest to future geeks. When I was a kid with an 8 bit computer (Amstrad CPC 664), there was almost zero barrier to entry to start coding. The book that came with it contained all the info you needed to write programs. 10 print "hello world!" [ENTER] run [ENTER]. Hey look at what I made the computer do! You'd have to write the programs in basic, but it was enough to get started. At somewhere between 8-10 years old I opened up the book and went for it. My social life evaporated and i've been coding in one way or another ever since.
These days you buy a computer and it comes with Windows. If you want to code you have to do a reasonable amount of work (30 minutes of googling and downloading is a lot for a young kid with no patience who doesn't even know where to start) before you can even think about it. Or maybe you'd install linux. If you're lucky you might stumble across scratch. Mostly it's much easier to say screw it and just load a game. It's a different ballgame if your parents are geeks too, but a lot of people my age still don't know much beyond facebook.
Anything that someone can get their hands on that might unleash their inner geek is a good thing even if it seems childish to you. I assume that's where the elitist comments came from.
I read that google did some experiments a while back and found that running the datacenter hotter saved more $$$ in cooling than the cost of the increased failure rate of hardware. That's fine for some computing workloads, but what are the obstacles to making computers that can run with an acceptable failure rate in an ambient temperature of (say) 50C (~120F)? I assume there are some major obstacles, i'm just curious as to what they are.
Even if you could run the solid state hardware at 50C and the disks in a separate storage room at 22C, that would still be a win right?
Where's the kaboom? You call that an earth shattering kaboom?
Oh. Wait.
I
It's on the moon, silly. That should be a "moon shattering kaboom". And it seems on-one has ever heard one of those, so we don't know how they sound like.
I was thinking about this. On the next trip to the moon they should stick a few seismic monitoring devices around the place. From that they could synthesize some audio which would make that youtube video a bit more exciting, and start a few flame wars on why there is audio at all from people who don't read tfs.
"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
"size of a small boulder"? This has to be one of the most useless size descriptions possible (I suppose they could have said "the size of a random rock"). Given that they later indicate
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide
it's not as if they shouldn't have been able to come up with a more descriptive metaphor.
That bothered me less than the fact that in the same sentence they describe its size and mass in metric units but its speed in imperial units.
if 1 milliamp produces a 6 month increase in maths performance, then logically, 1 ampere should produce a 6000 month increase in maths performance. Your genius would be smokin'!
from the article...
"The electrical current slowly ramped up to about 1 milliamp—a tiny fraction of the voltage of an AA battery—"
Perhaps the article writer could benefit from this electroshock therapy as well....
Perhaps they could benefit from this http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/05/15/dictionary-of-numbers/
"1 milliamp [~ the amount of current applied to the brain to boost math performance for 6 months]"