If what you mean by "jam" is "make service unavailable", yes, I would expect anybody with access to a powerful enough transmitter should be able to wash out GPS signals; at least locally.
I would wonder about the vulnerability of such a jammer to an antiradiation missile... but technically it's possible.
The downside of course is that by doing so, you render all your GPS recievers inoperative as well.
What you really want to do in a GPS context is something called "selective availibility" where you remove or downgrade the service from unauthenticated "public" receivers. Your stuff still works to an 8-figure grid, but the bad guys are lucky to get 4 figures, and it jumps around a lot.
In order to do that though, you need access to the source signal. You can't really do that from a "jammer".
The funny thing is... I'm not sure how important selective availibility is from a national security perspective.
Back in my recce days, I was required to know where I was at all times to 6 figures (100 metres) using nothing more than a map, a compass, and an odometer/pace count. It takes a lot of practice, but once you learn how, you can locate your position very accurately using terrain features and keeping accurate track of your route.
Same deal in an urban environment. "Meet me at the corner of Peel & St Catherines" is accurate to 100 metres. "Meet me at the nortwest corner of Peel & St Catherines" is accurate to about 5 metres.
Some environments can be a little more tricky - open desert, fog, out-of-date maps - but as long as you're talking about humans, accurate GPS is a "nice to have" not a "must have or cannot function"
The exception is GPS-guided precision munitions... which are not exactly common items amongst the bad guys.
If you look at where the UN and/or the US have gone in the last little while... The preferred weapon in Rwanda was a machete. Somallia, the AK-47. Bosnia/Serbia, the AK47, the land mine, and at least one Panther tank. Afganistan, AK47 and the RPG. Iraq, AK47, AK74, and the RPG.
Most of the bad guys are fighting with technology that was state of the art in 1945 - and even then, there's at least one 1945-era technology that hasn't made it into the hands of more than a few countries.
Terrorists? McVey used a truck full of fertillizer. The various groups blowing themselves up in the Middle East also use various chemical explosives. The big Al-Quaida innovation was to crash a big plane full of jet fuel into a building - and that'll never work again, because they changed the "how best to survive a hijacking" procedure so quickly that one of the planes IN THE AIR AT THE TIME didn't play ball.
In terms of places to spend political capital, this seems like a bad investment. Piss off your friends, do little harm to your enemies, and don't increase actual security by any measurable amount.
Mind you, I just described the invasion of Iraq too....
Oddly enough, my main home machine is a RedHat 8 Athlon 2100+
My wife has a digital camera, and it Just Works. Plug in the camera, start "Digital Camera Tool" from the Gnome start menu, download pics. No shell window required.
My non-techie wife has no problems with it at all.
Now getting the Espon C82 printer to print photos with any sort of colour fidelity was a weekend of build-CUPS-from-scratch HELL - but the camera was a no-brainer.
The RedHat desktop user experience is nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be.
This isn't a race. We don't get any bonus points if MS is gone from the planet by 2010, 2100, or indeed, ever.
MS could very well do an IBM and become a Linux services company that sold support for their "legacy" OS on the side. Who cares what they do? IT DOESN'T MATTER.
What _does_ matter is the days of the proprietary, closed-source software company are over. The asteroid has already struck. They may not be finished dying yet (indeed, they've only just started) but them dinosaurs are doomed just the same.
No matter how hard they fight, no matter what dirty tricks they pull, no matter how skilled the litigators, ultimate victory is assured so long as there are compilers, hackers, and Internet connections. So relax! Enjoy the show! Ride the glacier!
The GPL is based on copyright law. It's solid. A lot of very smart people spent a lot of time working on it, and it has been around in the wild for a long time as well. Nothing SCO can do will overturn that.
And even - if we play devil's advocate for a second - if SCO managed to somehow overturn the GPL, then the copyrights revert to the original authors and they STILL cannot steal it. And in the meantime, Stallman and the FSF will go to work on GPL Next Generation that patches whatever hole managed to get punched in it.
The Code Is Out There. It cannot be made to go away, and more importantly, the culture of Free Software/Open Source is established and entrenched. If necessary, Linux could be re-written from scratch and the project would carry on.
It's not going to come to that... but even in the worst possible case for us, SCO cannot stop us. At best, it can only slow things down.
What you are seeing and hearing are the first of the death throes of the former Big Players. Microsoft's death will likely be even more messy... but it doesn't matter in the end. The horse carriage makers and sailing shipbuilders died hard too.
We really are invincible - that's what has these people so scared. The only question is "when?" and... well, who cares? If you're reaping the benefits of Linux, then YOU have already won. So it takes a little while longer to make it to everone. *shrug* Big deal. When victory is inevitable, don't complain that it doesn't arrive fast enough.
Personally, I'm thanking my lucky stars that the first big opponent in the battle between Big Business Proprietary Software and Free Software - the case that is likely to set all kinds of precidents - is against an opponent so painfully and obviously in the wrong. They're centered around a *stock scam* fer crissakes, and they're abusing the judges. Read Groklaw for a taste of just how poorly this battle is being fought by the "other side" and how well by "our side".
We could have wound up fighting somebody much, much smarter with a better case, purer, and uncontaminated with by market foolishness. Instead, we got SCO. That's cause for celebration in my book.
There are some really spectacular community-produced modules too. CC1 and CC2 in particular were really very good. There are some really strong writers out there.
And Bioware has been keeping the Linux client up to date (and in some cases, even slightly advanced over) the Windows client. I'm VERY happy with the Linux support. Supposedly there is a Linux toolset coming too (OpenNights or something like that)
The comment about "breaking things" is very insightful.
I'm no master chess player, but I used to play a lot of chess against Sargon III on my C=64 back in the day.
I discovered, quite by accident, that the chess engine in Sargon III could not see "indirect" attacks (there's probably some real chess term for this - if you want to threaten a piece with some other piece, put some third piece in the line of intended attack, move the attacking piece into position, and then "reveal" the attack by moving the "blocking" piece someplace else)
After a while, the program had trained me to set up these elabourate attacks... that a real human, even another amatuer like myself, would instantly recognise.
Say... I wonder if the computer was programming me?
If I can get it to turn on recording at the same time as I push the DATA RECORD switch on the datalogger, then I get video and sound synched to the data log - and that would be a HUGE advantage.
Why solid-state? Because race cars take a lot of abuse. 1.6G to -1.6G in the space of half a second or so.
I figure an MPEG2 capture card, an audio capture card, the OS on EPROM and Compact Flash as the filesystem. Video IN and stereo audio IN. Record at full-speed every time the RECORD pin goes to ground. Operate at 10V-16V.
I've found a number of VERY similar devices (for security cameras), but nothing yet that does full speed video and sound. Build one, price it cheap, and I'll buy it.
...I'd like to see them team up with the people who produce the exit directories, and add in service stations etc.
I want answers to things like "Where is the nearest Flying J on my route?" or "How far to the next rest area?"
I've done the mapping software (National Geographic trip planner) + GPS thing, and while the moving map is really nifty, it would be more useful if it had more data.
Of all the programs I really miss from my Amiga days, Lightwave is the last one (now that PageStream has a Linux port - http://www.grasshopperllc.com - that I really jones for.
But oddly, it's like Linux doesn't exist over at NewTek. I've never understood why they didn't port Lightwave over.
It is unlikely that any nanobots we'll be dealing with in the forseeable future will be self-replicating. In fact, I think the opposite problem - how to keep the damn things functional long enough to do their job - will be the more prevelent one.
As such, the major issue facing nanobots is more likely to be analogous to the "space junk" problem (what do you do about large numbers of "dead" nanobots) than to be a "gray goo" or "runaway virus" problem.
I consider a "low hanging fruit" anything that you could go back in time and describe to a literate man of the Renaissence with a high probability of him understanding in sufficiant detail to be able to duplicate it himself.
Pasteurization for example. He may have to take it on faith that microrganisms exist (there being no microscopes handy to demonstrate with) but the immediate payoff in terms of life expectancy and reduction of disease with a proper programme of sanitation would be self-evident.
I think you would be very hard pressed to be able to describe the workings of a digital watch in sufficiant detail for him to be able to duplicate it.
Gravity and ballistics? Easy. Quantum mechanics? Not on your life.
More to the point, given that his date range is 800 BCE to 1950 CE, and the Americas were colonies struggling to be self-sufficiant (with little time for art or science) up until about 1800 or so, that gives Europe a much larger time window.
And then there's a classification problem related to the increase in global travel post 1900-ish. Is Einstein American, or European?
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone. The remaining problems tend to be "hard" in some non-trivial sense.
If you're a desktop-publishing kind of guy, you might want to try Pagestream.
http://www.grasshopperllc.com
This started life as an Amiga and Atari ST desktop publishing program, but it has since expanded to Windows, Mac, and Linux.
It is managed by a VERY small software house that has always been on the verge of bankruptcy (that's what happens when your customer base is on Amigas, and Chicken Lips goes under) but they are survivors, and over the years the core engine has gotten very good.
I just bought the Linux version. The UI stuff is still pretty buggy, but the developers are very responsive to bug reports, and they "release early, release often" so it should get very much better on a reasonably short timeframe.
The same thing happened back in the Amiga days. They released a major new version (3.0) and it was as buggy as hell, but with a lot of internet-based customer feedback, development was brisk.
BTW, if there EVER was a program to get bought out by an angel like Red Hat, and then open-sourced while keeping the main programmers on staff (OpenOffice, Mozilla) this is one of them. It really is very good. I did quite a lot of production work with it back in the day.
Slashdot Mirror
My father was a complete camera nut; he had a couple of Nikon FX (?) camera backs, and about a hundred different lenses.
Everything from super-wide-angle to "count nosehairs from 1km away"
It'd be really cool to have a digital camera that could make use of all these standardized (?) lenses.
Anybody got a source?
DG
You're not the only one registering complaints with the bank.
Within 20 min of learing about RBC's SCO investment, I had fired off a nasty letter to the CEO complaining about what the RBC was doing with MY money.
I would not be suprised if a lot of other RBC customers did similar things.
Perhaps they are taking notice.
DG
Where's my goddamned prune juice?
And why is there an onion tied to my belt?
DG
I always thought it was "The Producers"
DG
If what you mean by "jam" is "make service unavailable", yes, I would expect anybody with access to a powerful enough transmitter should be able to wash out GPS signals; at least locally.
I would wonder about the vulnerability of such a jammer to an antiradiation missile... but technically it's possible.
The downside of course is that by doing so, you render all your GPS recievers inoperative as well.
What you really want to do in a GPS context is something called "selective availibility" where you remove or downgrade the service from unauthenticated "public" receivers. Your stuff still works to an 8-figure grid, but the bad guys are lucky to get 4 figures, and it jumps around a lot.
In order to do that though, you need access to the source signal. You can't really do that from a "jammer".
The funny thing is... I'm not sure how important selective availibility is from a national security perspective.
Back in my recce days, I was required to know where I was at all times to 6 figures (100 metres) using nothing more than a map, a compass, and an odometer/pace count. It takes a lot of practice, but once you learn how, you can locate your position very accurately using terrain features and keeping accurate track of your route.
Same deal in an urban environment. "Meet me at the corner of Peel & St Catherines" is accurate to 100 metres. "Meet me at the nortwest corner of Peel & St Catherines" is accurate to about 5 metres.
Some environments can be a little more tricky - open desert, fog, out-of-date maps - but as long as you're talking about humans, accurate GPS is a "nice to have" not a "must have or cannot function"
The exception is GPS-guided precision munitions... which are not exactly common items amongst the bad guys.
If you look at where the UN and/or the US have gone in the last little while... The preferred weapon in Rwanda was a machete. Somallia, the AK-47. Bosnia/Serbia, the AK47, the land mine, and at least one Panther tank. Afganistan, AK47 and the RPG. Iraq, AK47, AK74, and the RPG.
Most of the bad guys are fighting with technology that was state of the art in 1945 - and even then, there's at least one 1945-era technology that hasn't made it into the hands of more than a few countries.
Terrorists? McVey used a truck full of fertillizer. The various groups blowing themselves up in the Middle East also use various chemical explosives. The big Al-Quaida innovation was to crash a big plane full of jet fuel into a building - and that'll never work again, because they changed the "how best to survive a hijacking" procedure so quickly that one of the planes IN THE AIR AT THE TIME didn't play ball.
In terms of places to spend political capital, this seems like a bad investment. Piss off your friends, do little harm to your enemies, and don't increase actual security by any measurable amount.
Mind you, I just described the invasion of Iraq too....
DG
Oddly enough, my main home machine is a RedHat 8 Athlon 2100+
My wife has a digital camera, and it Just Works. Plug in the camera, start "Digital Camera Tool" from the Gnome start menu, download pics. No shell window required.
My non-techie wife has no problems with it at all.
Now getting the Espon C82 printer to print photos with any sort of colour fidelity was a weekend of build-CUPS-from-scratch HELL - but the camera was a no-brainer.
The RedHat desktop user experience is nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be.
DG
Seriously!
This isn't a race. We don't get any bonus points if MS is gone from the planet by 2010, 2100, or indeed, ever.
MS could very well do an IBM and become a Linux services company that sold support for their "legacy" OS on the side. Who cares what they do? IT DOESN'T MATTER.
What _does_ matter is the days of the proprietary, closed-source software company are over. The asteroid has already struck. They may not be finished dying yet (indeed, they've only just started) but them dinosaurs are doomed just the same.
No matter how hard they fight, no matter what dirty tricks they pull, no matter how skilled the litigators, ultimate victory is assured so long as there are compilers, hackers, and Internet connections. So relax! Enjoy the show! Ride the glacier!
DG
See, here's the thing - it doesn't matter.
The GPL is based on copyright law. It's solid. A lot of very smart people spent a lot of time working on it, and it has been around in the wild for a long time as well. Nothing SCO can do will overturn that.
And even - if we play devil's advocate for a second - if SCO managed to somehow overturn the GPL, then the copyrights revert to the original authors and they STILL cannot steal it. And in the meantime, Stallman and the FSF will go to work on GPL Next Generation that patches whatever hole managed to get punched in it.
The Code Is Out There. It cannot be made to go away, and more importantly, the culture of Free Software/Open Source is established and entrenched. If necessary, Linux could be re-written from scratch and the project would carry on.
It's not going to come to that... but even in the worst possible case for us, SCO cannot stop us. At best, it can only slow things down.
What you are seeing and hearing are the first of the death throes of the former Big Players. Microsoft's death will likely be even more messy... but it doesn't matter in the end. The horse carriage makers and sailing shipbuilders died hard too.
We really are invincible - that's what has these people so scared. The only question is "when?" and... well, who cares? If you're reaping the benefits of Linux, then YOU have already won. So it takes a little while longer to make it to everone. *shrug* Big deal. When victory is inevitable, don't complain that it doesn't arrive fast enough.
Personally, I'm thanking my lucky stars that the first big opponent in the battle between Big Business Proprietary Software and Free Software - the case that is likely to set all kinds of precidents - is against an opponent so painfully and obviously in the wrong. They're centered around a *stock scam* fer crissakes, and they're abusing the judges. Read Groklaw for a taste of just how poorly this battle is being fought by the "other side" and how well by "our side".
We could have wound up fighting somebody much, much smarter with a better case, purer, and uncontaminated with by market foolishness. Instead, we got SCO. That's cause for celebration in my book.
DG
There are some really spectacular community-produced modules too. CC1 and CC2 in particular were really very good. There are some really strong writers out there.
And Bioware has been keeping the Linux client up to date (and in some cases, even slightly advanced over) the Windows client. I'm VERY happy with the Linux support. Supposedly there is a Linux toolset coming too (OpenNights or something like that)
Thumbs WAY up BioWare!
DG
The comment about "breaking things" is very insightful.
I'm no master chess player, but I used to play a lot of chess against Sargon III on my C=64 back in the day.
I discovered, quite by accident, that the chess engine in Sargon III could not see "indirect" attacks (there's probably some real chess term for this - if you want to threaten a piece with some other piece, put some third piece in the line of intended attack, move the attacking piece into position, and then "reveal" the attack by moving the "blocking" piece someplace else)
After a while, the program had trained me to set up these elabourate attacks... that a real human, even another amatuer like myself, would instantly recognise.
Say... I wonder if the computer was programming me?
DG
Given that Microsoft got caught lying to a Federal judge (during the antitrust case) why is anyone suprised that they'll lie to their customers?
Isn't that a given?
Anybody looking to a vendor to provide accurate data about its products or the products of its competitors deserves the crap they get.
DG
I've been looking for a 100% solid-state DVR.
Why? On-board camera for my race car.
If I can get it to turn on recording at the same time as I push the DATA RECORD switch on the datalogger, then I get video and sound synched to the data log - and that would be a HUGE advantage.
Why solid-state? Because race cars take a lot of abuse. 1.6G to -1.6G in the space of half a second or so.
I figure an MPEG2 capture card, an audio capture card, the OS on EPROM and Compact Flash as the filesystem. Video IN and stereo audio IN. Record at full-speed every time the RECORD pin goes to ground. Operate at 10V-16V.
I've found a number of VERY similar devices (for security cameras), but nothing yet that does full speed video and sound. Build one, price it cheap, and I'll buy it.
DG
...I'd like to see them team up with the people who produce the exit directories, and add in service stations etc.
I want answers to things like "Where is the nearest Flying J on my route?" or "How far to the next rest area?"
I've done the mapping software (National Geographic trip planner) + GPS thing, and while the moving map is really nifty, it would be more useful if it had more data.
DG
I started 3D work using Sculpt 3D in 1988. Then moved to Turbo Silver, and Imagine. Around 1996, I picked up Lightwave.
All these products were reasonably easy to figure out, and Lightwave just kicked ass. My productivity in Lightwave was just off the charts.
I've tried Blender a couple of times, but have never made any signifigant headway with it - the interface is just too obscure.
Lightwave for Linux - or Blender adoping a Lightwave-ish interface - would rock my world.
DG
Of all the programs I really miss from my Amiga days, Lightwave is the last one (now that PageStream has a Linux port - http://www.grasshopperllc.com - that I really jones for.
But oddly, it's like Linux doesn't exist over at NewTek. I've never understood why they didn't port Lightwave over.
Any ideas on if we'll ever see this?
DG
You said a magic phrase there: "self-replicating"
It is unlikely that any nanobots we'll be dealing with in the forseeable future will be self-replicating. In fact, I think the opposite problem - how to keep the damn things functional long enough to do their job - will be the more prevelent one.
As such, the major issue facing nanobots is more likely to be analogous to the "space junk" problem (what do you do about large numbers of "dead" nanobots) than to be a "gray goo" or "runaway virus" problem.
DG
I consider a "low hanging fruit" anything that you could go back in time and describe to a literate man of the Renaissence with a high probability of him understanding in sufficiant detail to be able to duplicate it himself.
Pasteurization for example. He may have to take it on faith that microrganisms exist (there being no microscopes handy to demonstrate with) but the immediate payoff in terms of life expectancy and reduction of disease with a proper programme of sanitation would be self-evident.
I think you would be very hard pressed to be able to describe the workings of a digital watch in sufficiant detail for him to be able to duplicate it.
Gravity and ballistics? Easy. Quantum mechanics? Not on your life.
Etc.
DG
More to the point, given that his date range is 800 BCE to 1950 CE, and the Americas were colonies struggling to be self-sufficiant (with little time for art or science) up until about 1800 or so, that gives Europe a much larger time window.
And then there's a classification problem related to the increase in global travel post 1900-ish. Is Einstein American, or European?
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone. The remaining problems tend to be "hard" in some non-trivial sense.
DG
I guess it would be "A"
Other similar-generation ships (Reliant, Excelcior) share a lot of design details, but nothing captures the elegance of ST-TMP Enterprise.
Although I agree that the TOS Klingon ships are also _very_ nice.
Pretty much anything TNG and beyond is a design disaster. Ugly ugly ugly.
DG
Say what you want about Star Trek in general, but the design of the "movie" Entreprise is one of the prettiest, most graceful vehicles ever built.
Something that beautiful deserves to get built, someday.
DG
If the mass of the fuel rod is sub-critical, they you can't steal it and make a bomb out of it.
DG
If you're a desktop-publishing kind of guy, you might want to try Pagestream.
http://www.grasshopperllc.com
This started life as an Amiga and Atari ST desktop publishing program, but it has since expanded to Windows, Mac, and Linux.
It is managed by a VERY small software house that has always been on the verge of bankruptcy (that's what happens when your customer base is on Amigas, and Chicken Lips goes under) but they are survivors, and over the years the core engine has gotten very good.
I just bought the Linux version. The UI stuff is still pretty buggy, but the developers are very responsive to bug reports, and they "release early, release often" so it should get very much better on a reasonably short timeframe.
The same thing happened back in the Amiga days. They released a major new version (3.0) and it was as buggy as hell, but with a lot of internet-based customer feedback, development was brisk.
BTW, if there EVER was a program to get bought out by an angel like Red Hat, and then open-sourced while keeping the main programmers on staff (OpenOffice, Mozilla) this is one of them. It really is very good. I did quite a lot of production work with it back in the day.
Give it a try!
DG
Goddamnit! Here's the fixed link: RBC Investor Relations
< href="http://www.rbc.com/contactus/invrel_email.ht ml">RBC Investor Relations Feedback</a>
I sent them a letter a few seconds ago. I suggest a lot of other people do the same.
We have to make investing in SCO a public relations nightmare.
DG
From a quick look at the Newtek site, I see that there's a screamernet node client for Linux, but not a user-interface version.
Why hasn't Newtek done a Linux version of Lightwave?
DG