I just read up on the civilian restrictions regarding fast, high altitude GPS and there aren't any restrictions imposed on domestic use, only export. So building or buying a GPS capable of achieving speeds over 515 m/s and 18 km altitude domestically in the USA appears to be legal as long as you don't export it.
You can roll your own using off the shelf components. Though this may add a bit of weight if you use PC hardware, an FPGA, DSP, microcontroller or combination may be able to do fast real time positioning past the measly few Hz that vendor GPS modules offer.
Honestly, applying munitions restrictions to fast GPS does nothing to stop anyone from building a cruise missile or other GPS guided weapons. All it does is impose silly restrictions that rogue nations, governments or peoples will simply ignore and work around while denying peaceful legitimate uses by ordinary people.
Or, I just thought about it. If the station were big enough I wonder if a sufficient amount of oxygen could be generated by plants. Then you may be able to get a surplus but then you still need night energy for the plants to grow. Its an interesting thought.
The problem is you can't get a neat gain from burning methane + O2 and using that energy to make more O2 and have energy left over. You would need an abundant supply of oxygen or a method of splitting water that is more efficient.
Titan looks like it could be a pretty interesting moon for building a space station. The atmospheric pressure is only 1.45 times of that on Earth meaning you could have the habitat pressure equalized with the atmosphere so pressure isn't a concern. If there is water trapped under ice as is speculated, we could produce oxygen for breathing and mix it with the plentiful nitrogen to make air similar to what we have on Earth. I don't know how much light reaches the surface, probably too little to be of use for solar so power generation would have to be from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). Too bad there isn't any oxygen otherwise all that methane would be pretty damn useful for power and heat.
On Earth it is relatively rare - 0.00052% by volume in the atmosphere. Most terrestrial helium present today is created by the natural radioactive decay of heavy radioactive elements (thorium and uranium, although there are other examples), as the alpha particles emitted by such decays consist of helium-4 nuclei. This radiogenic helium is trapped with natural gas in concentrations up to 7% by volume, from which it is extracted commercially by a low-temperature separation process called fractional distillation. Helium is a finite resource and is one of the only elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space.
I doubt McAfee is building anything. He has admitted that he is a crap coder and pretty much paid engineers to write his AV software when he was in charge of the company. I doubt he can even remember how to write code. Most likely he had this idea and decided to throw some money at people to build it for him and then slap his name on it.
Though as much as I think he is a megalomaniacal attention whore, if he has the money and it can benefit people by creating a secure, isolated network then i'm all for it. Just don't tell people YOU are building it. Tell them, you are funding it.
McAfee is talking about creating an encrypted, personal, portable mesh network device. The devices you linked are nothing more than TOR exit nodes which aren't as secure as most would like.
The idea behind a mesh network is there is no single point of control for the network, its literally a hodgepodge of nodes interacting with each other. So no ISP or internet connection needed, it is a separate network. If one node goes out the rest keep on talking to each other, you may lose contact with some clients though. Of course you won't be browsing the web with this device. Its main use would be for people in a meeting or conference who wish to share information without it going over any public networks. Sounds trivial but a plug and play solution isn't really available off the shelf unless you are talking about ad-hoc wifi which suffers from poor performance as the number of clients increases. I am sure it uses more modern wireless tech and has routing built in to balance the network traffic between nodes.
First we rid ourselves of manufacturing to become a country of services and intellectual property. Then we destroy the reputation of our services by spying on everyone who uses them. Good job government. Good job.
Although the Unimog is a nice utility vehicle you would want an older one with fully mechanical fuel injection and plenty of spare parts such as brake components, suspension parts and driveline parts if you are in North America. If you really want bulletproof get an old Dodge Ram diesel. The older 6BT series Cummins had fully mechanical injection which means even if the battery is dead and the alternator doesn't work, the engine will still happily keep running. Mechanical injection also means if you have a dead battery you can pull or push start the engine.
Manual vs automatic transmission is debatable depending on the engine fuel type and years made. In an old mechanical diesel the manual is your best option as you can now easily pull or push start it if the battery dies. In a gas job, unless you have a magneto for ignition (used only in race cars nowadays) a manual is useless for pull starting a dead battery.
If you are looking for an apocalypse ready vehicle you are better off building your own. Everything sold today is so full of electronic junk and emissions systems that they are unreliable without a tow truck and garage on hand. Diesels are no where as reliable as they once were. Run out of DEF(adBlue)? Power derate aka limp home mode comes on. DPF clogged? Derate or engine shutdown. Battery dead? So are you unless you can jump it. High pressure common rail electronic injection killed the ability to pull start an engine. Some engine makers still use unit injection but with electronics on top of it so its still a no go.
Here is my build: Old GM 4x4 CK 1500/2500 pickup chassis,8 foot bed and four door (aka crew cab). Cummins 4BT with 5 speed manual (you don't need tons of HP or torque if you want to be efficient while still being able to get out of jams.) Fuel system devoid of rubber so fuels other than diesel could be used in an emergency (rubber swells and fails with other fuels). Auxiliary hand cranked spring starter in case pull or push starting is not an option. Extra alternator and battery, some spare parts and tools. Some kind of bed cover or camper body that is low CG yet roomy enough for storage and sleeping. Winch, with a pull capacity at least double the trucks weight. Roof rack front to back that is re enforced which would allow a few people to stand atop the truck and also hold some cargo if necessary. also would double as a roll cage for worst case scenarios. Door between cab and bed/body and a hatch from both to the roof rack for better movement or escape options. Plenty of lighting with stone guards including a search light and spare bulbs, better make em quality LED for longevity and ruggedness. spare tire or two, hand tools to remove/mount the tire and the rim and tire plug kits. Also a good 12v compressor and manual tire pump as a backup. Heavy duty rope, snatch blocks, chains, tow strap etc. get yourself out of a bind without the winch if necessary. Extra fluids and a nice tool kit including duct tape.
Then stock it with your survival supplies and tools as you see fit.
A small Detroit Diesel 53 series engine would also be nice but they are heavy as hell. Really any smaller 4 cylinder fully mechanical diesel would be fine as long as parts are easy to get. 100-150HP is enough for most applications and they sip fuel. We used to have a 1989 Isuzu box truck with a small 4 cylinder 100 HP diesel that would go 250-300 miles on a 20 gallon tank loaded with upward of six thousand pounds. It wasn't as rocket ship but it did the job just fine.
What I would rather see in an embedded Linux board is more I/O. I am not talking about USB, HDMI or Ethernet but honest to goodness digital I/O's and serial busses like I2C or SPI. The minnowboard has a measly 8 GPIO's and two more hardwired to LED's. That isn't worth $200 when I can get the same thing by purchasing a cheap Atom ITX board and then adding an FPGA PCI I/O card from Mesa Electronics for slightly more.
If you want to impress me and make it worth $200 then how about using the Intel Atom Processor E6x5C featuring an embedded Altera FPGA which is connected to the CPU by a friggen PCIe Gen2 x1 link. Then include a default bitfile for the FPGA which gives you a bunch of GPIO, PWM and UARTS for serial ports like RS232, SPI and I2C. Also breakout the remaining PCIe link for further expansion. A kernel driver will then expose the various I/O devices inside the FPGA to a standard API. Then port the Wiring libs which is used by the Arduino to the new API for the FPGA and you will now have a development board that will blow the competition away. Even the Arduino IDE can be modified to build Linux binaries for the new API. Bonus points of you throw a nice 8 channel 16 bit high speed ADC on there. No re-learning new libraries or languages. Arduino libs could be added without code modification provided they don't make low level calls. Even then simple modifications could be made to port them. The API could also be called from any other language like C++, Go, Ada, D or whatever you fancy so you can write code in your language of choice. Newbies could plug in the board wait for it to boot and configure the FPGA and start writing code and wiring it into their projects, they already know Arduino libs so let them use those. If you really want to be fancy use the RT PREEMPT patch and let more advanced users write code for real time stuff guaranteeing determinism.
Imagine then if the internal FPGA bits could then be added to or modified to include new I/O devices. Establish a standard bus and I/O address space for the FPGA and make a template for writing new modules. Write a GUI editor which lets you snap modules onto the bus like Legos and set the address space and their I/O pins. Call Quartus using scripts in the background and generate the new bitfile which can be uploaded on the fly to the FPGA from the host OS. Then the standard API for the kernel driver would simplify writing libraries for talking to the new modules. Want to make a CNC? Add quadrature encoder interfaces and H bridge controllers and directly drive servo motors. Software radio, DSP, video processing, audio processing, the possibilities are endless. Then the community can release HDL modules which the user can snap into their designs and then do the wiring. This way people don't have to learn complex HDL programming, they use what the community provides. Don't like the default bitfile layout or standard templates? Write your own HDL code and do what you please. Open hardware means you have all the specs and source.
If that were available for 200-300 then I would gleefully say shut up and take my money.
Er, not to split hairs but I think you meant to say "Linux kernel". Linux is the name given to the kernel Torvalds wrote for the GNU operating system. Technically a Linux based OS should be called GNU/Linux implying that it is a GNU OS running on top of a Linux kernel. But Linux has become the common and accepted term for GNU/Linux.
Internet of things is yet another buzzword applied to an older term: home automation. Similar to how cloud computing is a throwback to mainframe computing. Street lighting, traffic signal automation, industrial automation, smart distribution and metering of electric power falls under automation and SCADA. I don't see a point to remotely control a washer or toaster over the internet. Though a local system might be helpful with remote reporting.
Though there are some appealing ideas that can come of connected home appliances, the most obvious being text alerts of status. I would love it if my washer and dryer could text me when they are finished. Nothing sucks more then forgetting to dry your work clothes and then finding the wet, wrinkled, mildew smelling mess in the washer the next morning. Same with the dryer, wrinkled dry clothes are just as useless as wrinkled wet clothes. Those are the only two good examples I can come up with. Connected refrigerators aren't as appealing. I know how many eggs I have left and how much milk I have left as I open my refrigerator daily. Microwaves and toasters aren't that necessary either as they spend little time doing the cooking. Maybe oven or stoves could be timed and send an alert that they are done. Thermostats and AC units could be monitored for usage and remotely turned on/off. That is another good use.
Home monitoring of power usage might be useful for people looking to cut their usage. If you had solar it would be good if you could compare your home load to your banked kw/h and see the usage in real time. "Your solar system generated 50 kW/h today. Your current load is 10kW, you have 5 hours of free power left." Then you could look at your current appliance load and see what uses the most power. A breakdown chart of appliances and their monthly power consumption could help people determine if they could use that appliance less. Clothes dryers suck up a lot of power, maybe during the warmer months they could use a clothesline. Hell I dry my clothes indoors during the winter too, the dry air helps.
Instead of wireless, which makes integration easier, powerline networking would be just as appropriate. Most of those appliances are either hard wired in or plugged in. A router would need a wall plug adapter and ethernet cable or better yet, the routers power cable could pass through to an internal power line networking adapter. That or use Zigbee on the lower frequency ISM bands.
I am 33 and I watch Adventure Time and Regular Show. I also catch the new Looney Tunes show as it can be quite hilarious at times. The reboot of Thunder Cats was great, though a bit cheesy at times. Unfortunately the series has been cancelled after just one season. To me there is nothing wrong with watching a kids show if there is dialog and has story that is worth watching, even if it is a bit simple. Some kids shows are awful, but then again some of the stuff I watched as a kid and enjoyed is now painful to watch (eg. Voltron).
That was the savings. He did just that, buy a used part from ebay (I told him junkyard but to him ebay = junkyard, which it is). I think he spent 200 on the part as it was guaranteed to work and the seller accepted returns. Supposedly the part is what drove up the price. I think he said 1000-1200 for the part from Scion dealer installed. New online it would cost around 800.
Mate is my pick. At one point I like the simplicity of Blackbox but it does require a bit of configuration. I then moved to XFCE and I currently use Mate.
To me the gnome 2.0 desktop was perfect. I could cram a bunch of stuff in the top bar like date/time/weather/disk usage/cpu & ram usage/network traffic and quick launch icons. And all of my running programs are at the bottom. Mate continues that trend and it works nicely for me.
Stupid laws are to blame not cops. But cops do have the power to use common sense and allow some bending of the laws.
All tickets are a money grab. The other day I was ticketed for doing 70 in a 55 while keeping pace with traffic. NY state keeps their speeds at the 1974 55mph fuel saving speed limit except the thruways a 65, how progressive. I wasn't weaving in and out of lanes or passing everyone up, just keeping pace. I guess I was the poor bastard singled out at that moment or maybe I briefly went faster, who knows. The kicker was the cop tells me to plead innocent and talk by phone to get the fine reduced from a moving violation to a seatbelt ticket but pay the same fine for speeding. He peeled out and immediately pulled someone else over after he was finished with me.
In new york city they did say that talking on a phone at a red light would not be counted as talking on a phone while driving. I don't know if that now applies to texting. Here in NY they just passed a law which makes texting while driving a moving violation with 5 points on your license and a 150 dollar fine. if you rack up more than 11 points in an 18 month period you get your license suspended for about a month. 5 points is a lot and is the same as failing to stop for a stopped (red flashers and sign) school bus, reckless driving (which occurs from texting) and one point less than doing 21-30 MPH over the limit.
Same thing when I was in court for a few tickets I got on the parkway with a van (no moving violations thankfully). As I sat in the front row a majority of the people there seemed to have moving violations, eg running red lights, blowing stop signs and speeding. Every time the prosecutor spoke to the defendants he just kept saying "No seat belt and a 200 dollar fine. (rubber stamp) Have a nice day." They were doing the motorist a favor by keeping the insurance companies out of the loop and simply extorted money from them. They just wanted the money, they didn't care about the laws broken.
Don't get me wrong some people are fucking assholes who text and drive and deserve more than the 5 points and $150 fine. The worst I saw was in NJ on the garden state parkway. This guy was blatantly weaving back and forth and at times taking up both of the two lanes. I tried to pass him and he almost side swiped me. I leaned on the horn and he flipped me off like I was the asshole. I can't begin to describe the rage that built up inside of me. I cooled off and one of my friends in the car called 911. they took the information and said they would dispatch a cop. Nothing happened and the guy continued to do this for miles until he got off. Others tried to pass but also were discouraged by his weaving. I wanted to physically assault that prick, put him in the hospital for a few days and let him think it over. But that isn't practical and I don't want to stoop to those levels.
I just asked one of my IT friends and his monthly expenses which only cover bills and NOT savings, food, vacations, going out etc. is $6000 per month or $72,000 per year. Their home is a smaller home, two floors and a basement with the upper floor being a separate apartment. They do have an inground pool though it was there when they bought it and is almost 20 years old. No fancy cars and he and his wife do all of the maintenance work like mowing the lawn, gardening and repairs (he even saved 1200 by fixing his wifes Scion after the throttle body went bad). They renovated their living room recently and saved 40 grand and spent a little over 5000 in supplies. They installed solar panels and even though they have another loan to pay (15k after rebates) they are planning ahead for children. They will come out ahead eventually and their combined income is about 110k per year and might get bumped to 130k if his new job pay what they promised. If any of the two were laid off, they would go broke. She actually makes more money than he so if she leaves work to raise children then he better hope he gets an amazing raise unless she continues to work.
Oh stop it already. Define Lavish for me please. I don't know about the cost of living outside of the NYC/Long Island areas but I will say that no IT person I know is living "lavish" as you put it. What do you think people deserve being paid for their work? less than 50k? less than 100K? Who the fuck are you to say that people are asking for too much money when most IT employees are already paid crap except for a few higher ups? Are you saying that people don't deserve a liveable wage to be able to afford a home, car and children? Unless you are making 150k/yr+ you aren't going to be living a lavish lifestyle.
I know quite a few IT people and most of them live in apartments because they can't afford a home loan (making 50-70k/yr) the higher up guys I know making six figures or who have a wife whose combined income is over 100k are the only ones buying homes. And even then they can just comfortably* afford the home. Most of them are putting children off until they are 35 (which is a bit old) to ensure they have money saved up.
* Living a comfortable life means you aren't living paycheck to paycheck and juggling bills to make sure you keep your head above water. I know people in their 30's who after paying their mortgage, taxes, insurances, car payments and utility bills have a few hundred dollars left over that can be saved or spent on thing like vacations or a weekend night out. And they are making a decent wage (100k+). These are people building a life for themselves and looking to start a family. Not some douche bag who buys overpriced luxury cars, clothes, jewelry and giant TV's to impress girls. Two of them have already spent money in converting part of their home into an apartment to make an additional 900-1200 per month in rent money. This gives them less space to live in once they have kids but gives them an additional income.
So we shouldn't make programming childish thereby completely alienating the people who will design the important stuff like controlling the electric grid or Martian probes.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Just because you dive into something head first and sidestep academia does not mean you can't pick up better practices as you progress. A strong foundation which mainly includes jargon and basic structural programming practices. From there you will begin to pick up on things like good commenting, clean design and error checking and handling. After that it goes into more technical aspects such as strengths and weaknesses of languages. There are great programmers who never studied at a university and are self taught. There are great programmers from some of the best universities in the world. I know one person who holds a masters degree in computer science and is a terrible programmer. I know one person who holds a four year degree in CS and music study who is an amazing programmer and composer. Its not the education that makes a great programmers but the person. People who mock the head first and self taught routes are often grad students with a chip on their shoulder.
Basically a good programmer is best described by the first reply to this post. The first line really nails it: "A good programmer understands that that they have to continue to learn and grow. They strive to do their best at every effort, admit to failures and learn from them." That also applies to many other fields but it hold true. Some people don't give a crap and produce just that, crap. Some people take pride in their work and feel a great deal of satisfaction from producing quality code that works, is reliable and efficient.
I would assume YMMV but the rear mirrors in industrial lasers are quite easy to tune. I work at a laser welding shop where we use lamp pumped pulsed Nd:YAG lasers. Rear mirror alignment is done manually using two screws and takes about 20-30 minutes thanks to the built in tuning meter. You set a pulse rate and width (eg 20Hz, each pulse 2ms long) and watch the power meter. You start with a number that gives you 10 watts and then tune until you can't get the power any higher(you now might have 15W. Then you do 50W, 100W,150W etc. until you hit the lasers power limit (500W for our machines) and your done. I did this twice when we configure a workstation and added a new laser. This is for our three Lumonics JK lasers. The ancient Raytheon is a bit different and is tuned by a service tech and the Trumpf we have is rock solid and never touched though has the worlds most shitty configuration software.
Thank you for the very informative response. I was thinking of FreeNAS for the sake of simplicity but I haven't looked into it enough to see if I can manually tweak the ZFS settings. I started my *nix tinkering on a pentium 166 running FreeBSD 4 then moved on to Linux once I discovered Debian around 2002. Haven't used BSD since but I am sure I can dive back into it.
I have been looking into ZFS as a replacement to my Linux + mdadm server (backups scripted to AWS account). May I ask what your current setup is OS and hardware wise?
We also need to get rid of the team mentality and eliminate the practice of forcing registered voters to pick a team and only be allowed to vote in their teams primary elections. Why should I be forced to align myself to a single party and then be restricted from voting for other candidates during primaries? Wouldn't it make more sense if I could vote as I see fit? What If I like both a certain Republican candidate and a certain Democrat candidate? I can choose my favorites for both primaries and in the final round let them duke it out and I will vote for my favorite. Or am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
I just read up on the civilian restrictions regarding fast, high altitude GPS and there aren't any restrictions imposed on domestic use, only export. So building or buying a GPS capable of achieving speeds over 515 m/s and 18 km altitude domestically in the USA appears to be legal as long as you don't export it.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Restrictions_on_civilian_use
You can roll your own using off the shelf components. Though this may add a bit of weight if you use PC hardware, an FPGA, DSP, microcontroller or combination may be able to do fast real time positioning past the measly few Hz that vendor GPS modules offer.
First you need a receiver for the GPS signals:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10981
Then you need to process that data into a useful position:
http://gnss-sdr.org/documentation/sige-gn3s-sampler-v2-usb-front-end
Honestly, applying munitions restrictions to fast GPS does nothing to stop anyone from building a cruise missile or other GPS guided weapons. All it does is impose silly restrictions that rogue nations, governments or peoples will simply ignore and work around while denying peaceful legitimate uses by ordinary people.
Or, I just thought about it. If the station were big enough I wonder if a sufficient amount of oxygen could be generated by plants. Then you may be able to get a surplus but then you still need night energy for the plants to grow. Its an interesting thought.
The problem is you can't get a neat gain from burning methane + O2 and using that energy to make more O2 and have energy left over. You would need an abundant supply of oxygen or a method of splitting water that is more efficient.
Titan looks like it could be a pretty interesting moon for building a space station. The atmospheric pressure is only 1.45 times of that on Earth meaning you could have the habitat pressure equalized with the atmosphere so pressure isn't a concern. If there is water trapped under ice as is speculated, we could produce oxygen for breathing and mix it with the plentiful nitrogen to make air similar to what we have on Earth. I don't know how much light reaches the surface, probably too little to be of use for solar so power generation would have to be from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). Too bad there isn't any oxygen otherwise all that methane would be pretty damn useful for power and heat.
Pretty much all of the Earths helium slowly accumulated there via radioactive decay over millions or billions of years.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium
I doubt McAfee is building anything. He has admitted that he is a crap coder and pretty much paid engineers to write his AV software when he was in charge of the company. I doubt he can even remember how to write code. Most likely he had this idea and decided to throw some money at people to build it for him and then slap his name on it.
Though as much as I think he is a megalomaniacal attention whore, if he has the money and it can benefit people by creating a secure, isolated network then i'm all for it. Just don't tell people YOU are building it. Tell them, you are funding it.
McAfee is talking about creating an encrypted, personal, portable mesh network device. The devices you linked are nothing more than TOR exit nodes which aren't as secure as most would like.
The idea behind a mesh network is there is no single point of control for the network, its literally a hodgepodge of nodes interacting with each other. So no ISP or internet connection needed, it is a separate network. If one node goes out the rest keep on talking to each other, you may lose contact with some clients though. Of course you won't be browsing the web with this device. Its main use would be for people in a meeting or conference who wish to share information without it going over any public networks. Sounds trivial but a plug and play solution isn't really available off the shelf unless you are talking about ad-hoc wifi which suffers from poor performance as the number of clients increases. I am sure it uses more modern wireless tech and has routing built in to balance the network traffic between nodes.
First we rid ourselves of manufacturing to become a country of services and intellectual property. Then we destroy the reputation of our services by spying on everyone who uses them. Good job government. Good job.
Although the Unimog is a nice utility vehicle you would want an older one with fully mechanical fuel injection and plenty of spare parts such as brake components, suspension parts and driveline parts if you are in North America. If you really want bulletproof get an old Dodge Ram diesel. The older 6BT series Cummins had fully mechanical injection which means even if the battery is dead and the alternator doesn't work, the engine will still happily keep running. Mechanical injection also means if you have a dead battery you can pull or push start the engine.
Manual vs automatic transmission is debatable depending on the engine fuel type and years made. In an old mechanical diesel the manual is your best option as you can now easily pull or push start it if the battery dies. In a gas job, unless you have a magneto for ignition (used only in race cars nowadays) a manual is useless for pull starting a dead battery.
If you are looking for an apocalypse ready vehicle you are better off building your own. Everything sold today is so full of electronic junk and emissions systems that they are unreliable without a tow truck and garage on hand. Diesels are no where as reliable as they once were. Run out of DEF(adBlue)? Power derate aka limp home mode comes on. DPF clogged? Derate or engine shutdown. Battery dead? So are you unless you can jump it. High pressure common rail electronic injection killed the ability to pull start an engine. Some engine makers still use unit injection but with electronics on top of it so its still a no go.
Here is my build:
Old GM 4x4 CK 1500/2500 pickup chassis,8 foot bed and four door (aka crew cab).
Cummins 4BT with 5 speed manual (you don't need tons of HP or torque if you want to be efficient while still being able to get out of jams.)
Fuel system devoid of rubber so fuels other than diesel could be used in an emergency (rubber swells and fails with other fuels).
Auxiliary hand cranked spring starter in case pull or push starting is not an option.
Extra alternator and battery, some spare parts and tools.
Some kind of bed cover or camper body that is low CG yet roomy enough for storage and sleeping.
Winch, with a pull capacity at least double the trucks weight.
Roof rack front to back that is re enforced which would allow a few people to stand atop the truck and also hold some cargo if necessary. also would double as a roll cage for worst case scenarios.
Door between cab and bed/body and a hatch from both to the roof rack for better movement or escape options.
Plenty of lighting with stone guards including a search light and spare bulbs, better make em quality LED for longevity and ruggedness.
spare tire or two, hand tools to remove/mount the tire and the rim and tire plug kits. Also a good 12v compressor and manual tire pump as a backup.
Heavy duty rope, snatch blocks, chains, tow strap etc. get yourself out of a bind without the winch if necessary.
Extra fluids and a nice tool kit including duct tape.
Then stock it with your survival supplies and tools as you see fit.
A small Detroit Diesel 53 series engine would also be nice but they are heavy as hell. Really any smaller 4 cylinder fully mechanical diesel would be fine as long as parts are easy to get. 100-150HP is enough for most applications and they sip fuel. We used to have a 1989 Isuzu box truck with a small 4 cylinder 100 HP diesel that would go 250-300 miles on a 20 gallon tank loaded with upward of six thousand pounds. It wasn't as rocket ship but it did the job just fine.
What I would rather see in an embedded Linux board is more I/O. I am not talking about USB, HDMI or Ethernet but honest to goodness digital I/O's and serial busses like I2C or SPI. The minnowboard has a measly 8 GPIO's and two more hardwired to LED's. That isn't worth $200 when I can get the same thing by purchasing a cheap Atom ITX board and then adding an FPGA PCI I/O card from Mesa Electronics for slightly more.
If you want to impress me and make it worth $200 then how about using the Intel Atom Processor E6x5C featuring an embedded Altera FPGA which is connected to the CPU by a friggen PCIe Gen2 x1 link. Then include a default bitfile for the FPGA which gives you a bunch of GPIO, PWM and UARTS for serial ports like RS232, SPI and I2C. Also breakout the remaining PCIe link for further expansion. A kernel driver will then expose the various I/O devices inside the FPGA to a standard API. Then port the Wiring libs which is used by the Arduino to the new API for the FPGA and you will now have a development board that will blow the competition away. Even the Arduino IDE can be modified to build Linux binaries for the new API. Bonus points of you throw a nice 8 channel 16 bit high speed ADC on there. No re-learning new libraries or languages. Arduino libs could be added without code modification provided they don't make low level calls. Even then simple modifications could be made to port them. The API could also be called from any other language like C++, Go, Ada, D or whatever you fancy so you can write code in your language of choice. Newbies could plug in the board wait for it to boot and configure the FPGA and start writing code and wiring it into their projects, they already know Arduino libs so let them use those. If you really want to be fancy use the RT PREEMPT patch and let more advanced users write code for real time stuff guaranteeing determinism.
Imagine then if the internal FPGA bits could then be added to or modified to include new I/O devices. Establish a standard bus and I/O address space for the FPGA and make a template for writing new modules. Write a GUI editor which lets you snap modules onto the bus like Legos and set the address space and their I/O pins. Call Quartus using scripts in the background and generate the new bitfile which can be uploaded on the fly to the FPGA from the host OS. Then the standard API for the kernel driver would simplify writing libraries for talking to the new modules. Want to make a CNC? Add quadrature encoder interfaces and H bridge controllers and directly drive servo motors. Software radio, DSP, video processing, audio processing, the possibilities are endless. Then the community can release HDL modules which the user can snap into their designs and then do the wiring. This way people don't have to learn complex HDL programming, they use what the community provides. Don't like the default bitfile layout or standard templates? Write your own HDL code and do what you please. Open hardware means you have all the specs and source.
If that were available for 200-300 then I would gleefully say shut up and take my money.
Er, not to split hairs but I think you meant to say "Linux kernel". Linux is the name given to the kernel Torvalds wrote for the GNU operating system. Technically a Linux based OS should be called GNU/Linux implying that it is a GNU OS running on top of a Linux kernel. But Linux has become the common and accepted term for GNU/Linux.
Internet of things is yet another buzzword applied to an older term: home automation. Similar to how cloud computing is a throwback to mainframe computing. Street lighting, traffic signal automation, industrial automation, smart distribution and metering of electric power falls under automation and SCADA. I don't see a point to remotely control a washer or toaster over the internet. Though a local system might be helpful with remote reporting.
Though there are some appealing ideas that can come of connected home appliances, the most obvious being text alerts of status. I would love it if my washer and dryer could text me when they are finished. Nothing sucks more then forgetting to dry your work clothes and then finding the wet, wrinkled, mildew smelling mess in the washer the next morning. Same with the dryer, wrinkled dry clothes are just as useless as wrinkled wet clothes. Those are the only two good examples I can come up with. Connected refrigerators aren't as appealing. I know how many eggs I have left and how much milk I have left as I open my refrigerator daily. Microwaves and toasters aren't that necessary either as they spend little time doing the cooking. Maybe oven or stoves could be timed and send an alert that they are done. Thermostats and AC units could be monitored for usage and remotely turned on/off. That is another good use.
Home monitoring of power usage might be useful for people looking to cut their usage. If you had solar it would be good if you could compare your home load to your banked kw/h and see the usage in real time. "Your solar system generated 50 kW/h today. Your current load is 10kW, you have 5 hours of free power left." Then you could look at your current appliance load and see what uses the most power. A breakdown chart of appliances and their monthly power consumption could help people determine if they could use that appliance less. Clothes dryers suck up a lot of power, maybe during the warmer months they could use a clothesline. Hell I dry my clothes indoors during the winter too, the dry air helps.
Instead of wireless, which makes integration easier, powerline networking would be just as appropriate. Most of those appliances are either hard wired in or plugged in. A router would need a wall plug adapter and ethernet cable or better yet, the routers power cable could pass through to an internal power line networking adapter. That or use Zigbee on the lower frequency ISM bands.
I am 33 and I watch Adventure Time and Regular Show. I also catch the new Looney Tunes show as it can be quite hilarious at times. The reboot of Thunder Cats was great, though a bit cheesy at times. Unfortunately the series has been cancelled after just one season. To me there is nothing wrong with watching a kids show if there is dialog and has story that is worth watching, even if it is a bit simple. Some kids shows are awful, but then again some of the stuff I watched as a kid and enjoyed is now painful to watch (eg. Voltron).
That was the savings. He did just that, buy a used part from ebay (I told him junkyard but to him ebay = junkyard, which it is). I think he spent 200 on the part as it was guaranteed to work and the seller accepted returns. Supposedly the part is what drove up the price. I think he said 1000-1200 for the part from Scion dealer installed. New online it would cost around 800.
Mate is my pick. At one point I like the simplicity of Blackbox but it does require a bit of configuration. I then moved to XFCE and I currently use Mate.
To me the gnome 2.0 desktop was perfect. I could cram a bunch of stuff in the top bar like date/time/weather/disk usage/cpu & ram usage/network traffic and quick launch icons. And all of my running programs are at the bottom. Mate continues that trend and it works nicely for me.
Stupid laws are to blame not cops. But cops do have the power to use common sense and allow some bending of the laws.
All tickets are a money grab. The other day I was ticketed for doing 70 in a 55 while keeping pace with traffic. NY state keeps their speeds at the 1974 55mph fuel saving speed limit except the thruways a 65, how progressive. I wasn't weaving in and out of lanes or passing everyone up, just keeping pace. I guess I was the poor bastard singled out at that moment or maybe I briefly went faster, who knows. The kicker was the cop tells me to plead innocent and talk by phone to get the fine reduced from a moving violation to a seatbelt ticket but pay the same fine for speeding. He peeled out and immediately pulled someone else over after he was finished with me.
In new york city they did say that talking on a phone at a red light would not be counted as talking on a phone while driving. I don't know if that now applies to texting. Here in NY they just passed a law which makes texting while driving a moving violation with 5 points on your license and a 150 dollar fine. if you rack up more than 11 points in an 18 month period you get your license suspended for about a month. 5 points is a lot and is the same as failing to stop for a stopped (red flashers and sign) school bus, reckless driving (which occurs from texting) and one point less than doing 21-30 MPH over the limit.
Same thing when I was in court for a few tickets I got on the parkway with a van (no moving violations thankfully). As I sat in the front row a majority of the people there seemed to have moving violations, eg running red lights, blowing stop signs and speeding. Every time the prosecutor spoke to the defendants he just kept saying "No seat belt and a 200 dollar fine. (rubber stamp) Have a nice day." They were doing the motorist a favor by keeping the insurance companies out of the loop and simply extorted money from them. They just wanted the money, they didn't care about the laws broken.
Don't get me wrong some people are fucking assholes who text and drive and deserve more than the 5 points and $150 fine. The worst I saw was in NJ on the garden state parkway. This guy was blatantly weaving back and forth and at times taking up both of the two lanes. I tried to pass him and he almost side swiped me. I leaned on the horn and he flipped me off like I was the asshole. I can't begin to describe the rage that built up inside of me. I cooled off and one of my friends in the car called 911. they took the information and said they would dispatch a cop. Nothing happened and the guy continued to do this for miles until he got off. Others tried to pass but also were discouraged by his weaving. I wanted to physically assault that prick, put him in the hospital for a few days and let him think it over. But that isn't practical and I don't want to stoop to those levels.
I just asked one of my IT friends and his monthly expenses which only cover bills and NOT savings, food, vacations, going out etc. is $6000 per month or $72,000 per year. Their home is a smaller home, two floors and a basement with the upper floor being a separate apartment. They do have an inground pool though it was there when they bought it and is almost 20 years old. No fancy cars and he and his wife do all of the maintenance work like mowing the lawn, gardening and repairs (he even saved 1200 by fixing his wifes Scion after the throttle body went bad). They renovated their living room recently and saved 40 grand and spent a little over 5000 in supplies. They installed solar panels and even though they have another loan to pay (15k after rebates) they are planning ahead for children. They will come out ahead eventually and their combined income is about 110k per year and might get bumped to 130k if his new job pay what they promised. If any of the two were laid off, they would go broke. She actually makes more money than he so if she leaves work to raise children then he better hope he gets an amazing raise unless she continues to work.
Oh stop it already. Define Lavish for me please. I don't know about the cost of living outside of the NYC/Long Island areas but I will say that no IT person I know is living "lavish" as you put it. What do you think people deserve being paid for their work? less than 50k? less than 100K? Who the fuck are you to say that people are asking for too much money when most IT employees are already paid crap except for a few higher ups? Are you saying that people don't deserve a liveable wage to be able to afford a home, car and children? Unless you are making 150k/yr+ you aren't going to be living a lavish lifestyle.
I know quite a few IT people and most of them live in apartments because they can't afford a home loan (making 50-70k/yr) the higher up guys I know making six figures or who have a wife whose combined income is over 100k are the only ones buying homes. And even then they can just comfortably* afford the home. Most of them are putting children off until they are 35 (which is a bit old) to ensure they have money saved up.
* Living a comfortable life means you aren't living paycheck to paycheck and juggling bills to make sure you keep your head above water. I know people in their 30's who after paying their mortgage, taxes, insurances, car payments and utility bills have a few hundred dollars left over that can be saved or spent on thing like vacations or a weekend night out. And they are making a decent wage (100k+). These are people building a life for themselves and looking to start a family. Not some douche bag who buys overpriced luxury cars, clothes, jewelry and giant TV's to impress girls. Two of them have already spent money in converting part of their home into an apartment to make an additional 900-1200 per month in rent money. This gives them less space to live in once they have kids but gives them an additional income.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Just because you dive into something head first and sidestep academia does not mean you can't pick up better practices as you progress. A strong foundation which mainly includes jargon and basic structural programming practices. From there you will begin to pick up on things like good commenting, clean design and error checking and handling. After that it goes into more technical aspects such as strengths and weaknesses of languages. There are great programmers who never studied at a university and are self taught. There are great programmers from some of the best universities in the world. I know one person who holds a masters degree in computer science and is a terrible programmer. I know one person who holds a four year degree in CS and music study who is an amazing programmer and composer. Its not the education that makes a great programmers but the person. People who mock the head first and self taught routes are often grad students with a chip on their shoulder.
Basically a good programmer is best described by the first reply to this post. The first line really nails it: "A good programmer understands that that they have to continue to learn and grow. They strive to do their best at every effort, admit to failures and learn from them." That also applies to many other fields but it hold true. Some people don't give a crap and produce just that, crap. Some people take pride in their work and feel a great deal of satisfaction from producing quality code that works, is reliable and efficient.
I would assume YMMV but the rear mirrors in industrial lasers are quite easy to tune. I work at a laser welding shop where we use lamp pumped pulsed Nd:YAG lasers. Rear mirror alignment is done manually using two screws and takes about 20-30 minutes thanks to the built in tuning meter. You set a pulse rate and width (eg 20Hz, each pulse 2ms long) and watch the power meter. You start with a number that gives you 10 watts and then tune until you can't get the power any higher(you now might have 15W. Then you do 50W, 100W ,150W etc. until you hit the lasers power limit (500W for our machines) and your done. I did this twice when we configure a workstation and added a new laser. This is for our three Lumonics JK lasers. The ancient Raytheon is a bit different and is tuned by a service tech and the Trumpf we have is rock solid and never touched though has the worlds most shitty configuration software.
Please stop linking to the NSAKEY article as an example of a back door. Its proven to be a non issue right in the wikipedia article you linked to.
Thank you for the very informative response. I was thinking of FreeNAS for the sake of simplicity but I haven't looked into it enough to see if I can manually tweak the ZFS settings. I started my *nix tinkering on a pentium 166 running FreeBSD 4 then moved on to Linux once I discovered Debian around 2002. Haven't used BSD since but I am sure I can dive back into it.
I have been looking into ZFS as a replacement to my Linux + mdadm server (backups scripted to AWS account). May I ask what your current setup is OS and hardware wise?
We also need to get rid of the team mentality and eliminate the practice of forcing registered voters to pick a team and only be allowed to vote in their teams primary elections. Why should I be forced to align myself to a single party and then be restricted from voting for other candidates during primaries? Wouldn't it make more sense if I could vote as I see fit? What If I like both a certain Republican candidate and a certain Democrat candidate? I can choose my favorites for both primaries and in the final round let them duke it out and I will vote for my favorite. Or am I missing something?