Check out my http://chrislent.googlepages.com

Engineers are often noted for their rather strange sense of humor. Easily housebroken, engineers are self-sufficent and make excellent pets :-)

Thought of and added by me to the Engineering entry on the Wikipedia

See my first posting about Cooper Union. Nice eh?

Stolen shamelessly from Buying an LCD? Buying an LCD? (Score:5, Insightful)
by Boss, Pointy Haired (537010) on Thursday
April 10, @11:20PM (#5707671)
Explain to the sales droid that LCD displays can have dead [or permanently alive] pixels. It probably won't know that knackered pixels are expected, but the vast majority of displays are perfect, so there's no harm in making sure you get a perfect one.

Unpack the display and plug it into a PC in the store. Now you need to check both a completely white screen and a completely black screen - because knackered pixels can be knackered either always on or always off.

To check always off, fire up Internet Explorer, go to "about:blank" (try it)and press F11 (full screen). This will give you a page full of white. Scan the page closely looking for "always off" dead pixels.

Then, to test for always on pixels, right click on the desktop and go to screen saver. Select "Blank" and then "Preview". Again, scan the blank screen and this time look for "always on" pixels - although these are much easier to spot!

Re:Buying an LCD? by BJH (Score:2) Thursday April 10, @11:29PM
Re:Buying an LCD? (Score:4, Informative)
by 200_success (623160) on Thursday April 10, @11:44PM (#5707827)
So, first go to about:blank, then to javscript:void(document.bgColor='red'), javscript:void(document.bgColor='green'), and javscript:void(document.bgColor='blue') with Full Screen (F11) after each color. April 10, @11:57PM technically... (Score:4, Informative)
by rebelcool (247749) on Thursday April 10, @11:59PM (#5707918)
it should be the other way around. An LCD 'turns on' its pixel so it becomes opaque - that is, black.

A pixel is 'turned off' (goes clear) and lets the white backlight through it to display white.

This is why LCD's are not as good at displaying black as CRT's. The backlight is always on, and the pixels can have varying degrees of opaqueness when turned on. This makes black more of an uneven very dark gray (well, uneven on my LCD anyway..newer ones might be better at it)

Also, they won't necessarily be black or white. I have some green dead pixels.

A new slant on U.S. Forces In Iraq Ban GPS Phones. In Sources: CIA Tips Prompted Bomb Attack, we discover

An intelligence source said Qusay, Hussein's heir apparent, had been directing Baghdad's defense with a Thuraya satellite cell phone that uses the global positioning system and whose location therefore can be pinpointed. Two weeks ago, Central Command ordered reporters traveling with troops to stop using their Thurayas because Iraq could monitor U.S. troop locations, the reporters were told. , "That's not why they [Central Command] did it," said the intelligence source. "They wanted to unclutter the frequency band so they could listen more clearly to the regime talking." One of the most communicative users of the Thuraya, he said, was Qusay.

Interestingly, the phone manufacturer Thuraya has right on its front page:

Thuraya Reaffirms the Security of Thuraya Satellite Phone System...

unless, of course, Central Command is after you...

Here it is:

How to install Knoppix v3.1 2003-01-01 EN on a hard drive. Just click to

http://www.cooper.edu/~lent/knoppix/




Just add some comments to let me know what

• needs to be updated for v3.2 2003-03-28 EN
  
  or
• what's just icky... :-)

For Fun: The father of DOS builds a Battlebot®...:-)

and a bit more on Tim Patterson

I finally got around to documenting an evil misfeature of NT4.0, Microsoft C 6.0 and Microsoft Visual C versions < 4.0.
The evil _heapmin() function.
Don't feel bad if you missed it. Some people I have immense respect for missed it too...
Andrew Schulman, Raymond J. Michels, Jim Kyle, Tim Paterson, David Maxey, and Ralf Brown

See Errata, Commentary, and "Release Notes" for UNDOCUMENTED DOS: A Programmer's Guide to Reserved MS-DOS Functions and Data Structures

100 The assertion that the C free() function, or the Pascal dispose() function, indirectly uses the DOS memory functions isn't quite true. Calls like free() or dispose() don't call INT 21h Function 49h (Release Memory Block); instead, they simply put freed memory blocks back on a free list. To actually release freed memory blocks back to the operating system, you need to use a function like _heapmin() in Microsoft C 6.0 or mark()/release() in Turbo Pascal.

Here are some malloc reimplementations that may or may not coalesce blocks together.
Apparently "ChorusOS" does the combining of blocks on malloc() calls.

free() as a security hole. I never really thought about it, but others have...

Depleted Uranium -- This material may be used as counter-balance weights in larger aircraft. Can be hazardous if outer protective coating is breeched.

NTSB procedures Page 24 of 190. Page II-E-24 of 20. 3.1 Wreckage Hazards, 3.1.1 Mechanical Hazards

Cool TDRS use in shuttle re-entry from OEX article.