Have the US Dept of Defense take over Windows XP updating

Mr. Ballmer,

 

Although Microsoft is planning to discontinue support for Windows XP in April 2014, it is thought that there's still at least 500 million people using it. When support is discontinued, it is expected that XP will eventually become a virus and botnet-infested mess, as new software exploits are discovered that can not and will not be fixed.

 

Microsoft is obviously interested in making money for its shareholders, so it does not make sense for the company to continue to provide updates for its obsolete software releases. But it is in the best interest of the US federal government and our national defense that Windows XP bugs still get fixed, even if Microsoft doesn't want to foot the bill anymore.

 

There much talk about "cybersecurity" and protecting our national defense by providing free software updates and virus protection to the poor or the technically unskilled. Dropping XP support seems an extremely bad idea for the overall cybersecurity of our country, so perhaps the US government should step in and take over the costs of updating XP from Microsoft.

 

What would it cost for the US government to fully take over the XP update process? Updating could still be handled by Microsoft employees, who salaries are now instead directly paid for by the US Dept of Defense.

 

If Microsoft wishes to completely wash its hands of XP, would you be willing to sell or transfer the intellectual property rights to the US government so that they have full access to the source for debugging and update purposes?

 

Updates paid for and provided by the US government could be handled through the standard Windows update process that Microsoft has already established, though with a new "opt-out" option if people do not wish to continue receiving XP updates that are explicitly paid for and provided by the US government.

 

Thank you for your time.

 

- Dale Mahalko

 

Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A is a piece of garbage

Some buying decisions you eventually come to regret, and the Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A is definitely a regrettable purchase. I unfortunately purchased a large number of these several years ago, when computers were first making the transition from ball mice to optical mice, and I needed an inexpensive way to get optical mice for a large number of computers that still had ball mice..

If you associate Microsoft with poorly designed products that sort of halfway do what they're supposed to do, the Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A definitely fits the description.

It requires no drivers, and simply installs as an "HID compliant mouse". It works fine..... most of the time. When idle, the pointer stays still as you would expect.

However, on occasion when moving the mouse around, the onscreen pointer suddenly shoots off in some random direction at extremely high speed, completely out of your control. If you do a web search for the Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A and the word "random" you will find it comes up several times, with people constantly trying to find drivers or whatever to solve this.

For 1st person 3D game players, usually they end up suddenly looking at the sky or at their feet, and spinning around wildly for a few moments when the mouse suddenly malfunctions like this.

I have seen this problem on literally 50+ different Microsoft Basic Optical Mice 1.0A. There's nothing to be done about it. The hardware for all of them is apparently defective and there is nothing that can be done about it...

... other than replacing it with a different brand or model. I've never seen this intermittent random tracking problem happen with the Microsoft optical mouse that has a bright red indicator on the front of the base.

If you either dispose of or send your defective Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A to a recycler, do the world a favor and cut the USB cord off, so that no one else looking to salvage old computer hardware has to suffer from using it.

Solar-thermal / low-temp boiler / turbine power generation?

(Apparently this is a ridiculously obscure technology discussion so this post is going to sit dormant. Maybe people searching for this topic will find this post and respond.)



I am looking for a low-power high-efficiency electricity generation system using heat from solar collectors.

In general this is the same as how a huge multiple-megawatt coal plant operates, except on a tiny scale using lower temperatures.

Heat pipe evacuated tube solar collectors are very efficient and extract a large amount of thermal energy from sunlight. They basically don't turn off however so when your thermal storage has reached the rated temperature you need (140F say), the heat pipes continue to collect heat anyway.

Some systems actually suggest using a "heat dump" to blow off the excess collected heat in the summer vs winter operation. It seems more rational to use that excess heat in some manner such as power generation.



Coal power is real simple. You burn coal, make heat, heat water, boil it, keep on heating it until it is "dry superheated steam" and use that to drive a turbine. Then cool the steam and run it through the cycle again.

Problem is, the temperatures are very high, and the turbines are monstrous million-watt critters that no homeowner could ever hope to afford for themselves.

But turbine power generation doesn't have to be huge and the temperatures don't have to be ridiculously high. Small high-effiency turbines can exist.



Turbine power can also be done using "low-temperature boiling point" liquids like alcohol or substances normally called refrigerants since their usual application is in cooling.

Rather than superheating steam, you can superheat other gases with lower boiling points, and achieve high turbine power energy conversion efficiency with lower temperature differentials between "hot" and "cold", and also do this with smaller energy inputs.



Though apparently, this is "uncommon". Probably it's more accurate to say that nobody does this on the small scale, and solar-thermal turbine power technology is mostly undeveloped for the 0.5 kw to 10 kw scale.

The most logical term for what this is, would be a "solar turbine" but that name is already being used as a trademark by a company that makes megawatt-sized turbines for the fossil fuel power plant industry, and they don't have anything smaller that a 1 megawatt turbine.

 
- Dale Mahalko

Disabling vehicle Event Data Recorders

NOTE: This is a discussion of the technology used for event data recorders (EDRs), and is not specific to any vehicle.

Doing any modifications to an EDR may void your product warranty. It may also affect your insurance (higher rates). And it could lead to prosecution if it is found to be vandalized or disabled when "the authorities" want access to it.


Some people in the United States still have this silly notion that citizens are supposed to be free from illegal search or seizure, free from constant governmental monitoring, and free to carry out their lives without some electronic bogeyman constantly spying on them and monitoring their every move, ready to "squeal" at a moment's notice.

Since the exact details of what is or isn't recorded is not required to be specified anywhere, there really is no way to know what all is being recorded with EDR's.

What with in-car integrated cellphone capabilities like OnStar, there really is nothing to prevent vehicle EDR's from also including a digitized audio recording of everything going on inside your vehicle several minutes prior to the crash, so that too can be part of the EDR "crash analysis" information.

So, if you want to put an end to this monitoring of your private activities and damn the consequences, then this is where your search will need to start.


1. Flash Memory

Flash memory cells wear out after thousands of writes. For an Event Data Recorder (EDR) to constantly track your vehicle's status, the information must be constantly updated.

Just updating the vehicle status info once a second (never know when a crash may occur), means that over the course of 10,000 miles at an average of 50 mph, that is 200 hrs of driving, or 720,000 seconds. That right there will damage most any flash memory cells used repeatedly.

However, flash could work if the EDR manufacturer is willing to buy high capacity memory chips and implement wear-leveling. This way although cells will progressively wear out and become unreliable, the damage will be distributed across millions of individual cells over time.

Assume an average of 4096 bytes of event data recorded per second. If 1 gigabyte of flash is available, then it takes 262,144 writes to record data to all cells a single time, in round-robin fashion. For the above 10,000 mile example, all cells would only have been used 3 times with 1 gig of flash storage. If the car were to last up to 300,000 miles, all cells would only have been written 90 times in the vehicle's lifetime.

Increasing the data written to 40 kilobytes per second still only means 900 writes to all cells in 300,000 miles for 1 gigabyte of flash. (Hmm, making a live audio recording of the vehicle cabin doesn't look too difficult to achieve.)

If your vehicle uses flash in its EDR, your only real options are to disable or destroy the memory chips. But the system probably has a way to detect a malfunctioning EDR memory unit since it is an essential part of the recording mechanism.




2. Static RAM

Static RAM is a very low-power memory that can be written an unlimited number of times, and can be powered by a tiny trickle of voltage.

As with flash memory, the system probably has a way to detect a malfunctioning or missing static EDR memory, and will report a "check engine" error code.

If the EDR uses static-RAM, then it most likely contains a small power source to keep data alive, in the event that the main battery is disconnected (like in an accident).


3. Lithium clock/memory batteries

Lithium batteries in home computers have a typical lifespan of about five years before they must be replaced and your computer's clock stops working. Since these batteries need to be replaced periodically, the dealer probably knows where the battery is and how to replace it.

If you were to remove the battery, the EDR would still function, but if the main battery terminals are disconnected, the EDR is instantly erased. Note, removing the battery may show up as a "Check Engine" error code, since that is how dealers would know to replace it.


4. Supercapacitors

An alternate way of retaining data is with a supercapacitor. This is a special high capacity device, which stores energy from the car battery and can be used as an emergency power source for computer memory if power is disconnected.

Supercapacitors effectively have an unlimited lifespan because they recharge almost instantly when power is applied to the device, and power is almost always available in a vehicle with a good battery.

Temporarily clearing the supercap can probably be accomplished by disconnecting the cables to your car battery, and then touching the two power cables together for about a minute. This will discharge any supercaps in the circuit, though it won't do anything if there is a diode in the supercap circuit to prevent draining this way.

The alternate method is to find the supercap and remove it from your vehicle (probably mounted on a circuit board right next to the EDR's memory). The EDR will still function normally with the car battery connected, but data will be instantly lost if the battery cables are disconnected.


5. Dummy / Modified EDR's

This is an advanced hacking project for a digital electronics expert. Basically you have to build a device or circuit which pretends to be an EDR but just discards all data sent to it.

Someone with sufficient knowledge of digital memory could also simply cut off the write signal wire on the memory chip(s) on the EDR circuit board, so that the system tries to send data into it, and nothing happens.


Also, the error monitoring could itself be hacked, so that the EDR cannot report there is a problem to the engine computer. Any request for system status is replied with "Oh yeah everything is fine over here!" while it continues to not store anything.



All of this is difficult to do without detailed knowledge of how the standard EDR or its bus signalling works, and none of this information is going to be available from the vehicle manufacturers.

VMWare Server 2.x and Ubuntu eth0 eth1 eth2 eth3....

Ubuntu can be really annoying when used with VMWare. The main point to note is that if you are transitioning VM's between machines, on the first startup it asks "Did you move or copy this VM?"

If you say you copied the VM, it assignes a new MAC address to the virtual machine. This will break all your previously defined network settings, and leave you with "ghost" interfaces of the old devices that are not used for anything.


To clear these now invalid entries, login with su, and go here:

/etc/udev/rules.d
70-persistent-net.rules

Copy the MAC addresses from eth2 / eth3 into eth0 / eth1 and then delete 2/3. 


If you remove all entires, you old config likely still won't be recognized.


Or just remember to tell VMWare you "moved" the VM, next time.

Exosuit as a VR/3D haptic interface

I sent this email to "sarcosinfo@sarcos.com" back in March 2009. I never got a response from them. Too bad. Well, maybe someone else would find this useful someday....

Fron: Dale Mahalko
To: sarcosinfo@sarcos.com
Date: Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:21 PM
Subject: Exosuit repurposed as a VR/3D haptic interface

Dear sir or madam,

After reading about your firm's exoskeleton projects for the US military, I would like to mention an alternative use for the exosuit technology that your engineers may not have considered.


While an exoskeleton may be able to magnify the strength of a soldier by several times over, those same abilities would allow the suit to perform as a fully immersive 3D virtual reality haptics interface, by sensing the occupant's position and actively moving against the occupant to simulate contact with virtual objects and surfaces within a simulated 3D environment.

One of the biggest problems with fully immersive environments is the problem of physically walking across the simulated space. There is no simple way to allow a person to walk in any direction within a virtual environment, short of placing them on top of a large sphere and rotating the sphere in the opposite direction of the user's travel. This also does not allow for VR simulation of stairways, inclines, or rough terrain.

Your exosuit would solve this problem very easily by mounting the back of the suit to a G-force/rotation gantry that suspends the suit and wearer a few feet above the ground. The wearer could then walk through a simulated 3D space, and the exosuit could provide sensory feedback such as of rough ground, or stepping up onto stairs.

Suspending the suit and wearer in midair allows for realistic simulated collisions and falling. They could be pushed by a simulated object and "fall over" by having the suit rotate into a prone position, followed by sudden upward motion of the gantry to simulate hitting the ground.

The US military might have an interest in this since it would allow for training simulations of a multitude of vehicles and environments, whereby training can be performed in a fully virtual environment and soldiers can literally climb up the ladder of a virtual vehicle and feel the ladder lugs under their feet, open its virtual cab door and feel the inertia of the door in their hands, and ride along in a sitting position in a virtual vehicle passenger seat as it bounces over rough terrain, all within the exosuit suspended in midair.



I am aware that the major barrier to using the exosuit on the battlefield is the problem of a sufficiently capable and small portable power supply. As a haptic interface, this problem can be ignored since it would always be tethered as a haptic device.

Generally all this is immediately applicable to the exosuit your firm has developed, with no major changes other than the ability for the suit to provide posiitonal inputs to a VR avatar in a 3D world, and for the simulated evironment to provide accurate force feedback to the avatar and consquently to the suit wearer.

The main challenge would be to develop the G-force-feedback support gantry and a gimbal system permitting the suit and wearer to move and rotate 360 degrees in any direction suspended in midair.

For the fully immersive experience to work, a head-tracking high-resolution stereo video display helmet or goggles, with position-aware stereo headphones would be needed for the haptic suit wearer.



I do not have the technological skill, programming background, or financial resources to carry any of this out on my own. But I would like to see such a technology developed. Since you are the developers of the exoskeleton, it seems you would be the only ones capable of developing this concept to completion.

I have posted about this concept previously on Internet forums and discussion boards, so it is out there waiting for someone to take this virtual ball and run with it across a virtual field.

https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-April/008957.html


Thank you for your time.

- Dale Mahalko

PowerOff doesn't work on Vista / Windows 7

The free PowerOff utility had allowed me to schedule Windows XP computers to shut down automatically each evening, but it doesn't work under Windows 7.

Further testing reveals the problem to be that Microsoft doesn't allow services to interact with the desktop directly anymore, so this software is just plain non-functional with Vista and Windows 7. Time to find another free solution...

It's discussed in more detail here:
Windows Developer Center > Windows: General Forums > Windows SDK > "Allow Service to interact with desktop" does not work on Vista