Audio Acoustic Amplifiers with no electronics

Amplifying audio without the use of any electronics: Audio Acoustic Amplifiers from Experimental Musical Instruments.

The Las Vegas Anomaly

It seems all the iPhones as part of the once-unknown location tracking log all have visits to locations in northwest Las Vegas, all at the same time. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden at O'Reilly Radar have dubbed this "The Las Vegas Anomaly", an elegant turn of phrase that will undoubtedly be incorporated into science fiction stories just as soon as writers get wind of it. Speaking as someone born and raised in Las Vegas, I have no clue why those locations are listed. There's not that much between the Kyle Canyon and Lee Canyon roads on US 95. A golf course, a small park, and scattered homes.

Notable: the size of the standard AC outlet

Did you know the distance between the center of the slots in the 120V standard AC outlet is exactly 1/2 inch? And so is the distance between the center of those and the center of the ground pin. 0.5". All of this only came out after I bought an inexpensive digital caliper and started measuring everything I could get my hands on.

Geiger counter problems interfacing with PC

I've been unable to get the DOS software AW-SRAD to work with the geiger counter for some time, on multiple machines, with Windows XP. It's a bummer. I can input the sound pulses from the clicker unit I made into a sound card, but I have no idea how to then get the PC to do something with that. I'm not a programmer. The original geiger counter set up was really simple: it toggled the RING indicator on the serial port.

Halogen resistance

If you are curious, the resistance of a 300W type J halogen bulb, the ones you would find in those halogen torchiere lamps, is 3.3 ohms when cold. When it's hot it is 48 ohms, but that's a calculation only based on the wattage.


A warm halogen bulb in the near infrared

Since converting such a torchiere to CFL (but not in this project), I had an extra halogen bulb and debated throwing it out, but I figured they might make a decent power resistor. I used it in a project converting a PC ATX power supply to a benchtop 12V source. It works--but the hassle of cleaning the contacts for soldering, soldering, and placing such a large object in the case was enough to decide buying a power resistor in the first place is probably easier.

Looking at the radio spectrum with an oscilloscope

One of the things I've always been interested in was radio; and part of that was scanning as much of the radio spectrum as possible to hear what was out there. As a kid, this was my father's shortwave receiver; I spent hours twirling the giant frequency handwheel on that radio absorbing every foreign radio broadcast I heard and wondering what the various weird noises I heard were.

For instance, at times there would be a overwhelmingly loud, rapid "thump-thump-thump" noise that was fairly broadband across a few megahertz. I asked my father about that and he called it the "Russian Woodpecker", an over-the-horizon radar system that used frequencies that were normally used by shortwave broadcasters. If I stayed up long enough at night, I would begin to pick up the European broadcasters waking up at dawn with their early morning news broadcasts.

One thing about most radios is you are only tuned to one frequency at a time. You get a limited amount of bandwidth around that frequency depending on how the radio works. It's hard hence to compare the strengths of two stations simultaneously without resorting to memory tricks or rapid tuning.

With a fancy piece of equipment called a spectrum analyzer, you can see a wide range of frequencies at once and see various radio stations, peaks, etc. To some extent you can do this with a PC sound card hooked up to the audio output of the radio, but again you are limited in bandwidth. See the laptop display below, for instance.


The generalized setup. An antenna, a diode detector, and an oscilloscope. The PC is not being used in this particular example.

What amazes me is a sub-$1000 digital oscilloscope that is advertised as a 40MHz scope, that is, it can display signals up to 40MHz in frequency, can in a FFT mode display the signals up to 500MHz and essentially function as a spectrum analyzer.


An overview of the Chicago radio spectrum
The key things to note here are intensity is the vertical, frequency is the horizontal. Near the upper right corner is "POS:", which notes the frequency at the center of the display. At the center bottom is the horizontal scale, in this case 25MHz per big division. So the bump of stuff to the left of center in this image is at about 125MHz-25MHz= 100MHz, which is in the FM Radio band.


FM Radio band.
In the FM band, you can see that there are plenty of stations filling the available channels. The isolated peak on the left is WHPK-FM, the campus radio station running at 100W, and is about two blocks from my location. It sits in the non-commercial section of the FM band.


AM Radio band
The AM radio band at my location is dominated by WRTO-AM at 1200kHz. This station gets into any cable, any wire, and if you have any rectification from a piece of corrosion, or just input an antenna directly into a PC, you will get La Tremenda.


Looking closer at 1200kHz
If you look closer at WRTO's signal, you see it has a strong carrier and two sidebands further out at about 12.5kHz out. Now, when I originally saved this image, I thought I was seeing the audio sidebands of the AM signal. If the AM radio station broadcasts a single note at 440Hz, for instance, you'd see the strong carrier, and two line peaks on either side at 440Hz away. But here they are all the way out at 12.5kHz, a frequency that is present in "ssss" or a cymbal but little else. And especially not normal AM radio broadcasting, which is limited by the FCC to just a tad over 20kHz bandwidth, so the stations have to drop all their treble sounds.

It appears these outliers are the dreaded "HD radio", a hybrid technique that transmits the audio in two sidebands that exceed the normal width of an AM broadcast. Unfortunately this process violates old technical standards that allowed stations to coexist with each other. It was dropped in favor of a proprietary digital standard that allows big stations to use more bandwidth and clog up the airwaves with digital hash noise.


Below the AM radio band

Just below the AM band is the rest of what is known as Mediumwave or Medium Frequency, which then transitions into LW or longwave; this band is notable for non-directional beacons for aeronavigation, DGPS (or differential GPS), and lots of noise. I will have to take another spin around this band to listen to some of those peaks and see if they are real signals.


VLF Radio spectrum
Once you get down here, you start running into lots and lots of switching mode power supply noise. Various Navies around the world still broadcast on this frequency for radionavigation and uninterruptible worldwide coverage. Two of the stronger signals to the left are probably the Russian radionavigation system at 11.9kHz and 12.6kHz.

I have some other snapshots showing excellent response to the shortwave radio broadcasters of the world. It's amazing to see the whole shortwave spectrum at once instead of moving around frequencies one kilohertz at a time.

The end of analog TV in Chicago

I watched the end of analog TV at noon today for Channels 2,5, and 7. They unceremoniously just cut the power--one in a commercial and two in soaps. Fox 32 is still broadcasting in analog with a constant scroll, and all the low-power and non-profits are still on, save WTTW.

Happy 1234567890 seconds!

Unix time just went past 1234567890; here's a screen shot of a little script I wrote.

The new cheap subnotebook race

More gadget blogs need this sort of writing. We are using several Eee PCs here as dumb terminals for various headless servers and they work great. In some cases they replaced 15 year old Toshiba laptops that until now had no modern replacements.

A few months ago, a Sony executive, asked what he thought of the success of the Asus Eee bargain sub-notebook, leaned back in his chair, sucked on his cigar and smugly denounced the pursuit of cute, tiny, low-cost laptops as "a race to the bottom." Then, turning dangerous, he leapt like a panther across the desk, tackled his inquisitor and plunged the smoldering ember of his cigar through the vitreous of his interviewer's eye.

Boing Boing Gadgets: Dell Joins Asus, HP In "Race To The Bottom" with Budget Sub-Notebook

Adventures in Large Format Digital Scanning: part 1

Have you ever taken a magnifying glass in a darkened room and focused the scene outside on a wall? Or just focused the sun or a bright light?


an image from a 50mm lens: the scene from the other room.

An even simpler optical system is the pinhole: Light rays are constrained in that there is one angle, and one angle only, that they can go through the pinhole, making an always in-focus optical system. There are pinhole systems everywhere: just go under a tree. All those round discs of light? Real images of the Sun. Most people don't notice until the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon, when those round discs turn into a thousand crescents.

Going back to the image formed from a real lens. Can you see if you replaced the wall with a piece of film, you've made yourself a camera? What if you put a CCD there? (That's the "film" of digital).

Now take a flatbed scanner. Those devices image just what's put right in contact with the glass on top of them. A piece of paper, a print, a film negative, etc. What if we put a flatbed scanner in the focal plane of the lens from above? If everything went right, we'd be scanning the image produced by the lens.

This is the technique used by a number of early medium format and current large format digital backs. For instance, see this Seitz scanning back or the range of scanning backs at BetterLight.

Now these are nice and all, but I don't have tens of thousands of dollars nor a 4x5 camera to stick a digital back on. So I decided to build one. This post has been sitting for quite some time with me wondering exactly how to start describing this project. My hand has been forced though, as yesterday I took my prototype outside for the first time and people starting asking questions.

So, here's an image from yesterday. Ignore the defects. The original is 1268x2552. I can quadruple that resolution at the moment, but didn't in this particular image.


Reynolds Club at 300dpi, smallish aperture, no IR block. Slight levels adjustment, unsharp mask. Click to enlarge.

UV coating on thin film solar cells

You might have read about a UCLA team that's developed a way to reduce UV degradation of thin film solar cell systems. They claim a patent for a "photon converting material" that converts UV into a lower-energy wavelength light. Yeah, it's actually just a fluorescent dye. Adding fluorescent dyes to CCDs has been common practice to increase the terrible efficiency of CCDs in the UV. I can't see what new non-obvious thing here needs to be patented.

This is the sort of thing a smart journalist needs to ask questions about, instead of taking a press release at face value.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13372-green-invention-special-longlife-solar-cells.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/solar-cell-coating.php

USA 193: it won't come down immediately

There is a big misconception in the media reports about the attempted kinetic attack on USA 193 that may happen tomorrow night: it won't come down immediately after being shot. Instead, the fragments of the satellite will continue to orbit. Atmospheric drag will greatly increase on each fragment, but it's certainly not coming down immediately over Canada as everyone says. At least some of the commenters on this Wired blog mention that.

But, it appears its perigee is at the northernmost part of its orbit (if I'm reading the orbital elements right), which is right after the interception. I bet they are thinking an orbit or two later it will come down over the northern Pacific.

Polaroid to stop making instant film

The end of another era in photography. Did you know Kodak stopped making black and white paper two years ago? The difference between that announcement and Polaroid's is that there is no other manufacturer of instant film. You can still get black and white paper from a multitude of vendors like Ilford and Oriental. Shake 'em while you still can.


Old polaroid passport camera from the library

Making dull technology pretty

I run a copy of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (data release 5). It sits on two large SQL servers and a single blade web server. I needed some images of the servers so I spent a little time yesterday glitzing them up as much as rack servers can be glitzed and photographed them. Here's a link to the images.

NYC detector bill

This will probably be my last comments on the proposed New York City bill to regulate detectors, hopefully because it sounds like some people realize the inanity of the bill; two very insightful sentences in this article from the Downtown Express
:

(NYPD Deputy Commissioner for counter terrorism)Falkenrath would not commit to publishing a list of approved devices or approved device specifications, because he said that list could give terrorists information about what the city is capable of detecting.

Vallone replied that the council normally does not pass bills with such broad language, but that he would defer to the Police Department’s judgment in this case.

So in other words, you need a permit for your detectors, but they won't tell you which detectors you'll need a permit for. Nor could manufacturers build devices to specifications for sale in NYC, because they wouldn't be able to know what those specifications were.

New star in a box

I received my latest box of goodies from Jameco, and in it was a particular weakness of mine.



I'm a sucker for the latest and greatest LEDs. This particular white LED is named "Piranha" by the manufacturer. In the picture I am running it at half-brightness.


Slightly underexposed to highlight the brightness

Compact Fluorescents

Compact fluorescent lighting is a hot topic in the media right now. Repeated utility and environmental group campaigns have encouraged people to switch to them, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will phase out the sale of incandescents in 2012. Economically speaking, there are real incentives for consumers to switch to them. But... people who have done so often come right back to incandescents. Why is that?

1. Quantity of light. CF manufacturers are blatantly over-reporting the luminosity of the CFs. This will probably not be resolved until a lawsuit occurs over the false advertising. To get an equivalent amount of light I always recommend getting the CFL that is a step-up: so if you are replacing a 60W incandescent, buy a "75W" CF. You'll be much happier, and don't fret the increase in energy use, since you are still using less energy than before (60W vs 20W for a "75W" CF), it's still a win.

2. Quality of light. This is the most legitimate complaint, and most of it stems from failure of manufacturers to label the color temperature of their bulbs. For most consumer applications, getting the color to match tungsten (2700K) is critical for acceptance. Some of the cheaper CFs have poor color rendition: they are too pink or too green and it turns off people. This is the fault of using the wrong phosphor blends. Take a gander at this quote from yesterday's NYTimes article on CFs:

In the living room, for example, where there are four recessed lights along one wall, Mr. Chipman tested six dimmable bulbs and determined that one made by Greenlite with the same hue as incandescents worked best in certain spots, attractively lighting an exposed brick wall and maple bookshelves. A Satco brand bulb with a slightly whiter hue made a limestone-tiled fireplace in the middle of the wall look best, so he installed one above it. Mr. Chipman’s wife, Liz Diamond, 53, a theater director who considers herself even more particular about aesthetics than her husband, said investing time in trying multiple bulbs made a big difference. “There was one bulb that made the limestone look really freaky, ugly and moldy,” she said, but the Satco bulb now in place makes the space look “fabulous.” “I was amazed at how much variation there was, but you can really get a color that you like,” she said. Mr. Chipman agreed. “You really have to experiment with different bulbs to find the ones that work for you,” he said. “But they exist.”

Get the right color for your application. I use GE 6500K daylight bulbs during the day to completely match outside light--you would be hard pressed to figure out if the light from the other room was from a window or the bulb. I also have some old tube "full-spectrum" fluorescents to wake up to in the morning in my bedroom. Again, these have fantastic matching color rendition to daylight.

For nighttime, it's best to limit your exposure to blue light, as it disrupts the production of melatonin and hence your sleepiness. I switch to tungsten matching lights at night as much as possible. For matching incandescents, both the n:vision soft white and GE series match the color. The n:vision lights instantaneously, whereas the the GE takes too long to light (and has other objections below).

3. Noise. A false objection is the claim that compact fluorescents buzz like old magnetic ballast fluorescent tubes. This is just wrong--CFs haven't used magnetic ballasts for a long time. Electronic ballasts, as used in CFs, can make noise if components in them aren't physically attached as well as they can be, and if certain cheaper circuits are used. The fundamental switching frequencies are ultrasonic, so you can't hear the old buzz that magnetics do. But with the design issues mentioned you can have a variety of whines and higher frequency buzzes.

4. Time to light
Many CF bulbs take a delay to light. This is annoying and a common complaint for many brands of bulbs. I've found that GE's Soft White 20W(75W) has a 1/2 second light time that drives me insane.

In addition, every CF I've ever owned takes time to warm to full brightness. I don't mind a short delay. I've had no problem with the the warm-up time, but in hotels I've seen lights that have taken literally minutes to light up to full brightness.

5. Short lifetimes
A lot of people have reported the CFs aren't lasting as long as claimed. I can believe this, especially if they bought by price. The compact fluorescents also are very intolerant of cycling--don't use them in closets and places you don't need the lights on for hours at a time. The lights are also sensitive to overheating--so don't stick them in unventilated fixtures, or recessed ceiling cans, or in general any upside-down fixture.

Now for long life. In 1991 or so I bought a very early CF. It was underpowered--I think it's a 7W. I used it for a few years and then went to college. It's still sitting in my old room at my parent's place, and I use it whenever I visit. Granted, this means it doesn't have many hours on it, but that CF bulb is older than many people I know.


My own specific recommendations are to get N:Vision soft white CFs for general use. I can say they are as close to an incandescent as I've seen in CFs.

I built an awesome "halogen torchiere killer" that I'll describe in another post.

Lens: a new way of finding things in the library

As some people know, I work at the University of Chicago Library. I've been working on a project for some time now--a new "library catalog" as it were, although since the new "catalog" includes things not normally in a catalog, some people with credentials don't want it called that.

It's cool, and more in tune with more modern searching techniques than the old catalog. I hope it encourages students and researchers to use the catalog more frequently.

The new catalog is called Lens, and you can see it in beta here. My involvement with the project is that I am the system administrator on the machine behind the URL. It's running on a very nice Sun Fire v40z running Windows 2003 Server 64-bit on eight-cores, with 16GB of RAM. We also added more disk space to it by setting up a SAN and connecting via Fibre Channel. All these things are like new toys to sysadmins like me.

The software itself is an application from a Dutch company called Medialab. They've been selling this software to lots and lots of libraries over the past few years, and now they're starting to sell it to big academic libraries, like us. We're not the first academic to use it; Oklahoma State has it up and running. But we do have a very large collection--some 5.3 million "things" come up when I ask Lens what we have (there are a lot more items in the library physically, since the catalog wouldn't count individual serials and such. Plus don't get me started about uncataloged items).

On the left side of the new catalog is a Flash* app that finds some associations with search terms you've entered. I thought this was flashy, no pun intended, and pointless, until I began discovering interesting items in our collection I never knew existed. This ranged from UC dissertations to non-technical books that I've got lined up to read (one never runs out of reading material). Once I find something interesting, I dump the record into our site-licensed Refworks for later retrieval.

Instead of scrolling through a long list of items, you can narrow your search by using the right-hand column to refine by a variety of methods like format, how old the item is, or by other means. You can also refine by the classification (aka the call number range) of the book: I'm usually quickly cutting off the chaff by refining by selecting Q (Science), for instance.

We also bought additional content to stick into the new catalog--things like book covers and album art are de rigeur in Amazon, and it can grab your interest or make known items quick to find in a list. We also bought audio CD song title listings, the table of contents of many books, and some summaries of books.

A neat little tool available is you can subscribe to an RSS feed for specific searches, so if something new comes along, you can discover it automatically. (Like say the acquisition or new publication of a particular author or subject). This RSS feed will give you new items of Bill Bryson, for example.

There are some issues with it. It indexes the Library's web site, but the results are messy and voluminous. If you search for a specific author, often anthologies or chapters in a book come up before titles actually fully authored by them. The "relevancy" or ranking of an item, especially when you are searching for authors, is currently in flux and for the moment they put a lot of extra author refinements in to compensate until the main rankings are improved. For instance, if you search for science fiction author James Blish, it will bring up anthologies of science fiction he has stories in first, and then some non-related items that have the word "establish" in them, before titles written by him. A simple author refine on the right side gets rid of that, but it won't be there once the relevancy engine gets tuned.

At some point in the near future, we might enable social tagging on the catalog, like LibraryThing, so people can enter their own tags to help sort the catalog, offer reviews, raves, and criticisms of items, and such. It's still up in the air.

*If you don't have Flash, I made sure that the developers included a simple text version of the word cloud. And, if the thing annoys you truly, and you don't wish to discover items you may not have thought about to look at, you can turn it off too.

End of the year non-review #3: Civil rights and the government,

I continue running through my overflowing Google Reader "Starred Items" list.

TSA to punish fliers for facecrime a la New screening technology might detect terrorists before they act


The TSA and DIY culture clash I used to naively think as long as it passed the swab test, the TSA would professionally act accordingly and let it through, as it couldn't possibly be explosive. It seems that any exercise of your rights means immediate retaliation. The days of me refusing to let screeners and the Secret Service take photos through my cameras is probably over.

Watching FISA fizzle
Chris Dodd's actions on the telecom immunity provisions made me reconsider who I'm voting for in the primaries. More here.

DEA War on Plants
98% of all "seized marijuana plants" is wild hemp with no active drug content.

Another Man Arrested For Using Free Cafe WiFi

Ethicist Says Nothing Wrong With Using Free WiFi
When your operating system automatically connects and uses an open wifi system, how the hell can anyone claim that's illegal? Close your systems if you don't want people to use them off-site. This nonsense is why we don't currently have a ubiquitous and free wifi in dense cities.

My own philosophy comes from the old days of radio, where any radio wave entering your home or your personal space was fair game to receive and listen to. Telecom interests lobbied and paid campaigns well to get the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which suddenly made certain wavelengths illegal to listen to, all because their cordless and cellular phones were poorly designed and completely open to listening.

Australian DRM from 1923 - dumb radio idea that refuses to die

The Schneier section.
Bruce Schneier usually gets it right about security and insecurity in the world.

• We're All a Little Nervous in a post-1748 World The stupidity and inanity of prohibiting public photography and "note-taking".
  
  
• Buildings You Can't Photograph
  This should be entitled "Buildings They Claim You Can't Photograph". Know your rights: The Photographer’s Right
  
  
• Essay on Fear
  
  
• I have nothing to hide, why should I care if the government looks at it?
  Why this argument is fallacious.
  
  
• Security Theater Imagine the cost of all the security, all the waiting in security queues, all the overreactions. What does that cost us economically?
  
  
• U.S. Government Threatens Retaliation Against States who Reject REAL ID
  
  
• Interview with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell
  
  
• The War on the Unexpected
  

Papers Please: Arrested at Circuit City for refusing to show ID, receipt
Remember that you are never required to show a receipt to leave a store. I never do, and it saves me much time on leaving busy stores like Fry's.
A members-only store may issue such rules, but common law says when you bought the item, it's yours. Some of the people exercising this right are jerks, but that doesn't excuse the stores and their aggressive rent-a-cops.

Insect Spy

Protesters might even nab one with a net -- one of many reasons why Ehrhard, the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they doubted that the hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. march -- and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march participant described on the Web "a jet-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue . . . watching us"?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large, spectacularly adorned dragonflies that "can knock your socks off," he said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people at the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies -- an accoutrement that Louton could not explain. And all reported seeing at least three maneuvering in unison.

"Dragonflies never fly in a pack," he said.

Paranoia from activists or real? I'd really like to know--this is tantalizingly straddling the border between the kooks and real technologies. I don't trust either sides' judgement or statements on this.

California Police Camera Surveillance Increasing
The only solution now that public surveillance is out of the bag is to require the government to open up all the video and use of the system to the public. ,

Video of Man Tasered to Death
Incredibly uncomfortable, so much so I haven't watched it. Tasering is torture and our society uses them way too much. Overescalation is epidemic.

Your color laser printer has been compromised and is leaking data.

Ubuntu Linux

This post is brought to you by the fact that I've been running a LiveCD version of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux on my home computer for the past week since my hard drive failed (which was running Windows XP). I did it because I wanted to be back up and running quickly, without having to replace the hard drive and reinstall Windows. A simple reboot with Ubuntu in the CD drive and I was back up and running. Most reading material is web based, and I use the built-in remote desktop application to access email on my work PC, so the only thing I've really lost is gaming, which I haven't had the time to do lately anyways. And besides, I have access to Desktop Tower Defense, so what gaming have I lost really?

And you know what? Ubuntu works. It works well. So much so that after putting a new hard drive in my home PC, I'm installing Ubuntu on it. I suppose I will set up a dual-boot system, or experiment with virtualization or a WINE Windows emulation system, but for the moment I am happy and established and most importantly, up and running, with a free OS that comes off of a CD.

My background with free OSes started a while ago, when I was a student employee at the Library. A fellow student employee who was overqualified for the job installed NetBSD on our then kick-ass Pentium 60 machine in the student/storeroom down in the subbasement of the Library. It offered two X window managers: gwm or twm; both were not ready for primetime. Things have come a long way since then (circa, uh, don't judge me on this, 1995).

I've been running Ubuntu as a server for testing purposes at work for over a year; the rough edges back then have been smoothed out (for instance, multi-CPU systems required a little extra to install, as well as setting screen resolution correctly); these things seem to have been correctly thought about in the latest version (7.10). At work I could access Windows file shares via Samba; I could offer up whatever I needed to via apache (http). But since I am a Windows System Administrator, the work portion of what I do was offered up via Windows 2003 Server and IIS 6. I have nothing really against Windows 2003--it's a fine OS, but IIS was up until 6.0 the crappiest web server around. It's a lot better now, but Apache works just as well, and I'm happy running both, although for me Apache is a test environment while work items run in IIS (because the vendor made it that way).

What really got me was the situation I was in: I had a bad hard drive, and I needed access to the web and my machine at work. The easiest solution was a CD with Ubuntu on it.

I think that Linux has arrived at the casual desktop, and it really works, and most hardware now works with it. I hope it's moved out of the enthusiast market and into the real world, where people don't necessary have the technical skills to replace the kernel or compile a program. I hope that people get fed up with infected and trojaned machines, and the monoculture of Windows gets diluted a bit with a more dynamic and robust computing environment. That's not to say I'm against Windows--after all, it gives me a paying job; but I like that I can recover from a hard drive failure with one CD and one reboot.