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Related Links About Academia:
        http://novia.net/~pschleck/academia/
Sample link:
        "Generation Debt; Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty"
        http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,kamenetz,53011,1.html
        "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."

Sounds like it is getting worse. Here is part of why:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
   

Everything old is new again:

"The CBS field sequential color system in its simplest form consisted of a rotating color wheel of red, blue, and green filter segments in front of a monochrome camera, feeding a black and white CRT receiver viewed through a second rotating color wheel. The two wheels were kept in phase synchronization, such that successive television fields were viewed using identical color primary filters to that at the camera....

CBS had first broadcast its Field Sequential Color System as early as August 28, 1940."

http://novia.net/~ereitan/Color_Sys_CBS.html

No doubt this company got a patent for their revolutionary new night goggles? (Although I'll admit it is a useful steal of the concept.)

In a few places, Air waves, RCA connectors on TV, etc... It is the government's job to regulate standards, not to regulate competition. Two completely different things. Anyone here remember Ethyl stations? How about the CBS format for broadcasting TV? Just because a standard is mandated doesn't mean that the government is interfering in the free market. Just because the government regulated the size and features of a gas pump doesn't mean that there is no competition in the Gas Station market. Requiring a standard is very different from regulating business models. Just because we use 110V in our house doesn't mean that there isn't competition in power companies. The local monopolies take care of that. But in return for that monopoly is close regulation. The only one who is skirting by this is the Cable companies. I really don't know why that is. They are a common carrier now just like Verizon, why not be regulated as such?

http://novia.net/~ereitan/Color_Sys_CBS.html

Actually, given the plaintiff involved, it might be time to drag Jeff Meyer out of pseudo-retirement and revive STUPID PEOPLE'S COURT!

>There's a reason why broadcasters opt for tubes for outputting high power RF transmissions.

And that reason is tubes are a great high voltage device, whereas most solid state devices are better at handling higher currents (when correctly designed).

Now, for fun, let's hook your favourite high power RF transmitter to a 4 ohm speaker rather than 50 ohm coax and watch it melt (wooohooo!). Hell, let's say the RF amplifier is tuned for shortwave. Hook that baby up to a cell phone antenna. MELTY MELTY!

One is definately not the same as the other.

For more info, read this.

"This means that the load resistance must be the same as the
characteristic impedance of the transmission line, and the load must contain
no reactance (that is, the load must be free of inductance or capacitance).
In any other situation, the voltage and current fluctuate at various points
along the line, and the SWR is not 1."

Considering most speakers are nothing but HUGE inductors, they're the exact antithesis of what you should hook up to an RF transmitter.

A journalist who used to cover the NTSC told us recently of a lighter moment at the laboratories of the record company RCA in Princeton, New Jersey, where the system was developed. Team leader George Brown laid on a final transmission test. A colour camera was focused on a bowl of colourful fruit in one lab, and the received signal was displayed in another lab on a prototype colour tube. Just before the test Brown took a banana from the bowl and painted it blue.

For the rest of the day the engineers at the receiving end struggled desperately to find out how their new system was faithfully reproducing the colour of red apples, orange oranges and green grapes, but resolutely converting yellow into blue.

The headline here is not quite right. Before there was RCA Dot-Sequential color, there was CBS Color. A bit of broadcasting history.

From Ed Reitan's web site http://www.novia.net/~ereitan/. ...brig

not exactly 'hd' but you can also fish for digital content in the shortwave bands.

"Ia:! Ia:! Shub-Commodore! The black computer of the woods with a thousand pixels!"

Seriously, doesn't this sound like Fundie Xtians saying that Christ is due back, like, any minue now? Check out The Rapture Index to see what I mean, and tell me that some Amiga fan somewhere won't start up The Amiga's Return Index of their own.

Taking something and making it more than it was. Yet another definition of hacking.

Here's a sweet example of that. Color TV.

TV seems pretty mundane and simple... till you start looking into it's origins.

Here's a cool link that goes into the history of color TV.

Imagine being tasked with the job of creating color TV - and then being told... oh ya... it has to work with the thousands of black and white TV's that are out there too. Doh!

Very cool hack.

Check it out.

History of Color TV

Man - today we are spoiled. Super powerful processors that crunch the heck out of digital data. Imagine if we could redesign color TV today? Oh wait a sec - isn't that what HDTV is all about? Ah, forget it. Too much red tape bs.

Grin