Although fire is a big risk, you are all (hopefully) shooting with the same gear on as a low-budget fire department, so the odds of you catching on fire are pretty slim. The entire time you are shooting (if it's a hand-fire), you are being rained on by burning embers (barring good winds)
It's the concussion of the charge that will get you. Whenever you are loading or handling fireworks, you always keep your back to an open area, so if something happens you get thrown away instead of thrown into something solid. The buildings that they build fireworks in will blow to pieces much easier than any normal building so that anyone inside doesn't get compressed by all that pesky expanding gas.
I've only done around a dozen shoots, and am not a licenced pyrotechnician, but on two of the shoots we have had misfires. One was one of my tubes on a hand-fire, and fortunately blew out the other side of the rack (it was my first shoot). The second misfire was on a finale so everyone was quite a ways away, we didn't even really realize what happened until we were cleaning up and found a 2-by-4 twenty yards or so away and a half of a rack with a pretty much destroyed tube. Fireworks are fun.
What year? I may have known some people involved. I typically do a couple of shoots around town, but never the Liberty shoot, it's way too big, and nowdays it's all electric, so it's no fun.
There were some particularly weird "things" on XMission (a local and awesome ISP)'s hold music
When I worked there, there were two songs that were the techs favorites. One of them was something like six minutes of dogs barking. The users really hated it, it really rubbed all of them the wrong way. Rubbed them the wrong way so much that you could always tell when it had just finished playing and someone had to sit through all of it. Even though there were thousands of songs in the playlist (mostly trance), this one got a lot of attention and was removed.
The song that people liked to hear the most was "C is for cookie" by the cookie monster. Wouldn't matter if they had just been sitting on hold for three days and the DSL line had surged out of control and killed both of their parents, anyone after listening to that was in a pretty happy mood by the time they got to you. I think that one is still on there.
My personal favorite Hold Music was what I put on when I worked at a little company in San Jose. 100% Christmas music, the Secretary said it shouldn't be done, it was October and all. But I said "But if we don't do it now, we won't catch them by suprise." It's really quite amazing how few people know how to change the hold music, even though it was powered by a normal cd player with a little wire running to the PBX
Actually, that's not how it went.
The PS2 actually has a PSOne-on-a-chip embedded in it. It's used to handle I/O (memory cards, controllers, perhaps even disk reads). Sony got the PSOne down to a single chip (mostly) solution, so instead of redesigning all of the I/O for the PS2, they just glued a PSOne on there. Kinda crazy, eh?
Ironically, we just switched off of using astrisk on Friday, to a non-IP phone solution.
Astrisk really has a great set of features, a lot of which I am really going to miss. On the downside is that we were constantly having problems with it. Not major problems mind you, a couple lost calls here or there and sometimes the voicemail prompts would stutter. I'm not sure if the dropped calls were actually the fault of astrisk, or the PRI circuit we had coming in, because the astrisk console always was feeding warning messages about a particular PRI.
This could all be because we were running off of CVS versions of astrisk, with local patches but aparently, it is the way to go, because stable releases of astrisk are very few, and very far between.
So take this as a word of warning, astrisk is rad, but it'll take some work to get it to settle down.
There is.
Actually, it's not command line driven, it's a network daemon mode. I wrote a ad-banner creator system that connected to the daemon mode of GIMP, and through the power of scheme (btw, GIMP has a horrible scheme development environment) and some CGI's (real, written in horrible-horrible C CGI's), we had a pure server-side image creator that people needed no javascript for. It was neat, but a big pain in the ass. Oh, and back then, you had to run a dummy X server, so it would have something to connect to.
So, next time you want a command line GIMP, remember, it's just a telnet away!
I have a Treo 270, it runs Palm OS. They pretty well have most of the syncing problem taken care of. I don't know what more you could ask, the thing is basically perfect (for those of us who like fliphones, and don't mind having a crappy browser). The builtin directory dials quickly, and it works really well for instant messaging with the thumboard being suprisingly usable for quite a bit of typing. Overall, I'd give it a 9/10, just because the web browser ain't too hot.
Eh, it's nothing new. I worked at an smaller radio station, but big enough that it was spread through a couple of markets.
The music choice on those stations were small enough that they never did requests, they would record the call, and when the song came up, they would play it back. Typically it would be just over an hour between when the frequently requested songs were played back to back.
Gave me hell when I was trying to diagnose a problem with one of the audio servers, because it always seemed to crash pretty close to this one song ("Linkin Park - In The End"), so we reencoded that song, reuploaded it, ran it through some wav checkers, and everything turned up fine. Then I scanned through the log files, and found out that it played around 26-30 times A DAY, so no matter when those guys crashed, it would be somewhere near/in the queue.
I worked for a company in Utah that was running all of their radio broadcasts via digital signals up to the tops of mountains (much, much better transmit range).
Since we were in the valley, one of our hops went from the middle of the city, off of the top of the opposite mountains, to a Gas station that had line-of-site to the top of the peak. The Gas station didn't take much to convince them into letting us stick a few medium sized yagis on the roof.
BTW, none of this was 802.11b, it was all run through these deviceses called Gentner's (IIRC), which we would typically operate like they were a frame relay (they provided all of the necessary framing), but aparently some of their later models even took ethernet as an input. According to someone that used to work there, they no longer make them, so you might need to dig around on ebay.
As for getting it all setup, head on down to the local AM radio station, a few hundred should get the engineers there setting you up in a hurry.
SLP is the Stampede Linux Package format. Just slightly more advanced than a slackware.tgz. And I mean just slightly. It was a.tar.bz2 with a struct fwrite()'ed to the end of it. It worked off of a "feature" in tar/bzip2 where it would ignore any data beyond the end of where tar thought the file would end data, so you could extract data from them with just standard tar.
The other cool part about them, was that the final byte in the file told you what version of SLP the package was, and a single fread() call would get all of the metadata extracted. The downside was that none of the fields were varible length, and that I never got around to implementing dependency checking.
All in all, it doesn't much matter, because the Stampede Linux Project is Deader than BSD;). It was a fun little package format to write, I took over since the v2 packages (we went through a lot of versions). Oh well, enough reminicing(sp) for me.
I'm replying to this just for the one guy that posted here, and if someone else reads it, more power to them (it is a very late post)
From what I understand, reincarnation isn't so much an actual thing, rather than a chain-of-events type thing. For example, if you are going though life as a total asshole, when you die, you don't come back to life as a squid, or a guy with really bad luck. Your actions in life as an asshole will have scarred people you have interacted with, giving them bad behaviors to follow, or instilling distrust in others. So you aren't reborn into someone anew, but your behaviors are "born" in others.
I could be totally wrong about this, but that is how I understand it.
Just a note for #2, ATI's catlyst drivers support linux, including install notes for debian, and links to various open source projects that support different parts of ATI's line of products. It's actually a pretty slick install, and the 3d acceleration is very nice.
JFFS is one, specifically for embedded linux applications, it seems to do pretty well, and has the great advantage of being journaling ( embedded devices are supposed to handle having the power yanked out from under their feet fairly well ) A good writeup of that is availible here:
http://www.embeddedlinuxworks.com/articles/jffs_gu ide.html
Flash disks tend to have filesystems specifically designed for them because they have very different characteristics from traditional drives (ones can change to zeros, but zeros can't change to ones, unless you erase the entire flash sector, and writing a flash sector doesn't matter, it's the erases that count.)
A good flash filesystem will ensure that sectors are only erased when absolutely necessary, and will spread the allocation table out accross multiple sectors FAT16 and FAT32 are horrible about this, and will lead to extremely early flash death. So, if you are going to use flash, please treat it like it is flash, even though it has an IDE interface, it is very different than a standard disk on the other end.
I used to work directly below this company, and since the operator of the company I worked for, was the wife of the president of Klever Kart, I know most of the people that work there. They started around 1995, and as far as I know, have never sold anything. I was even planning on heading by their office (which is accross the street from the scariest park in Salt Lake City, UT, and right up the street from the abandoned train station.) in the next week, just to hassle the owners. IIRC their devices are pretty huge machines, running Windows CE, and with all the custom application being developed in Delphi, they were crazy little displays, that would play.gif's when they got close enough to a 900Mhz signal that sent out the right ID, and even though it has been working (I saw demos) since 1995, all that I can remember them doing is doing demos in actual stores for a weekend or so, but not actual sales of their devices. So maybe they are actually picking up on sales now, either that, or they got a huge amount of capital invested, and are living off of the intrest.
Let me recommend, instead of buying some cheap speakers (which, for under $200, is what you will be buying), get some really nice headphones. I have a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO's, which cost me around $140, and they are easily the best sounding speakers/headphones I have ever had, and surpass most of the studio monitors that a radio station I worked for had. So, if he's an audiophile, speakers probably aren't the way to go, for the price, headphones give a much, much higher quality of sound. Oh, and the neighbors will love you.
I've built apache on my multia, and on my PC164SX, both of which are 64-bit alpha machines, and it works just fine. So... I'm kindof confused about this article too. It sounds like AMD just payed about 200k or so for someone to type 'make'
Well, actually, it looks like the guys at IBM are going that way. Not sticking the entire kernel on chip, but a bunch of helper functions ( I would imagine task swapping to be in there ) to assist the kernel, think of it as MMX for the kernel code. From the roadmap that was linked to from slashdot a few days ago, it looks like the kernel-accellerators are being built into the POWER5 series. Oh, and as for put string functions in the chip, it appears that is the next phase. In the POWER6 series they are planning on adding accellerator functions for DB2 and Websphere (I think a hardware accellerated DB2 is really gonna give Oracle a run for it's money). Just FYI
> Duct Tape Seals Cooling/Heating Ducts!
Funny thing, is that Duct tape is almost completely worthless on heating ducts, the tempature they get to is too high and the duct tape gule melts and it falls right off. Go and take a look at your ducts, they don't have duct tape on them, they have some really shiney type tape (which I forget what it is called).
That's not too hard to imagine. seeing that a Power4 processor MODULE consists of eight processors, and eats a half a kilowatt of power
My reference. What amazes me is that the Itanium2 and the Alpha have it beat, although I always liked the Alpha architecture.
It doesn't matter what the numbers are. If there is a significant legal use for them (such as turning your XBox into a Ogg Vorbis playing set top box) they are legal. This is the same way that VCR's with the record button are legal, even though they may be used for illegal copying of copyrighted material (which is probably their primary use), having the ability to also copy your home movies gives them the legal right to exist and be sold.
yes, yes, I know that some TVs do both PAL and NTSC, and some people speak multiple languages, or don't care about the language like for an action game, but those are definitely in the minority.
Majority or minority doesn't matter. if a single person has the legal right to use a tool, there should be no law against that tool. Or would you rather we convict an innocent man just so it is easier to convict the guilty?
This probably has a legal foothold in the area that it's still just a camera taking pictures of a person in public, the angle is just different. Even though the intent of this camera is to grab some dirty photos, it's still just a camera, in public taking pictures at a different angle. A down-blouse camera would be a bit easier to argue for, because it could be just a poorly aimed camera happening to take some dirty shots.
God Damnit. I am not changing from Linux, to GNU/Linux, to BSD/GNU/Linux, it's just too much. I think being an operating system infers that some code has been stolen from some BSD or another and if I'm not giving credit to the BSD guys, I'm certianly not giving credit to the authors of textutils and bash, so Linux and just plain Linux it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Strangly, not really true.
Although fire is a big risk, you are all (hopefully) shooting with the same gear on as a low-budget fire department, so the odds of you catching on fire are pretty slim. The entire time you are shooting (if it's a hand-fire), you are being rained on by burning embers (barring good winds)
It's the concussion of the charge that will get you. Whenever you are loading or handling fireworks, you always keep your back to an open area, so if something happens you get thrown away instead of thrown into something solid. The buildings that they build fireworks in will blow to pieces much easier than any normal building so that anyone inside doesn't get compressed by all that pesky expanding gas.
I've only done around a dozen shoots, and am not a licenced pyrotechnician, but on two of the shoots we have had misfires. One was one of my tubes on a hand-fire, and fortunately blew out the other side of the rack (it was my first shoot). The second misfire was on a finale so everyone was quite a ways away, we didn't even really realize what happened until we were cleaning up and found a 2-by-4 twenty yards or so away and a half of a rack with a pretty much destroyed tube. Fireworks are fun.
What year? I may have known some people involved. I typically do a couple of shoots around town, but never the Liberty shoot, it's way too big, and nowdays it's all electric, so it's no fun.
There were some particularly weird "things" on XMission (a local and awesome ISP)'s hold music
When I worked there, there were two songs that were the techs favorites. One of them was something like six minutes of dogs barking. The users really hated it, it really rubbed all of them the wrong way. Rubbed them the wrong way so much that you could always tell when it had just finished playing and someone had to sit through all of it. Even though there were thousands of songs in the playlist (mostly trance), this one got a lot of attention and was removed.
The song that people liked to hear the most was "C is for cookie" by the cookie monster. Wouldn't matter if they had just been sitting on hold for three days and the DSL line had surged out of control and killed both of their parents, anyone after listening to that was in a pretty happy mood by the time they got to you. I think that one is still on there.
My personal favorite Hold Music was what I put on when I worked at a little company in San Jose. 100% Christmas music, the Secretary said it shouldn't be done, it was October and all. But I said "But if we don't do it now, we won't catch them by suprise." It's really quite amazing how few people know how to change the hold music, even though it was powered by a normal cd player with a little wire running to the PBX
Actually, that's not how it went. The PS2 actually has a PSOne-on-a-chip embedded in it. It's used to handle I/O (memory cards, controllers, perhaps even disk reads). Sony got the PSOne down to a single chip (mostly) solution, so instead of redesigning all of the I/O for the PS2, they just glued a PSOne on there. Kinda crazy, eh?
Ironically, we just switched off of using astrisk on Friday, to a non-IP phone solution.
Astrisk really has a great set of features, a lot of which I am really going to miss. On the downside is that we were constantly having problems with it. Not major problems mind you, a couple lost calls here or there and sometimes the voicemail prompts would stutter. I'm not sure if the dropped calls were actually the fault of astrisk, or the PRI circuit we had coming in, because the astrisk console always was feeding warning messages about a particular PRI.
This could all be because we were running off of CVS versions of astrisk, with local patches but aparently, it is the way to go, because stable releases of astrisk are very few, and very far between.
So take this as a word of warning, astrisk is rad, but it'll take some work to get it to settle down.
There is.
Actually, it's not command line driven, it's a network daemon mode. I wrote a ad-banner creator system that connected to the daemon mode of GIMP, and through the power of scheme (btw, GIMP has a horrible scheme development environment) and some CGI's (real, written in horrible-horrible C CGI's), we had a pure server-side image creator that people needed no javascript for. It was neat, but a big pain in the ass. Oh, and back then, you had to run a dummy X server, so it would have something to connect to.
So, next time you want a command line GIMP, remember, it's just a telnet away!
I have a Treo 270, it runs Palm OS. They pretty well have most of the syncing problem taken care of. I don't know what more you could ask, the thing is basically perfect (for those of us who like fliphones, and don't mind having a crappy browser). The builtin directory dials quickly, and it works really well for instant messaging with the thumboard being suprisingly usable for quite a bit of typing. Overall, I'd give it a 9/10, just because the web browser ain't too hot.
You're right, just check right here
Eh, it's nothing new. I worked at an smaller radio station, but big enough that it was spread through a couple of markets.
The music choice on those stations were small enough that they never did requests, they would record the call, and when the song came up, they would play it back. Typically it would be just over an hour between when the frequently requested songs were played back to back.
Gave me hell when I was trying to diagnose a problem with one of the audio servers, because it always seemed to crash pretty close to this one song ("Linkin Park - In The End"), so we reencoded that song, reuploaded it, ran it through some wav checkers, and everything turned up fine. Then I scanned through the log files, and found out that it played around 26-30 times A DAY, so no matter when those guys crashed, it would be somewhere near/in the queue.
I worked for a company in Utah that was running all of their radio broadcasts via digital signals up to the tops of mountains (much, much better transmit range). Since we were in the valley, one of our hops went from the middle of the city, off of the top of the opposite mountains, to a Gas station that had line-of-site to the top of the peak. The Gas station didn't take much to convince them into letting us stick a few medium sized yagis on the roof. BTW, none of this was 802.11b, it was all run through these deviceses called Gentner's (IIRC), which we would typically operate like they were a frame relay (they provided all of the necessary framing), but aparently some of their later models even took ethernet as an input. According to someone that used to work there, they no longer make them, so you might need to dig around on ebay. As for getting it all setup, head on down to the local AM radio station, a few hundred should get the engineers there setting you up in a hurry.
SLP is the Stampede Linux Package format. Just slightly more advanced than a slackware .tgz. And I mean just slightly. It was a .tar.bz2 with a struct fwrite()'ed to the end of it. It worked off of a "feature" in tar/bzip2 where it would ignore any data beyond the end of where tar thought the file would end data, so you could extract data from them with just standard tar. ;). It was a fun little package format to write, I took over since the v2 packages (we went through a lot of versions). Oh well, enough reminicing(sp) for me.
The other cool part about them, was that the final byte in the file told you what version of SLP the package was, and a single fread() call would get all of the metadata extracted. The downside was that none of the fields were varible length, and that I never got around to implementing dependency checking.
All in all, it doesn't much matter, because the Stampede Linux Project is Deader than BSD
I'm replying to this just for the one guy that posted here, and if someone else reads it, more power to them (it is a very late post)
From what I understand, reincarnation isn't so much an actual thing, rather than a chain-of-events type thing. For example, if you are going though life as a total asshole, when you die, you don't come back to life as a squid, or a guy with really bad luck. Your actions in life as an asshole will have scarred people you have interacted with, giving them bad behaviors to follow, or instilling distrust in others. So you aren't reborn into someone anew, but your behaviors are "born" in others.
I could be totally wrong about this, but that is how I understand it.
Just a note for #2, ATI's catlyst drivers support linux, including install notes for debian, and links to various open source projects that support different parts of ATI's line of products. It's actually a pretty slick install, and the 3d acceleration is very nice.
JFFS is one, specifically for embedded linux applications, it seems to do pretty well, and has the great advantage of being journaling ( embedded devices are supposed to handle having the power yanked out from under their feet fairly well ) A good writeup of that is availible here: http://www.embeddedlinuxworks.com/articles/jffs_gu ide.html
Flash disks tend to have filesystems specifically designed for them because they have very different characteristics from traditional drives (ones can change to zeros, but zeros can't change to ones, unless you erase the entire flash sector, and writing a flash sector doesn't matter, it's the erases that count.)
A good flash filesystem will ensure that sectors are only erased when absolutely necessary, and will spread the allocation table out accross multiple sectors FAT16 and FAT32 are horrible about this, and will lead to extremely early flash death. So, if you are going to use flash, please treat it like it is flash, even though it has an IDE interface, it is very different than a standard disk on the other end.
I used to work directly below this company, and since the operator of the company I worked for, was the wife of the president of Klever Kart, I know most of the people that work there. They started around 1995, and as far as I know, have never sold anything. I was even planning on heading by their office (which is accross the street from the scariest park in Salt Lake City, UT, and right up the street from the abandoned train station.) in the next week, just to hassle the owners. IIRC their devices are pretty huge machines, running Windows CE, and with all the custom application being developed in Delphi, they were crazy little displays, that would play .gif's when they got close enough to a 900Mhz signal that sent out the right ID, and even though it has been working (I saw demos) since 1995, all that I can remember them doing is doing demos in actual stores for a weekend or so, but not actual sales of their devices. So maybe they are actually picking up on sales now, either that, or they got a huge amount of capital invested, and are living off of the intrest.
Let me recommend, instead of buying some cheap speakers (which, for under $200, is what you will be buying), get some really nice headphones. I have a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO's, which cost me around $140, and they are easily the best sounding speakers/headphones I have ever had, and surpass most of the studio monitors that a radio station I worked for had. So, if he's an audiophile, speakers probably aren't the way to go, for the price, headphones give a much, much higher quality of sound. Oh, and the neighbors will love you.
I've built apache on my multia, and on my PC164SX, both of which are 64-bit alpha machines, and it works just fine. So... I'm kindof confused about this article too. It sounds like AMD just payed about 200k or so for someone to type 'make'
Well, actually, it looks like the guys at IBM are going that way. Not sticking the entire kernel on chip, but a bunch of helper functions ( I would imagine task swapping to be in there ) to assist the kernel, think of it as MMX for the kernel code. From the roadmap that was linked to from slashdot a few days ago, it looks like the kernel-accellerators are being built into the POWER5 series. Oh, and as for put string functions in the chip, it appears that is the next phase. In the POWER6 series they are planning on adding accellerator functions for DB2 and Websphere (I think a hardware accellerated DB2 is really gonna give Oracle a run for it's money). Just FYI
> Duct Tape Seals Cooling/Heating Ducts!
Funny thing, is that Duct tape is almost completely worthless on heating ducts, the tempature they get to is too high and the duct tape gule melts and it falls right off. Go and take a look at your ducts, they don't have duct tape on them, they have some really shiney type tape (which I forget what it is called).
That's not too hard to imagine. seeing that a Power4 processor MODULE consists of eight processors, and eats a half a kilowatt of power My reference. What amazes me is that the Itanium2 and the Alpha have it beat, although I always liked the Alpha architecture.
It doesn't matter what the numbers are. If there is a significant legal use for them (such as turning your XBox into a Ogg Vorbis playing set top box) they are legal. This is the same way that VCR's with the record button are legal, even though they may be used for illegal copying of copyrighted material (which is probably their primary use), having the ability to also copy your home movies gives them the legal right to exist and be sold.
This probably has a legal foothold in the area that it's still just a camera taking pictures of a person in public, the angle is just different. Even though the intent of this camera is to grab some dirty photos, it's still just a camera, in public taking pictures at a different angle. A down-blouse camera would be a bit easier to argue for, because it could be just a poorly aimed camera happening to take some dirty shots.
God Damnit. I am not changing from Linux, to GNU/Linux, to BSD/GNU/Linux, it's just too much. I think being an operating system infers that some code has been stolen from some BSD or another and if I'm not giving credit to the BSD guys, I'm certianly not giving credit to the authors of textutils and bash, so Linux and just plain Linux it is.