Coming up we have other breaking news. The earth has mass, and studies show that people sometimes do and say things they wish they hadn't. Wait a moment, this just in: Barbara Streisand sues photographer Kenneth Adelman for violation of privacy, because his aerial photography to track coastal erosion included her Malibu home in one of his 12,000 photographs. Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, the image was viewed on the photographer's web site six times, two of which were by Streisand's attorneys, and within one month of the suit, more than 420,000 people had seen the image. We'll have more on these breaking stories when we come back.
This is the guy who spent his time and mostly his own money to document the quickly-fading memory of Bulletin Board Systems in a documentary. I know because he came all the way to California and interviewed me and many others who were sysops back in the day. My board was very minor but he was gracious enough to travel to the small town where I now live to interview me. I have a great deal of respect for him and his efforts at preservation. Some day someone will be asked to preserve Jason's life and legacy and I hope they can apply the same zeal he brings to his efforts to their own. He's not curing cancer or landing a man on the moon, but somebody who takes the time to preserve the slightly less critical aspects of our tech history deserves support and credit. Good for him.
I have come to really despise the iAds for companies who pay Apple to insert them into the web pages I'm viewing in Safari on my iPhone. I'm enough of a consumer to know that advertising pays for stuff, but does every page you view, every time you view it, have to have one or more ads right in the middle? On the small phone screen it's very obnoxious. Apple is hacking the flow of information on my browser screen and injecting an ad right in the middle of the page. It really is making me crazy, and provides a great incentive for jailbreaking.
Now, Apple is crowing about their new ad blocking features in the next release of iOS, but they will not be blocking iAds. This great new feature merely blocks ads for companies that have not paid Apple to advertise. Once you pay Apple for the privilege, Apple will guarantee that the user will not be able to block the ad. Since this whole advertising scheme is built into the OS and not Safari, it will be very difficult to defeat. I am growing to regret my purchase of an iPhone 6.
Google "adaptive headlights" and you'll see that this has been going on since the dawn of the headlight, or at least since the 1930's. There have been systems that were mechanically linked to the steering wheel, like the famous middle headlight on the Tucker, as well as automatic dimmers. In the late 60's my father bought a 1956 Lincoln Continental Mk II which was the first Lincoln to offer such a system. It was very unreliable and I think he disabled it somehow. Typically, in an effort to protect us all from crazy automakers making headlights... um... dangerously adaptive (??? my words, but really, WTF?) created a standard definition of exactly how the lights had to work, and anything else is illegal. To keep us safe. Of course.
As long as you can use it without it flying off your lap, (we are talking about a laptop, right?) or desk, and the rest of the specs are what you're looking for, why wouldn't you want it to be as light as possible? As long as the "bottom" where the keyboard is weighs enough so the screen doesn't tip it over backwards, I say the lighter the better! Why would you intentionally want something to be heavy? Screw all the conversations around it being preceived as being cheap because it's light. The only people that would think that are people who know NOTHING about what it takes to MAKE things light in the first place! If it weren't for durability factors and little things like flashpoints, I would say make everything out of magnesium honeycomb! Or whatever is next, of course. (Spiderweb anyone?)
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'"
- Isaac Asimov
I think his point was that the majority of new hams no longer construct their own radios from scratch. They buy them commercially made, and the new radios are no more serviceable than your cellphone or any other modern surface-mounted-components electronic device. I don't think he meant commercial as in, commercial band radios. But I could be wrong.
Since you posted as AC I'll say this. You must be an older Ham who got his ticket "back in the day" when you had to know morse code and had to design a radio circuit from scratch during your examan, and now you resent the ease with which an Amateur Radio license can be obtained. There have always been jerks in every endeavor. Why, you may not believe this, but there are even a few here on Slashdot! The FCC continues to cut funding for enforcement, so more and more we hams have to police ourselves. So, do that. If you have a couple of hams in your neighborhood who are violating rules, report them.
As far as getting all sanctimonious, when was the last time you really heard anything about what Hams did in a crisis, other than on vary narrowly focused outlets like Slashdot or Amateur Radio Newsline? It's not like we're parading in the streets crowing about our accomplisments. Just a little acknowledgement is all we want, and then only because Amateur Radio is largely invisible so people think it's dying. It's not. There are more licensed operators world wide now then ever before.
I know we have to try to make responsible laws for things like the environment, but when has the U.S. government EVER gotten science really right? "Hello, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." Right. We are up to our eyeballs in regulations, many based on bad science due to ignorance and politics, and many others based merely on greed and backroom dealings. So I'm all for transparency. President Obama utterly failed to actually provide any of the transparency he promised when he was campaigning, yet I am not sure this legislation is the way to do it either. Typically, the bill has all the trademarks of politicians who don't know anything about science or the scientific process trying to pass science legislation. There is more political relevance than scientific relevance to this, and some of it just wrong-headed. As stated in the article, "[S.544] would require EPA to base all its rules, assessments, and guidance on data that is... reproducible" and then later states "many studies, such as longitudinal surveys, are not realistically reproducible" which means they would not be allowed to be used under these rules. I am suspicious of the agendas of all of the various elected officials who are discussing this bill. (FWIW, I am neither a Republicrat nor a Demopublican.)
If more controls are put in place, the work will simply move offshore. I work for a large financial institution, and they decided the best solution for technical labor was to build a large organization offshore, and these are not just call-center folks. These are highly skilled technical workers. And they are doing jobs that could easily be done here, but obviously for a lot more money. This way they avoid the overhead and headaches of H1B sponsoring altogether. Not saying it hasn't and doesn't happen in this company. But the offshore labor is a lot less expensive, and to some, that is of primary importance.
Too bad you posted as AC. Were you involved with the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in Orange County, California in the 70's? I ask because that was my first computer too, and the configuration you mention was the same as ours. Not sure how many other TSS-8 systems there were, but I think the bulk of them did not. I went to Newport Harbor High, and was a system administrator (we called them System Managers) for a year or so.
I went through the whole presentation, and I really want one! I live in California, and we use the 1.25m band (220 MHz) a lot in my area. Nobody includes this band, even in the big expensive All-Band All-Mode mobile radios. You can get a single-band radio, but I don't drive a van or a truck, and my space for radios in the car is strictly limited. I would love to have one tri-band radio with 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm (144, 220, and 440 MHz) bands without using a transverter, and be able to do SSB on 2m. Now THAT would be a radio to have! I already have an SDR, one of the of the greatest radios on the market, the Elecraft K3, and I love it! With this I could have a fantastic mobile and another for base. Very cool! 73, WT6G
They are the same thing. Relax. I suspect the true first occurence of the abbreviation HT to mean "handheld transceiver" or "Handie-Talkie" is lost in the mists of time. The Handie Talkie was probably the first two-way-voice handheld transciever, and it entered service in the US military in about 1941. I have always heard HT means "Handie Talkie" but it obviously means "handheld transceiver" too. FWIW, the term "Walkie Talkie" referred to a radio that was so big it lived in a backpack the radioman had to lug around. It was self-contained so you could walk around with it. The Handie Talkie was a huge improvement, and is the handheld radio you see the US Army soldiers using in all the old WWII movies.
73,
WT6G
IANAS but wasn't this one of the big drawbacks to cloning an adult organism? You start with DNA that has already been shortened by this reduction of the telomeres and create a brand new organism but with part of the clock already run out. Didn't Dolly have this problem?
As a new-ish ham, I hear a lot of "ham radio is dead" stuff, and it's just not true. There are more registered hams now then ever before, and the rate of new licensees is also going up. (i.e. the number of new hams every year keeps going up) But the new young hams are not getting into it for the same reasons the older hams did. Most of the older hams were at least amateur radio electronics guys. Now, nobody (or very very few) builds a radio from bare components, and the first level of license requires only a basic understanding of radio electronics principles. In my book it's still very cool to put up my antenna (I live in an antenna-restricted community) and know that when I contact someone in another country, I'm doing it without relying on somebody else's infrastructure. It's just me, my battery, my radio, and my antenna, and I'm talking to some guy half-way around the world! How cool is that? And emergency communications will always be a valid use. In fact, in a real emergency, cell phones are useless for a variety of reasons, some of which can be failed infrastructure, or even just simple congestion. If an earthquake hits or a hurricane, cell towers go down or everybody jumps on their phone and then nobody can get in on the overcrowded towers. Or EMS blocks all calls except for emergency services to use. I don't know how it's going to evolve, but it always does, and it's most definitely not dead.
73,
WT6G
The title of the paper is "Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential" and only talks about CURRENTLY CIRCULATING viruses. I have not read the paper, only the abstract, but even the abstract indicates that all they are doing is studying the behavior of currently circulating viruses that are similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918. Sensationalizing a random paper is a great way to make headlines, but the truth will always out. In this case, the sooner the better. This is not to say we don't need to be careful and follow the suggestion to seriously review all "gain-of-function" virus research and don't do it if it can be avoided. But this article is quite flamboyant and inflammatory, probably just to draw attention to this risk. However, credibility has been sacrificed. Too bad.
Everybody knows the technology and even the frequency spectrums in use by the various carriers is mostly all different. You watch. The carriers now will say that they have to raise prices or even completely do away with contract subsidies in order to be competitive. As "do-gooder" efforts go, this is up there. Sounds great on paper, but utterly fails in it's intended consequence and/or has worse unintended consequences.
I live just south of Santa Barbara and I finally weaseled it out of them that Verizon plans no new roll-outs of FIOS anywhere. If you don't have it "in your neighborhood" now, you'll never have it. The "last mile" problem proved too expensive to deal with. (That's the part where they run fiber to each home from the neighborhood "trunk".) I think this is why AT&T U-verse is still growing. They run fiber to a neighborhood and then use the existing copper for the last short run to the home. Definitely a compromise, but it's a helluva lot faster than DSL! Unfortunately, in my area, we don't even have that. Fastest connection I could get was from COX Cable. (DISH was still cheaper for my TV, btw, since we get zero OTA channels where I live.)
See: https://www.overdrive.com/ I don't know how other libraries do it, but this is how ours handles it. Yes, there are limitations, but add up all of the subscriptions we are now being asked to fund every month. Everything is becoming a monthly fee, conveniently charged to your credit card or coming out of your bank account.
Dangerous levels of dihydrogen monoxide! The government needs to protect us! Billions of dollars spent by this industry to make sure every home has a constant supply, exposing our children in ways that sometimes end in death! Read more here: http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
You have been warned!!
There is a great article in our local online newspaper written by a guy who is a consultant. He compares electric vs. hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and it turns out that it's way more ineffecient to create the hydrogen for the cars to turn into electricity than it is to just use the electricity as electric cars do now. http://www.noozhawk.com/articl...
Slashdot Mirror
Coming up we have other breaking news. The earth has mass, and studies show that people sometimes do and say things they wish they hadn't. Wait a moment, this just in: Barbara Streisand sues photographer Kenneth Adelman for violation of privacy, because his aerial photography to track coastal erosion included her Malibu home in one of his 12,000 photographs. Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, the image was viewed on the photographer's web site six times, two of which were by Streisand's attorneys, and within one month of the suit, more than 420,000 people had seen the image. We'll have more on these breaking stories when we come back.
This is the guy who spent his time and mostly his own money to document the quickly-fading memory of Bulletin Board Systems in a documentary. I know because he came all the way to California and interviewed me and many others who were sysops back in the day. My board was very minor but he was gracious enough to travel to the small town where I now live to interview me. I have a great deal of respect for him and his efforts at preservation. Some day someone will be asked to preserve Jason's life and legacy and I hope they can apply the same zeal he brings to his efforts to their own. He's not curing cancer or landing a man on the moon, but somebody who takes the time to preserve the slightly less critical aspects of our tech history deserves support and credit. Good for him.
Now, Apple is crowing about their new ad blocking features in the next release of iOS, but they will not be blocking iAds. This great new feature merely blocks ads for companies that have not paid Apple to advertise. Once you pay Apple for the privilege, Apple will guarantee that the user will not be able to block the ad. Since this whole advertising scheme is built into the OS and not Safari, it will be very difficult to defeat. I am growing to regret my purchase of an iPhone 6.
Google "adaptive headlights" and you'll see that this has been going on since the dawn of the headlight, or at least since the 1930's. There have been systems that were mechanically linked to the steering wheel, like the famous middle headlight on the Tucker, as well as automatic dimmers. In the late 60's my father bought a 1956 Lincoln Continental Mk II which was the first Lincoln to offer such a system. It was very unreliable and I think he disabled it somehow. Typically, in an effort to protect us all from crazy automakers making headlights ... um... dangerously adaptive (??? my words, but really, WTF?) created a standard definition of exactly how the lights had to work, and anything else is illegal. To keep us safe. Of course.
As long as you can use it without it flying off your lap, (we are talking about a laptop, right?) or desk, and the rest of the specs are what you're looking for, why wouldn't you want it to be as light as possible? As long as the "bottom" where the keyboard is weighs enough so the screen doesn't tip it over backwards, I say the lighter the better! Why would you intentionally want something to be heavy? Screw all the conversations around it being preceived as being cheap because it's light. The only people that would think that are people who know NOTHING about what it takes to MAKE things light in the first place! If it weren't for durability factors and little things like flashpoints, I would say make everything out of magnesium honeycomb! Or whatever is next, of course. (Spiderweb anyone?)
Just check out bmc.com and look at their IT Asset Management page. BMC IT Asset Management
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov
I think his point was that the majority of new hams no longer construct their own radios from scratch. They buy them commercially made, and the new radios are no more serviceable than your cellphone or any other modern surface-mounted-components electronic device. I don't think he meant commercial as in, commercial band radios. But I could be wrong.
As far as getting all sanctimonious, when was the last time you really heard anything about what Hams did in a crisis, other than on vary narrowly focused outlets like Slashdot or Amateur Radio Newsline? It's not like we're parading in the streets crowing about our accomplisments. Just a little acknowledgement is all we want, and then only because Amateur Radio is largely invisible so people think it's dying. It's not. There are more licensed operators world wide now then ever before.
Get a grip, and get real. Seriously.
I know we have to try to make responsible laws for things like the environment, but when has the U.S. government EVER gotten science really right? "Hello, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." Right. We are up to our eyeballs in regulations, many based on bad science due to ignorance and politics, and many others based merely on greed and backroom dealings. So I'm all for transparency. President Obama utterly failed to actually provide any of the transparency he promised when he was campaigning, yet I am not sure this legislation is the way to do it either. Typically, the bill has all the trademarks of politicians who don't know anything about science or the scientific process trying to pass science legislation. There is more political relevance than scientific relevance to this, and some of it just wrong-headed. As stated in the article, "[S.544] would require EPA to base all its rules, assessments, and guidance on data that is ... reproducible" and then later states "many studies, such as longitudinal surveys, are not realistically reproducible" which means they would not be allowed to be used under these rules. I am suspicious of the agendas of all of the various elected officials who are discussing this bill. (FWIW, I am neither a Republicrat nor a Demopublican.)
If more controls are put in place, the work will simply move offshore. I work for a large financial institution, and they decided the best solution for technical labor was to build a large organization offshore, and these are not just call-center folks. These are highly skilled technical workers. And they are doing jobs that could easily be done here, but obviously for a lot more money. This way they avoid the overhead and headaches of H1B sponsoring altogether. Not saying it hasn't and doesn't happen in this company. But the offshore labor is a lot less expensive, and to some, that is of primary importance.
Too bad you posted as AC. Were you involved with the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in Orange County, California in the 70's? I ask because that was my first computer too, and the configuration you mention was the same as ours. Not sure how many other TSS-8 systems there were, but I think the bulk of them did not. I went to Newport Harbor High, and was a system administrator (we called them System Managers) for a year or so.
I went through the whole presentation, and I really want one! I live in California, and we use the 1.25m band (220 MHz) a lot in my area. Nobody includes this band, even in the big expensive All-Band All-Mode mobile radios. You can get a single-band radio, but I don't drive a van or a truck, and my space for radios in the car is strictly limited. I would love to have one tri-band radio with 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm (144, 220, and 440 MHz) bands without using a transverter, and be able to do SSB on 2m. Now THAT would be a radio to have! I already have an SDR, one of the of the greatest radios on the market, the Elecraft K3, and I love it! With this I could have a fantastic mobile and another for base. Very cool! 73, WT6G
They are the same thing. Relax. I suspect the true first occurence of the abbreviation HT to mean "handheld transceiver" or "Handie-Talkie" is lost in the mists of time. The Handie Talkie was probably the first two-way-voice handheld transciever, and it entered service in the US military in about 1941. I have always heard HT means "Handie Talkie" but it obviously means "handheld transceiver" too. FWIW, the term "Walkie Talkie" referred to a radio that was so big it lived in a backpack the radioman had to lug around. It was self-contained so you could walk around with it. The Handie Talkie was a huge improvement, and is the handheld radio you see the US Army soldiers using in all the old WWII movies. 73, WT6G
IANAS but wasn't this one of the big drawbacks to cloning an adult organism? You start with DNA that has already been shortened by this reduction of the telomeres and create a brand new organism but with part of the clock already run out. Didn't Dolly have this problem?
As a new-ish ham, I hear a lot of "ham radio is dead" stuff, and it's just not true. There are more registered hams now then ever before, and the rate of new licensees is also going up. (i.e. the number of new hams every year keeps going up) But the new young hams are not getting into it for the same reasons the older hams did. Most of the older hams were at least amateur radio electronics guys. Now, nobody (or very very few) builds a radio from bare components, and the first level of license requires only a basic understanding of radio electronics principles. In my book it's still very cool to put up my antenna (I live in an antenna-restricted community) and know that when I contact someone in another country, I'm doing it without relying on somebody else's infrastructure. It's just me, my battery, my radio, and my antenna, and I'm talking to some guy half-way around the world! How cool is that? And emergency communications will always be a valid use. In fact, in a real emergency, cell phones are useless for a variety of reasons, some of which can be failed infrastructure, or even just simple congestion. If an earthquake hits or a hurricane, cell towers go down or everybody jumps on their phone and then nobody can get in on the overcrowded towers. Or EMS blocks all calls except for emergency services to use. I don't know how it's going to evolve, but it always does, and it's most definitely not dead. 73, WT6G
...Christmas. Just sayin'.
The title of the paper is "Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential" and only talks about CURRENTLY CIRCULATING viruses. I have not read the paper, only the abstract, but even the abstract indicates that all they are doing is studying the behavior of currently circulating viruses that are similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918. Sensationalizing a random paper is a great way to make headlines, but the truth will always out. In this case, the sooner the better. This is not to say we don't need to be careful and follow the suggestion to seriously review all "gain-of-function" virus research and don't do it if it can be avoided. But this article is quite flamboyant and inflammatory, probably just to draw attention to this risk. However, credibility has been sacrificed. Too bad.
Everybody knows the technology and even the frequency spectrums in use by the various carriers is mostly all different. You watch. The carriers now will say that they have to raise prices or even completely do away with contract subsidies in order to be competitive. As "do-gooder" efforts go, this is up there. Sounds great on paper, but utterly fails in it's intended consequence and/or has worse unintended consequences.
I live just south of Santa Barbara and I finally weaseled it out of them that Verizon plans no new roll-outs of FIOS anywhere. If you don't have it "in your neighborhood" now, you'll never have it. The "last mile" problem proved too expensive to deal with. (That's the part where they run fiber to each home from the neighborhood "trunk".) I think this is why AT&T U-verse is still growing. They run fiber to a neighborhood and then use the existing copper for the last short run to the home. Definitely a compromise, but it's a helluva lot faster than DSL! Unfortunately, in my area, we don't even have that. Fastest connection I could get was from COX Cable. (DISH was still cheaper for my TV, btw, since we get zero OTA channels where I live.)
See: https://www.overdrive.com/ I don't know how other libraries do it, but this is how ours handles it. Yes, there are limitations, but add up all of the subscriptions we are now being asked to fund every month. Everything is becoming a monthly fee, conveniently charged to your credit card or coming out of your bank account.
Dangerous levels of dihydrogen monoxide! The government needs to protect us! Billions of dollars spent by this industry to make sure every home has a constant supply, exposing our children in ways that sometimes end in death! Read more here: http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html You have been warned!!
Don't matter just so long as it's not made in China! That kind lets through all the gummint stuff and filters out the rest!
Sure would like to git me some of them quantum nano-thingys and their negative frequencies! (Um. uh, just whut is a negative frequency?)
There is a great article in our local online newspaper written by a guy who is a consultant. He compares electric vs. hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and it turns out that it's way more ineffecient to create the hydrogen for the cars to turn into electricity than it is to just use the electricity as electric cars do now. http://www.noozhawk.com/articl...