Albemarle County, VA FD2002 (WA4TFZ)
on
Field Day 2002
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Albemarle Amateur Radio Club (WA4TFZ) will be holding it's
FD2002 (warning: PDF) at the Earlysville Firehouse. Come check it out if you're near Central VA. Should be starting around 10AM on Sat. morning.
Well, I guess they just lost your business, as well as...oh, maybe 10 other people.:)
But, seriously, I wish a player would handle WAV, shorten or some other un/losslessly-compressed format. I wouldn't mind sacrificing storage space for better quality. Of course, in a portable environment (headphones at the gym, etc.) the difference between a 256kbit/s MP3 and a WAV aren't going to bug me (or even, perhaps, be noticable).
Sadly, though, Toshiba doesn't care about losing your or my business. The 20 or so units they'll sell because of these features won't make back the cost of adding/maintaining them. Welcome to the minority.:(
What I'd like to see is how today's cards stand up against the cards of yester-year (Oh, OK, yester-decade).
I still run an AMD K6-450 for a single reason: it's got 3 ISA slots that I can put my dual-port joystick board, my Advanced Gravis Ultrasound MAX and my SoundBlaster AWE32 in. Those 2 sound boards kick this living [explative] out of everything else I've heard in the (affordable) PC sound dept. And, the AWE32 has 8 megs of RAM for something useable: putting sound samples into for MIDI/MOD playback.
Sure, I don't get 18bit, 48KHz playback (which, I'll admit, may be nice for homestudio stuff) but all my 16bit, 44.1KHz stuff (practically everything, since that's what CDs are) sounds fantastic. Nice CODEC chips, nice analog output stages, descrete amps, etc. And, yes, I do listen to it through something worthy of playing back good sound.
I'd like somebody who has a good A/B comparison rig, good ears and a newer whiz-bang audio card to campare it to a GUS or AWE32 and tell me if they agree. Have these newer everything-on-one-piece-of-silicon cards caught up in sound quality? Keep in mind, also, that I payed only $35 for both of these cards (having dated hardware is nice on the wallet:).
And even if it did make a difference, heavy speaker cable should only cost a little more than jumper cables. You could even make an (almost) impedance-matched 8.3 ohm coax by putting six 50 ohm coaxes in parallel, and it still wouldn't cost as much as the ridiculous audiophile cables.
It does make a difference because of the frequency of the signal travelling down the wire. Jumper cables transfer DC...a LOT of DC. Speaker cables carry AC...very sensitively modulated AC. The two tasks require completely different cables. That's why high-grade audio cable (Tributaries, EAR, etc.) has lots and lots of very small pieces of wire.
At AF frequencies, current travels better along the surface of the conductor than through it. So, having more conductors increases your surface area. This is also why radio transmitting equipment (like what I have in my HAM shack) uses grounding foil instead of heavy-guage wire (sometimes people even use copper braid!). You want better conduction of high frequencies to ground so they don't end up on your chassis. You want better conduction of the very subtle highs in your music to your speakers so you can hear them.
Sure...if you forget about all the legacy equip.
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 1
Sure, he's got a point: better ways (that we have now) of using radio spectrum may eliminate the "bandwidth limits" that we have now. But that's just not the case with many modes.
Consider your typical FM transmitter. FM broadcast radio worked so well because of a lot of factors, including the "capture effect". In FM, when you have two transmitters nearby your reciever, one of them (unless they are extreamly close) will "capture" your reciever, preventing the other from being heard. This greatly reduces the appearence of interference from distant-but-still-within-reception-range transmitters.
AM and SSB transmissions don't have/suffer from this. That's why SSB ham nets work so well - SOMEBODY is bound to be able to hear you even if your signal overlaps with others.
Now, I don't know as much about spreadsprectrum as I do other radio modes but I assume the idea is "listen to a lot of spectrum and pick out what you're interested in". Now, if my signal completely captures your reciever, just exactly what are you planning on picking up from other stations?
I'm not sure exactly what makes Gillmor believe that more devices using a given portion of spectrum increases the bandwidth. Perhaps he means that more information is being transmitted between more devices -- more bps, more "bandwidth". This assumes, however, that all these devices are compatible in spectrum, mode, capablility, etc. The minute I key up my 2.4GHz FM transciever for sattelite work things may change.
Too bad the licensing costs for Terminal Server and metaframe are so high you'd be better off buying standalone software. Plus, MS still wants client access licenses for users. I looked at Metaframe for my office, but it costs WAY more money. The only real savings is in administration costs (which is where termserv/metaframe really shines).
In short, boss didn't go for it - said my time was cheaper.:(
Seriously! As a resident of said city and state, I'm not really sure I care that much about Open Source when it comes to my local government. I'd just like to see them stop spending my tax dollars on stupid projects and maybe do something about the cost of housing around here.
I vote for number two. That's the major trend these days is to think that the proper user:admin ratio is 10 to 1 in a smallish company. It's slightly higher than that where I work and if it weren't for out COE, we [the admins] would be doing nothing but fighting fires all day.
Now, we're in a little different situation in that we don't do any windows development - just unix - but NOBODY has root on his/her workstation (unix or NT). Some machines don't even have a 'root' account. Developers work on development servers that are network-isolated/firewalled and get re-imaged periodically from a standard baseline. Norton Ghost provides a common NT workstation setup that rarely gets dorked up because users can't screw with them! There are workstations that run X and people sit at them and use Netscape, Office, Lotus Notes, etc., and then there are development machines that people ssh into and do coding on. The separation is VERY key to our security, productivity and management.
Now, this does get tougher for windows. My suggestion would be to use Terminal Server. My original suggestion to my CTO was a machine running NT4-TSE and Citrix Meta-frame. Unfortunately, my boss didn't fly for this extra expense so we just resorted to Ghost.
Also, for our unix development, we allow developers to run 'jails' on their workstations. The jail is a mecahnism of FreeBSD that's kinda like the logical conclusion of 'chroot'. Developers can have root in a jail on his/her workstation and test code there and we don't have to worry about the integrity of the workstation itself. There are 3 scripts people can run to blow-away, rebuild or reinitialize the jail environment. The jails even have their own IP address!
I hope you do realize that most admins don't want to confine people, but usually our choices are: a) user can do anything; b) user can do nothing. So, choice b meets our objectives and a doesn't. We do our best to use tools that give people ability to do what they need to be able to do and no more, but this is difficult and time-consuming for admins/support staff.
I wish you the best of luck, though. I will point out, as a final note, that I think most people underestimate the amount of work that can be done with usual limited account privs. Nowadays, poeple just assume 'I need root on my box in order to survive' and that's just not true. I've done lots of useful work on machines without root/administrator, etc. It's not a matter of circumventing access controls to get higher privileges. Of course, making the entire Windows registry read-only IS nuts.:)
So I'm puzzled by that CNN article. It goes on and on about people hoping this will cause the sales of new PCs to pick up. I'm curious about this.
OK, we all know that the only reason to buy a new PC is when you can't enough FPS in Quake{x} but why do other people buy new PCs? Well, I guess games are important for them too, but what else is there? Besides, it's not like most slashdotters buy mass-market PCs anyway -- we build 'em.
I guess I'm a bit burned by the fact that the article seems to welcome an OS that will make people buys new PCs. Shouldn't we, in this economy, be wanting something that keeps us from having to buy a new PC? Or is the economy going to be helped by people spending what little money they have for no reason?
I, myself, haven't upgraded my PC in 3 years - and that's a LONG time for me. I'm running the K6-2/300 that I bought before my junior year of college. Sure, it's too slow to run Quake3 and I'm finally starting to run out of space on my 8GB hard drive, but it's a great machine. It runs FreeBSD and BeOS and Windows98 and plays Quakeworld (my all-time favorite DM game) great on its Voodoo Banshee (besides, I do all my real coding work on my Sun, anyway). Am I the norm or the exception these days among the average computer user?
OK. I have to speak up here. I worked in one of Professor Bloomfield's research labs during high school. Lou is one of the greatest hackers I've ever met. He loves science and he loves teaching people science, no matter how smart a person is how technically declined he/she may be. He teaches "How Things Work" because he really wants to give non-technical people an insight into the technical world.
My dad, who works with Professor Bloomfield at U.Va. brought the original article in Charlottesville's local paper to my attention earlier this week (I tried to provide a link to this article but it's no longer on their web site). This is the culmination of Bloomfield's LONG fight with the Honor system at U.Va. A few years ago, he told my dad he had basically given up on trying to catch cheaters. His class is SO popular (it fulfills the Universities basic physical science requrements for non-science majors) that we (my dad and I) had to rig up a way to "tele-conference" in 2 other class rooms of students (I used to run the video camera in the main lecture hall, too). Because of its popularity, he's had to deal with so many people (who don't care about the science but just want to graduate and play football) blatently cheating on the final paper (which is worth 25% of your course grade, BTW). I, personally, can't believe how many people scheduled for graduation are taking a course intended to first-year students (the 100 designation at U.Va.).
However, almost nothing has been done by the honor committee on his previous referalls. I think this is mostly due to U.Va.'s 'single-sanction' policy (see http://www.student.virginia.edu/~honor/ ) and a student jury refusing to pass a judgement that will result in expulsion. Lou said it was too much work for him and nothing ever came of it.
I'm glad he decided to have one more go at it, though. Maybe they'll listen to him this time.
I run SuSE 7.0 and (with the exception of the installer choosing the wrong keyboard map by default) I like it a lot. It's got new features, an up-to-date kernel (I'm not in front of the box so I can't give real specifics) and is quite comprehensive (4 CDs long, 3 binaries, 1 source). I was worried about SuSE's non-x86 distros after I played with a PPC beta that utterly stunk (nothing worked in X - just a server; couldn't even find crtl-alt-bksp to kill it because the keybd map was wrong) but SuSE SPARC is quite nice.
Actually, some of the guys from Future Crew, working with Remedy Entertainment, have a demo out now called "Final Reality" available at www.finalreality.com. Go get it and watch the famous "city scene" in modern 3D (they ripped themselves off for one scene:) Also, if you're so inclined, load the music up in your favorite MOD player (it's an XM sitting in plain-sight in the program directory - gee) and read the message.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a reasonable explanation from the ARRL
The Albemarle Amateur Radio Club (WA4TFZ) will be holding it's FD2002 (warning: PDF) at the Earlysville Firehouse. Come check it out if you're near Central VA. Should be starting around 10AM on Sat. morning.
But, seriously, I wish a player would handle WAV, shorten or some other un/losslessly-compressed format. I wouldn't mind sacrificing storage space for better quality. Of course, in a portable environment (headphones at the gym, etc.) the difference between a 256kbit/s MP3 and a WAV aren't going to bug me (or even, perhaps, be noticable).
Sadly, though, Toshiba doesn't care about losing your or my business. The 20 or so units they'll sell because of these features won't make back the cost of adding/maintaining them. Welcome to the minority. :(
I still run an AMD K6-450 for a single reason: it's got 3 ISA slots that I can put my dual-port joystick board, my Advanced Gravis Ultrasound MAX and my SoundBlaster AWE32 in. Those 2 sound boards kick this living [explative] out of everything else I've heard in the (affordable) PC sound dept. And, the AWE32 has 8 megs of RAM for something useable: putting sound samples into for MIDI/MOD playback.
Sure, I don't get 18bit, 48KHz playback (which, I'll admit, may be nice for homestudio stuff) but all my 16bit, 44.1KHz stuff (practically everything, since that's what CDs are) sounds fantastic. Nice CODEC chips, nice analog output stages, descrete amps, etc. And, yes, I do listen to it through something worthy of playing back good sound.
I'd like somebody who has a good A/B comparison rig, good ears and a newer whiz-bang audio card to campare it to a GUS or AWE32 and tell me if they agree. Have these newer everything-on-one-piece-of-silicon cards caught up in sound quality? Keep in mind, also, that I payed only $35 for both of these cards (having dated hardware is nice on the wallet :).
-Josh
It does make a difference because of the frequency of the signal travelling down the wire. Jumper cables transfer DC...a LOT of DC. Speaker cables carry AC...very sensitively modulated AC. The two tasks require completely different cables. That's why high-grade audio cable (Tributaries, EAR, etc.) has lots and lots of very small pieces of wire.
At AF frequencies, current travels better along the surface of the conductor than through it. So, having more conductors increases your surface area. This is also why radio transmitting equipment (like what I have in my HAM shack) uses grounding foil instead of heavy-guage wire (sometimes people even use copper braid!). You want better conduction of high frequencies to ground so they don't end up on your chassis. You want better conduction of the very subtle highs in your music to your speakers so you can hear them.
Sure, he's got a point: better ways (that we have now) of using radio spectrum may eliminate the "bandwidth limits" that we have now. But that's just not the case with many modes.
Consider your typical FM transmitter. FM broadcast radio worked so well because of a lot of factors, including the "capture effect". In FM, when you have two transmitters nearby your reciever, one of them (unless they are extreamly close) will "capture" your reciever, preventing the other from being heard. This greatly reduces the appearence of interference from distant-but-still-within-reception-range transmitters.
AM and SSB transmissions don't have/suffer from this. That's why SSB ham nets work so well - SOMEBODY is bound to be able to hear you even if your signal overlaps with others.
Now, I don't know as much about spreadsprectrum as I do other radio modes but I assume the idea is "listen to a lot of spectrum and pick out what you're interested in". Now, if my signal completely captures your reciever, just exactly what are you planning on picking up from other stations?
I'm not sure exactly what makes Gillmor believe that more devices using a given portion of spectrum increases the bandwidth. Perhaps he means that more information is being transmitted between more devices -- more bps, more "bandwidth". This assumes, however, that all these devices are compatible in spectrum, mode, capablility, etc. The minute I key up my 2.4GHz FM transciever for sattelite work things may change.
Too bad the licensing costs for Terminal Server and metaframe are so high you'd be better off buying standalone software. Plus, MS still wants client access licenses for users. I looked at Metaframe for my office, but it costs WAY more money. The only real savings is in administration costs (which is where termserv/metaframe really shines).
:(
In short, boss didn't go for it - said my time was cheaper.
Now my access point can get 0wn3d too! What'll they think of next?
Seriously! As a resident of said city and state, I'm not really sure I care that much about Open Source when it comes to my local government. I'd just like to see them stop spending my tax dollars on stupid projects and maybe do something about the cost of housing around here.
I vote for number two. That's the major trend these days is to think that the proper user:admin ratio is 10 to 1 in a smallish company. It's slightly higher than that where I work and if it weren't for out COE, we [the admins] would be doing nothing but fighting fires all day.
Now, we're in a little different situation in that we don't do any windows development - just unix - but NOBODY has root on his/her workstation (unix or NT). Some machines don't even have a 'root' account. Developers work on development servers that are network-isolated/firewalled and get re-imaged periodically from a standard baseline. Norton Ghost provides a common NT workstation setup that rarely gets dorked up because users can't screw with them! There are workstations that run X and people sit at them and use Netscape, Office, Lotus Notes, etc., and then there are development machines that people ssh into and do coding on. The separation is VERY key to our security, productivity and management.
Now, this does get tougher for windows. My suggestion would be to use Terminal Server. My original suggestion to my CTO was a machine running NT4-TSE and Citrix Meta-frame. Unfortunately, my boss didn't fly for this extra expense so we just resorted to Ghost.
Also, for our unix development, we allow developers to run 'jails' on their workstations. The jail is a mecahnism of FreeBSD that's kinda like the logical conclusion of 'chroot'. Developers can have root in a jail on his/her workstation and test code there and we don't have to worry about the integrity of the workstation itself. There are 3 scripts people can run to blow-away, rebuild or reinitialize the jail environment. The jails even have their own IP address!
I hope you do realize that most admins don't want to confine people, but usually our choices are: a) user can do anything; b) user can do nothing. So, choice b meets our objectives and a doesn't. We do our best to use tools that give people ability to do what they need to be able to do and no more, but this is difficult and time-consuming for admins/support staff.
I wish you the best of luck, though. I will point out, as a final note, that I think most people underestimate the amount of work that can be done with usual limited account privs. Nowadays, poeple just assume 'I need root on my box in order to survive' and that's just not true. I've done lots of useful work on machines without root/administrator, etc. It's not a matter of circumventing access controls to get higher privileges. Of course, making the entire Windows registry read-only IS nuts. :)
So I'm puzzled by that CNN article. It goes on and on about people hoping this will cause the sales of new PCs to pick up. I'm curious about this.
OK, we all know that the only reason to buy a new PC is when you can't enough FPS in Quake{x} but why do other people buy new PCs? Well, I guess games are important for them too, but what else is there? Besides, it's not like most slashdotters buy mass-market PCs anyway -- we build 'em.
I guess I'm a bit burned by the fact that the article seems to welcome an OS that will make people buys new PCs. Shouldn't we, in this economy, be wanting something that keeps us from having to buy a new PC? Or is the economy going to be helped by people spending what little money they have for no reason?
I, myself, haven't upgraded my PC in 3 years - and that's a LONG time for me. I'm running the K6-2/300 that I bought before my junior year of college. Sure, it's too slow to run Quake3 and I'm finally starting to run out of space on my 8GB hard drive, but it's a great machine. It runs FreeBSD and BeOS and Windows98 and plays Quakeworld (my all-time favorite DM game) great on its Voodoo Banshee (besides, I do all my real coding work on my Sun, anyway). Am I the norm or the exception these days among the average computer user?
Is buying new PCs really good for the economy?
My dad, who works with Professor Bloomfield at U.Va. brought the original article in Charlottesville's local paper to my attention earlier this week (I tried to provide a link to this article but it's no longer on their web site). This is the culmination of Bloomfield's LONG fight with the Honor system at U.Va. A few years ago, he told my dad he had basically given up on trying to catch cheaters. His class is SO popular (it fulfills the Universities basic physical science requrements for non-science majors) that we (my dad and I) had to rig up a way to "tele-conference" in 2 other class rooms of students (I used to run the video camera in the main lecture hall, too). Because of its popularity, he's had to deal with so many people (who don't care about the science but just want to graduate and play football) blatently cheating on the final paper (which is worth 25% of your course grade, BTW). I, personally, can't believe how many people scheduled for graduation are taking a course intended to first-year students (the 100 designation at U.Va.).
However, almost nothing has been done by the honor committee on his previous referalls. I think this is mostly due to U.Va.'s 'single-sanction' policy (see http://www.student.virginia.edu/~honor/ ) and a student jury refusing to pass a judgement that will result in expulsion. Lou said it was too much work for him and nothing ever came of it.
I'm glad he decided to have one more go at it, though. Maybe they'll listen to him this time.
I run SuSE 7.0 and (with the exception of the installer choosing the wrong keyboard map by default) I like it a lot. It's got new features, an up-to-date kernel (I'm not in front of the box so I can't give real specifics) and is quite comprehensive (4 CDs long, 3 binaries, 1 source). I was worried about SuSE's non-x86 distros after I played with a PPC beta that utterly stunk (nothing worked in X - just a server; couldn't even find crtl-alt-bksp to kill it because the keybd map was wrong) but SuSE SPARC is quite nice.
So, any bets on how much of Yast2 gets translated properly this time? *snicker*
-Josh
Actually, some of the guys from Future Crew, working with Remedy Entertainment, have a demo out now called "Final Reality" available at www.finalreality.com. Go get it and watch the famous "city scene" in modern 3D (they ripped themselves off for one scene :) Also, if you're so inclined, load the music up in your favorite MOD player (it's an XM sitting in plain-sight in the program directory - gee) and read the message.