Gee, I love the idea of the solar cells being "above the track". Wild animals from lizards on up are smart enough to seek out the shade, as are vagrant livestock. So, with the tracks in the shade for a good part of the day, I expect we could have a chain of Momma's Train-Killt Bar-B-Q stands all the way from Tucson to Phoenix (Cook them in solar ovens, come to think of it.) Or maybe DARPA could fund a next-generation cow catcher on the front of the engine, one that works at 200mph...
There are lots of places in the Bay Area that do this. It's much more than a sop to carbon neutrality: the goats can "mow" slopes that are far too steep and uneven to wrestle a mower across. They also make short work of areas that are filled with rocks, brush and stumps and have no objection to a dessert course of poison oak (that's a good reason not to pat them on the head, though).
I used to watch them arrive at the Lawrence Hall of Science up in the Berkeley hills. Trailers pull up; the goat wranglers set out a low fence and then unload the goats and a few working dogs. Over the next few days the wranglers move the fenced area across the slope and the goats eat and fertilize their way across the landscape. A few days after they arrive the brush is gone and some very nasty terrain has become a fire break, with roots still in place to prevent land slides. What's not to love?
A $30 switch and a patch cable will take down your spanning-tree enabled infrastructure very effectively. Loop the cable on your cheap switch: voila, a broadcast-storm generator. Plug it into the wall; plug your laptop into the switch and let it DHCP Discover, which is a broadcast. Your cheap switch now generates a stream of broadcasts as fast as it can, injecting them into the network. Your Spanning-Tree Enabled switches now repeat the broadcast faithfully. Network crashes*. STP prevents your switches from creating loops, NOT from propagating broadcast storms...
*unless you are throttling the ports based on broadcast traffic, which you now know is NOT a feature of Spanning Tree
Actually, Bandwidth In Mirror Will Be Larger Than It Appears (BIMWBLTIA)! And, when it gets right down to it, you don't care about bandwidth anyway; you only think you do. 1. Why do companies spend $500 a month for a 1.544Mbps T-1 when a 1.5Mbps DSL connection is only $29? BECAUSE YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT BANDWIDTH (you only think you do. more below.) 2. Why does your 64Kbps codec consume more than that when you actually look at it? BECAUSE OVERHEAD COULD DRIVE THROUGHPUT AS HIGH AS 3,500Kbps! (actually that's just a theoretical, non-real world extreme, _as is 64Kbps_, more below.)
Regarding #1. Bandwidth, schmandwidth. It's all about LATENCY. Which is better for voice, a 50Mbps pipe or a 56Kbps pipe? Answer: Cannot tell from info provided in question. If, in the 60th second of a minute-long call, I deliver 3000Mb of voice data, I've given you the promised 50Mbps bandwidth. Unfortunately, there were 59 seconds of silence followed by an auctioneer's delightful squirt of one minute's words delivered in one second! Far better if they had been delivered less dramatically, but spaced evenly, over that minute. VOICE IS DIFFERENT FROM DATA IN THIS WAY. Had that been a big file, it wouldn't have made any difference. For file-type data, you pay your provider for the bandwidth. For voice-type data, you need to find a provider who can guarantee you evenly-spaced, regular delivery: that is, low latency and jitter. A T-1 has low latency, jitter and pkt loss; a DSL pipe may have identical _bandwidth_ but comes with no guarantee as to what is really important for voice, latency-jitter-loss. That 56Kbps pipe? If it were a plain old $20-a-month land line from the phone company, that skimpy bandwidth would be delivering your voice with an end-to-end delay (latency) of less than 150ms; compare that to the VOIP standard (again, nominal) of 450ms. Your land line is still the Gold Standard for voice quality. (And yes, I have experienced better-sounding voice over Skype; Pure Friendly Magic! Great proof that VOIP can exceed even Carrier Grade. Someday, Vladimir, someday all the workers will have Carrier Grade VOIP.)
Regarding #2. I know that XorNand mentions overhead and is obviously aware of the following, but let's be explicit: overhead is more than trivial. You will never, never, never, never deliver voice at 64Kbps with a 64Kbps codec. That is a fake number, the limit that VOIP might approach asymptotically. Worst case? Your voice, encoded at 64Kbps, consumes about 3.5Mbps of bandwidth. (Also a fake number; we make a deal with the Devil, i.e. Delay, to keep the bandwidth down.) The phone company standard codec, G-711, samples your voice 8000 times per second and represents the volume of your voice in that sample as an 8-bit number: 8bits*8,000 samples --> 64,000bps. The phone company then drops your voice onto the wire (on say a T-1 line) 8 bits at a time; each sample drops as soon as it's encoded, eight thousand times a second. Because this wire goes straight to the Central Office (say), the Telco does not need to add an IP address: there's only one place for it to go, the other end of the wire. Because the wire has a clocking device at both ends (the CSU that terminates a T-1) the Telco does not need to attach an RTP Timestamp to your voice: the T-1 circuit does that too. Because the voice samples can't leapfrog eachother in the wire, or get lost, the Telco does not need to attach a TCP sequence number or acknowledgement; the CSUs know whether a sample is to be used as voice or data, and handle multiplexing, so there is no need for a TCP/UDP port number. You can see where this is going, right? VOIP takes the same sample, and to deliver it attaches an RTP header for timing/sequencing/codec info, a UDP header for port number, an IP header for end-to-end addressing, and an Ethernet header to get you across your LAN. That 1-byte sample is now dozens of bytes long. It's as if to carry 8000 commuters to work you sent out 8000 trains, each with a string of locomotives to pull a single commuter down the rails.
They win if they can show us to be morally corrupt. They could successfully argue that we are, at least to sympathetic listeners, if we use nukes. And what could possibly win them more sympathy than being under attack by taboo weapons?
We supplied the terrorists with the bombs for the Trade Center by lax stewardship of our airplanes, and now we are offering them control of our nukes. We have shown them how to leverage nukes they don't own: just take these actions, and we will make this reaction. We are committed to fighting their war for them, by attacking them. We have our hand on the button, and we have shown them how to place their hand over ours and make us push it.
How foolish of us to make a threat that will destroy us if we carry it out.
Have you tried typing with the keyboard on your lap? With the kb that low, you can relax your shoulders. (I keep my mouse at lap height, too. Actually, it's a Logitech trackball velcro'd over the number pad.)
You'll want the keyboard at an angle so that you don't have to bend your wrists. Some "back specialty stores" sell beanbag-type lap trays that work well to hold the keyboard at a forward-tilted angle. This allows your wrists to stay inline with your forearms, which feels great. (A rolled-up towel works well, too; try it and see if you like it. This could be a no-gear solution.)
As I read these focussed questions and the fuzzy, almost-on-topic remarks by "Governor Bush" I suddenly realized that he's a ChatBot.
Of course it's just a silently accepted fiction that W himself sat down to answer these questions; we all know it was a staff-bot. We judge how seriously (or not) he takes us as an audience not so much by what he says, as by the quality of the Bot he assigned to answer the questions.
1. A sheet of plastic covered with grease, or liquid soap. Your feet can slide in any direction. You are supported by parallel bars at armpit height. Your ankles/toes/heels are marked by fluorescent stickers and tracked by a camera, or by transponders and tracked by rf receivers.
2. Or: No grease; you wear fuzzy socks.
3. Or: You wear socks with soles made of the plasticized magnetic material used in flexible refrigerator magnets. Under the plastic sheet-you-stand-on is an array of electromagnets. Thus walking resistance can be varied.
4. Or: the individual electromagnets in the floor array can be varied based on location, so that you might sense a bumpy/smooth terrain. You might be able to simulate walking up stairs, for example, by having the step "ahead" require more force to make your foot touch the ground, simulating (as with a step-excerciser) stepping "up".
**The sphere is a silly, expensive, cumbersome way to get unrestricted walking motion on a plane.
**If you want a spherical viewscreen, cut the bottom out and use a slippery surface instead for motion input/simulation.
Re:So you would rather...
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 1
Hell yes I would rather. There are a lot of things I would rather have disappear than persist in another form.
1. Your mother dies and leaves instructions that her body go to a local teaching hospital. But the hospital is sold to an HMO chain. Your mother's corpse is put on display in the lobby, floating in a vat of formaldehyde under a banner that warns about the dangers of autoerotic asphyxiation.
2. 299 of your most intelligent, penetrating posts on slashdot are printed in a little bound volume and distributed by MicroSoft as "Thoughts of Chairman Bill".
3. You find yourself having to make micropayments to look up your own usenet posts. You spent hundreds of hours helping out newbies for the love of the community; now someone is selling your words.
It's all about context. Just because you do something for free does not mean you don't value it. And if the law does not recognize that, who's wrong: you, or the law?
It's so sad to see a film that schmoes out, overyanks the wonder-teat. You start to wonder about the unholy cabal that influences Lucas (the blue elephant in the bar in Revenge, the fuzzEwoks, Jar-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken.) Did they get to DePalma? Are they also choosing films for Robin Williams? Go see Titus. American Beauty. Two movies that won't fail you; guaranteed to restore your faith in movies, (although not sci-fi.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, I think they meant to say that he is the "de jure" head of state--by law, not the "de facto" head of state--by fact.
Gee, I love the idea of the solar cells being "above the track". Wild animals from lizards on up are smart enough to seek out the shade, as are vagrant livestock. So, with the tracks in the shade for a good part of the day, I expect we could have a chain of Momma's Train-Killt Bar-B-Q stands all the way from Tucson to Phoenix (Cook them in solar ovens, come to think of it.) Or maybe DARPA could fund a next-generation cow catcher on the front of the engine, one that works at 200mph...
I wonder if you are thinking about sheep ("hooved locusts"?)
There are lots of places in the Bay Area that do this. It's much more than a sop to carbon neutrality: the goats can "mow" slopes that are far too steep and uneven to wrestle a mower across. They also make short work of areas that are filled with rocks, brush and stumps and have no objection to a dessert course of poison oak (that's a good reason not to pat them on the head, though).
I used to watch them arrive at the Lawrence Hall of Science up in the Berkeley hills. Trailers pull up; the goat wranglers set out a low fence and then unload the goats and a few working dogs. Over the next few days the wranglers move the fenced area across the slope and the goats eat and fertilize their way across the landscape. A few days after they arrive the brush is gone and some very nasty terrain has become a fire break, with roots still in place to prevent land slides. What's not to love?
A $30 switch and a patch cable will take down your spanning-tree enabled infrastructure very effectively. Loop the cable on your cheap switch: voila, a broadcast-storm generator. Plug it into the wall; plug your laptop into the switch and let it DHCP Discover, which is a broadcast. Your cheap switch now generates a stream of broadcasts as fast as it can, injecting them into the network. Your Spanning-Tree Enabled switches now repeat the broadcast faithfully. Network crashes*. STP prevents your switches from creating loops, NOT from propagating broadcast storms...
*unless you are throttling the ports based on broadcast traffic, which you now know is NOT a feature of Spanning Tree
Actually, Bandwidth In Mirror Will Be Larger Than It Appears (BIMWBLTIA)! And, when it gets right down to it, you don't care about bandwidth anyway; you only think you do.
1. Why do companies spend $500 a month for a 1.544Mbps T-1 when a 1.5Mbps DSL connection is only $29? BECAUSE YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT BANDWIDTH (you only think you do. more below.)
2. Why does your 64Kbps codec consume more than that when you actually look at it? BECAUSE OVERHEAD COULD DRIVE THROUGHPUT AS HIGH AS 3,500Kbps! (actually that's just a theoretical, non-real world extreme, _as is 64Kbps_, more below.)
Regarding #1. Bandwidth, schmandwidth. It's all about LATENCY. Which is better for voice, a 50Mbps pipe or a 56Kbps pipe? Answer: Cannot tell from info provided in question. If, in the 60th second of a minute-long call, I deliver 3000Mb of voice data, I've given you the promised 50Mbps bandwidth. Unfortunately, there were 59 seconds of silence followed by an auctioneer's delightful squirt of one minute's words delivered in one second! Far better if they had been delivered less dramatically, but spaced evenly, over that minute. VOICE IS DIFFERENT FROM DATA IN THIS WAY. Had that been a big file, it wouldn't have made any difference. For file-type data, you pay your provider for the bandwidth. For voice-type data, you need to find a provider who can guarantee you evenly-spaced, regular delivery: that is, low latency and jitter. A T-1 has low latency, jitter and pkt loss; a DSL pipe may have identical _bandwidth_ but comes with no guarantee as to what is really important for voice, latency-jitter-loss.
That 56Kbps pipe? If it were a plain old $20-a-month land line from the phone company, that skimpy bandwidth would be delivering your voice with an end-to-end delay (latency) of less than 150ms; compare that to the VOIP standard (again, nominal) of 450ms. Your land line is still the Gold Standard for voice quality. (And yes, I have experienced better-sounding voice over Skype; Pure Friendly Magic! Great proof that VOIP can exceed even Carrier Grade. Someday, Vladimir, someday all the workers will have Carrier Grade VOIP.)
Regarding #2. I know that XorNand mentions overhead and is obviously aware of the following, but let's be explicit: overhead is more than trivial. You will never, never, never, never deliver voice at 64Kbps with a 64Kbps codec. That is a fake number, the limit that VOIP might approach asymptotically. Worst case? Your voice, encoded at 64Kbps, consumes about 3.5Mbps of bandwidth. (Also a fake number; we make a deal with the Devil, i.e. Delay, to keep the bandwidth down.)
The phone company standard codec, G-711, samples your voice 8000 times per second and represents the volume of your voice in that sample as an 8-bit number: 8bits*8,000 samples --> 64,000bps. The phone company then drops your voice onto the wire (on say a T-1 line) 8 bits at a time; each sample drops as soon as it's encoded, eight thousand times a second. Because this wire goes straight to the Central Office (say), the Telco does not need to add an IP address: there's only one place for it to go, the other end of the wire. Because the wire has a clocking device at both ends (the CSU that terminates a T-1) the Telco does not need to attach an RTP Timestamp to your voice: the T-1 circuit does that too. Because the voice samples can't leapfrog eachother in the wire, or get lost, the Telco does not need to attach a TCP sequence number or acknowledgement; the CSUs know whether a sample is to be used as voice or data, and handle multiplexing, so there is no need for a TCP/UDP port number.
You can see where this is going, right? VOIP takes the same sample, and to deliver it attaches an RTP header for timing/sequencing/codec info, a UDP header for port number, an IP header for end-to-end addressing, and an Ethernet header to get you across your LAN. That 1-byte sample is now dozens of bytes long. It's as if to carry 8000 commuters to work you sent out 8000 trains, each with a string of locomotives to pull a single commuter down the rails.
They win if they can show us to be morally corrupt. They could successfully argue that we are, at least to sympathetic listeners, if we use nukes. And what could possibly win them more sympathy than being under attack by taboo weapons?
We supplied the terrorists with the bombs for the Trade Center by lax stewardship of our airplanes, and now we are offering them control of our nukes. We have shown them how to leverage nukes they don't own: just take these actions, and we will make this reaction. We are committed to fighting their war for them, by attacking them. We have our hand on the button, and we have shown them how to place their hand over ours and make us push it.
How foolish of us to make a threat that will destroy us if we carry it out.
You'll want the keyboard at an angle so that you don't have to bend your wrists. Some "back specialty stores" sell beanbag-type lap trays that work well to hold the keyboard at a forward-tilted angle. This allows your wrists to stay inline with your forearms, which feels great. (A rolled-up towel works well, too; try it and see if you like it. This could be a no-gear solution.)
Some back stores: (thanks, google!)
Relax the Back
Healthy Back
Cheers!
Of course it's just a silently accepted fiction that W himself sat down to answer these questions; we all know it was a staff-bot. We judge how seriously (or not) he takes us as an audience not so much by what he says, as by the quality of the Bot he assigned to answer the questions.
2. Or: No grease; you wear fuzzy socks.
3. Or: You wear socks with soles made of the plasticized magnetic material used in flexible refrigerator magnets. Under the plastic sheet-you-stand-on is an array of electromagnets. Thus walking resistance can be varied.
4. Or: the individual electromagnets in the floor array can be varied based on location, so that you might sense a bumpy/smooth terrain. You might be able to simulate walking up stairs, for example, by having the step "ahead" require more force to make your foot touch the ground, simulating (as with a step-excerciser) stepping "up".
**The sphere is a silly, expensive, cumbersome way to get unrestricted walking motion on a plane.
**If you want a spherical viewscreen, cut the bottom out and use a slippery surface instead for motion input/simulation.
Hell yes I would rather. There are a lot of things I would rather have disappear than persist in another form. 1. Your mother dies and leaves instructions that her body go to a local teaching hospital. But the hospital is sold to an HMO chain. Your mother's corpse is put on display in the lobby, floating in a vat of formaldehyde under a banner that warns about the dangers of autoerotic asphyxiation. 2. 299 of your most intelligent, penetrating posts on slashdot are printed in a little bound volume and distributed by MicroSoft as "Thoughts of Chairman Bill". 3. You find yourself having to make micropayments to look up your own usenet posts. You spent hundreds of hours helping out newbies for the love of the community; now someone is selling your words. It's all about context. Just because you do something for free does not mean you don't value it. And if the law does not recognize that, who's wrong: you, or the law?
You must be stopped.
It's so sad to see a film that schmoes out, overyanks the wonder-teat .
You start to wonder about the unholy cabal that influences Lucas (the blue elephant in the bar in Revenge, the fuzzEwoks, Jar-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken.)
Did they get to DePalma? Are they also choosing films for Robin Williams? Go see Titus. American Beauty. Two movies that won't fail you; guaranteed to restore your faith in movies, (although not sci-fi.)