The "garbled footage" was a radio signal from the incoming first stage. Getting good communications from a vehicle during re-entry is a hard problem. And a GoPro (at least before this landing attempt) wouldn't have helped much because it would have been on the ocean floor along with the rest of the rocket.
And in the case of this particular landing attempt, it was before sunrise in heavy fog.
They sell five 2N2222 in a 15 pack with five each of two other transistor types (probably 3904/3906). Since then I have lucked into well over a thousand 2N2222 transistors (technically PN2222 because plastic case), so I don't have to worry about that little thing anymore.
Really the only innovative thing they did post-PC was the Tandy 1000 CGA mode. IBM's CGA modes were total crap.
Even the Tandy 2000 wasn't that great, since it was barely PC compatible, and as an 80186 machine, it would have had issues with the "unused" interrupt vectors that IBM used in the original PC.
Here in Austin a few years ago, they were closing some less successful RS stores. One of them was near me. But one that was even nearer to me was closed too... because the strip mall management wouldn't move their sign up higher into a vacated higher position. (A highway had been recently upgraded to a freeway, seriously reducing visibility for that sign.)
And guess which store they left open? The one across the street from Fry's. WTF. Which is about as far away from me as my next closest Radio Shack, only in the opposite direction (that RS is in a far suburb city, and I rarely go that way).
You can (and I have), but it's only the exe. There is no provision to automatically keep needed data files (or DLLs) together with it. OS X has a directory attribute that says "present this to the user as though it was a single application file". You can right-click and "show contents" from a menu, but otherwise it just appears as a single draggable icon. When you double-click on it, it runs the executable contained inside.
Because, thanks to nonsense like the registry, installing an app into Windows is a non-trivial operation. So everybody uses one of two or three installer shells that all use that "wizard" mode where you have to click next ten times.
The sad part is that it is possible to make a trivial app that doesn't need to be installed. Putty does it, and I've done one before, too. But MS never came up with a "bundle" concept like OS X (I think it was in 9 as well) that presents a folder as through it were a single application, nor is there a default applications directory that multiple users can all access by simply dropping stuff into it. So if you've got files that need to tag along with the.exe (especially DLLs) or want the app installed for more than one user, you're stuck with installer hell.
I don't normally use Windows except as a launcher for certain Windows-only games that I play (I'm primarily an OS X user), and even when I use a web browser, it is NOT Internet Exploder. A few weeks ago I ended up running one of those crapware installers on a W7 laptop. Fortunately the very fact that I don't use Windows for much helped me, because I noticed the problem immediately and could see all the new stuff simply sorting by date.
A couple of things I noticed: turning off my WiFi didn't persist over a reboot! (Macs have always kept track of your wireless on/off state over reboots.)
Also, out of the half dozen or so things that got installed before I turned off WiFi, maybe half of them were "properly" installed, showing up in Control Panel->Programs and Features, and with a fully working uninstaller. I guess installing stuff in Windows is sufficiently non-trivial that they didn't even try to make their crapware hard to uninstall. The rest of the stuff I searched for in the registry by name and tediously deleted registry entries one-by-one.
And then there was C:\ProgramData, which I had never heard of before, because most of my Windows experience was with XP. Way to go Microsoft, making yet another "Program Files"-like directory and setting the hidden attribute on it. At least one crapware installed itself there.
Because Microsoft came up with this abomination called "the registry", and by Bill, we're going to USE it. It can't be the wrong way to do things, because it's the way we've been doing things for years, so we're not going to stop now!
So you are implying that there is no other way to know what you are voting for than to have your freaking official ballot mailed to you? I can go to my county's elections website and get a sample of my specific ballot. Then I can figure out who/what I want to vote for before going to the voting site. Here in Texas, early voting is open Monday to Saturday for two weeks before the election (but not the day before the election), and any voting site in your county can let you vote the specific ballot for your district on an e-voting machine.
(I used to be able to download my sample ballot directly just by knowing my district number, but now they make me enter my name and address. I guess too many people were too stupid to look up the number printed on their voter card. It also used to be a PDF of the OCR ballot, even with mostly e-voting machines in use, and now it's just an HTML list, though I seem to recall that the last time it was a PDF ballot again.)
Since last summer I have Uverse voice over my DSL modem. I am curious what speed it would work at if I hooked up a USR Courier V.Everything to it. I suppose it would depend on whether it tries to make an 8kbps voice channel or a 56kbps voice channel. But I've had DSL since early 2000, so I would first have to find a number to call. And I'd also have to dig up an RS-232 to USB adapter.
I think it's been at least ten years since I last used an analog modem, and that last time was when I set one up as a dial-in on my second phone line for a few days so someone in town for the weekend could use it for a PPP connection.
With a later generation of Zenith remotes (with a piezo oscillator rather than the resonant bars) the TV would change channels whenever my mom vacuumed around the room. This was also before varicaps, so the TV actually had a dozen manually-adjusted tuners selected by a solenoid-driven stepper motor, and made a noticeable thunk when changing channels.
The 14400+ modem connect sounds are part of standard sound effects collections now. The much simpler 300 baud sound is going to be a lot rarer to hear. And I never ever got to hear the sound of a Telebit Trailblazer, though I had heard it described as "whalesong". There is one linked on wikipedia, and it sounds pretty weird, but sadly there is no actual data transfer sound.
When I was in high school in the early '80s, the teachers would run a program that printed out pages of math problems for remedial math students, using our dial-up 300 baud DECWriter terminals. SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH chunk SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH chunk bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz chunk SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH clack clack chunk... and they would run a lot of them.
Hey, give 'em a break. They have to launch at exactly the right moment to catch ISS, and today's moment was simply too early to have any sunlight there. The dense fog didn't help either. On the other hand, it didn't land in the water, so they can finally take the SD card out of the GoPro in the rocket!
I just want to see a picture of rocket bits on the barge, broken or not.
Who is "we"? I just read today that Elon Musk expects to get 80,000 people there by 2040. (I think that's a bit ambitious, but certainly doable in 25 years for a much smaller mission.)
Slashdot Mirror
The "garbled footage" was a radio signal from the incoming first stage. Getting good communications from a vehicle during re-entry is a hard problem. And a GoPro (at least before this landing attempt) wouldn't have helped much because it would have been on the ocean floor along with the rest of the rocket.
And in the case of this particular landing attempt, it was before sunrise in heavy fog.
Maybe these guys failed to properly convert stone to kilograms.
Well, at least it seems the Entry/Descent/Landing engineers knew what they were doing. The "petal" system engineers, not quite so much.
They sell five 2N2222 in a 15 pack with five each of two other transistor types (probably 3904/3906). Since then I have lucked into well over a thousand 2N2222 transistors (technically PN2222 because plastic case), so I don't have to worry about that little thing anymore.
Really the only innovative thing they did post-PC was the Tandy 1000 CGA mode. IBM's CGA modes were total crap.
Even the Tandy 2000 wasn't that great, since it was barely PC compatible, and as an 80186 machine, it would have had issues with the "unused" interrupt vectors that IBM used in the original PC.
I think the canonical form is "You've got questions, we've got blank stares".
Here in Austin a few years ago, they were closing some less successful RS stores. One of them was near me. But one that was even nearer to me was closed too... because the strip mall management wouldn't move their sign up higher into a vacated higher position. (A highway had been recently upgraded to a freeway, seriously reducing visibility for that sign.)
And guess which store they left open? The one across the street from Fry's. WTF. Which is about as far away from me as my next closest Radio Shack, only in the opposite direction (that RS is in a far suburb city, and I rarely go that way).
So you can inflate your party balloons?
So it's a place that all users have write access to, but it's invisible, so most users don't know that it even exists?
So what? The point is that Microsoft still hasn't.
You can (and I have), but it's only the exe. There is no provision to automatically keep needed data files (or DLLs) together with it. OS X has a directory attribute that says "present this to the user as though it was a single application file". You can right-click and "show contents" from a menu, but otherwise it just appears as a single draggable icon. When you double-click on it, it runs the executable contained inside.
Because, thanks to nonsense like the registry, installing an app into Windows is a non-trivial operation. So everybody uses one of two or three installer shells that all use that "wizard" mode where you have to click next ten times.
The sad part is that it is possible to make a trivial app that doesn't need to be installed. Putty does it, and I've done one before, too. But MS never came up with a "bundle" concept like OS X (I think it was in 9 as well) that presents a folder as through it were a single application, nor is there a default applications directory that multiple users can all access by simply dropping stuff into it. So if you've got files that need to tag along with the .exe (especially DLLs) or want the app installed for more than one user, you're stuck with installer hell.
I don't normally use Windows except as a launcher for certain Windows-only games that I play (I'm primarily an OS X user), and even when I use a web browser, it is NOT Internet Exploder. A few weeks ago I ended up running one of those crapware installers on a W7 laptop. Fortunately the very fact that I don't use Windows for much helped me, because I noticed the problem immediately and could see all the new stuff simply sorting by date.
A couple of things I noticed: turning off my WiFi didn't persist over a reboot! (Macs have always kept track of your wireless on/off state over reboots.)
Also, out of the half dozen or so things that got installed before I turned off WiFi, maybe half of them were "properly" installed, showing up in Control Panel->Programs and Features, and with a fully working uninstaller. I guess installing stuff in Windows is sufficiently non-trivial that they didn't even try to make their crapware hard to uninstall. The rest of the stuff I searched for in the registry by name and tediously deleted registry entries one-by-one.
And then there was C:\ProgramData, which I had never heard of before, because most of my Windows experience was with XP. Way to go Microsoft, making yet another "Program Files"-like directory and setting the hidden attribute on it. At least one crapware installed itself there.
Because Microsoft came up with this abomination called "the registry", and by Bill, we're going to USE it. It can't be the wrong way to do things, because it's the way we've been doing things for years, so we're not going to stop now!
So you are implying that there is no other way to know what you are voting for than to have your freaking official ballot mailed to you? I can go to my county's elections website and get a sample of my specific ballot. Then I can figure out who/what I want to vote for before going to the voting site. Here in Texas, early voting is open Monday to Saturday for two weeks before the election (but not the day before the election), and any voting site in your county can let you vote the specific ballot for your district on an e-voting machine.
(I used to be able to download my sample ballot directly just by knowing my district number, but now they make me enter my name and address. I guess too many people were too stupid to look up the number printed on their voter card. It also used to be a PDF of the OCR ballot, even with mostly e-voting machines in use, and now it's just an HTML list, though I seem to recall that the last time it was a PDF ballot again.)
Since last summer I have Uverse voice over my DSL modem. I am curious what speed it would work at if I hooked up a USR Courier V.Everything to it. I suppose it would depend on whether it tries to make an 8kbps voice channel or a 56kbps voice channel. But I've had DSL since early 2000, so I would first have to find a number to call. And I'd also have to dig up an RS-232 to USB adapter.
I think it's been at least ten years since I last used an analog modem, and that last time was when I set one up as a dial-in on my second phone line for a few days so someone in town for the weekend could use it for a PPP connection.
I'm pretty sure that the city of Windcrest, Texas (a San Antonio suburb) still does their siren test every Monday at noon.
With a later generation of Zenith remotes (with a piezo oscillator rather than the resonant bars) the TV would change channels whenever my mom vacuumed around the room. This was also before varicaps, so the TV actually had a dozen manually-adjusted tuners selected by a solenoid-driven stepper motor, and made a noticeable thunk when changing channels.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/03/22/1326213/the-sounds-of-tech-past
And I found it by accident just now while trying to see if I could find a Telebit modem sound.
The 14400+ modem connect sounds are part of standard sound effects collections now. The much simpler 300 baud sound is going to be a lot rarer to hear. And I never ever got to hear the sound of a Telebit Trailblazer, though I had heard it described as "whalesong". There is one linked on wikipedia, and it sounds pretty weird, but sadly there is no actual data transfer sound.
When I was in high school in the early '80s, the teachers would run a program that printed out pages of math problems for remedial math students, using our dial-up 300 baud DECWriter terminals. SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH chunk SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH chunk bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz chunk SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH clack clack chunk... and they would run a lot of them.
Hey, give 'em a break. They have to launch at exactly the right moment to catch ISS, and today's moment was simply too early to have any sunlight there. The dense fog didn't help either. On the other hand, it didn't land in the water, so they can finally take the SD card out of the GoPro in the rocket!
I just want to see a picture of rocket bits on the barge, broken or not.
after driving around the Equator ten times first
If driving over the ocean doesn't stop you, the Darién Gap will, after you turn north.
We aren't going to Mars in this century.
Who is "we"? I just read today that Elon Musk expects to get 80,000 people there by 2040. (I think that's a bit ambitious, but certainly doable in 25 years for a much smaller mission.)
And we now have the best reason ever to go back to the moon. We must build an Olympic-size swimming pool on the moon!
Also, He3 is a very stupid reason to go to the moon. It requires level 2 nuclear fusion, and we haven't reached level 1 yet. lrn2civ noob