Anything compound that emits enough radiation to be easily detectable though trees and such is unlikely to be BENIGN. I wouldn't want them injecting me with that crap. (I did a lot of biochem work with radiation, I know a bit about it.)
And anything that you can detect, they enemy can too. "Ivan! Am picking up gamma radiation burst from due south." "It's probably nothing, Yvgeny."
Even changing something like the IR reflection profile seems risky. It's not like a cypher that you can change on the fly.
I checked out K5 while slashdot was down and I didn't like it. Weird op-ed pieces like "communism is coming" seemed to dominate the site. It looks like a great place to be if you want to argue, but it was pretty light on the "technology and culture" stuff mentioned at the top of the page.
The Coca-Karma story was good though. That whole thing was news to me.
Code is gone for the entry level. To get HF priveleges you need to pass a 5 WPM code test. Higher licenses require passing more written tests, but no more code. 5 WPM is tops now.
Personally, I like the fact that the test requires you to study basic electronics. It seems appropriate that you should know how a radioworks before you get a license to operate one. I think the ham entry requirements are just about perfect right now... if they were dumbed down any more it would turn into CB radio. Yuck.
So you do agree the most visble and active ones do in fact meet my description?
In my area at least, no. The hams are mostly mid-20s to mid-50s. 50 is old, but not OLD.:)
BTW, when a ham talks about building their own radio, they mean they are soldering transistors together, not sticking some prefab PCBs into a case. Building a PC is trivial compared to many ham projects.
You said it. I have my own mail server too, and it makes life grand. I still use my ISP account for many things though... I can't switch 100% to my own system because as soon as I do the cable modem cops will wave the TOS at me shut down my server... murphy's law.
Really, what I am waiting for is ISP-approved spam. If the right to send spam is legally upheld, I think this is what awaits us in the future:
- Major ISPs set up "commercial email facilitation services."
- Spammer contacts the ISP. Spammer signs up for the service, and for $0.0X per email address the ISP guarantees delivery to the end user. How many users does home.com have? Or Earthlink?
- ISP makes a bundle.
- We all start getting 50 approved spams every day (the ISP would be smart enough not to redistribute pr0n spam)
- ISP rewrites the TOS so you can't complain about it or opt out.
- ISP monkeys with subject and sender headers to defeat mail filters.
- ISP defends their actions by claiming that spam was costing them $X million a year and this is the only way they can recover costs.
Obnoxious? Yes. But with the huge money to be made I think it's only a matter of time before things go this route. Non-spamming ISPs will become rare... only small ISPs will want to refuse the income, because their small user base won't make it worth backlash. But as more and more small ISPs get bought out or go under, there will be fewer and fewer places to run...
I got annoyed at the probing, and my system continuously emailing me security alerts, so I blackholed them with ipfw.
Over the past 2 years of FreeBSD nirvana I have come to be totally dependent on the web/email/ftp server I run at home off my cable modem. If the cable providers ever get serious about shutting down hobbyist servers I am going to be up a creek!
They (ATT@Home Seattle) keep threatening to switch me to DHCP, too... I negotiated a static IP when I first signed up 6 months ago, and every time I call tech support (about once per 2 weeks to bitch about an outage) they hassle me about my static IP address and how it's probably the problem.
Actually I have been wondering... what are the home-server-friendly broadband options? Are you stuck going to "business" DSL if you want to run servers without violating the TOS?
You're slamming DD sound for no reason. DTS is a fine standard, but overhyped. I have the capability to decode both, and a good system to play 'em through, and there is precious little difference.
Most of the time, DTS sounds a bit better just because it's a little LOUDER for the same volume knob setting. If there is some greate innate superiority, the mixing engineers on my DTS DVDs haven't tapped into it.
If you can recommend a DVD where the DTS is clearly, far and away superior, to the point that your across the board DD slam is justified, I'd like to know.
(but people don't complain about Tom Greens or Adam Sandler's antics)
They certainly would if they showed up in STAR WARS, for Pete's sake. If you go to an Adam Sandler movie you know what you are getting into. Star Wars is supposed to be DIFFERENT than that.
Are you kidding? Jar-Jar is gonna be a Jedi. Imagine how the kids will go ape for the clumsy Jedi, who can't ever seem to do anything right but somehow manages to save the day anyway... Puke!
But seriously, I heard Jar-Jar will be getting PLENTY of screen time and an increasingly important role in the series. Double puke.
Even more dumb than the Apple Records suit are the conditions under which it was settled: Apple was not allowed, for a long time, to do anything on Macs that related to music. Apple's own lawyers maintained that to be safe they couldn't even use notes from musical instruments as the system "beep" options.
Some guy at Apple, fed up with this, put some kind of musical "toot" in the OS as a beep option. The sound file was named "Sosumi." So... sue... me... get it...?
With iTunes and all, I guess the terms of the Apple Records settlement are long dead. If Apple didn't have to avoid music technology for so long I wonder where they would have taken it by now?
Re:The road to closed PC hardware?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 4
Man, I better go buy some Intel hardware. God knows they need the support. Those poor guys with their great CPUs have never amounted to anything, and now nVidia's really going to crush them. It's a shame.
I loved both of those. There was another book I read at about the same time, about 3 kids who had a time machine. The time machine looked like a '50s flying saucer on the cover. I remember the book I had being the second of two, but I could never find the first. I probably checked that book out of the school library 10 times.
Can't remember much about the time machine book now, except the kids foiled some guy's plot to steal a lot of gold, and I think they went back to the Revolutionary War.
I really can't feel too bad for those who got caught in the dot-bomb burst. I mean, really, did you need the porsche?
Get a clue. Not all dotcommers were making Porsche money. Among all the overpaid idiot suits were a lot of talented, hard working people who weren't making the huge wages all you outsiders thought they were.
There were also plenty of dotcoms that had decent business plans too... but when 95% of your industry is crap like den.com, even the good companies can get dragged down.
I think a lot don't have well-defined skills and are generalists - which is hard to sell to employers these days.
Man, you nailed it. That's it exactly. It doesn't pay to be a generalist. Not that I didn't accomplish things on the job. My resume isn't totally devoid of good things. But it all doesn't add up to 2 magic words like "JavaScript proficient."
I should have been a programmer, what the hell was I thinking?
I wish I had a time machine, I'd go back and tell my young self to be a coder, or get an MBA, or go into sales. Sales sucks but at least there are always jobs out there.
My last job was actually in "sales engineering," which means I was the propellorhead who accompanied the tech-clueless sales guys on calls. "Yes Mr. Prospective Client, we can do that for $X,000, and here's my SE to tell you the details of how."
You kind of have to sell your sould to be an SE -- I was helping to sell people on VIGNETTE, for god's sake -- but it paid well and it wasn't unpleasant work. Besides the whole sliminess thing.:)
In my past dotcom life I was a "product manager." As an unemployed bum, I haven't had but 2 interviews in 4 months of looking. I think that employers are figuring out that "product manager" means "talentless middle-management hack" and they are figuring out how to do without us.:)
I am not a programmer, but everywhere I look I see job opportunities for them. That part of the job market looks plenty strong to me. But if you don't actually PRODUCE something, god help you! I'll be working at Kinko's soon for 1/3 the salary. The last few months have definitely been a personal low. (Can I get a +1, Pity now?)
Slashdot Mirror
Neat. Good for you. I was just trying to make a point about the relative difficulty of building a PC and a radio.
"Benine?" Do you mean "benign?"
Anything compound that emits enough radiation to be easily detectable though trees and such is unlikely to be BENIGN. I wouldn't want them injecting me with that crap. (I did a lot of biochem work with radiation, I know a bit about it.)
And anything that you can detect, they enemy can too. "Ivan! Am picking up gamma radiation burst from due south." "It's probably nothing, Yvgeny."
Even changing something like the IR reflection profile seems risky. It's not like a cypher that you can change on the fly.
I checked out K5 while slashdot was down and I didn't like it. Weird op-ed pieces like "communism is coming" seemed to dominate the site. It looks like a great place to be if you want to argue, but it was pretty light on the "technology and culture" stuff mentioned at the top of the page.
The Coca-Karma story was good though. That whole thing was news to me.
Code is gone for the entry level. To get HF priveleges you need to pass a 5 WPM code test. Higher licenses require passing more written tests, but no more code. 5 WPM is tops now.
Personally, I like the fact that the test requires you to study basic electronics. It seems appropriate that you should know how a radioworks before you get a license to operate one. I think the ham entry requirements are just about perfect right now... if they were dumbed down any more it would turn into CB radio. Yuck.
So you do agree the most visble and active ones do in fact meet my description?
:)
In my area at least, no. The hams are mostly mid-20s to mid-50s. 50 is old, but not OLD.
BTW, when a ham talks about building their own radio, they mean they are soldering transistors together, not sticking some prefab PCBs into a case. Building a PC is trivial compared to many ham projects.
Yeah, but I'm worried about my connectivity provider playing that game. Ugh.
Ever been pissed off at the phone company? So which other phone company did you switch to, I'd like to know because I hate mine...
Anyway, if all the major ISPs adopted this there would be *nowhere to run to.* Frankly I am surprised that it isn't happening already.
I said it might be excessively cynical, you were warned.
Which Windows? I just tried it on WinMe and there is is no Preview tab, just General and Sumamry. No preview option that I could see. Would be nice.
You said it. I have my own mail server too, and it makes life grand. I still use my ISP account for many things though... I can't switch 100% to my own system because as soon as I do the cable modem cops will wave the TOS at me shut down my server... murphy's law.
[WARNING: This post may be excessively cynical.]
Really, what I am waiting for is ISP-approved spam. If the right to send spam is legally upheld, I think this is what awaits us in the future:
- Major ISPs set up "commercial email facilitation services."
- Spammer contacts the ISP. Spammer signs up for the service, and for $0.0X per email address the ISP guarantees delivery to the end user. How many users does home.com have? Or Earthlink?
- ISP makes a bundle.
- We all start getting 50 approved spams every day (the ISP would be smart enough not to redistribute pr0n spam)
- ISP rewrites the TOS so you can't complain about it or opt out.
- ISP monkeys with subject and sender headers to defeat mail filters.
- ISP defends their actions by claiming that spam was costing them $X million a year and this is the only way they can recover costs.
Obnoxious? Yes. But with the huge money to be made I think it's only a matter of time before things go this route. Non-spamming ISPs will become rare... only small ISPs will want to refuse the income, because their small user base won't make it worth backlash. But as more and more small ISPs get bought out or go under, there will be fewer and fewer places to run...
Ditto here in Seattle.
I got annoyed at the probing, and my system continuously emailing me security alerts, so I blackholed them with ipfw.
Over the past 2 years of FreeBSD nirvana I have come to be totally dependent on the web/email/ftp server I run at home off my cable modem. If the cable providers ever get serious about shutting down hobbyist servers I am going to be up a creek!
They (ATT@Home Seattle) keep threatening to switch me to DHCP, too... I negotiated a static IP when I first signed up 6 months ago, and every time I call tech support (about once per 2 weeks to bitch about an outage) they hassle me about my static IP address and how it's probably the problem.
Actually I have been wondering... what are the home-server-friendly broadband options? Are you stuck going to "business" DSL if you want to run servers without violating the TOS?
That's all neat, but give me an example where the difference is obvious. There must be some DVD that comes to mind.
Bah, I should have kept my mouth shut, the DD/DTS thing has started plenty of flamewars in the past.
You're slamming DD sound for no reason. DTS is a fine standard, but overhyped. I have the capability to decode both, and a good system to play 'em through, and there is precious little difference.
Most of the time, DTS sounds a bit better just because it's a little LOUDER for the same volume knob setting. If there is some greate innate superiority, the mixing engineers on my DTS DVDs haven't tapped into it.
If you can recommend a DVD where the DTS is clearly, far and away superior, to the point that your across the board DD slam is justified, I'd like to know.
(but people don't complain about Tom Greens or Adam Sandler's antics)
They certainly would if they showed up in STAR WARS, for Pete's sake. If you go to an Adam Sandler movie you know what you are getting into. Star Wars is supposed to be DIFFERENT than that.
Enough to keep a Star Wars fan happy for some time.
Enough to make a Star Wars fan try to swallow his or her own tongue in a fit of psychopathic rage and disgust, I'd say.
It will be enough to make a Phantom Menace fan pretty happy though.
On the day this comes out, I think I'll just watch Aliens. Again.
Are you kidding? Jar-Jar is gonna be a Jedi. Imagine how the kids will go ape for the clumsy Jedi, who can't ever seem to do anything right but somehow manages to save the day anyway... Puke!
But seriously, I heard Jar-Jar will be getting PLENTY of screen time and an increasingly important role in the series. Double puke.
Remember, you can't neglect PHYSICAL security! I'm ordering Wood today. Or is it Free?
I live near a bridge. I should probably go over there with some soup and a blanket. And some clean socks.
Even more dumb than the Apple Records suit are the conditions under which it was settled: Apple was not allowed, for a long time, to do anything on Macs that related to music. Apple's own lawyers maintained that to be safe they couldn't even use notes from musical instruments as the system "beep" options.
Some guy at Apple, fed up with this, put some kind of musical "toot" in the OS as a beep option. The sound file was named "Sosumi." So... sue... me... get it...?
With iTunes and all, I guess the terms of the Apple Records settlement are long dead. If Apple didn't have to avoid music technology for so long I wonder where they would have taken it by now?
Man, I better go buy some Intel hardware. God knows they need the support. Those poor guys with their great CPUs have never amounted to anything, and now nVidia's really going to crush them. It's a shame.
I remember those. The kid knew this guy named Prof. Bullfinch.
What were those books called?
Danny Dunn! That was it. That was the kid's name. I think the books were numbered, and called something like "Danny Dunn and the Foo Bar."
There were a ton of those books. Oh, man, I haven't thought about them in years. Now that I think back I remember them pretty well.
- The dinosaur (included stuff about supercondicting magnets, I think they tried to trap it)
- The anti-gravity paint
- The weather generator
I know there were more, memory failing... I loved those books though.
I loved both of those. There was another book I read at about the same time, about 3 kids who had a time machine. The time machine looked like a '50s flying saucer on the cover. I remember the book I had being the second of two, but I could never find the first. I probably checked that book out of the school library 10 times.
Can't remember much about the time machine book now, except the kids foiled some guy's plot to steal a lot of gold, and I think they went back to the Revolutionary War.
I really can't feel too bad for those who got caught in the dot-bomb burst. I mean, really, did you need the porsche?
Get a clue. Not all dotcommers were making Porsche money. Among all the overpaid idiot suits were a lot of talented, hard working people who weren't making the huge wages all you outsiders thought they were.
There were also plenty of dotcoms that had decent business plans too... but when 95% of your industry is crap like den.com, even the good companies can get dragged down.
I think a lot don't have well-defined skills and are generalists - which is hard to sell to employers these days.
:)
Man, you nailed it. That's it exactly. It doesn't pay to be a generalist. Not that I didn't accomplish things on the job. My resume isn't totally devoid of good things. But it all doesn't add up to 2 magic words like "JavaScript proficient."
I should have been a programmer, what the hell was I thinking?
I wish I had a time machine, I'd go back and tell my young self to be a coder, or get an MBA, or go into sales. Sales sucks but at least there are always jobs out there.
My last job was actually in "sales engineering," which means I was the propellorhead who accompanied the tech-clueless sales guys on calls. "Yes Mr. Prospective Client, we can do that for $X,000, and here's my SE to tell you the details of how."
You kind of have to sell your sould to be an SE -- I was helping to sell people on VIGNETTE, for god's sake -- but it paid well and it wasn't unpleasant work. Besides the whole sliminess thing.
In my past dotcom life I was a "product manager." As an unemployed bum, I haven't had but 2 interviews in 4 months of looking. I think that employers are figuring out that "product manager" means "talentless middle-management hack" and they are figuring out how to do without us.
I am not a programmer, but everywhere I look I see job opportunities for them. That part of the job market looks plenty strong to me. But if you don't actually PRODUCE something, god help you! I'll be working at Kinko's soon for 1/3 the salary. The last few months have definitely been a personal low. (Can I get a +1, Pity now?)