And how much daylight do you save in winter? How much energy?
I live in Montana..
In the winter, I'd really like to have *some* daylight at the end of the day...Sunset can be as early as 4:45pm, and sunrise during that same period is after 8am. If you work 8-5, you go to work in the dark, and come home from work in the dark - during the week if you want to do something which requires sunlight, you have to take time off from work or do it during the week.
I'm all in favor of switching to DST and staying there.
It's hard to tell from the original question whether the mathematic failures were more to do with the inherent nature of High School, or if it's more that the original poster just isn't wired for mathematics.
Personally, I'm pretty strong at math, but have had problems dealing with the whole school environment, so I've only completed some calculus, and parts of some other higher math courses. It wasn't that they were *hard*, it was more that the whole learning method was *boring*.
In any case, I've recently felt the need to refresh and extend my higher math skills. In a similar quest for the same time of course as the original poster, I came across "Engineering Mathematics" by Stroud. This book starts with the basic mathematical rules (how to add and subtract, etc), and covers a lot of territory, including calculus (and of course trig and algebra along the way). It works great for me, as it explains the concepts concisely without wasting a lot of time on each step along the way. This isn't the book for someone who needs a lot of verbosity for each step, but it definately is good for those with some mathematical aptitude.
I'm not sure what technology florida is using, but in most areas here in Montana (other than those so small that it's easier to hand count), we use the ES&S optical scan ballots. These are completed by completing an arrow next to the person or choice you want. The ballots are normally counted by machine, but if a manual recount is desired it can be done directly from the ballots. It is also very easy to determine the voter's indicated choice when looking at the ballot as opposed to say the "hanging chad" system.
For disabled people who cannot mark a ballot by hand, they have an Automark system which will actually mark the optical scan ballot with the person's choice.
I do understand that there have been counting machine malfunctions (but relatively few with this system nationwide), however, this is common with any automated device. With the paper ballots it allows you to do the manual recount which is not possible with the electronic systems.
While I disagree with some hidden limit, as a sysadmin for an ISP with caps, I will say that these types of limits are being driven by some real economics on the back end.
In much of the country, ISP's are thrilled if they can pay (at the DS3 level) $75 per mb/s delivered to their network. $100/mb/s is not uncommon, as are much higher figures.
Note that this does not include things like the actual facilities used to deliver this to the consumer.
1mb/s is 3.6gb/hour, 86.4gb/day, or 2592gb/month. Note that these are all gigabit/s. Divide by 8 to get gigabytes/month and you find that the ISP only has 324GB/month (assuming perfect transfer efficiencies) for their $75.00. This also incorrectly assumes that the traffic is spread evenly over 24x7. In reality, transfer on a full circuit is more along the lines of 100-150GB/month per meg of circuit capacity when you take into account day and night patterns.
So assuming that someone is transferring 300GB/month, the bandwidth alone may be costing the ISP close to $150/month.
Another point which is often missed is the traffic engineering issues caused by even a couple of customers transferring 300GB/month on a given segment - Especially if this is upload traffic in a system which has very limited upload capacity. One or two customers transferring this quantity of data can bring a system to it's knees and significantly affect the throughput other subscribers have available to them, causing all subscribers on the segment to be unhappy about their service. The ISP is then faced with upgrading it's systems to support one or two customers which are already potentially costing them more money than they are providing. To put this into perspective, the same amount of capacity to serve one 300GB/month subscriber could easily handle 100 or more "normal" 3GB/s or less a month subscriber.
After I submitted this article, I also discovered protocase which is specifically for equipment cases.. I haven't had a chance to play a lot with the software, but I do see ITX cases on their website.
I think you missed the 'e' on the original post. PCI Express. 8x AGP is the end of the road for AGP. 8x AGP is capable of a total of about 2GB/s.
PCI express uses the concept of a "lane". Each lane is capable of 250MB/s in each direction at the same time, for a total of 500MB/s. A x1 PCIe card has 1 lane, and a x2 has two, and so on. I think the video card mentioned above is a x16 card, capable of 16 lanes, or 4GB/s in each direction, or 8GB/s total. I believe the spec for 32 lanes is also already set.
The cool thing about pcie is that it can be used for not only video but for everything else. Plus each lane isn't shared across the slots. So you have 8GB/s for your video card, and 500MB/s for your Gigabit (100MB/s) ethernet card, and another 8GB/s for a SANS disk array interface card, and so on.
Unless you are implementing this in a *really* small processor, Zigbee should fit in about anything. For example, Microchip has an royalty-free implementation of the ZigBee protocol which only needs about 32K for a coordinator and 15K for a RFD (endpoint).
This is right on the mark. I would differ in a few implementation details (aka I hate sendmail with a passion), but this is the way we do it at a medium-size ISP with a mail server "cluster" running in the thousands of mailboxes category.
In short, we have mail servers accepting the mail and dropping it on a shared NFS server which stores all the mail. The incoming servers run spam and virus filtering and is responsible solely for delivering the mail to the customer's mail directory which lives on the NFS server.
On the client side, we run IMAP and POP3 servers which access the stored mail on the NFS server to deliver it to the clients.
The exact software used for both of these functions are somewhat irrelevant. Once you split this up this way, you can also split the selection process. I.E. which is the best server for accepting SMTP mail and dumping it in customer's mail directories. Which can be answered with a completely different answer than the question of "what is the best NFS (or SANS) server to use to store the mail", or "what IMAP server should we be using", or "what webmail front end should we be using", or so on.
It also makes changing your mind down the road on any piece easier since you can actually run and test any one of these components in the live system as a final test before moving a replacement into the system.
FWIW, I would *love* to consult on something this scale.
Benefits of Morse code:
1) Lowest signal to noise ratio of any communications system.
2) Lowest power requirements.
3) Lowest bandwidth requirement.
4) You could in theory make a transmitter out of any very simple electrical circuit (perhaps limited range, but...).
5) An operator can still twitch out a message even if they can speak or they're batteries are low.
Well, you got 2 out of 5...
1, 2 and 3 are more accurately described as PSK31 anymore. PSK31 is narrower than CW, generally uses less power, and can be recovered from almost below the noise floor. I've seen situations where the PSK31 station drops so low that I can't hear it at all but am still getting almost perfect copy. All you need for PSK31 is a computer with a sound card and a HF radio. And no CW skills.
And you don't need to be able to speak *or hear* to use psk31.
No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
97.405 Station in distress.
(a) No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station in distress of any means at its disposal to attract attention, make known its condition and location, and obtain assistance.
(b) No provision of these rules prevents the use by a station, in the exceptional circumstances described in paragraph (a), of any means of radiocommunications at its disposal to assist a station in distress.
The problem is that in many cases, we aren't in a situation which is described as above. We're typically handling "health and welfare traffic" which are things like "we arrived safely" or "we are going to stay here for the night" (which don't qualify) as opposed to "send an ambulance right now" (which does). Having the ability to use the HF bands to pass this traffic is just as important in an emergency response situation as the specific cases where anyone can pick up a radio (licensed or not) and use it.
In addition, amateurs are cautioned that operating outside their permissions even during an emergency may jeapordize their license. The FCC (assuming they hear about it) will likely review the situation and make a determiniation whether or not the operation fell into one of the exemptions. In short, if it's life or death, I can use anything at my disposal to attract attention. If it's not I better be prepared to explain my actions and expect to possibly loose my license or be subject to fines if the FCC doesn't agree that it was justified.
What is the point of amateur radio when the Internet has connected most of the globe?
Amateur radio has basically become a service organization, providing emergency communications when the crap hits the fan. In our area, our Ham radio club provides communications for both the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, and acts as a backup communications system for the normal communications channels if they are overloaded or unavailable.
I feel that the Morse requirement definitely hinders the ability of amateur radio to serve in this capacity. A good example of this happened to us a couple of years ago when we were providing communications for the Red Cross during a Forest Fire in the local area which required evacuations. The Red Cross has a policy that their workers have to have available communications at all times to ensure they can contact emergency help when needed. In the area where the forest fire was, there was no cell coverage, so we were providing communications. Also due to the location, the coverage of our VHF (144Mhz) repeater was marginal at best. As a result, we had to rely on 80meters at 3.880 Mhz. The only operators who can work on the 80meter band are operators who have passed the morse test and also a written test. This eliminated about half of the operators at our disposal just because they were not of the correct license class.
Eliminating the Morse requirement would have increased this pool since most operators are able to pass the General Class test with some studying. Morse code is much more difficult, and is really not neccessary. I learned 5WPM code and got my Tech Plus License and then shortly (after another change to the rules) upgraded to Extra. Today, I operate fairly regularly on the HF bands, but I couldn't read morse code if I wanted to since it doesn't interest me and I haven't kept up with it.
Looks like one of those Lame-squishy keyboards to me. Not the rock solid, spring-loaded, nicely tactile and loud IBM Model M's which actually let you type at a reasonable speed.
Excuse me, but isn't Moore's Law complete bunk? I mean, if from 1980 the 4.77MHz would double every 18 months, today we'd have something like a 30GHZ processor.
Moore's law actually says we'd double the NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS, not actual speed. For this metric, it's pretty close.
no way. you're going through VPS for all the transactions. you're using their system the whole time. you have no merchant account with Visa, or MC, or anyone other than VPS. and when the VPS system goes down you're screwed.
I use Verisign payflow pro.
I definately *DO* have my own merchant accounts. One with Visa/MC, one with Discover, and one with Amex. All Verisign does is act as an online terminal for internet transactions. I.E. the internet equivalent of the hardware credit card machines normal brick-and-mortar stores use.
I can take my merchant account and process through any of the online payment processors. If I decide I want to pay extra for the priviledge of also having authorize.net I can do so with my existing accounts.
In a "previous life" I did some work for a radio station, including some stuff in relation to the old EBS system.
The previous poster is correct. There were actually two tones (853 and 960 Hz) which were broadcast at the same time for 22.5 seconds. By using two tones it prevented false detection. Usually. I built more than one EBS detector during that period with a couple of Tone detectors (NE567 if I remember correctly) and an and gate and a 555 timer to not alert unless the tone was on for more than 10 seconds or so. This was primarily used in later years for local emergencies such as tornadoes. However, for nationwide emergencies another system was used.
Each station had a "big red envelope". The station I worked for had it at the operator position in the main control room. Digging around the internet I found this site which has a picture of an envelope from 73. I remember the newer ones (about 1991) being better printed, but about the same. The envelopes were sealed and were not to be opened unless the station received an EBS message via teletype which needed to be authenticated. This envelope was replaced on a regular basis.
At some point during the period I was around the station I asked the owner about the envelope, and he related the story about the February 1971 activation. Evidentally he was on duty when the message came in. (Looks like there's a copy of the message up on this site). He opened the envelope and checked the authenticators. Now you have to realize that everyone pretty much knew that the only likely reason for the nationwide system to be activated was nuclear war. Saying that he was rather worried by this message is an understatement. I can't remember if he complied with the warning or if it was called off fast enough that he didn't have to, but I do remember he was either ready to shut down or did.
If you google for "1971 EBS Activation", You will find some other stories about this event.
we can legally transmit up to 2500 watts vs 50 milliwatts
Not quite, when you're talking about spread spectrum....
From the part 15 rules:
"d) The transmitter power must not exceed 100 W under any circumstances. If more than 1 W is used, automatic transmitter control shall limit output power to that which is required for the communication. This shall be determined by the use of the ratio, measured at the receiver, of the received energy per user data bit (Eb) to the sum of the received power spectral densities of noise (N0) and co-channel interference (I0). Average transmitter power over 1 W shall be automatically adjusted to maintain an Eb/(N0 + I0) ratio of no more than 23 dB at the intended receiver."
I have heard that IBM uses its large warehouse of patents purely as a method of protecting itself from lawsuits.
Not sure about the truth to this, but I heard once that the way that patent lawsuits usually get resolved between big companies is that both companies basically list all of the patents they think the other company is infringing, and the company who has the most patents usually ends up winning.
I think that's probably part of the reason we saw Patents show up in the SCOvIBM lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Montana..
In the winter, I'd really like to have *some* daylight at the end of the day...Sunset can be as early as 4:45pm, and sunrise during that same period is after 8am. If you work 8-5, you go to work in the dark, and come home from work in the dark - during the week if you want to do something which requires sunlight, you have to take time off from work or do it during the week.
I'm all in favor of switching to DST and staying there.
Personally, I'm pretty strong at math, but have had problems dealing with the whole school environment, so I've only completed some calculus, and parts of some other higher math courses. It wasn't that they were *hard*, it was more that the whole learning method was *boring*.
In any case, I've recently felt the need to refresh and extend my higher math skills. In a similar quest for the same time of course as the original poster, I came across "Engineering Mathematics" by Stroud. This book starts with the basic mathematical rules (how to add and subtract, etc), and covers a lot of territory, including calculus (and of course trig and algebra along the way). It works great for me, as it explains the concepts concisely without wasting a lot of time on each step along the way. This isn't the book for someone who needs a lot of verbosity for each step, but it definately is good for those with some mathematical aptitude.
I'm not sure what technology florida is using, but in most areas here in Montana (other than those so small that it's easier to hand count), we use the ES&S optical scan ballots. These are completed by completing an arrow next to the person or choice you want. The ballots are normally counted by machine, but if a manual recount is desired it can be done directly from the ballots. It is also very easy to determine the voter's indicated choice when looking at the ballot as opposed to say the "hanging chad" system. For disabled people who cannot mark a ballot by hand, they have an Automark system which will actually mark the optical scan ballot with the person's choice. I do understand that there have been counting machine malfunctions (but relatively few with this system nationwide), however, this is common with any automated device. With the paper ballots it allows you to do the manual recount which is not possible with the electronic systems.
http://www.dell.com/linux
While I disagree with some hidden limit, as a sysadmin for an ISP with caps, I will say that these types of limits are being driven by some real economics on the back end.
In much of the country, ISP's are thrilled if they can pay (at the DS3 level) $75 per mb/s delivered to their network. $100/mb/s is not uncommon, as are much higher figures.
Note that this does not include things like the actual facilities used to deliver this to the consumer.
1mb/s is 3.6gb/hour, 86.4gb/day, or 2592gb/month. Note that these are all gigabit/s. Divide by 8 to get gigabytes/month and you find that the ISP only has 324GB/month (assuming perfect transfer efficiencies) for their $75.00. This also incorrectly assumes that the traffic is spread evenly over 24x7. In reality, transfer on a full circuit is more along the lines of 100-150GB/month per meg of circuit capacity when you take into account day and night patterns.
So assuming that someone is transferring 300GB/month, the bandwidth alone may be costing the ISP close to $150/month.
Another point which is often missed is the traffic engineering issues caused by even a couple of customers transferring 300GB/month on a given segment - Especially if this is upload traffic in a system which has very limited upload capacity. One or two customers transferring this quantity of data can bring a system to it's knees and significantly affect the throughput other subscribers have available to them, causing all subscribers on the segment to be unhappy about their service.
The ISP is then faced with upgrading it's systems to support one or two customers which are already potentially costing them more money than they are providing. To put this into perspective, the same amount of capacity to serve one 300GB/month subscriber could easily handle 100 or more "normal" 3GB/s or less a month subscriber.
After I submitted this article, I also discovered protocase which is specifically for equipment cases.. I haven't had a chance to play a lot with the software, but I do see ITX cases on their website.
Would that be an imaginary moderation then?
PCI express uses the concept of a "lane". Each lane is capable of 250MB/s in each direction at the same time, for a total of 500MB/s. A x1 PCIe card has 1 lane, and a x2 has two, and so on. I think the video card mentioned above is a x16 card, capable of 16 lanes, or 4GB/s in each direction, or 8GB/s total. I believe the spec for 32 lanes is also already set.
The cool thing about pcie is that it can be used for not only video but for everything else. Plus each lane isn't shared across the slots. So you have 8GB/s for your video card, and 500MB/s for your Gigabit (100MB/s) ethernet card, and another 8GB/s for a SANS disk array interface card, and so on.
Unless you are implementing this in a *really* small processor, Zigbee should fit in about anything. For example, Microchip has an royalty-free implementation of the ZigBee protocol which only needs about 32K for a coordinator and 15K for a RFD (endpoint).
1) Is or is not Jaimie an evil genius? 2) Did or did not Adam loose that eyebrow? (and if he didn't can't he get a little closer on the next take?)
In short, we have mail servers accepting the mail and dropping it on a shared NFS server which stores all the mail. The incoming servers run spam and virus filtering and is responsible solely for delivering the mail to the customer's mail directory which lives on the NFS server.
On the client side, we run IMAP and POP3 servers which access the stored mail on the NFS server to deliver it to the clients.
The exact software used for both of these functions are somewhat irrelevant. Once you split this up this way, you can also split the selection process. I.E. which is the best server for accepting SMTP mail and dumping it in customer's mail directories. Which can be answered with a completely different answer than the question of "what is the best NFS (or SANS) server to use to store the mail", or "what IMAP server should we be using", or "what webmail front end should we be using", or so on.
It also makes changing your mind down the road on any piece easier since you can actually run and test any one of these components in the live system as a final test before moving a replacement into the system.
FWIW, I would *love* to consult on something this scale.
1) Lowest signal to noise ratio of any communications system.
2) Lowest power requirements.
3) Lowest bandwidth requirement.
4) You could in theory make a transmitter out of any very simple electrical circuit (perhaps limited range, but
5) An operator can still twitch out a message even if they can speak or they're batteries are low.
Well, you got 2 out of 5...
1, 2 and 3 are more accurately described as PSK31 anymore. PSK31 is narrower than CW, generally uses less power, and can be recovered from almost below the noise floor. I've seen situations where the PSK31 station drops so low that I can't hear it at all but am still getting almost perfect copy. All you need for PSK31 is a computer with a sound card and a HF radio. And no CW skills.
And you don't need to be able to speak *or hear* to use psk31.
97.403 Safety of life and protection of property.
No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
97.405 Station in distress.
(a) No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station in distress of any means at its disposal to attract attention, make known its condition and location, and obtain assistance.
(b) No provision of these rules prevents the use by a station, in the exceptional circumstances described in paragraph (a), of any means of radiocommunications at its disposal to assist a station in distress.
The problem is that in many cases, we aren't in a situation which is described as above. We're typically handling "health and welfare traffic" which are things like "we arrived safely" or "we are going to stay here for the night" (which don't qualify) as opposed to "send an ambulance right now" (which does). Having the ability to use the HF bands to pass this traffic is just as important in an emergency response situation as the specific cases where anyone can pick up a radio (licensed or not) and use it.
In addition, amateurs are cautioned that operating outside their permissions even during an emergency may jeapordize their license. The FCC (assuming they hear about it) will likely review the situation and make a determiniation whether or not the operation fell into one of the exemptions. In short, if it's life or death, I can use anything at my disposal to attract attention. If it's not I better be prepared to explain my actions and expect to possibly loose my license or be subject to fines if the FCC doesn't agree that it was justified.
Amateur radio has basically become a service organization, providing emergency communications when the crap hits the fan. In our area, our Ham radio club provides communications for both the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, and acts as a backup communications system for the normal communications channels if they are overloaded or unavailable.
I feel that the Morse requirement definitely hinders the ability of amateur radio to serve in this capacity. A good example of this happened to us a couple of years ago when we were providing communications for the Red Cross during a Forest Fire in the local area which required evacuations. The Red Cross has a policy that their workers have to have available communications at all times to ensure they can contact emergency help when needed. In the area where the forest fire was, there was no cell coverage, so we were providing communications. Also due to the location, the coverage of our VHF (144Mhz) repeater was marginal at best. As a result, we had to rely on 80meters at 3.880 Mhz. The only operators who can work on the 80meter band are operators who have passed the morse test and also a written test. This eliminated about half of the operators at our disposal just because they were not of the correct license class.
Eliminating the Morse requirement would have increased this pool since most operators are able to pass the General Class test with some studying. Morse code is much more difficult, and is really not neccessary. I learned 5WPM code and got my Tech Plus License and then shortly (after another change to the rules) upgraded to Extra. Today, I operate fairly regularly on the HF bands, but I couldn't read morse code if I wanted to since it doesn't interest me and I haven't kept up with it.
Fouled up by one number, perhaps?
Looks like one of those Lame-squishy keyboards to me. Not the rock solid, spring-loaded, nicely tactile and loud IBM Model M's which actually let you type at a reasonable speed.
Moore's law actually says we'd double the NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS, not actual speed. For this metric, it's pretty close.
I use Verisign payflow pro.
I definately *DO* have my own merchant accounts. One with Visa/MC, one with Discover, and one with Amex. All Verisign does is act as an online terminal for internet transactions. I.E. the internet equivalent of the hardware credit card machines normal brick-and-mortar stores use.
I can take my merchant account and process through any of the online payment processors. If I decide I want to pay extra for the priviledge of also having authorize.net I can do so with my existing accounts.
Do any of those Linksys boxes have ssh? Well.... Actually... Yes, the WRT54G(S) sure can have ssh with the appropriate third party firmare.
Hate to follow-up my own post, but 1971 EBS Norad yields even better results at google.
The previous poster is correct. There were actually two tones (853 and 960 Hz) which were broadcast at the same time for 22.5 seconds. By using two tones it prevented false detection. Usually. I built more than one EBS detector during that period with a couple of Tone detectors (NE567 if I remember correctly) and an and gate and a 555 timer to not alert unless the tone was on for more than 10 seconds or so. This was primarily used in later years for local emergencies such as tornadoes. However, for nationwide emergencies another system was used.
Each station had a "big red envelope". The station I worked for had it at the operator position in the main control room. Digging around the internet I found this site which has a picture of an envelope from 73. I remember the newer ones (about 1991) being better printed, but about the same. The envelopes were sealed and were not to be opened unless the station received an EBS message via teletype which needed to be authenticated. This envelope was replaced on a regular basis.
At some point during the period I was around the station I asked the owner about the envelope, and he related the story about the February 1971 activation. Evidentally he was on duty when the message came in. (Looks like there's a copy of the message up on this site). He opened the envelope and checked the authenticators. Now you have to realize that everyone pretty much knew that the only likely reason for the nationwide system to be activated was nuclear war. Saying that he was rather worried by this message is an understatement. I can't remember if he complied with the warning or if it was called off fast enough that he didn't have to, but I do remember he was either ready to shut down or did.
If you google for "1971 EBS Activation", You will find some other stories about this event.
Not quite, when you're talking about spread spectrum....
From the part 15 rules:
"d) The transmitter power must not exceed 100 W under any circumstances. If more than 1 W is used, automatic transmitter control shall limit output power to that which is required for the communication. This shall be determined by the use of the ratio, measured at the receiver, of the received energy per user data bit (Eb) to the sum of the received power spectral densities of noise (N0) and co-channel interference (I0). Average transmitter power over 1 W shall be automatically adjusted to maintain an Eb/(N0 + I0) ratio of no more than 23 dB at the intended receiver."
Not sure about the truth to this, but I heard once that the way that patent lawsuits usually get resolved between big companies is that both companies basically list all of the patents they think the other company is infringing, and the company who has the most patents usually ends up winning.
I think that's probably part of the reason we saw Patents show up in the SCOvIBM lawsuit.
Only 8 instructions to learn, fully Turing-complete, implementations which run on almost anything, and a name sure to get your mouth washed out with soap just for mentioning it.
By the time you've done all that cutting, there won't be anything functioning. Much less fully. But I bet it would taste good after being cooked.