Goal here was to inform a reader unfamiliar with the term from within the thread so they would not have to go out of the conversation to search for what LOX means. It's just unobvious enough that I knew some might not know and it took me half a sec to author.
( I appreciate your ":-P " Marco. )
I also didn't want to return to the thread later today and find 30 posts asking what LOX was....
To this day, when I'm shopping for a new cell phone I always search for one with a retractable antenna - despite the problems it causes when I try to pull it from my pocket. Many don't come with antennas like this anymore but it does weigh on my decision. I've never had a phone w/o an antenna like this and I'm happy for my decision every time I'm somewhere that people are complaining that they can't make a call, yet I can place and receive calls and text messages with ease.
In my office, if I hold up my phone [MOT e815] steady in free space, I can see a change in the "bars" when I put the antenna up and down. I don't think my phone has a sensor to detect whether it is up or down so it can lie to me - it's not a wired connection to the radio in the handset but it is RF coupled.
By having an antenna that I can selectively retract or deploy, I can reduce the transmit power my phone requires to make contact with a tower when I put it up. If the antenna is up, my handheld needs to radiate less power (they scale transmit power up and down both at the handset and tower to save power and keep RF emissions to a minimum) and that means less RF energy going into my skull. My retractable antenna is safer and saves power. My battery will last longer than if I did not have one - all else being equal.
It's annoying to deal with sometimes but I can go longer without a charge and I'm less likely to be without coverage. Worth it for me. I can unscrew mine if it gets in the way and still make calls if I'm in a good area.
(An old Ham adage is "You can't work 'em if you can't hear them." This is speaking to the fact that, regardless of how much transmit power you have - you can't communicate with someone else if they don't break through your noise floor on the receive section. Cell towers command the power level of the handsets they are trying to communicate with and if they are not getting a good signal, they will instruct it to increase the power output so the party you are talking to can hear you. The inefficient and hidden antennas on many of the "antennaless" handsets will often be asked to pump out more power so the tower can hear you. This reduces your battery life AND floods you and everybody around you with higher and higher levels of RF - probably not good for your brain and eyeballs, all else being equal.)
If you are having trouble connecting with one of those "antennaless" handsets, try holding it vertically and rotating your body and the direction the back of the phone is "pointing" until things improve. Many of these antenna configurations are very directional by the time you consider that the patch antenna and the attenuation your body has on the signal in the direction of your head. If the cell site is in the direction of your left ear and you are speaking with it on your right, that RF must both be received and transmitted either through your head or must bounce off some nearby structure. Just turn around and you might be able to make the call or not be required to scream or talk very slowly just so that you can tell your honey you will be home soon for dinner.
If you want to "calibrate" your bars, see how your phone responds to making calls while moving it in and out of a semi-closed metal filing cabinet - a great RF shielded enclosure. Do the bars drop out all at once, or slowly as the drawer is closed? If your office or home is far away from a cell site, how open does the drawer need to be open before you can place a call to it? See how your bars respond to this semi-controlled signal level experiment.
If I turn my body in front of the window to which cell sites are available, I can get the signal bars to scale up and down by the amount I am shielding the phone from access to the tower.
Getting my amateur ticket in high school has probably saved me many hours of frustration and prevented many missed contacts just through an awareness of RF, antenna patterns, etc. Get your ticket(amateur radio license) - no Morse code required.
Performance is limited by network connections; true. It goes deeper, however, in the fact that performance is also limited by the cpu and storage of your peers, and their peers, etc....
The network should eventually level demand across nodes. If one node for some reason gets saturated, peers will eventually find data faster elsewhere, reducing its load. Lower performance machine/network nodes may end up slightly less popular and those equipped will move more traffic. Freenet has a number of ways to optimize and can be quite robust via various ways to self-heal.
If going to college isn't WAAAY more than attending classes then, in my eyes, you're missing out. Don't spend time bitching about the textbooks. Spend time trying to get into the homework group of the single semi-attractive female in your engineering math class of 200. Spend time trying to get on the robotics competition team, or figure out how to build a concrete canoe.
Spend time finding obscure research texts in the library. Wander through the physics lab. Join a club, find a gang you can get together regularly with and play a game or urban explore, or practice some crazy martial art.
Even if you can't do all these things while maintaining an unnecessary A+ average - who cares? What is life? Why are you in school? Every day gets you closer to death so why, as long as you can stay in school, do you care enough about shitty textbooks or grading practices to even spend the time bitching about it?
Get into research as an undergraduate. Take trips out of town to the nearby lake on a beautiful Thursday afternoon instead of going to lecture. Take a classmate and discuss your impending fluid dynamics exam there while on a boat. How fast does a wave propagate? Can you go faster? What happens?
The phrase "Live and Learn" has the words ordered the way they are for a reason. You'll feel much better about your four years when you graduate than if you never let loose "back when you were in school." They're you're college days - use them as such.
And yes I paid for it and no I don't regret it. Do whatever you want but I guarantee you you'll regret more keeping you nose buried in horrible engineering texts than spending that time with people and exploring your surroundings.
Engineering degree? I did it all for the nookie.:)
The 1st GPS "NAVSTAR" satellite SVN01 PRN04 (space vehicle number 01, pseudorandom noise) was launched 30 years ago from Vandenberg AFB as of 22 February 1978 @ just before 1600 Pacific.
http://www.insidegnss.com/node/522
Despite these separate Air Force, Navy, and Army efforts, the early GPS program lacked support from the military services' operating commands -- which would rather have spent the money on weapons systems. Mission needs, user requirements, and concept of operations were still in the process of being defined.
The underwhelming response had led DoD officials to adopt GPS as an agency-wide initiative and place it under the care of a Joint Program Office with an Air Force colonel acting as the executive manager.
Over the years, the program faced many risks and overcame many obstacles -- even defunding by the Air Force in 1980-82. But the launch of SVN01 became a shot heard 'round the world [...]
I believe Sun's resurgence will come from moving people onto ZFS, not necessarily from sales of MySQL. They will add some nice improvements to MySQL, and this move has bought them a LOT of potential customers - but the long term benefit to going with Sun is going to be with their stable and flexible Solaris and ZFS products and services.
Nobody is scaling down in the amount of data they deal with. To say ZFS is scalable is an understatement.
A good reason would be to learn more about the various other unices out there and the various ways things are done amongst kernels and distros. Other than that, and the really cool ports system, I can't see it being worth the hassle for the typical home user.
I would not deter you from trying, and you might end up loving it, but it's not just another linux distro.
FreeBSD excels not on the single user systems but, in my opinion, where you have multiple users or services running on the same piece of hardware. If you're hosting virtual domains for people and want to make sure that one of your users doesn't disturb things for another, it's great. It's things like login.conf(5) that just come with the OS. I haven't personally run any linux boxen in about 5 years (maybe more) since I started playing with FreeBSD; but some years ago, providing similar functionality in linux was not trivial. It's a stable, feature-filled OS. I'd even suggest it for learning on - like learning to drive on a manual transmission vehicle w/o power steering vs. an automatic. It's great but takes some setting up and might frusturate faster than most linux distros. More powerful, and more knobs. More like pro-audio equipment vs. a typical home-audio component CD player. Less flash, more business.
"The Power to Serve" is the tagline for this excellent OS. That's what it does best - serve - not hold you by the hand. If you're not interested in getting dirt under your fingernails and instead want point-and clicky interfaces to system administrative functions, do look elsewhere. (Spoken to other readers, not necessarily yourself.)
Do not mess with this OS without looking to the FreeBSD Handbook. A quick read will give you a feel of the power and it's something you should have close at hand when starting to play with it for the first time.
Give it a try but be ready for a time investment to get it like you want. Maybe put it on a "closet machine" and let it serve files or web for you so you can take down your regular box for dual-booting, running xine, or the reboots you're sure to have more often with linux than the beastie:)
It's a great platform, but doesn't come pre-configured.
No - you don't smoke it. You _run_ it. A 'drinking club with a running problem' is their tagline and it's a wonderful way to get exercise, meet fun people, and have a beer "on trail."
It's a lot of fun. I'm a member of Sir Walter's Hash House Harriers in "The Triangle" (Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Durham, NC) and you can find all past hashes here. They've even got stats : (mine) , (all).
If you'd like to hang out with people with names like Ass Clown, E'lickser, SpongeDick NoPants, Turns'Em Gay, Ball Me, Banger Not, Better Not Suck,Big Box,Blows the Hammer,Briar Breast,BubbaGump, Buckafuffalo, Cheese Infection,Cock Cleaner,Condomint,Cracked Nuts, Endangered Feces,Finger Licking Good, Gigglegasm,Goes Down Hard, Mary Lou Rotten, and Photo Spread, find a local hash and run!
It's a world-wide thing that began in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1938 so there's probably one near you, regardless of the continent you live on. LINKS
Faster than geocaching - and they have beer! On-On!
As soon as the prices of this e-ink come down, market share will expand when someoby can put two 'pages' side by side with a hinge down the middle.
Cover it with leather (non-dead animal coverings availible as well), allow bluetooth or other wireless connectivity for transfer (and power if possible), get the price point below $150, and ensure customers that ebooks will remain a certain percentage price below the dead-tree versions, and you've got a product.
Feeling ambitious? Get a gumsix and some e-ink and go out and build one (built in.pdf and plain-text capabilities please).
Want design ideas for your next project/product? Have a sticky problem and need a brainstorm? I charge nothing. [cyrus at 80d dot org]
[ Amendment IV ] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.
!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org
and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email
to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)
SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR
Would the parent poster or others in this thread mind visiting SaveYourHearing.org and sharing some of your experiences? I'd like to grow this site into a place where people can go to get information on hearing, hearing loss - the unfortunate effects thereof especially, and hearing protection.
Do tell your stories please, if you might, so that others can learn how debilitating such a loss can be to one's life (and those of others who need to shout in order to maintain a conversation).
Please - make it yours. CONTENT CREATION IS CURRENTLY OPEN TO ANONYMOUS USERS so that I may "seed" this beast without people being reluctant to login. (This will probably last until I start receiving spam posts.) Create an account if you'd like though, and post your experiences. If you have references on hearing loss, hearing aid types, DSP software or settings, etc. please pass them along so others may enjoy them as well.
Tell your horror stories or how your hearing loss has affected you so that others may potentially avoid the same fate! (Please try to suppress your jealousy towards those still retaining their HF or voiceband response.....)
Many thanks. (yes - it's very new. I came up with the idea after spending $20 at a recent concert to buy earplugs from the bar and hand them out to people standing right near the speakers. I wanted a place where I could direct them to find information on protection and the effects of permanant (mostly high-frequency) hearing loss). Please express interest if you'd like to donate to such a fund. I'd like to give away or subsidize hearing protection distribution at music clubs.
If you have an SPL meter and would like to report on your findings at various music clubs across the planet, please do so!! I'd like to build a database of peak readings and then try and convince the audio engineers at these places to turn the volume down. I think "self regulation" is best and if we can convince club owners to keep the environment safe for the good of their customers, we all will benefit. I try to bring my protection every time, and often a few pair for friends.
Ever try having a conversation with a bass player or drummer who doesn't realize you're not wispering when you talk to them??? Please help me save people's hearing. Donate. Contribute. Tell your stories. Show people where they can buy earplugs cheaply online. Subsidize protection for others that wouldn't normally carry it themselves.
Do you have anyt tips or tricks for protecting your ears? Know a good way to fold up some material to place it in your ear for a makeshift plug? A good way to carry earplugs so they stay clean (and they're there when you need them - I think wallet based storage would be good but can't figure out a good way...). Do tell!
Thank you for any help or contact you can provide. If you'd like to contact me to help (with a SPL-survey, links for the site or suggestions, etc.) please do not hesitate to send me an email! "cyrus+saveyourhearing *at* 80d.org" (that's eight-zero-dee.org)
Once again - thank you. Spread the word, link to me or post whatever you can that you think might be helpful.
Would the parent poster or others in this thread mind visiting SaveYourHearing.org and sharing some of your experiences? I'd like to grow this site into a place where people can go to get information on hearing, hearing loss - the unfortunate effects thereof especially, and hearing protection.
Do tell your stories please, if you might, so that others can learn how debilitating such a loss can be to one's life (and those of others who need to shout in order to maintain a conversation).
Please - make it yours. CONTENT CREATION IS CURRENTLY OPEN TO ANONYMOUS USERS so that I may "seed" this beast without people being reluctant to login. (This will probably last until I start receiving spam posts.) Create an account if you'd like though, and post your experiences. If you have references on hearing loss, hearing aid types, DSP software or settings, etc. please pass them along so others may enjoy them as well.
Tell your horror stories or how your hearing loss has affected you so that others may potentially avoid the same fate! (Please try to suppress your jealousy towards those still retaining their HF or voiceband response.....)
Many thanks. (yes - it's very new. I came up with the idea after spending $20 at a recent concert to buy earplugs from the bar and hand them out to people standing right near the speakers. I wanted a place where I could direct them to find information on protection and the effects of permanant (mostly high-frequency) hearing loss). Please express interest if you'd like to donate to such a fund. I'd like to give away or subsidize hearing protection distribution at music clubs.
If you have an SPL meter and would like to report on your findings at various music clubs across the planet, please do so!! I'd like to build a database of peak readings and then try and convince the audio engineers at these places to turn the volume down. I think "self regulation" is best and if we can convince club owners to keep the environment safe for the good of their customers, we all will benefit. I try to bring my protection every time, and often a few pair for friends.
Ever try having a conversation with a bass player or drummer who doesn't realize you're not wispering when you talk to them??? Please help me save people's hearing. Donate. Contribute. Tell your stories. Show people where they can buy earplugs cheaply online. Subsidize protection for others that wouldn't normally carry it themselves.
Do you have anyt tips or tricks for protecting your ears? Know a good way to fold up some material to place it in your ear for a makeshift plug? A good way to carry earplugs so they stay clean (and they're there when you need them - I think wallet based storage would be good but can't figure out a good way...). Do tell!
Thank you for any help or contact you can provide. If you'd like to contact me to help (with a SPL-survey, links for the site or suggestions, etc.) please do not hesitate to send me an email! "cyrus+saveyourhearing *at* 80d.org" (that's eight-zero-dee.org)
Once again - thank you. Spread the word, link to me or post whatever you can that you think might be helpful.
Does anything like this (calendar stuff in general) make use of LDAP backends? I imagine the authentication and ACL-like permissions would come in handy in a situation like this...
I'm sure that would be fine. It's your audio capture device, the pipelines on the card, DMA transfers, bus speed/contention, and system schedulers that are the problem. Oh yeah. All *that* stuff.... And then you need to get back through the bus, card pipelines and out through the DAC to generate output. Phew!
Dedicated, you'd probably be fine at 100Mhz or less with the right [embedded : most likely hand coded assembly] software. Most modern desktops have so much crap running all the time however that those precious CPU cycles dissapear very quickly. Even if you could do it, there'd probably be gaps or delays without some nicely written double or triple buffering techniques. These things take time and then therefore kill what you set out to do.....
Actually - If the microphone was placed very close to the source, you may be able to generate some anti-sound "down range" (ie. Your desk) and the latency could be compensated for in that regard. It would take some fine tuning - in fact another microphone at the place where you need the quiet could be used for the system to tune itself. (This of course is assuming there are no walls in the room for the sound to bounce off of so that you aren't trying to defeat 17 "sources" simultaneously).
I'm not claiming any authority on this or saying it can't be done, just stating that it's probably quite a bit more complicated than it may look at first glance. Real time work is not something most "normal" OSes are setup to do. It can be done, but for things to be faster than sound you've got to get your latency WAY WAY WAY down.
Software would generally be too slow. A DSP-based sound card could potentially be programmed to do phase-inversion and time-slew (to account for distance) but an ordinary desktop machine would generally need to be very fast and incorporate real time extensions in the kernel. This is the reason you generally find hardware-only solutions (and in headphones for the reasons mentioned in a peer post). Of course I could be way off....
urgent is relative&ambiguous, train your boss,
on
Meet The Life Hackers
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Precisely why I used quotes. The term is being used lightly and only used because I've seen it elsewhere - similarly misused. Most of us probably very much agree but the point is well taken. It is, however, all relative.
Expectations do vary locally and between people, within organizations or groups, etc. How does one's boss, or anybody, know how often another checks email? It's when they reply. If you communicate with someone via email often enough, you can develop a sense as to when you might hear back from them. Lunch time? Late afternoon? Within 3 hours, by the end of the week, etc.
Many people are at their desks all day and have reliable email they are expected to check quite often. It all comes down to expectation and it's easy to get burned when judging reliability/ping times.
The trick is to train your boss (or sender) to not expect a response in the middle of the day if you are often out of the office, at a job site, etc. Reply always at the end of the day to signal to them that delivery is not reliable in the middle of the afternoon but you can usually get back to them by 4:30p or so.... even if you see their email during the day, just hold off or respond and postpone (or schedule delivery) till later.
This can backfire and reduce efficiency within an organization but the technique can be put to good use for those that tend to be especially nagging or demanding of "immediate" responses.
Text/SMS can be a good alternative to calling somebody when you can't rely on email. The reception confirmation is of course again ambiguous (ask them to send a simple "OK" reply), but people carry their cell phones far more places then their email access. Delays are minimal and you don't need to get involved in a conversation for simple requests, informative notes, or reminders.
Any amount of exchange however will often take a shorter amount of time with a simple call than with lots of back and forth over SMS. It is however great for flirtations, sending your hubby/wife an "I'm thinking of you," for noisy environments where talking is difficult, or where talking on a cell is rude (this is many more places than most people believe!)
You can actually send text messages to email accounts and email/AIM to cell phones - check your provider or post tips in reply for others.
Work for 10 minutes. Break for 2. Do something else for 10. Repeat, killing items on your list. Supposedly you can do quite a bit of "next actions" in an hour this way. DON'T SKIP BREAKS!
Perhaps a Bayesian filter could be trained to alert you to "urgent" emails and none other just the same as they can be trained to flag/delete UCE messages?
Procmail could be used to send a text message to your phone when someone from your whitelist sends you a message (people from your department, the president of your company, your broker, your brother/dad, but not Jim the annoying guy down the hall who's in your department) so, even away from your desk, you could respond quickly. Else, just stay away from your inbox till 4:00pm or so...
Procmail or SIEVE could be extensively useful if the time spent programming them could be found:(
[I'm not a windows admin so I've no idea if any of this is possible...]
You might....
Figure out how to log all USB plug-in/remove events and notify a central location when they are USB Mass Storage devices. Figure out how to log all copies or transfers to/from USB mass storage devices. Make up some reporting process and either have a talk with excessive USB-keyers or disable their USB ports. Remember that they can probably use other workstations to do as they please. Could USB Mass Storage devices be made 'read-only' via some policy editor?
(Probably easier on an OS in which you could mess with the kernel sources.)
Let your users know all activity on the corporate network is being logged (not keystrokes or file contents - file names probably OK) and what behaviour is not OK.
Notify that all USB key contents will be inspected and copy off of any USB drive as soon as it's inserted for later inspection. Tell them big brother made you do it and if they're worried about their personal stuff being looked at to not use their personal USB key at work.
Anybody familiar with this device know if there are any USB audio interfaces that would mate with this ARM machine? Forgive me for not searching myself, but what does the state of audio tools look like under ARM debian? How many USB device drivers are supported/exist? USB 'webcam' options?
How difficult would it be to turn this into a portable audio-capture (and streaming???) or playback device? Could I direct a USB audio interface input stream toward a USB attached HD? What bandwidth might I expect? At 266MHz could I real-time vorbis-encode and stream to disk or network? At what quality? (I'm not expecting much more than guesses here.) Is the vorbis encoder available for ARM and how efficient would this be compared to an X86 machine? Could I do FLAC? Again - leaving tomorrow so no time to search myself:( If you know, post; if not, yes - I know about google.
For that matter, does anybody know of any small device that will record in a lossless format (ie. NOT 'voice' or 'mp3' recorder or in a proprietary format) with reasonable sample rate/resolution, has decent [read: low noise] line or mic inputs, removable media slot (or hackable to add a spinning magnetic media device), and doesn't cost >$250?
Everybody seems to be talking about network applications, but with a 12V battery, a keyboard and heads up display or audio interface (yes - I believe you can get software that generates a virtual, audible, terminal via voice prompts) this could be a wonderful wearable device. Do you think so? Too power hungry?
Just thinking/rambling. Tell me slashdot what you think (if you've got the time.)
Slashdot Mirror
You might consider exploring http://www.knowledgetree.com/ (commercial open source) or another DMS like the following:
Alfresco - Open Source Enterprise Content Management (CMS) ... - alfresco.com ... - openkm.com ... - epiware.com ... - ademero.com
OpenKM - powerful, easy to use, web-based scalable electronic
Epiware - Document Management Solutions for Everyone. A powerful
Document Management Software - Your Search for Document
http://www.opendocman.com/ (PHP)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Document_management_systems
I couldn't give a shit about karma[1] right now.
Goal here was to inform a reader unfamiliar with the term from within the thread so they would not have to go out of the conversation to search for what LOX means. It's just unobvious enough that I knew some might not know and it took me half a sec to author.
( I appreciate your " :-P " Marco. )
I also didn't want to return to the thread later today and find 30 posts asking what LOX was....
Have a super day!
[1] slashdot karma that is...
If you're wondering, LOX is "Liquified Oxygen"
To this day, when I'm shopping for a new cell phone I always search for one with a retractable antenna - despite the problems it causes when I try to pull it from my pocket. Many don't come with antennas like this anymore but it does weigh on my decision. I've never had a phone w/o an antenna like this and I'm happy for my decision every time I'm somewhere that people are complaining that they can't make a call, yet I can place and receive calls and text messages with ease.
In my office, if I hold up my phone [MOT e815] steady in free space, I can see a change in the "bars" when I put the antenna up and down. I don't think my phone has a sensor to detect whether it is up or down so it can lie to me - it's not a wired connection to the radio in the handset but it is RF coupled.
By having an antenna that I can selectively retract or deploy, I can reduce the transmit power my phone requires to make contact with a tower when I put it up. If the antenna is up, my handheld needs to radiate less power (they scale transmit power up and down both at the handset and tower to save power and keep RF emissions to a minimum) and that means less RF energy going into my skull. My retractable antenna is safer and saves power. My battery will last longer than if I did not have one - all else being equal.
It's annoying to deal with sometimes but I can go longer without a charge and I'm less likely to be without coverage. Worth it for me. I can unscrew mine if it gets in the way and still make calls if I'm in a good area.
(An old Ham adage is "You can't work 'em if you can't hear them." This is speaking to the fact that, regardless of how much transmit power you have - you can't communicate with someone else if they don't break through your noise floor on the receive section. Cell towers command the power level of the handsets they are trying to communicate with and if they are not getting a good signal, they will instruct it to increase the power output so the party you are talking to can hear you. The inefficient and hidden antennas on many of the "antennaless" handsets will often be asked to pump out more power so the tower can hear you. This reduces your battery life AND floods you and everybody around you with higher and higher levels of RF - probably not good for your brain and eyeballs, all else being equal.)
If you are having trouble connecting with one of those "antennaless" handsets, try holding it vertically and rotating your body and the direction the back of the phone is "pointing" until things improve. Many of these antenna configurations are very directional by the time you consider that the patch antenna and the attenuation your body has on the signal in the direction of your head. If the cell site is in the direction of your left ear and you are speaking with it on your right, that RF must both be received and transmitted either through your head or must bounce off some nearby structure. Just turn around and you might be able to make the call or not be required to scream or talk very slowly just so that you can tell your honey you will be home soon for dinner.
If you want to "calibrate" your bars, see how your phone responds to making calls while moving it in and out of a semi-closed metal filing cabinet - a great RF shielded enclosure. Do the bars drop out all at once, or slowly as the drawer is closed? If your office or home is far away from a cell site, how open does the drawer need to be open before you can place a call to it? See how your bars respond to this semi-controlled signal level experiment.
If I turn my body in front of the window to which cell sites are available, I can get the signal bars to scale up and down by the amount I am shielding the phone from access to the tower.
Getting my amateur ticket in high school has probably saved me many hours of frustration and prevented many missed contacts just through an awareness of RF, antenna patterns, etc. Get your ticket(amateur radio license) - no Morse code required.
Performance is limited by network connections; true. It goes deeper, however, in the fact that performance is also limited by the cpu and storage of your peers, and their peers, etc....
The network should eventually level demand across nodes. If one node for some reason gets saturated, peers will eventually find data faster elsewhere, reducing its load. Lower performance machine/network nodes may end up slightly less popular and those equipped will move more traffic. Freenet has a number of ways to optimize and can be quite robust via various ways to self-heal.
Engineering degree? It sucked but I loved it.
:)
If going to college isn't WAAAY more than attending classes then, in my eyes, you're missing out. Don't spend time bitching about the textbooks. Spend time trying to get into the homework group of the single semi-attractive female in your engineering math class of 200. Spend time trying to get on the robotics competition team, or figure out how to build a concrete canoe.
Spend time finding obscure research texts in the library. Wander through the physics lab. Join a club, find a gang you can get together regularly with and play a game or urban explore, or practice some crazy martial art.
Even if you can't do all these things while maintaining an unnecessary A+ average - who cares? What is life? Why are you in school? Every day gets you closer to death so why, as long as you can stay in school, do you care enough about shitty textbooks or grading practices to even spend the time bitching about it?
Get into research as an undergraduate. Take trips out of town to the nearby lake on a beautiful Thursday afternoon instead of going to lecture. Take a classmate and discuss your impending fluid dynamics exam there while on a boat. How fast does a wave propagate? Can you go faster? What happens?
The phrase "Live and Learn" has the words ordered the way they are for a reason. You'll feel much better about your four years when you graduate than if you never let loose "back when you were in school." They're you're college days - use them as such.
And yes I paid for it and no I don't regret it. Do whatever you want but I guarantee you you'll regret more keeping you nose buried in horrible engineering texts than spending that time with people and exploring your surroundings.
Engineering degree? I did it all for the nookie.
The 1st GPS "NAVSTAR" satellite SVN01 PRN04 (space vehicle number 01, pseudorandom noise) was launched 30 years ago from Vandenberg AFB as of 22 February 1978 @ just before 1600 Pacific.
http://www.insidegnss.com/node/522 Despite these separate Air Force, Navy, and Army efforts, the early GPS program lacked support from the military services' operating commands -- which would rather have spent the money on weapons systems. Mission needs, user requirements, and concept of operations were still in the process of being defined.
The underwhelming response had led DoD officials to adopt GPS as an agency-wide initiative and place it under the care of a Joint Program Office with an Air Force colonel acting as the executive manager.
Over the years, the program faced many risks and overcame many obstacles -- even defunding by the Air Force in 1980-82. But the launch of SVN01 became a shot heard 'round the world [...]
I'm interested in experiences /. readers have had with The Hurd. Have you installed or run this system? What did you think?
I believe Sun's resurgence will come from moving people onto ZFS, not necessarily from sales of MySQL. They will add some nice improvements to MySQL, and this move has bought them a LOT of potential customers - but the long term benefit to going with Sun is going to be with their stable and flexible Solaris and ZFS products and services.
Nobody is scaling down in the amount of data they deal with. To say ZFS is scalable is an understatement.
You can always pickup a jiggit at http://www.thesheepmarket.com/.
About : http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/thesheepmarket/
Created with : http://www.processing.org/, http://www.mturk.com/mturk/
A good reason would be to learn more about the various other unices out there and the various ways things are done amongst kernels and distros. Other than that, and the really cool ports system, I can't see it being worth the hassle for the typical home user.
:)
I would not deter you from trying, and you might end up loving it, but it's not just another linux distro.
FreeBSD excels not on the single user systems but, in my opinion, where you have multiple users or services running on the same piece of hardware. If you're hosting virtual domains for people and want to make sure that one of your users doesn't disturb things for another, it's great. It's things like login.conf(5) that just come with the OS. I haven't personally run any linux boxen in about 5 years (maybe more) since I started playing with FreeBSD; but some years ago, providing similar functionality in linux was not trivial. It's a stable, feature-filled OS. I'd even suggest it for learning on - like learning to drive on a manual transmission vehicle w/o power steering vs. an automatic. It's great but takes some setting up and might frusturate faster than most linux distros. More powerful, and more knobs. More like pro-audio equipment vs. a typical home-audio component CD player. Less flash, more business.
"The Power to Serve" is the tagline for this excellent OS. That's what it does best - serve - not hold you by the hand. If you're not interested in getting dirt under your fingernails and instead want point-and clicky interfaces to system administrative functions, do look elsewhere. (Spoken to other readers, not necessarily yourself.)
Do not mess with this OS without looking to the FreeBSD Handbook. A quick read will give you a feel of the power and it's something you should have close at hand when starting to play with it for the first time.
Give it a try but be ready for a time investment to get it like you want. Maybe put it on a "closet machine" and let it serve files or web for you so you can take down your regular box for dual-booting, running xine, or the reboots you're sure to have more often with linux than the beastie
It's a great platform, but doesn't come pre-configured.
No - you don't smoke it. You _run_ it. A 'drinking club with a running problem' is their tagline and it's a wonderful way to get exercise, meet fun people, and have a beer "on trail."
,BubbaGump, Buckafuffalo, Cheese Infection,Cock Cleaner,Condomint,Cracked Nuts, Endangered Feces,Finger Licking Good, Gigglegasm,Goes Down Hard, Mary Lou Rotten, and Photo Spread, find a local hash and run!
About, history, etc. Also take a look at the dictionary.
It's a lot of fun. I'm a member of Sir Walter's Hash House Harriers in "The Triangle" (Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Durham, NC) and you can find all past hashes here. They've even got stats : (mine) , (all).
If you'd like to hang out with people with names like Ass Clown,
E'lickser, SpongeDick NoPants, Turns'Em Gay, Ball Me, Banger Not, Better Not Suck,Big Box,Blows the Hammer,Briar Breast
It's a world-wide thing that began in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1938 so there's probably one near you, regardless of the continent you live on. LINKS
Faster than geocaching - and they have beer! On-On!
As soon as the prices of this e-ink come down, market share will expand when someoby can put two 'pages' side by side with a hinge down the middle.
.pdf and plain-text capabilities please).
Cover it with leather (non-dead animal coverings availible as well), allow bluetooth or other wireless connectivity for transfer (and power if possible), get the price point below $150, and ensure customers that ebooks will remain a certain percentage price below the dead-tree versions, and you've got a product.
Feeling ambitious? Get a gumsix and some e-ink and go out and build one (built in
Want design ideas for your next project/product? Have a sticky problem and need a brainstorm? I charge nothing. [cyrus at 80d dot org]
Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.
Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/
DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography
=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages
!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org
and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt
to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)
SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR
Would the parent poster or others in this thread mind visiting SaveYourHearing.org and sharing some of your experiences? I'd like to grow this site into a place where people can go to get information on hearing, hearing loss - the unfortunate effects thereof especially, and hearing protection.
Do tell your stories please, if you might, so that others can learn how debilitating such a loss can be to one's life (and those of others who need to shout in order to maintain a conversation).
Please - make it yours. CONTENT CREATION IS CURRENTLY OPEN TO ANONYMOUS USERS so that I may "seed" this beast without people being reluctant to login. (This will probably last until I start receiving spam posts.) Create an account if you'd like though, and post your experiences. If you have references on hearing loss, hearing aid types, DSP software or settings, etc. please pass them along so others may enjoy them as well.
Tell your horror stories or how your hearing loss has affected you so that others may potentially avoid the same fate! (Please try to suppress your jealousy towards those still retaining their HF or voiceband response.....)
Many thanks. (yes - it's very new. I came up with the idea after spending $20 at a recent concert to buy earplugs from the bar and hand them out to people standing right near the speakers. I wanted a place where I could direct them to find information on protection and the effects of permanant (mostly high-frequency) hearing loss). Please express interest if you'd like to donate to such a fund. I'd like to give away or subsidize hearing protection distribution at music clubs.
If you have an SPL meter and would like to report on your findings at various music clubs across the planet, please do so!! I'd like to build a database of peak readings and then try and convince the audio engineers at these places to turn the volume down. I think "self regulation" is best and if we can convince club owners to keep the environment safe for the good of their customers, we all will benefit. I try to bring my protection every time, and often a few pair for friends.
Ever try having a conversation with a bass player or drummer who doesn't realize you're not wispering when you talk to them??? Please help me save people's hearing. Donate. Contribute. Tell your stories. Show people where they can buy earplugs cheaply online. Subsidize protection for others that wouldn't normally carry it themselves.
Do you have anyt tips or tricks for protecting your ears? Know a good way to fold up some material to place it in your ear for a makeshift plug? A good way to carry earplugs so they stay clean (and they're there when you need them - I think wallet based storage would be good but can't figure out a good way...). Do tell!
Thank you for any help or contact you can provide. If you'd like to contact me to help (with a SPL-survey, links for the site or suggestions, etc.) please do not hesitate to send me an email! "cyrus+saveyourhearing *at* 80d.org" (that's eight-zero-dee.org)
Once again - thank you. Spread the word, link to me or post whatever you can that you think might be helpful.
Cyrus
Would the parent poster or others in this thread mind visiting SaveYourHearing.org and sharing some of your experiences? I'd like to grow this site into a place where people can go to get information on hearing, hearing loss - the unfortunate effects thereof especially, and hearing protection.
Do tell your stories please, if you might, so that others can learn how debilitating such a loss can be to one's life (and those of others who need to shout in order to maintain a conversation).
Please - make it yours. CONTENT CREATION IS CURRENTLY OPEN TO ANONYMOUS USERS so that I may "seed" this beast without people being reluctant to login. (This will probably last until I start receiving spam posts.) Create an account if you'd like though, and post your experiences. If you have references on hearing loss, hearing aid types, DSP software or settings, etc. please pass them along so others may enjoy them as well.
Tell your horror stories or how your hearing loss has affected you so that others may potentially avoid the same fate! (Please try to suppress your jealousy towards those still retaining their HF or voiceband response.....)
Many thanks. (yes - it's very new. I came up with the idea after spending $20 at a recent concert to buy earplugs from the bar and hand them out to people standing right near the speakers. I wanted a place where I could direct them to find information on protection and the effects of permanant (mostly high-frequency) hearing loss). Please express interest if you'd like to donate to such a fund. I'd like to give away or subsidize hearing protection distribution at music clubs.
If you have an SPL meter and would like to report on your findings at various music clubs across the planet, please do so!! I'd like to build a database of peak readings and then try and convince the audio engineers at these places to turn the volume down. I think "self regulation" is best and if we can convince club owners to keep the environment safe for the good of their customers, we all will benefit. I try to bring my protection every time, and often a few pair for friends.
Ever try having a conversation with a bass player or drummer who doesn't realize you're not wispering when you talk to them??? Please help me save people's hearing. Donate. Contribute. Tell your stories. Show people where they can buy earplugs cheaply online. Subsidize protection for others that wouldn't normally carry it themselves.
Do you have anyt tips or tricks for protecting your ears? Know a good way to fold up some material to place it in your ear for a makeshift plug? A good way to carry earplugs so they stay clean (and they're there when you need them - I think wallet based storage would be good but can't figure out a good way...). Do tell!
Thank you for any help or contact you can provide. If you'd like to contact me to help (with a SPL-survey, links for the site or suggestions, etc.) please do not hesitate to send me an email! "cyrus+saveyourhearing *at* 80d.org" (that's eight-zero-dee.org)
Once again - thank you. Spread the word, link to me or post whatever you can that you think might be helpful.
Cyrus
Does anything like this (calendar stuff in general) make use of LDAP backends? I imagine the authentication and ACL-like permissions would come in handy in a situation like this...
I'm sure that would be fine. It's your audio capture device, the pipelines on the card, DMA transfers, bus speed/contention, and system schedulers that are the problem. Oh yeah. All *that* stuff.... And then you need to get back through the bus, card pipelines and out through the DAC to generate output. Phew!
s ystemi ng5 4
Dedicated, you'd probably be fine at 100Mhz or less with the right [embedded : most likely hand coded assembly] software. Most modern desktops have so much crap running all the time however that those precious CPU cycles dissapear very quickly. Even if you could do it, there'd probably be gaps or delays without some nicely written double or triple buffering techniques. These things take time and then therefore kill what you set out to do.....
Actually - If the microphone was placed very close to the source, you may be able to generate some anti-sound "down range" (ie. Your desk) and the latency could be compensated for in that regard. It would take some fine tuning - in fact another microphone at the place where you need the quiet could be used for the system to tune itself. (This of course is assuming there are no walls in the room for the sound to bounce off of so that you aren't trying to defeat 17 "sources" simultaneously).
I'm not claiming any authority on this or saying it can't be done, just stating that it's probably quite a bit more complicated than it may look at first glance. Real time work is not something most "normal" OSes are setup to do. It can be done, but for things to be faster than sound you've got to get your latency WAY WAY WAY down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_process
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_cancellation
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/27/16412
Software would generally be too slow. A DSP-based sound card could potentially be programmed to do phase-inversion and time-slew (to account for distance) but an ordinary desktop machine would generally need to be very fast and incorporate real time extensions in the kernel. This is the reason you generally find hardware-only solutions (and in headphones for the reasons mentioned in a peer post). Of course I could be way off....
Precisely why I used quotes. The term is being used lightly and only used because I've seen it elsewhere - similarly misused. Most of us probably very much agree but the point is well taken. It is, however, all relative.
Expectations do vary locally and between people, within organizations or groups, etc. How does one's boss, or anybody, know how often another checks email? It's when they reply. If you communicate with someone via email often enough, you can develop a sense as to when you might hear back from them. Lunch time? Late afternoon? Within 3 hours, by the end of the week, etc.
Many people are at their desks all day and have reliable email they are expected to check quite often. It all comes down to expectation and it's easy to get burned when judging reliability/ping times.
The trick is to train your boss (or sender) to not expect a response in the middle of the day if you are often out of the office, at a job site, etc. Reply always at the end of the day to signal to them that delivery is not reliable in the middle of the afternoon but you can usually get back to them by 4:30p or so.... even if you see their email during the day, just hold off or respond and postpone (or schedule delivery) till later.
This can backfire and reduce efficiency within an organization but the technique can be put to good use for those that tend to be especially nagging or demanding of "immediate" responses.
Text/SMS can be a good alternative to calling somebody when you can't rely on email. The reception confirmation is of course again ambiguous (ask them to send a simple "OK" reply), but people carry their cell phones far more places then their email access. Delays are minimal and you don't need to get involved in a conversation for simple requests, informative notes, or reminders.
Any amount of exchange however will often take a shorter amount of time with a simple call than with lots of back and forth over SMS. It is however great for flirtations, sending your hubby/wife an "I'm thinking of you," for noisy environments where talking is difficult, or where talking on a cell is rude (this is many more places than most people believe!)
You can actually send text messages to email accounts and email/AIM to cell phones - check your provider or post tips in reply for others.
(10+2)*5
Work for 10 minutes. Break for 2. Do something else for 10. Repeat, killing items on your list. Supposedly you can do quite a bit of "next actions" in an hour this way. DON'T SKIP BREAKS!
Perhaps a Bayesian filter could be trained to alert you to "urgent" emails and none other just the same as they can be trained to flag/delete UCE messages?
:(
Procmail could be used to send a text message to your phone when someone from your whitelist sends you a message (people from your department, the president of your company, your broker, your brother/dad, but not Jim the annoying guy down the hall who's in your department) so, even away from your desk, you could respond quickly. Else, just stay away from your inbox till 4:00pm or so...
Procmail or SIEVE could be extensively useful if the time spent programming them could be found
Post links to helpful resources in reply here.
[I'm not a windows admin so I've no idea if any of this is possible...]
You might....
Figure out how to log all USB plug-in/remove events and notify a central location when they are USB Mass Storage devices. Figure out how to log all copies or transfers to/from USB mass storage devices. Make up some reporting process and either have a talk with excessive USB-keyers or disable their USB ports. Remember that they can probably use other workstations to do as they please. Could USB Mass Storage devices be made 'read-only' via some policy editor?
(Probably easier on an OS in which you could mess with the kernel sources.)
Let your users know all activity on the corporate network is being logged (not keystrokes or file contents - file names probably OK) and what behaviour is not OK.
Notify that all USB key contents will be inspected and copy off of any USB drive as soon as it's inserted for later inspection. Tell them big brother made you do it and if they're worried about their personal stuff being looked at to not use their personal USB key at work.
Just ideas....
Anybody familiar with this device know if there are any USB audio interfaces that would mate with this ARM machine? Forgive me for not searching myself, but what does the state of audio tools look like under ARM debian? How many USB device drivers are supported/exist? USB 'webcam' options?
:( If you know, post; if not, yes - I know about google.
How difficult would it be to turn this into a portable audio-capture (and streaming???) or playback device? Could I direct a USB audio interface input stream toward a USB attached HD? What bandwidth might I expect? At 266MHz could I real-time vorbis-encode and stream to disk or network? At what quality? (I'm not expecting much more than guesses here.) Is the vorbis encoder available for ARM and how efficient would this be compared to an X86 machine? Could I do FLAC? Again - leaving tomorrow so no time to search myself
For that matter, does anybody know of any small device that will record in a lossless format (ie. NOT 'voice' or 'mp3' recorder or in a proprietary format) with reasonable sample rate/resolution, has decent [read: low noise] line or mic inputs, removable media slot (or hackable to add a spinning magnetic media device), and doesn't cost >$250?
Everybody seems to be talking about network applications, but with a 12V battery, a keyboard and heads up display or audio interface (yes - I believe you can get software that generates a virtual, audible, terminal via voice prompts) this could be a wonderful wearable device. Do you think so? Too power hungry?
Just thinking/rambling. Tell me slashdot what you think (if you've got the time.)