That's the 'pronounceable' password option. If you kept it short, it wasn't too bad.. it'd give you things like 'ORSTRAPS'. Set it to 64 characters, though, and it's pretty gnarly!
The cargo bay can be pressurized? I've never heard that before. I was under the impression that the cargo bay doors had to be open to expose the radiators. Or do you mean that it can carry a space lab module?
I'm not sure if they're going to be represented this year, but I've seen some GNU Radio stuff shown at the annual ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference, which happens to be coming up next week in Hartford, CT. I see a couple of SDR-related topics on the schedule, including the Sunday seminar.
Even if you're not an amateur radio operator, it's worth checking out if you're interested in SDR. And the banquet speaker this year is Bruce Perens of Debian and OSI fame.
Does anyone use hemp for serious rope making anymore? In search and rescue we weren't allowed to even have the stuff around - it is most certainly not appropriate for lifesaving applications. I had a rope swing made with hemp rope in my back yard as a kid, and it broke at least twice over the years. Never had that problem with synthetics.
Re:Does this really improve the odds of finding hi
on
Help Find Steve Fossett
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It probably can't hurt, but you're right in that it can be difficult for even a trained observer to spot the wreckage of a small plane at that resolution - or even from 5,000 feet with your own eyeballs.
I spent a few years on the local search and rescue team and fortunately only got to see one serious crash up close. From the air, it looked more or less like a bunch of trash strewn across a 100-foot stretch of hillside. Nothing you'd identify immediately as an aircraft, though in this case the huge burn mark helped it stand out.
You can get that from a top-of-the-line Garmin PFD, no radiation required! Check out the account here of what happens to a Garmin G1000 when the fuel sensors aren't behaving as it expects.
After reading that, I don't think I'd ever buy anything safety-critical from them. That's just bad programming. Of course, the F-22 had even more blatant errors...
The buried cable thing doesn't make sense, I agree. But I know that hitting an above-ground line isn't all that hard - it happens all the time, usually because of stupid rednecks shooting at birds sitting on the wires. I know that even here in the middle of a small city there have been incidents, one of which took out something like 300 pairs of a 400 pair (copper) cable. My dad worked for GTE (before the Verizon merger) for about 30 years, and saw it a number of times. He said shotguns were worse, because you'd get shorts from pellets embedded in the cable. No such problems with fiber, but still - hitting it is obviously within the abilities of random idiots with guns.
I never worked for LMCO (they offered, I thought better of it) but I had to deal with them quite a bit and I can vouch for #3. That was the solution to nearly EVERY difficulty - they'd come up with a workaround and train the users in it. Oh, there's a requirement for ad-hoc reports in the system? No problem, we'll just train the users to use Hyperion! Never mind that the training was based around Hyperion's canned training database and NOT the one users would be running reports against. No one had even TRIED building reports in that graphical editor they were expecting end users to use - that being the only option short of teaching them all SQL. And you know what? It couldn't be done. Not without huge amounts of complexity, anyway. But it didn't matter - someone decided that was good enough, and I suppose the customer eventually signed off on it.
I kept my mouth shut for years, but I don't work there anymore and I find I don't give a damn now if anyone finds out what I think of that project.
I don't suppose you worked on anything RSA IIA related? I hate to think that ALL of their projects are equally mismanaged. They obviously build sophisticated planes that manage to fly pretty well, so I'm guessing at least some parts of the company are reasonably competent. I just didn't get to see them.
How old are your GPS receivers? I use headless (no display) SiRF III-based receivers that sell for under $70 and they work indoors where my older, expensive Garmin units don't, and rarely give a fix less accurate than 30 feet. And that's with the built-in patch antennas.
I think Garmin's new handheld units (the GPSmap 60CSx I'm sure of) use the SiRF III chipset. If you're going to carry a GPS receiver for backpacking, get one of those, carry a couple extra sets of lithium batteries, and you're set. I still recommend carrying topo quads and a compass, just in case. Also, bring a ruler along and make sure you understand how to plot GPS readings on the map by hand. It's really not that hard, and a 7.5" quad beats a tiny GPS display any day.
"At this stage of development of an AI I can trust the computer only to show a letter 'a' on the screen when I press the 'a' key."
You must not be an MS Word user. Sure, it *might* display 'a' when you type 'a' - or it might decide to indent, start a bulleted list, knock an illustration or two down to the next page, reformat your columns, and summon an annoying animated dog to ask you inane questions about your intentions.
Ok, I'll admit I did horribly at math in college - what little college I completed. Probably because I was too busy sketching logic diagrams and basically designing a microprocessor instead of listening to the lecture. In other words, I was too intent on what I considered the interesting parts of computer science to pay any attention to the boring, abstract crap.
Now that I'm having to work with DSP techniques more, I regret not getting more out of those classes. I think it's interesting that most of what I read about DSP algorithms comes straight from the math side of things. I needed an algorithm to demodulate audio frequency shift keying (AFSK) signals, and I found several, all well-defined and characterized in mathematical terms. That would have been fine, IF I was programming for an actual digital signal processor. But I wasn't - the chip in question is an 8-bit MCU running at less than 8 MHz, that sells for about $1.69.
So I threw all (or most) of that away, and did my heuristic best. I'm still refining the code, but even in its current state it does a remarkably good job. And the clock recovery algorithm works great - given the same input, it decodes more reliably than the equivalent $180 commercial modem I've got.
Only trouble is, I don't have the math background to know if it's even possible to model the algorithm mathematically in any meaningful way. I can only evaluate the performance by testing it - for convenience I've got it duplicated on a Core2 Duo machine and can process 30 minutes of audio data in under 2 seconds to test changes - but I couldn't even begin to characterize the system in mathematical terms. I'm considering some tweaks like allowing the algorithm to vary when the next sample will be taken to try to improve the discrimination without increasing the sample rate, and I've never even seen anything along those lines. (Possibly because it's just a bad idea, but we'll see.)
Anyway, I guess my point is that I don't like the tendency in CS education to shoehorn everything into mathematical terms. It seems like the level of math needed to understand and model some system is way beyond what's really needed to understand it in a different framework. I can show my demodulator code to any competent programmer and describe its operation in a few minutes, but it'd take higher math beyond anything I've taken to do it with math. So yeah, maybe pure math gets in the way sometimes, and the educational approach needs to be diversified a bit.
Re:Safety isn't first
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 5, Funny
To be fair, the building from the middle east was in the country illegally anyway.
I'll give you one example where it matters - an inkjet postage meter. Mine ran out right in the middle of printing an $18 imprint, with not enough showing to even be able to make a claim for the lost postage.
After that I switched to aftermarket cartridges that have clear housings. Found out that way that the meter says the cart is empty when it's still about half full. I've had it stop (clogged?) after going well past that point, but a quick burst from an air compressor cleared it and it's still going.
And I'm pretty confident that the fluorescent pink ink that splattered onto my driveway and car in the process will eventually degrade in the sunlight...
I had to laugh when I saw that solar panel on the roof. It's all about energy, and to get energy from sunlight you need surface area. Go look at a cornfield in Iowa - it's so densely packed and corn leaves are such naturally efficient collectors it's hard to imagine making any significant improvement on that arrangement. You can't see anything but green - every bit of surface area in that field is conducting photosynthesis. Put a structure *anywhere* in that field, and you're only going to reduce the amount of sunlight being used.
I'm not sure how people are able to forget this fact. Maybe it's because they're used to seeing house plants thriving in meager indoor lighting. Ever seen the horribly stupid movie 'Silent Running'? There's a truly idiotic scene in there where the top naturalist can't figure out why his plants aren't thriving now that his ship is so far away from the sun.
I really, really think we need to spend a little more time teaching the basics of thermodynamics in high school...
I understand completely. My thing is 8-bit MCUs, and there's nothing like the satisfaction of coming up with some elegant, tight construct where not a byte or cycle is wasted. And there's a real economic incentive for that sort of optimization, too - I'm running my code on chips that cost $1.68 each, and doing things that my competitors might use a $6 ARM chip or $20 Java module for.
"...as the signal cannot reach the satellite from a submersible"
Since when do you need to get a signal TO the satellites? (The GPS ground control segment excluded, of course.) Obvious errors and poorly-written summaries aside, though, the real question would be how it performs with real-world acoustic propagation. How does it deal with reflections and refractions from obstacles, thermoclines, the surface, and the ocean floor?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the 'pronounceable' password option. If you kept it short, it wasn't too bad.. it'd give you things like 'ORSTRAPS'. Set it to 64 characters, though, and it's pretty gnarly!
Heck, I was doing that in OpenVMS 10 years ago. Not for security, though.. I'm just a bastard.
The cargo bay can be pressurized? I've never heard that before. I was under the impression that the cargo bay doors had to be open to expose the radiators. Or do you mean that it can carry a space lab module?
I'm not sure if they're going to be represented this year, but I've seen some GNU Radio stuff shown at the annual ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference, which happens to be coming up next week in Hartford, CT. I see a couple of SDR-related topics on the schedule, including the Sunday seminar.
Even if you're not an amateur radio operator, it's worth checking out if you're interested in SDR. And the banquet speaker this year is Bruce Perens of Debian and OSI fame.
http://www.tapr.org/dcc
Does anyone use hemp for serious rope making anymore? In search and rescue we weren't allowed to even have the stuff around - it is most certainly not appropriate for lifesaving applications. I had a rope swing made with hemp rope in my back yard as a kid, and it broke at least twice over the years. Never had that problem with synthetics.
It probably can't hurt, but you're right in that it can be difficult for even a trained observer to spot the wreckage of a small plane at that resolution - or even from 5,000 feet with your own eyeballs.
I spent a few years on the local search and rescue team and fortunately only got to see one serious crash up close. From the air, it looked more or less like a bunch of trash strewn across a 100-foot stretch of hillside. Nothing you'd identify immediately as an aircraft, though in this case the huge burn mark helped it stand out.
You can get that from a top-of-the-line Garmin PFD, no radiation required! Check out the account here of what happens to a Garmin G1000 when the fuel sensors aren't behaving as it expects.
After reading that, I don't think I'd ever buy anything safety-critical from them. That's just bad programming. Of course, the F-22 had even more blatant errors...
The buried cable thing doesn't make sense, I agree. But I know that hitting an above-ground line isn't all that hard - it happens all the time, usually because of stupid rednecks shooting at birds sitting on the wires. I know that even here in the middle of a small city there have been incidents, one of which took out something like 300 pairs of a 400 pair (copper) cable. My dad worked for GTE (before the Verizon merger) for about 30 years, and saw it a number of times. He said shotguns were worse, because you'd get shorts from pellets embedded in the cable. No such problems with fiber, but still - hitting it is obviously within the abilities of random idiots with guns.
I never worked for LMCO (they offered, I thought better of it) but I had to deal with them quite a bit and I can vouch for #3. That was the solution to nearly EVERY difficulty - they'd come up with a workaround and train the users in it. Oh, there's a requirement for ad-hoc reports in the system? No problem, we'll just train the users to use Hyperion! Never mind that the training was based around Hyperion's canned training database and NOT the one users would be running reports against. No one had even TRIED building reports in that graphical editor they were expecting end users to use - that being the only option short of teaching them all SQL. And you know what? It couldn't be done. Not without huge amounts of complexity, anyway. But it didn't matter - someone decided that was good enough, and I suppose the customer eventually signed off on it.
I kept my mouth shut for years, but I don't work there anymore and I find I don't give a damn now if anyone finds out what I think of that project.
I don't suppose you worked on anything RSA IIA related? I hate to think that ALL of their projects are equally mismanaged. They obviously build sophisticated planes that manage to fly pretty well, so I'm guessing at least some parts of the company are reasonably competent. I just didn't get to see them.
How old are your GPS receivers? I use headless (no display) SiRF III-based receivers that sell for under $70 and they work indoors where my older, expensive Garmin units don't, and rarely give a fix less accurate than 30 feet. And that's with the built-in patch antennas.
I think Garmin's new handheld units (the GPSmap 60CSx I'm sure of) use the SiRF III chipset. If you're going to carry a GPS receiver for backpacking, get one of those, carry a couple extra sets of lithium batteries, and you're set. I still recommend carrying topo quads and a compass, just in case. Also, bring a ruler along and make sure you understand how to plot GPS readings on the map by hand. It's really not that hard, and a 7.5" quad beats a tiny GPS display any day.
"At this stage of development of an AI I can trust the computer only to show a letter 'a' on the screen when I press the 'a' key."
You must not be an MS Word user. Sure, it *might* display 'a' when you type 'a' - or it might decide to indent, start a bulleted list, knock an illustration or two down to the next page, reformat your columns, and summon an annoying animated dog to ask you inane questions about your intentions.
Ok, I'll admit I did horribly at math in college - what little college I completed. Probably because I was too busy sketching logic diagrams and basically designing a microprocessor instead of listening to the lecture. In other words, I was too intent on what I considered the interesting parts of computer science to pay any attention to the boring, abstract crap.
Now that I'm having to work with DSP techniques more, I regret not getting more out of those classes. I think it's interesting that most of what I read about DSP algorithms comes straight from the math side of things. I needed an algorithm to demodulate audio frequency shift keying (AFSK) signals, and I found several, all well-defined and characterized in mathematical terms. That would have been fine, IF I was programming for an actual digital signal processor. But I wasn't - the chip in question is an 8-bit MCU running at less than 8 MHz, that sells for about $1.69.
So I threw all (or most) of that away, and did my heuristic best. I'm still refining the code, but even in its current state it does a remarkably good job. And the clock recovery algorithm works great - given the same input, it decodes more reliably than the equivalent $180 commercial modem I've got.
Only trouble is, I don't have the math background to know if it's even possible to model the algorithm mathematically in any meaningful way. I can only evaluate the performance by testing it - for convenience I've got it duplicated on a Core2 Duo machine and can process 30 minutes of audio data in under 2 seconds to test changes - but I couldn't even begin to characterize the system in mathematical terms. I'm considering some tweaks like allowing the algorithm to vary when the next sample will be taken to try to improve the discrimination without increasing the sample rate, and I've never even seen anything along those lines. (Possibly because it's just a bad idea, but we'll see.)
Anyway, I guess my point is that I don't like the tendency in CS education to shoehorn everything into mathematical terms. It seems like the level of math needed to understand and model some system is way beyond what's really needed to understand it in a different framework. I can show my demodulator code to any competent programmer and describe its operation in a few minutes, but it'd take higher math beyond anything I've taken to do it with math. So yeah, maybe pure math gets in the way sometimes, and the educational approach needs to be diversified a bit.
To be fair, the building from the middle east was in the country illegally anyway.
I'll give you one example where it matters - an inkjet postage meter. Mine ran out right in the middle of printing an $18 imprint, with not enough showing to even be able to make a claim for the lost postage.
After that I switched to aftermarket cartridges that have clear housings. Found out that way that the meter says the cart is empty when it's still about half full. I've had it stop (clogged?) after going well past that point, but a quick burst from an air compressor cleared it and it's still going.
And I'm pretty confident that the fluorescent pink ink that splattered onto my driveway and car in the process will eventually degrade in the sunlight...
But energy is energy. If you want a crop with high food energy, you have to give it more energy to grow.
I had to laugh when I saw that solar panel on the roof. It's all about energy, and to get energy from sunlight you need surface area. Go look at a cornfield in Iowa - it's so densely packed and corn leaves are such naturally efficient collectors it's hard to imagine making any significant improvement on that arrangement. You can't see anything but green - every bit of surface area in that field is conducting photosynthesis. Put a structure *anywhere* in that field, and you're only going to reduce the amount of sunlight being used.
I'm not sure how people are able to forget this fact. Maybe it's because they're used to seeing house plants thriving in meager indoor lighting. Ever seen the horribly stupid movie 'Silent Running'? There's a truly idiotic scene in there where the top naturalist can't figure out why his plants aren't thriving now that his ship is so far away from the sun.
I really, really think we need to spend a little more time teaching the basics of thermodynamics in high school...
And Atlantis has made at least 27 trips to the repair depot along the way. How many times have they brought the ISS down to work on it?
when you're looking for an all night Denny's around Omicron Percei 8, the system that you use will end up paying me patent royalties!
My planet is tidally locked, you insensitive clod!
How do I buy stock in conspiracy books?
I'm not sure about books, but you can't go wrong with either this or this.
I understand completely. My thing is 8-bit MCUs, and there's nothing like the satisfaction of coming up with some elegant, tight construct where not a byte or cycle is wasted. And there's a real economic incentive for that sort of optimization, too - I'm running my code on chips that cost $1.68 each, and doing things that my competitors might use a $6 ARM chip or $20 Java module for.
Mel? Is that you?
You mean like they did with fuel injection technology?
"...as the signal cannot reach the satellite from a submersible"
Since when do you need to get a signal TO the satellites? (The GPS ground control segment excluded, of course.) Obvious errors and poorly-written summaries aside, though, the real question would be how it performs with real-world acoustic propagation. How does it deal with reflections and refractions from obstacles, thermoclines, the surface, and the ocean floor?
Maybe, but you can't get patches for VMS 5 anymore. Zoloft, on the other hand, is thankfully still readily available.
REAL geeks don't need e-waste recycling - they just hold on to their stuff until the Computer History Museum offers to haul it away.
(Ok, so I'd still be holding on to the VAX, but with my girlfriend moving in there just wasn't room for both. It was a tough choice.)