Actually, AMEX hasn't been as bad as I thought from the merchant side. The discount rate's not great, but I can live with it. Getting set up wasn't hard, and I pay like $5/month for service. Granted, I have very little AMEX volume, and larger merchants pay more. But no complaints so far...
It was interesting to see Butterflyphoto in that album - I bought a camera from them over the summer. The price was fine, but I found out that their deal is high-pressure phone sales. Right after I placed the order, they called me to let me know that they were holding it to make sure that's what I really wanted. See, I'd ordered a regular SD card and not a high speed SD card, and that couldn't possibly be what I wanted. (Of course, I'd just selected the 'premium' package with the case and SD card that THEY suggested...) I had to tell them several times that no, I REALLY didn't want to upgrade, especially not when I knew I could get the faster SD card from Costco cheaper.
Anyway, I did get my camera, and you know what? It came with a high speed SD card. I wouldn't be surprised if they all ship like that, and they just do the high pressure sales thing to jack their profit margin up when they can.
I'd suggest an exception to this for embedded code. When I'm writing something for a PC, sure, there's no excuse for not making the code readable. But when you're squeezing as much functionality as possible into a chip with maybe a couple hundred bytes of RAM and a few KB of flash, things get ugly.
It's not uncommon for my code to do something really non-obvious to accomplish a task in a more efficient way. Processing sensor readings, for example - on a PC it'd be a simple floating point math operation. On the chips I use, the floating point library would itself fill the entire available memory. Instead, I wind up with a bit of hard-to-read code that accomplishes the same thing using the shift and multiply operations the CPU is good at. For my own sanity I leave very specific comments about what's going on and what the equivalent calculation is.
comments in haiku
not for any good reason
I was very bored
(And yes, I have done this. The bit above and several others are, as far as I know, still in some shipping management system for a certain multinational mining corporation.)
Since no one else took the mesh network one, I will. Consider that the probes would likely be millions of miles from each other. It's very expensive to carry high power transmitters and high gain antennas on these probes - you're much better off using very large antennas on Earth to communicate with them. Except for special cases like the Mars rovers where they're not more than a few hundred kilometers from their relay satellites, it would be much harder to make the probes capable of talking to each other than of talking directly to Earth.
But yeah, if we're talking about planetary exploration, we can certainly use a few high-speed relays to offload the link back to Earth from smaller, nearby probes and rovers. That's already being done. But in deep space, forget it.
I never thought the original series had had much of an impact on me. But yesterday a friend sent me a package of surplus weather balloons, and I started filling some up with air to test them out.
Those things were seriously creeping me out, jiggling around in the living room...
$400,000,000. So? If memory serves, that's about the price of a Titan IV. Not counting payload. Shuttle launches are more than that. Expensive, yeah, but not out of line with what we're paying for other spacecraft.
I don't see why a fridge would be such a problem when they've got plenty of propane. You can get an 18 cu. ft. fridge that consumes 1.5 lbs of propane per day. Even a small one would be a big improvement over nothing, and wouldn't cost much to run.
Frankly, I think this is a really stupid argument for lunar exploration. Yeah, it might be a good fuel - IF we had fusion reactors that could use it! It's not like bringing back a truckload of this stuff is going to instantly solve our energy problems.
Exactly how much better than the usual DT mix would this stuff have to be to make it worth the expense of getting it and bringing it back?
See OFDM. Frequency multiplexing alone is NOT enough to account for a 1000-fold increase over current modulation schemes, many of which use OFDM schemes already.
Your assignment for today is to read up on the Shannon-Hartley theorem. Then ponder the sort of signal-to-noise ratio required to do what they're saying. I'm just not seeing it happen. And the explanation of changing the frequency of individual cycles - that doesn't make any sense to me. That's just FM, not a novel modulation technique.
Also, consider the black-box demo - so typical of snake oil these days. If it was an actual, novel system, you'd probably have a custom board with a pile of FPGAs and such in there. No amount of staring at it would tell you anything significant about how it works. On the other hand, if it's a commercial WiFi board with 'Netgear' plastered all over it, it's going to be pretty obvious. So what are they hiding?
And what's more, the book presented the softened shells as a bad thing! Do you know how hard it is to crack enough spotted owl eggs for a decent omelette if they haven't been softened a bit first? They're almost as tough as bald eagle eggs!
"From a long time ago they have allowed full download of their databases for testing purposes. I have a copy of Oracle 9 running in my machine to make tests of software I develop."
This is one of the things I like best about Oracle. Yeah, installation isn't always easy (it's much better now than in Oracle 7) but at least they never make you jump through hoops when it comes to license management. No keys to enter, license files to install, or anything. I think it gives you a little warning in the installer to make sure you've got appropriate licenses for all options, but it never forces anything.
"For starters, now for anything smaller (e.g., a 1-2 ton satellite)..."
First of all, it's the Air Force, not the Army. Second, no one's putting little tiny satellites on the Shuttle. You've got Pegasus, Minotaur, Athena, and soon Falcon boosters for small payloads, for example. And there most certainly IS a need for heavy-lift capability. After the Challenger disaster in '86, the Air Force was left without a booster for those heavy, polar-orbiting satellites and had to upgrade the Titan boosters to fill in. The last of those launched last week.
I'll agree that the Shuttle is a waste for most payload delivery tasks. But keep in mind that the heavy payload launched last week (undoubtedly a very expensive spy satellite) is DISPOSABLE, because we have no capability to get to it and upgrade or repair even the smallest thing on it. In theory, manned access to those orbits could have given the military more bang for the buck.
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Actually, AMEX hasn't been as bad as I thought from the merchant side. The discount rate's not great, but I can live with it. Getting set up wasn't hard, and I pay like $5/month for service. Granted, I have very little AMEX volume, and larger merchants pay more. But no complaints so far...
Anyway, I did get my camera, and you know what? It came with a high speed SD card. I wouldn't be surprised if they all ship like that, and they just do the high pressure sales thing to jack their profit margin up when they can.
Air Force bases only have Burger King, not McDonald's.
Fortunately my 9-year old son understands the ESRB rating system and can explain it to me when I'm buying him games.
It's not uncommon for my code to do something really non-obvious to accomplish a task in a more efficient way. Processing sensor readings, for example - on a PC it'd be a simple floating point math operation. On the chips I use, the floating point library would itself fill the entire available memory. Instead, I wind up with a bit of hard-to-read code that accomplishes the same thing using the shift and multiply operations the CPU is good at. For my own sanity I leave very specific comments about what's going on and what the equivalent calculation is.
not for any good reason
I was very bored
(And yes, I have done this. The bit above and several others are, as far as I know, still in some shipping management system for a certain multinational mining corporation.)
But yeah, if we're talking about planetary exploration, we can certainly use a few high-speed relays to offload the link back to Earth from smaller, nearby probes and rovers. That's already being done. But in deep space, forget it.
Those things were seriously creeping me out, jiggling around in the living room...
Because it'd doubtless be outsourced to India and then no one would understand what's being said.
$400,000,000. So? If memory serves, that's about the price of a Titan IV. Not counting payload. Shuttle launches are more than that. Expensive, yeah, but not out of line with what we're paying for other spacecraft.
I don't see why a fridge would be such a problem when they've got plenty of propane. You can get an 18 cu. ft. fridge that consumes 1.5 lbs of propane per day. Even a small one would be a big improvement over nothing, and wouldn't cost much to run.
Exactly how much better than the usual DT mix would this stuff have to be to make it worth the expense of getting it and bringing it back?
See OFDM. Frequency multiplexing alone is NOT enough to account for a 1000-fold increase over current modulation schemes, many of which use OFDM schemes already.
Also, consider the black-box demo - so typical of snake oil these days. If it was an actual, novel system, you'd probably have a custom board with a pile of FPGAs and such in there. No amount of staring at it would tell you anything significant about how it works. On the other hand, if it's a commercial WiFi board with 'Netgear' plastered all over it, it's going to be pretty obvious. So what are they hiding?
The bad news is that the speed of light is now roughly 18 miles per hour.
And what's more, the book presented the softened shells as a bad thing! Do you know how hard it is to crack enough spotted owl eggs for a decent omelette if they haven't been softened a bit first? They're almost as tough as bald eagle eggs!
"Come on, man. It's 2006 already"
Goddamned daylight savings time changes...
"This is exaustively demonstrated by that Will Smith movie that wasn't based on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot"
Come on, that's not exactly fair. I understand the movie follows the cover illustration pretty closely.
"From a long time ago they have allowed full download of their databases for testing purposes. I have a copy of Oracle 9 running in my machine to make tests of software I develop."
This is one of the things I like best about Oracle. Yeah, installation isn't always easy (it's much better now than in Oracle 7) but at least they never make you jump through hoops when it comes to license management. No keys to enter, license files to install, or anything. I think it gives you a little warning in the installer to make sure you've got appropriate licenses for all options, but it never forces anything.
"For starters, now for anything smaller (e.g., a 1-2 ton satellite)..."
First of all, it's the Air Force, not the Army. Second, no one's putting little tiny satellites on the Shuttle. You've got Pegasus, Minotaur, Athena, and soon Falcon boosters for small payloads, for example. And there most certainly IS a need for heavy-lift capability. After the Challenger disaster in '86, the Air Force was left without a booster for those heavy, polar-orbiting satellites and had to upgrade the Titan boosters to fill in. The last of those launched last week.
I'll agree that the Shuttle is a waste for most payload delivery tasks. But keep in mind that the heavy payload launched last week (undoubtedly a very expensive spy satellite) is DISPOSABLE, because we have no capability to get to it and upgrade or repair even the smallest thing on it. In theory, manned access to those orbits could have given the military more bang for the buck.
"Carter, I can see my house from here!"
I've been working on this, but it turns out Big Mutha Truckers doesn't actually teach things like double-clutching.
Thankfully all those hours of playing Halo taught me proper breath control and sight picture, so sniping's always a fallback option.
It's just like how communism has made government irrelevant in the workers' pardises of Cuba and North Korea!
Heck yeah, I've got a 20-amp coffee maker that starts brewing a batch every morning at 4:00 whether I'm home or not! How's that for diligence?
My God... it's full of arthropods!