Wow, you must be, like, 16 years old. Two words: Office 97.
a little hot? try exploding!
on
Flaming Cellphones
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You guys and your girly tales of excessive charge rates and wisps of smoke...
Those of us salivating all over the
Samsung SPH-i500 PalmPDA/phone
(units of which finally started trickling to market 3 weeks ago)
have been hearing for weeks of the travails of this guy who's modded his to add Bluetooth and maybe more.
"I decided to build the sled out of the extended battery. Initially, I was planning on making the standard battery fit inside the extended case, but then I got a first hand lesson in the volitile nature of li-ion batteries. After the 2 FOOT FLAME, which looked like a smoke flare going off, this MESS is what was left of the battery... What caused that? Believe it or not, it was LIGHTLY nicking it with the tip of my jewlers screwdriver! It doesn't take much."
> > Of course, we've got millions of dollars an > > hour running through our facility so heads > > would roll if we weren't this paranoid.
> I heard someone throw out a figure once, I don't > know how accurate it is, but supposedly HSN > potentially looses $365,000 per minute that it > is off the air...
Yeah, that was actually a typo on my part -- I meant millions of dollars a minute:) [puffs up chest]
Don't these backbone routers have backup? I was in an ISP server house in the UK which had a full backup system. In the case of a power failure, it had a UPS that kicked in for 10 seconds while the generator was booting up, which then provided power for the infrastructure of the building. I would find it hard to believe that in the USA they don't have similar systems?
Uh, yeah, thanks, we never thought of that.
UPS's run out of juice. Generators run out of fuel. Generators turn out to be less than perfectly maintained and fail after a couple hours. Budgets get trimmed, maintenance gets overlooked, blah blah blah it's never a perfect world. If it was, engineers would be replaced by algorithms.
Companies that are dead serious about power reliability run generator tests every day, and when lightning is detected within miles we automatically start up all the generators and run off them. Yes, we actually go OFF THE GRID every time a thunderstorm rolls in, and in Atlanta that's many times a week. Of course, we've got
millions of dollars an hour
running through our facility so heads would roll if we weren't this paranoid.
I believe we keep our tanks fueled up for 3 days of continuous service, and we pay a premium to guarantee that when the shit hits the fan, WE get refueled first.
Of course, hardcore multiply-redundant (and *tested*) systems are something that elude the typical IT crew staffed by DeVry grads.
One thing is certain, W. is not going to say a word about the NYC power cut until he can work out how it can be used to justify some policy to benefit Texas oil men.
Specifically, and mark my words, they will work out how it can be used to justify licensing and building new nuclear reactors. Even though this problem will likely to be traced (as before) to a shortage of transmission capacity, not generation capacity. Oh, and they'll also figure out a way to make it necessary in the war against civil lib^H^H^H terrorism.
...Wireless Local Number Portability (LNP), meaning you can change to another wireless provider in your service area while keeping the same telephone number, goes into effect November 24, 2003.
And you're a fool if you call in on that day, that week, or even anytime this year expecting a smooth transition of your phone to a new carrier. If you do think it should work fine, I have a copy of Windows 1.0 to sell you.
Let everyone else bleed all over the place -- wait until spring 2004.
Radio does have automatic limiters. Listen to a rock station sometime, it all comes out about the same level, despite the different levellings of the individual recordings.
Oh man, you have no idea... radio screws with the sound like there's no tomorrow.
Not only are they trying to normalize the levels between songs, they're trying to get the ads to jump out at you. And they are compressing (aka maximizing) their signal like mad so that their station sounds louder than the others on the dial.
Imagine an old radio with a knob tuner, with which you could just zip up and down the dial by spinning the knob. The loudest stations grab your attention. Also, the compression has the effect of making your signal go a little farther -- it has an effect at the fringe of your coverage (e.g. 40 miles out).
And of course audiophiles cringe to hear nearly any commercial FM station. I mean, FM is bad enough, now you have to go and compress it? I mostly listen to FM and I'm always amazed when I put in a CD and crank it up. It sounds soooo much better then the hypercompressed nu-metal (or classic rock) shite that dominates white-male-dweeb radio these days.
Non-comm stations are more interested in fidelity, so that's why they'll tend to sound quieter -- they're backed off on the compression so they get more dynamic range out of the FM process. Of course, to a certain extent it's because they have less money and so can't buy the latest and greatest compressor technology.
Big names in this business: Orban, Omnia, dbx .
- Chris, chief engineer of a non-comm 40,000 Watt FM station for 4 years
I use rewards for my self, as stupid as it sounds. Like today, I have to write some thankyou cards, and fill out some rebate forms. So, I promised my self that after I do that, I'm gonna go to walmart and spend 20$ on something fun and/or stupid!
I do this on a much longer timescale. I really want to purchase and install a solar electric (photovoltaic) array on my roof and start helping other people do the same. My wife really wants us to get the bathroom renovation project executed. So I've decided only get to do the PV array after the bathroom is done. Consequently, I'm busting ass on the bathroom project:)
If I think of something else that needs doing I write it down, I don't start doing it disrupting the current task
Get a tiny voice recorder. Not the 60+ minute digital dictation things, just a little one that captures 30-90 seconds of voice. I bought my first one of this VoiceIt model for $40 7 years ago and it changed my life. I never EVER forget anything now (which has it's own problems:) because I can just dictate it into the voice thingy and transcribe it into the PDA/whatever later. If you rely on scribbling it down, you'll often fail right from the start because A) you'll forget before you get a slip of paper and pen, or B) writing isn't an option -- like when you're in traffic, mowing the lawn, etc.
It's critical that it be small enough (credit card sized) that you just carry it in your pocket everywhere, not just when you think you might have some bright ideas...
Cell phones these days often come with a voice memo function, but that solution is often lacking due to A) size of cell phone and B) they won't store more than 5 discrete memos. I frequently have 10 piled up in my VoiceIt before I have a chance to sit down and transcribe into my PDA.
Remember you can read your email just once or twice a day. Ditto web news sites/slashdot
One way to effect this is to turn OFF automatic retreival of your email from your mail server. When you're ready to spend 15 minutes on reading and replying to emails, hit the "fetch" button. Auto-retrieval just breaks your concentration every five minutes.
2.4 isn't even in "maintenance" mode yet - it is _the_ stable tree, and its getting new things added to it with each release (slowly, and after being tested in other trees, and RCs). Just recently new ACPI for example.
Er, ACPI is a bad example because
ACPI has NOT yet been migrated into 2.4.
The ACPI guys have been trying to get it in for a long time and finally threw a tantrum on LKML about it when Marcelo said he was planning on releasing 2.4.22 without it. They changed his mind and Marcelo now plans to include it, but it's not actually in there yet.
Keep it in mind, and you'll be amazed at how it applies to everything.
Re:A little bit too much of "I" in the parent post
on
VoIP Booming in Africa
·
· Score: 1
>> I also built a pan-African voice and data satellite network
>_You_ have built it or helped build it? Because if you've built it yourself, you must be really close to God Almighty.
That's fair. I was the sole systems engineer in charge of rolling it out. Another [sales] engineer convinced the customer that our stuff could do it, a program manager dealt with the money side, and one or two field engineers (like Peter) built the first remote sites, educating some locals in the process and then they built the rest themselves. I did, however, personally build the network hub system at the network center near Oxford, UK. Five racks of equipment inside and five test remotes outside (satellite dishes ranging from 1.8m to 2.4m). And a lot of the remote equipment was tested in our inhouse lab in the US before shipping to Africa.
It's a great job to shoot the shit about but I'm glad I'm out. There are other ways to make life interesting.
The customer was a US telecom company (nobody that anyone here's ever heard of), and they contracted with my employer to build an Standard B IDR earth station to link Ghana out to London and Toronto, if memory serves. (Google for "Standard B satellite gateway" and "IDR IBS satellite" to see what that means)
Along with the 11-meter antenna, all the equipment was housed in a small building full of racks and UPS, and a generator outside. The generator (and fuel storage, fuel delivery services, etc.) had to be rated to be able to deliver hours of power, on a routine basis (daily), because that's how often the power would fail.
Now, that was just the gateway to allow the public phone network to interface to the rest of the world. I also built a pan-African voice and data satellite network for a corporate customer (hint: Exxploit) that simply wanted to bypass all the local telco nonsense and just have a system (albeit and expensive one) that would work regardless. Calls went from city to city (e.g. Libreville to Accra) over the private satellite network and went to the rest of the world via a direct hop to London.
A critical factor in all of this is the ability to get the equipment LEGAL in the country (look up "homologation") -- it's really just an elaborate national shakedown system (as is the european CE mark). The key for us getting the contract was that we had our foot in the door in most of the countries already and could get the equipment in and on the air by riding our existing paperwork.
Anyway, all this is to illustrate that the tariff issue is of critical importance, and solving the technical issues are really secondary -- you've got to find a way to make it legal or the local jackboots will shut you down.
- Chris
P.S. And to illustrate a sadder side of the business, the guy who built the Accra gateway with me, Peter Kennedy, later took a contract job building telecom infrastructure in Chechnya, was taken hostage by Chechen rebels for ransom, and was found decapitated a few weeks later. Not a peep out of the U.S. State Department. Peter was a really nice guy.
I've just installed the 1.4 version on their FTP site, and clicking About Mozilla says that it's the 2003/06/24 build. Which means either that it hasn't been updated since RC3 at all, or that they haven't actually placed the 2003/06/30 final build in that ftp directory.
1.4 final is indeed the same as 1.4 RC3 -- the only change is a name change. Source: moz developer IRC channel.
As I recall, that scene (and the interview scene it references) were fairly important plot devices -- i.e. Snooty Girl Begins To Recognize Intrinsic Value Of Scruffy Boy, And Reevaluate Herself.
With a low user number like 35421, I'd figure you'd know this. Before posting a "why hasn't anyone mentioned this" post, always do a comment list at a threshold of 1 or even 0, and then search for relevant text (trivial in Mozilla). Usually someone HAS commented, it just hasn't come up in mod level yet (so go mod it up). When you posted, at least three people had already mentioned Dear Raed (among the nitwits spouting the tired and self-serving claim that Fox News is only offsetting CNN supposed liberal bias).
and Atanajurat (The Fast Runner).
The Russian Ark
and
Atanarjuat
were two of the most amazing movies I've seen in the past year, and they were both shot on digital video. Atanarjuat is so engrossing that while watching it you forget time and space and particularly that it's a narrative movie, until they shows shots of the film-making processes during the end credits roll.
Wow. For the 90% of you who have your panties in wad about how this can't possibly work, please go back to your video game consoles and Mountain Dew. Do you really think you're the first person to have thought hard about the problem?
Slashdot posters have such refined senses of humor that I have all "Funny" comments knocked down by a -2 modifier so I don't waste my time with them. To paraphrase JWZ's famous comment about Linux, Slashdot is funny only if you're not terribly smart (or still in high school).
[ducks]
[karma sinks like a rock]
You did it AGAIN. Please use little 'b' to mean bits, and use big 'B' to mean bytes. I couldn't care less about the 1024/1000 distinction (2.4% error), but the B/b distinction is rather big (800% error).
So that's 2400 kB/s, not 2400 kb/s.
Aaanyway, I'll still assume this was on a corporate/campus network, not at home.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you must be, like, 16 years old. Two words: Office 97.
Those of us salivating all over the Samsung SPH-i500 PalmPDA/phone (units of which finally started trickling to market 3 weeks ago) have been hearing for weeks of the travails of this guy who's modded his to add Bluetooth and maybe more.
"I decided to build the sled out of the extended battery. Initially, I was planning on making the standard battery fit inside the extended case, but then I got a first hand lesson in the volitile nature of li-ion batteries. After the 2 FOOT FLAME, which looked like a smoke flare going off, this MESS is what was left of the battery ... What caused that? Believe it or not, it was LIGHTLY nicking it with the tip of my jewlers screwdriver! It doesn't take much."
http://i500.nopdesign.com/hw/ifire.jpg
The complete story is here; the flames start on page 2.
"Hello, Samsung? I would like 1000 units of your new Lithium-Ion bomb phone please. Do you ship to Chechnya?"
> > Of course, we've got millions of dollars an
:)
> > hour running through our facility so heads
> > would roll if we weren't this paranoid.
> I heard someone throw out a figure once, I don't
> know how accurate it is, but supposedly HSN
> potentially looses $365,000 per minute that it
> is off the air...
Yeah, that was actually a typo on my part -- I
meant millions of dollars a minute
[puffs up chest]
Uh, yeah, thanks, we never thought of that.
UPS's run out of juice. Generators run out of fuel. Generators turn out to be less than perfectly maintained and fail after a couple hours. Budgets get trimmed, maintenance gets overlooked, blah blah blah it's never a perfect world. If it was, engineers would be replaced by algorithms.
Companies that are dead serious about power reliability run generator tests every day, and when lightning is detected within miles we automatically start up all the generators and run off them. Yes, we actually go OFF THE GRID every time a thunderstorm rolls in, and in Atlanta that's many times a week. Of course, we've got millions of dollars an hour running through our facility so heads would roll if we weren't this paranoid.
I believe we keep our tanks fueled up for 3 days of continuous service, and we pay a premium to guarantee that when the shit hits the fan, WE get refueled first.
Of course, hardcore multiply-redundant (and *tested*) systems are something that elude the typical IT crew staffed by DeVry grads.
Specifically, and mark my words, they will work out how it can be used to justify licensing and building new nuclear reactors. Even though this problem will likely to be traced (as before) to a shortage of transmission capacity, not generation capacity. Oh, and they'll also figure out a way to make it necessary in the war against civil lib^H^H^H terrorism.
And you're a fool if you call in on that day, that week, or even anytime this year expecting a smooth transition of your phone to a new carrier. If you do think it should work fine, I have a copy of Windows 1.0 to sell you.
Let everyone else bleed all over the place -- wait until spring 2004.
Oh man, you have no idea ... radio screws with the sound like there's no tomorrow.
Not only are they trying to normalize the levels between songs, they're trying to get the ads to jump out at you. And they are compressing (aka maximizing) their signal like mad so that their station sounds louder than the others on the dial.
Imagine an old radio with a knob tuner, with which you could just zip up and down the dial by spinning the knob. The loudest stations grab your attention. Also, the compression has the effect of making your signal go a little farther -- it has an effect at the fringe of your coverage (e.g. 40 miles out).
And of course audiophiles cringe to hear nearly any commercial FM station. I mean, FM is bad enough, now you have to go and compress it? I mostly listen to FM and I'm always amazed when I put in a CD and crank it up. It sounds soooo much better then the hypercompressed nu-metal (or classic rock) shite that dominates white-male-dweeb radio these days.
Non-comm stations are more interested in fidelity, so that's why they'll tend to sound quieter -- they're backed off on the compression so they get more dynamic range out of the FM process. Of course, to a certain extent it's because they have less money and so can't buy the latest and greatest compressor technology.
Big names in this business: Orban, Omnia, dbx .
- Chris, chief engineer of a non-comm 40,000 Watt FM station for 4 years
I do this on a much longer timescale. I really want to purchase and install a solar electric (photovoltaic) array on my roof and start helping other people do the same. My wife really wants us to get the bathroom renovation project executed. So I've decided only get to do the PV array after the bathroom is done. Consequently, I'm busting ass on the bathroom project :)
If I think of something else that needs doing I write it down, I don't start doing it disrupting the current task
Get a tiny voice recorder. Not the 60+ minute digital dictation things, just a little one that captures 30-90 seconds of voice. I bought my first one of this VoiceIt model for $40 7 years ago and it changed my life. I never EVER forget anything now (which has it's own problems :) because I can just dictate it into the voice thingy and transcribe it into the PDA/whatever later. If you rely on scribbling it down, you'll often fail right from the start because A) you'll forget before you get a slip of paper and pen, or B) writing isn't an option -- like when you're in traffic, mowing the lawn, etc.
It's critical that it be small enough (credit card sized) that you just carry it in your pocket everywhere, not just when you think you might have some bright ideas ...
Cell phones these days often come with a voice memo function, but that solution is often lacking due to A) size of cell phone and B) they won't store more than 5 discrete memos. I frequently have 10 piled up in my VoiceIt before I have a chance to sit down and transcribe into my PDA.
Remember you can read your email just once or twice a day. Ditto web news sites/slashdot
One way to effect this is to turn OFF automatic retreival of your email from your mail server. When you're ready to spend 15 minutes on reading and replying to emails, hit the "fetch" button. Auto-retrieval just breaks your concentration every five minutes.
And, finally, cable TV is evil. Cancel it.
Er, ACPI is a bad example because ACPI has NOT yet been migrated into 2.4. The ACPI guys have been trying to get it in for a long time and finally threw a tantrum on LKML about it when Marcelo said he was planning on releasing 2.4.22 without it. They changed his mind and Marcelo now plans to include it, but it's not actually in there yet.
- Fast
- Good
- Cheap
Pick two.Keep it in mind, and you'll be amazed at how it applies to everything.
>_You_ have built it or helped build it? Because if you've built it yourself, you must be really close to God Almighty.
That's fair. I was the sole systems engineer in charge of rolling it out. Another [sales] engineer convinced the customer that our stuff could do it, a program manager dealt with the money side, and one or two field engineers (like Peter) built the first remote sites, educating some locals in the process and then they built the rest themselves. I did, however, personally build the network hub system at the network center near Oxford, UK. Five racks of equipment inside and five test remotes outside (satellite dishes ranging from 1.8m to 2.4m). And a lot of the remote equipment was tested in our inhouse lab in the US before shipping to Africa.
It's a great job to shoot the shit about but I'm glad I'm out. There are other ways to make life interesting.
Along with the 11-meter antenna, all the equipment was housed in a small building full of racks and UPS, and a generator outside. The generator (and fuel storage, fuel delivery services, etc.) had to be rated to be able to deliver hours of power, on a routine basis (daily), because that's how often the power would fail.
Now, that was just the gateway to allow the public phone network to interface to the rest of the world. I also built a pan-African voice and data satellite network for a corporate customer (hint: Exxploit) that simply wanted to bypass all the local telco nonsense and just have a system (albeit and expensive one) that would work regardless. Calls went from city to city (e.g. Libreville to Accra) over the private satellite network and went to the rest of the world via a direct hop to London.
A critical factor in all of this is the ability to get the equipment LEGAL in the country (look up "homologation") -- it's really just an elaborate national shakedown system (as is the european CE mark). The key for us getting the contract was that we had our foot in the door in most of the countries already and could get the equipment in and on the air by riding our existing paperwork.
Anyway, all this is to illustrate that the tariff issue is of critical importance, and solving the technical issues are really secondary -- you've got to find a way to make it legal or the local jackboots will shut you down.
- Chris
P.S. And to illustrate a sadder side of the business, the guy who built the Accra gateway with me, Peter Kennedy, later took a contract job building telecom infrastructure in Chechnya, was taken hostage by Chechen rebels for ransom, and was found decapitated a few weeks later. Not a peep out of the U.S. State Department. Peter was a really nice guy.
or 12 years old and written by a grad student ...
1.4 final is indeed the same as 1.4 RC3 -- the only change is a name change. Source: moz developer IRC channel.
As I recall, that scene (and the interview scene it references) were fairly important plot devices -- i.e. Snooty Girl Begins To Recognize Intrinsic Value Of Scruffy Boy, And Reevaluate Herself.
Fair and open markets, competition, survival of the fittest, FCC and laissez faire, ET CETERA.
With a low user number like 35421, I'd figure you'd know this. Before posting a "why hasn't anyone mentioned this" post, always do a comment list at a threshold of 1 or even 0, and then search for relevant text (trivial in Mozilla). Usually someone HAS commented, it just hasn't come up in mod level yet (so go mod it up). When you posted, at least three people had already mentioned Dear Raed (among the nitwits spouting the tired and self-serving claim that Fox News is only offsetting CNN supposed liberal bias).
and Atanajurat (The Fast Runner). The Russian Ark and Atanarjuat were two of the most amazing movies I've seen in the past year, and they were both shot on digital video. Atanarjuat is so engrossing that while watching it you forget time and space and particularly that it's a narrative movie, until they shows shots of the film-making processes during the end credits roll.
Ok, what is it with you user=6xxxxx noobies and the damn P paragraph breaks? If you want people to read your posts, then make them more readable.
Wow. For the 90% of you who have your panties in wad about how this can't possibly work, please go back to your video game consoles and Mountain Dew. Do you really think you're the first person to have thought hard about the problem?
http://216.239.41.100/search?q=cache:UIxZ_jqTcxgJ: www.mail-archive.com/gnhlug-discuss%40mail.gnhlug. org/msg03722.html+win4lin+merge+sco&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
and get that +5 grandparent back down ...
Slashdot posters have such refined senses of humor that I have all "Funny" comments knocked down by a -2 modifier so I don't waste my time with them. To paraphrase JWZ's famous comment about Linux, Slashdot is funny only if you're not terribly smart (or still in high school). [ducks] [karma sinks like a rock]
So that's 2400 kB/s, not 2400 kb/s.
Aaanyway, I'll still assume this was on a corporate/campus network, not at home.